Semiotics as a postmodern recovery ofthe cultural unconscious
Semiotics as a postmodern recovery ofthe cultural unconscious

Summary/Abstract: This essay explores the terminology of semiotics with an eye to the historical layers of human experience and understanding that have gone into making the doctrine of signs possible as a contemporary intel¬lectual movement. Using an essentially Heideggerian view of language as a heuristic hypothesis, the name semiotics is examined in light of the re¬alization that only with Augustine's Latin signum was the possibility of a general doctrine of signs introduced, and that first among the later Latins was the idea of sign as a general mode of being specifically verifiable both in nature and in culture in establishing the texture of human experi¬ence vindicated according to an explanation of how such a general mode of being is possible. The contemporary resumption through Charles Peirce of the Latin line of vindication completed especially by Poinsot is ex-plored along these same lines in terms of considerations of why the term semiotics has emerged as, so to speak, the logically proper name of the global interest in signs.

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