Before the Sign: On Relationship as the Prior Condition of Meaning, Mind, and World
Delivered as the Pieterse-Nakamura Lecture in Foundational Semiotic Theory, Global Congress of Semiotic Sciences, Lagos-Copenhagen, 2275
Professor Sula Vanthorpe-Osei, Holder of the Wittgenstein-Deleuze Chair in Pre-Semiotic Philosophy, Founding Director, the Centre for Relational Ontology and the Dissolution of Disciplinary Boundaries, Institute for What Remains When Frameworks Fail, University of Accra
I want to begin by telling you what this lecture is not, because what it is not is as important as what it is, and because the not-saying has, in my experience of the academy, a way of doing more work than the saying.
This is not a lecture in semiotics.
I say this at the Okonkwo-Bernstein Memorial Congress, in the Pieterse-Nakamura Lecture series, to an audience of semiotic scientists, having been introduced as a semiotic philosopher of some standing, and I mean every word of it. This is not a lecture in semiotics. It is a lecture about the condition that makes semiotics possible and that semiotics, by its own constitution as a discipline, cannot examine without ceasing to be semiotics. I intend to examine it anyway, and if what follows resembles the act of a scholar sawing off the branch on which she is sitting, I ask you to consider that the branch may have needed sawing, and that the ground, though unfamiliar, is not as far below us as it looks.
Let me reconstruct the argument we have inherited, because it is a remarkable argument and it deserves reconstruction before it is dissolved.
In 2075, Professor Okonkwo-Bernstein asked: why do signs emerge? She answered: because communities under survival pressure develop precise and deniable communication systems. The answer was functionalist, it was historically grounded, and it was correct within its terms. Those terms assumed a community that exists prior to its sign system, a pressure that acts upon the community from outside, and a sign system that the community produces in response. Subject, environment, response. This is the grammar of the pressure thesis.
In the same year, Dr. Arredondo-Weiss asked: why do signs flourish? She answered: because communities under pressure, and also communities in delight, and communities in devotion, and navigators in cosmological attendance, elaborate sign systems beyond the functional requirement of the situation. The answer was pluralist, it was aesthetically generous, and it was also correct within its terms. Those terms retained the same grammar: community, environment, sign. What changed was the valence of the community’s relationship to the sign—from purely reactive to also generative, from survival-driven to also pleasure-driven. But the community still came first. The sign still followed. The grammar was the same grammar in a more tolerant mood.
In 2250, Professor Pieterse-Nakamura asked the question that Arredondo-Weiss had half-asked and then declined to press: where do signs come from? And the Resonance Semiosis Project answered: from before the community, from the environment the community enters, from layers of structured meaning deposited by prior inhabitants and perhaps by processes that are not human cognitive aggregates at all but something the Bergen group designated, with admirable honesty, as “a structuring property of certain environments that is not the product of any cognitive aggregate.” The answer was revolutionary, it shook the discipline to its foundations, and it was also, I will argue, still insufficient. Because the resonance thesis, for all its radicalism, retained one assumption so deep that neither Pieterse-Nakamura nor the Bergen group noticed they were making it.
The assumption is this: that meaning exists.
Not that meaning exists in the community. Not that meaning exists in the environment. Not that meaning exists in the transaction between them. But that meaning—as a kind of substance, a property, a thing that can be deposited and detected and decoded—exists at all, prior to and independent of the relationships within which what we call meaning appears to arise.
This is the assumption I am here to question.
My proposal is this, and I will state it plainly before I argue for it, because plain statement followed by argument is a more honest structure than argument followed by a revelation: what we call meaning is not a thing that exists and is found, or a thing that exists and is made, or a thing that exists in environments and is detected by communities attuned to detect it.
What we call meaning is a temporary stabilisation within relationship. It is what relationship looks like when it holds still long enough to be pointed at. It is the moment when the continuous, dynamic, mutually constituting movement between what we are calling the sign and what we are calling the mind and what we are calling the environment reaches a temporary equilibrium that we then mistake for a fact about the world—for a meaning that was there, waiting, prior to the relationship that produced it.
This is a further shift. I want to be precise about how far a shift it is, because precision here matters and imprecision here would be, in the exact technical sense I am developing, a stabilisation error—a mistake of the same kind as the foundational mistake I am identifying, only at the level of the argument rather than the level of the world.
The pressure thesis stabilises meaning in the community. The generative thesis stabilises meaning in the community’s creative act. The resonance thesis stabilises meaning in the environment, in the structured electromagnetic impression, in the field signature that precedes the community. My proposal does not stabilise meaning anywhere. My proposal is that the stabilisation itself is what requires explaining—not as a discovery or an invention or a detection, but as an event within a prior field that is not a field of meaning at all, but a field of relationship, within which meaning, mind, environment, and body all become distinguishable from each other in the first place.
Dr. Yuna Sato-Mwangi, who directs the Laboratory for Pre-Conceptual Dynamics at the Kyoto-Nairobi Institute and whose experimental work is the empirical foundation of everything I am arguing today, has put this with the concision that I find I cannot improve upon: “We have been measuring the content of the field. We should have been asking what the field is made of. The answer, when we finally asked it correctly, was: relationship. Not things in relationship. Relationship prior to things. The things, including the things we call signs and minds and environments, are what relationship produces when it differentiates. The prior condition is not a sign-bearing environment. The prior condition is an undifferentiated relational field within which sign-bearing environments and meaning-detecting communities and the boundary between them all arise simultaneously.”
I want to dwell on that phrase: simultaneously. Because simultaneity is what the entire preceding tradition—pressure, generative, resonance—has been unable to account for. In every preceding framework, something comes first. In the pressure thesis, the community comes first, and the sign system follows. In the generative thesis, the community and its creative impulse come first, and the sign follows. In the resonance thesis, the structured environment comes first, and the attuned community follows. There is always a before and an after, always a causal sequence, always a thing that acts and a thing that is acted upon.
But consider Lady C——’s fan. In the moment when the fan is drawn across the cheek from right to left, and the initiated woman across the room registers the negation—in that moment, what comes first? The gesture? The perceiver? The social context that makes the gesture possible? The history of the women who developed the gesture under the pressures Okonkwo-Bernstein described? The aesthetic tradition that Arredondo-Weiss identified in Lady C——’s enjoyment of the language? The resonance impression of the drawing room’s prior inhabitants that Pieterse-Nakamura might have detected with RSP instruments? None of these come first. All of them are already in a relationship that is already constituting all of them simultaneously, and what we call the meaning of the gesture is not a property of any one of them but an event in the relationship between all of them—an event that we can only describe after it has occurred, and that we then, consistently and inevitably, misdescribe as a property that was waiting, fully formed, in one of the elements that the relationship was already producing.
This is not a claim about perception. It is not a claim about social construction. It is a claim about ontology—about what exists and what exists prior to what—and it requires a framework that none of the existing semiotic traditions have been equipped to provide, because all of them begin inside the distinction between sign and mind and world, and none of them ask what produces the distinction.
Professor Kenji Almeida-Okonkwo—no relation to Yael, though he has noted publicly that the coincidence of surname is the kind of resonance Pieterse-Nakamura would have found significant—has been developing, in a series of papers that the field has found variously illuminating and maddening, what he calls relational field theory as an alternative to the semiotic paradigm. His most direct statement of the position comes from his 2271 paper “The Differentiation Event: Toward a Non-Semiotic Account of Sign Emergence”: “A sign does not exist until the relationship that produces it, the mind that receives it, and the environment that carries it have differentiated from each other sufficiently for the sign to appear between them. Before that differentiation, there is no sign, no mind, no environment—there is only the field of mutual constitution from which all three arise. To ask where the sign comes from is to ask the wrong question in the wrong grammar. The right question is: what is the field within which signs, minds, environments, bodies, and histories all become distinguishable in the first place? And the right answer to that question is not a semiotic answer. It is an ontological one.”
I want to be honest about what this means for the discipline, because the discipline deserves honesty even when—especially when—the honesty is uncomfortable.
If Almeida-Okonkwo and Sato-Mwangi are correct, and if the experimental evidence from the Kyoto-Nairobi Laboratory supports the conclusion in the way that the preliminary publications suggest it does—the 2273 resonance mapping studies that found not field signatures of meaning in environments but something prior to field signatures, something the Bergen group’s instruments registered only as the absence of differentiation that precedes the appearance of structure, which Sato-Mwangi designated the pre-differentiation ground—then what we have been doing for two and a half centuries under the name of semiotics has been, at its deepest level, a study of the products of a process whose nature we did not examine, conducted with instruments that presupposed the distinctions the process produces and therefore could not see the process itself.
This does not mean that Okonkwo-Bernstein was wrong to study pressure communities. It does not mean that Arredondo-Weiss was wrong to insist on delight. It does not mean that Pieterse-Nakamura was wrong to find, in the Hyde Park resonance mapping, something that preceded the 1960s gay community’s inhabitation of that space. All of those findings are real. All of them describe something that happened. What they do not describe is the prior condition within which the happening became possible—within which there was a community to be under pressure, an environment to carry resonance, a body with the capacity for delight, a distinction between sign and receiver for the sign to cross.
The question I am asking is not: what generates sign systems? I am asking what generates the field within which sign systems, and the communities that use them, and the environments they use them in, all become distinguishable from each other. I am asking what is before the before. And I am asking it with full awareness that the asking cannot be completed from inside the framework that generates the question, which means that what I am doing here is not, in the end, answering a question but identifying the place where the discipline ends and something else must begin.
Lady C—— sat in a drawing room in 1861 and described a language she had spoken for fifty-one years. The language was real. The drawing room was real. The women she communicated with were real. The fan in her hand was real. All of these were real, and all of them were already inside a relationship that constituted all of them simultaneously, and the relationship was prior to all of them, and the relationship had no name in 1861, and it has no adequate name in 2275, and the name it does not have is not a semiotic name.
Okonkwo-Bernstein, in her 2075 essay, closed with a question that she put in the mouth of every sign system she had examined: I am here. I know what this means. Do you? It is a beautiful question. I have been thinking about it for thirty years. And the answer I keep arriving at is: the question assumes that here is a location, that I is an entity, that meaningis a thing that can be known, and that you is separate from I in a way that makes the question possible. Before all of those assumptions is the field within which here and I and meaning and you become distinguishable from each other. Before the question is the condition that makes the question possible.
That condition does not have a name yet.
Naming it is the work. Not of semiotics. Of whatever comes next.
I do not know what that is. I know that it begins precisely here, at the place where the discipline discovers that it has been standing all along on a ground it never examined, and that the ground, when you finally look at it, is not ground at all. It is relation, all the way down, and then further down than that, and the discipline that has the nerve to follow it there has not yet been invented.
I look forward to its invention.
I expect not to see it in my lifetime.
I find this, as Arredondo-Weiss found the prospect of her own supersession, more interesting than alarming. And I note that finding something, and being alarmed or interested, are both events in relationship, and that the relationship is prior, and that I am demonstrating the argument as I conclude it, which is either elegant or unavoidable, and I am no longer sure there is a difference.
Professor Sula Vanthorpe-Osei holds the Wittgenstein-Deleuze Chair in Pre-Semiotic Philosophy at the University of Accra and directs the Centre for Relational Ontology and the Dissolution of Disciplinary Boundaries, established by the Pan-African Institute for Foundational Research in 2261. Her monographs include The Prior Field: Relationship, Differentiation, and the Conditions of Meaning (2268) and What Remains: Ontology After Semiotics (2272). She serves on the advisory board of the Kyoto-Nairobi Laboratory for Pre-Conceptual Dynamics. She is the first holder of the Pieterse-Nakamura Lecture series who has used the occasion to argue that the lecture series should probably be renamed, since “semiotic theory” may no longer accurately describe what the work requires. The Congress has not yet decided whether to take this suggestion. She regards the indecision as data.
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