Against Necessity: On the Insufficiency of Pressure as a Generative Account of Semiotic Richness
A Response to Okonkwo-Bernstein, “The Eloquence of Silent Things” (Journal of Transhistorical Sign Systems, Vol. 31, 2075)
Published in The Journal of Transhistorical Sign Systems, Vol. 32, 2075 (Response Section)
Dr. Fumiko Arredondo-Weiss, Associate Professor of Ludic and Aesthetic Semiotics, Department of Generative Sign Theory, Humboldt-Makere Institute for the Study of Meaning, Berlin-Kampala, Fellow, Centre for the Semiotics of Play and Invention
Professor Okonkwo-Bernstein’s essay is a considerable achievement, and I say this as someone who intends, in what follows, to contest its central claim at length. The framework of pressure semiotics is genuinely productive. The archival range is impressive.
The recovery of Lady C——’s 1861 document as a founding text of non-institutional semiotic analysis is a service to the field that I do not wish to diminish. What I wish to contest is the claim that pressure—defined as the survival necessity of accurate and deniable communication—constitutes the generative condition of semiotic richness. It does not. Or rather: it constitutes one generative condition among several, and the essay’s elevation of it to a theoretical universal produces distortions that the essay’s own evidence does not support, and that the inclusion of the Pacific navigation case makes not stronger but more visible.
Let me begin with the simpler objection and proceed to the harder one.
The simpler objection is this: play generates semiotic richness. So does delight. So does the specifically aesthetic impulse—the human desire not merely to communicate but to communicate beautifully, to make the sign itself an object of pleasure independent of its communicative function, to add to the world a form that rewards attention regardless of what the form contains. Professor Okonkwo-Bernstein’s framework has no place for these generative conditions, because her framework is, at its foundation, functionalist: it asks what the sign is for, and finds the answer in survival necessity, and this functionalism systematically excludes from its account every sign system that was built for reasons other than or in addition to survival.
Consider the illuminated manuscript. The Lindisfarne Gospels, produced on Holy Island around 715 CE, represent a sign system of extraordinary complexity and richness: the interlaced knotwork, the zoomorphic letterforms, the colour vocabulary of a palette assembled from materials gathered across the known world. These signs did not arise under the pressure of concealment or deniability. They arose under the pressure of devotion, certainly, but devotion is not survival necessity in the sense Okonkwo-Bernstein requires—the monks of Lindisfarne were not encoding their marginality; they were celebrating their centrality to a tradition they loved with a completeness that demanded expression in every available material. The richness of the Lindisfarne sign system is a richness of excess, of elaboration beyond functional requirement, of a visual intelligence operating in the register of pure aesthetic invention. Professor Okonkwo-Bernstein’s framework cannot account for it, because it was not built under pressure in her sense. It was built under joy.
Dr. Celestine Mwamba-Johansson, in her 2068 monograph The Surplus Sign: Aesthetics, Play, and the Limits of Functionalist Semiotics, makes this argument with characteristic precision: “the functionalist account of sign systems is always haunted by the signs it cannot explain—the cave paintings that predate any identifiable practical utility, the decorative borders that exceed their frames, the musical flourish that adds nothing to the melody’s communicative content and everything to the listener’s experience of it. These surplus signs are not marginal to the history of human signification. They are among its most important products, and a theory that treats them as anomalies has probably identified the wrong centre.” I find this persuasive, and I find it directly applicable to the Okonkwo-Bernstein framework, which is haunted throughout by the possibility that some of the semiotic richness it admires was produced not by necessity but by a generative surplus that necessity alone cannot explain.
Return to Lady C—— herself, who is the essay’s most articulate witness and who I think undermines the pressure thesis more than she confirms it. Lady C—— describes the fan vocabulary with evident pleasure. She describes colour grammar and flower semiotics with the appreciation of a connoisseur, not merely the efficiency of a practitioner. When she writes about the way a fan held entirely still communicates a quality of concentrated intelligence “that no words would convey with equal elegance,” she is not describing a sign optimised for survival. She is describing a sign optimised for elegance, which is a different criterion entirely, and a criterion that reveals a practitioner who has moved beyond the functional requirements of the sign system and into something closer to its aesthetic dimension. The women in Lady C——’s drawing room were not merely surviving. They were also, clearly, taking pleasure in the intricacy of the language they had built, in the precision of its distinctions, in the very quality of refinement that Okonkwo-Bernstein reads as the product of pressure but that reads equally well as the product of women who found the language genuinely interesting and made it more beautiful because beauty was available to them and they chose it.
This is not a minor revision to the pressure semiotics framework. It is a structural one. If the same sign system can be simultaneously a survival tool and an aesthetic object—if the practitioner can simultaneously deploy it under pressure and take pleasure in its deployment as a form—then the pressure account explains the system’s existence but not its elaboration. It explains why the fan vocabulary needed to exist but not why Lady C—— found it worth writing down with the care and precision she brought to the task. Something beyond necessity generated that care. I propose that the something is delight: the delight of a woman who had spent fifty-one years inside a language she found genuinely interesting, and who wrote about it the way a scholar writes about a beloved text.
Now I turn to the harder objection, which concerns the Pacific navigation case and which I think represents the essay’s most significant theoretical overreach.
Okonkwo-Bernstein includes the navigation languages of the Marshall Islands as evidence for pressure semiotics on the grounds that they were built under survival conditions—navigation error means drowning—and that they share with Lady C——’s fan vocabulary and the Sydney gay body language the structure of a gated interpretant operating under pressure. The comparison is vivid and the pressure element is real. But I want to argue that it is, precisely, a comparison—an analogy—and that the analogy obscures a distinction between the Pacific navigation system and all the other systems in the essay that is not incidental but constitutive.
Every other sign system Okonkwo-Bernstein examines is fundamentally oriented toward a human receiver. The fan communicates to a woman across a drawing room. The handkerchief signals to a man in a bar. The iykyk posts to a community of digital natives. In every case, the sign’s primary function is social: it creates or maintains or protects a relationship between human beings. The gating of the interpretant—the bifurcated structure that communicates to the initiated and conceals from the uninitiated—is a social mechanism, addressed to the social stakes of the situation.
The Pacific navigation sign system is not, in its primary function, social. It is cosmological. The navigator reading the behaviour of a deep-water swell is not communicating with another human being. She is reading the ocean—reading it as a text, certainly, and a text of extraordinary complexity, but a text whose author, if we can call it that, is not a human community managing its marginal position within a dominant culture. The ocean does not gate its interpretants. The ocean does not conceal its signs from the uninitiated as a survival strategy. The ocean’s signs are available in principle to any observer with sufficient training and attention; the gating is in the navigator’s training, not in the sign’s design. This is a categorically different semiotic situation from Lady C——’s fan, and treating them as instances of the same framework—pressure semiotics—requires suppressing the distinction between a sign system designed by a human community to be read selectively, and a sign system discovered by a human community in a non-human environment and learned, not designed.
Professor Hemi Walker-Ngata, Director of the Pacific Navigation Language Preservation Society whom Okonkwo-Bernstein thanks in her acknowledgements, has made this point in a different context but with direct relevance here. In his 2071 address to the International Symposium of Indigenous Knowledge Systems, he argued that “to describe Pacific navigation as a language is to illuminate it in one direction and obscure it in another. It illuminates the complexity and the learning and the transmission across generations. It obscures the fact that the navigator is not encoding a meaning—she is reading one. The ocean has not been written by human beings. To say otherwise is to repeat, in a more sympathetic register, the colonial error of treating indigenous knowledge as a cultural production rather than as an accurate account of a reality that exists independently of the culture that learned to read it.” I want to extend this argument to the semiotic context: the Pacific navigation system is not well described by a framework built around the concealment of meaning from hostile observers, because the ocean is not a hostile observer and the navigator’s task is not concealment. The navigator’s task is orientation—the accurate determination of position and direction in relation to a non-human environment. This is not a lesser cognitive achievement than clandestine social signalling; it is a different one, and it deserves a different theoretical account.
What both objections share—the objection from play and delight and the objection from Pacific navigation—is a concern about the totalising ambition of the pressure semiotics framework. Okonkwo-Bernstein argues that pressure is the generative condition of semiotic richness, and the argument is structured as a universal: all the richest sign systems, she implies, arose under survival conditions. But the universality is purchased by the selection of cases that confirm it, and the selection excludes the illuminated manuscript, the purely decorative border, the musical ornament, the navigator’s cosmological reading, the child who invents a private language for the pleasure of the invention rather than for protection against adult surveillance. These cases are not rare. They are, in many respects, the normal case—the case in which human beings produce signs because they find signification intrinsically satisfying, because the making of meaning is one of the things that human beings simply do, under pressure and in its absence, out of necessity and out of abundance, because they must and because they can and because the can is as interesting as the must and sometimes more so.
I want to propose, in place of pressure semiotics or in supplement to it, what I am calling generative semiotics—a framework that treats survival necessity, aesthetic play, devotional elaboration, cosmological reading, and sheer inventive delight as equally valid generative conditions for sign system richness, and that asks of any sign system not only what pressure produced it but what else was going on in the community that built it: what they found pleasurable, what they found beautiful, what they were curious about, what they were celebrating, what they were trying to make that had no name yet and required a sign.
This framework would accommodate Lady C——’s evident enjoyment of her own language alongside her deployment of it under social pressure. It would accommodate the Lindisfarne monks’ aesthetic elaboration alongside their devotional function. It would accommodate the Gen-Alpha teenager who invents a new compression not because adult surveillance requires it but because the compression is pleasing—because the word snapping shut around its meaning like a lock is satisfying in the way that a perfect sentence is satisfying, in the way that form and content finding each other is satisfying, in the way that all good making is satisfying regardless of the circumstances that occasioned it. And it would accommodate the Pacific navigator without requiring her cosmological reading to be a social concealment strategy, because it was not, and because saying it was does the navigator and the ocean both a disservice.
Okonkwo-Bernstein closes her essay with a sequence of images—the fan snapping shut, the handkerchief placed, the phrase dropped into the feed, the swell read below the hull—and asks, of all of them: I am here. I know what this means. Do you? It is a beautiful closing, and it correctly identifies what all these sign systems share: the question of shared understanding, of community, of who is inside the meaning and who is outside it.
But there is another question that some sign systems ask, and that the pressure framework does not hear. The illuminated manuscript does not ask do you know what this means. It asks is this not extraordinary. The child inventing a private language asks isn’t this interesting. The navigator reading the deep-water swell asks where are we—a question addressed not to another human being but to the ocean itself, which is a different kind of question entirely and which deserves a different kind of theoretical attention.
The eloquence of silent things is not only the eloquence of the endangered. It is also the eloquence of the delighted, the devoted, the inventive, and the oriented. A semiotics adequate to the full range of human signification needs to account for all of them.
Dr. Fumiko Arredondo-Weiss invites correspondence and welcomes disagreement. She acknowledges that this response was written with a pleasure that the pressure semiotics framework would struggle to account for, and that this constitutes, if nothing else, a small piece of autobiographical evidence for her central claim.
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