Distributed semiosis and division of labor

A psychologist cuts out a lobe of my brain (nihil animale a me alienum puto) and then, when I find I cannot express myself, he says, ‘You see, your faculty of language was localized in that lobe.’ No doubt it was; and so, if he had filched my inkstand, I should not have been able to continue my discussion until I had got another. Yea, the very thoughts would not come to me. So my faculty of discussion is equally localized in my inkstand.

(Peirce in CP 7.366 [1905].)

This section explores the distributed nature of semiosis and, as its special case, the semiotic division of labor in and between communities, a notion particularly relevant for this study. The implications for questions of personhood will be further elaborated in section 2.3. Part of the anti-Cartesian commitment of Peirce’s pragmatism was to go beyond dualist, mentalist, and individualist notions of “meaning” and “mind.”¹⁸ These notions were re-envisioned as distributed semiotic phenomena that emerge out of interactional processes.

The problem with individualist and mentalist views that reduce

“meaning” and “mind” (or intentionality) to states of individual brains or mental substances is, first of all, that they tend to neglect those mediating infrastructures and actual semiotic behaviors that give rise to experiences and knowledge of the world (including embodied infrastructures such as hands that provide perceptual information, perform cultural techniques, and wield various instruments). In the pragmatist view, all knowledge of either

“inner” or “outer” realities is based on interactions with physical, cultural, and social environments.¹⁹ That is, humans experience, think, and exist

18 “Anti-Cartesian” should be understood as a shorthand for a critical revision and reformulation of certain ideas in the Cartesian tradition and not as a rejection thereof. According to Peirce, “Descartes marks the period when Philosophy put off childish things and began to be a conceited young man” (CP 4.71; quoted in Anderson 2009: 154). Similarly, the fact that Peirce’s work in some regards was a critique of Kant, should not overcloud the fact that it was also based on and owed enormously to the Kantian tradition. In fact, Peirce regarded Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason as “perhaps, the greatest work of the human intellect” (quoted in Leaf 1989: 187).

19 We could contrast this view with, for instance, Verhagen’s (2010: 1) crystallization of the principles of cognitive semantics: “A fundamental principle in cognitive linguistics is that semantics is, indeed, primarily cognitive and not a matter of relationships between language and the world (or truth conditions with respect to a model). [N]otions such as ‘perspective,’ ‘subjectivity,’ or ‘point of view’ – – capture aspects of conceptualization that cannot be sufficiently analyzed in terms of properties of the object of conceptualization.” In the pragmatist view, cognition itself is precisely an interactional relation between organisms and their environments. No object of conceptualization can have any properties (in Verhagen’s sense) independently of the interpreting agent. That is, no “objects” are simply out there. In that sense, agreeably, all meaning does indeed involve “subject[s] of conceptualization,” or agents of interpretation more generally. The “subject” itself, however, is a

mediated by other persons, environments, and instruments (see Skagestad 1999; 2004; Wilce 2009a: 60; Kockelman 2013b: 48; cf. with Popper’s [1972]

notion of “exosomatic organs”). Interactions with others and the use of artificed instruments (including “prosthetic” extensions of personhood, such as voodoo dolls or online dating advertisements) enable interactants, for instance, to make their signs last longer or travel further or to create more accurate, complex, or imaginative interpretations of them. Moreover, even relatively private representations or intentional states must cohere with others’ attitudes and cultural norms in order to be effective in social life.

“Meaning” and “mind,” then, are embodied and embedded in environments, artifacts, and interactions as much as they are embrained (see Kockelman 2006a: 3).

Secondly, approaches that equate minds with those individual biological organisms in which minds are embodied and embrained during actual moments of cognitive or affective operation easily overlook the dimension of habit and continuity (see Colapietro 1989: 105). Minds exist to other minds and give rise to real effects in many ways independently of the biological epicenter (e.g., via the artifactual residues they have left behind; via others’

memories, anticipations, and imaginings of them; via the habits and attitudes they have given rise to in others). Persons as semiotic objects include dimensions other than whatever is going on in the biological organism at any particular moment. In a number of ways, persons can really be in many places at the same time (and even after the biological epicenter has ceased to exist). That is, minds and persons also reside in continuities of interactions, or in distributed webs of habit, on different time scales.²⁰

Minds and persons, then, are “species of semiosis” (Colapietro 1989: xx).

Any semiotic process is distributed in interactions between objects, signs, and interpretants, which may be displaced to various degrees from one another in different points of spacetime and between different agents.

Moreover, such processes rely on ontological assumptions and regimenting metaprocesses that are more or less culture-specific and community-specific.

Consequently, all semiotic processes, intentionality and personhood included, can be theorized as infrastructurally and interactionally distributed (Kockelman 2013a; also 2006b: 112–117).

complex and layered ensemble of interactional processes and agents. From a pragmatist standpoint, then, neither strict “language”-“world” (or cognition-world) nor “subject”-“object” dichotomies make sense.

20 In Peircean metaphysical terms, one might say that individual persons and minds exist as much in the dimension of Thirdness (in continuities, generalities, and distributed habits) as they do in the dimension of Secondness (in particular events and actual embodied processes). Or, like Peirce himself, one might compare persons to words. Lexemes are only ever actually encountered through particular word-forms (or sinsign tokens), but their meaning essentially resides in the types (or legisigns) that gradually emerge out of complex chains of particular usages and interactions. (See Colapietro 1989:

103; cf. also Gell 1998: 221–223.)

Meaning can be unevenly and unequally distributed in communities.

Objects can be known at different grades of clearness by different agents, persons, communities, or generations (see Peirce 1955). The term linguistic division of labor (Putnam 1975) points to the fact that reference to objects by linguistic signs has a social patterning. That is, denotational stereotypes and prototypes reside in the practices of different semiotic communities. There are, for instance, institutional practices of ratified experts with specialized skills and tools who have authority over and the last word on the truth (or correctness of reference) concerning a particular kind of object or a particular denoting expression (see Agha 2007a: 127; Carr 2010). This can be generalized to all kinds of semiotic processes and applies to “material” as well as “social” or “mental” kinds (see Kockelman 2013a: e.g. 72–73). In other words, experts can be goldsmiths or chemists as well as psychologists or judges.

Divisions of labor also exist (1) between different genres of discourse (or any other practices) that make the same objects knowable in different but complementary ways and (2) between expert and lay users of any particular genre. Online dating, too, has its own experts. In addition to normative metadiscourses embodied in, for instance, online dating guidebooks (see 3.2 and chapter 7), there are professional experts who offer commercial advice and ghostwriting services for online daters. The production of promotional personae and the mediation of social relations in online dating, then, are also linked to an economic division of labor. That is, they have become mediatized (see Agha 2012; also Irvine 1989). One such professional expert, whose services include “writing unique profiles to get you noticed” and

“writing one-of-a-kind emails to get someone’s attention,” emphasizes in an article the importance of being the “real you” and “just being yourself,”

because “that way, you know when someone shows interest, it’s because he or she likes the actual things you said” (Erika Ettin in Philly.com, January 29, 2013). There is an interesting tension between the emphasis on being “real”

and the suggestion that someone else should write your profile for you.

According to the logic of such mediatized practices, professional experts know better what the “real” someone should look like, when shaped into a specific kind of text-artifact, than that someone herself. In light of such ontological assumptions, “realness” of a text-artifact (or the persona mediated by the text-artifact) does not require the person’s direct involvement with it (cf. with the requirement of indexical contact discussed at the beginning of chapter 1). The online dater merely serves as an authorizer (or a principle in Goffman’s terms), but the practical agency of composing the signs according to cultural models is relegated to experienced experts.²¹ (Where the “true self” is anchored and how the relation between a

21 It is also noteworthy that in these cases there is no explicit distinction between principals, authors (or ghostors), and animators in the text. They differ from expressions like “my friends call me X,” “I’ve been described as Y,” in which the source of represented speech is explicilty denoted. As will

person and a text is understood in different contexts are questions that will be returned to in chapter 7.)

Much of meaning, then, ultimately relates to public and socially structured semiotic processes and is, therefore, inherently linked to questions of power and control. Since interpretants of even very private signs are often publicly perceivable, interpretable signs themselves, they can be regimented, even forcefully, by authorities (such as states, churches, or group pressures). Insofar as agents are capable of anticipating others’

interpretations and controlling their own semiotic behaviors, they can try to mask the kinds of signs and interpretants that would be considered non-desirable or inappropriate and to feign ones that would be considered desirable or appropriate. One example particularly relevant to this study is biographic control, or individuals’ attempts to avoid and – if too late – to repress the publicity and circulation of information about themselves that might be considered stigmatizing by others (see Goffman 1990 [1963]). The other need not be an actual person or community. In Mead’s (1934) terms it can also be a generalized other that one has internalized in the form of, say, social norms or ego ideals (see also Piers & Singer 1971 [1953]). The distribution of meaning-making often involves a dialectic between processes that attempt to hide object-sign relations from interpreters (whether it is the workings of the superego or underground resistance movements, or a person trying to “save face” or “keep up appearances” in social interaction) and processes that attempt to uncover them (whether it is psychoanalysis or the Inquisition, or someone interpreting the “true self” behind an “embellished”

dating advertisement) (see also Kockelman 2013a: 180).