Paolo Teobaldelli

The analysis I will outline in this work derives from a previous research, which I made in a work of 1993-94. The general theme was Multimedia Communication, and particularly I tried to outline a possible typology of 'multimedial texts' within the ambit of semiotic Textology, a new approach worked out from Petöfi (1989-90), as a transition from Textlinguistik toward a wider semiotical and philosophical Theory of human Communication.

To assure a deeply comprehension of what I'm near to say it would be better to introduce shortly the goals and results of this previous work.

When I started my work I realized that the concept multimedial Communication were still totally undefined.

Then the first question was:

• What is multimedia Communication?

In an intuitive way can we say that multimedial Communication is that type of communication constituted by the contemporary presence of more than a medium.

Then we have firstly to satisfy two more questions:

• What is a medium?
• Which is the interrelations between the various media involved in the multimedial Communication as a daily concrete process?

I tried then to find a solution to those question by analyzing the development of communication's modeling within Communication Theory.

I will shortly resume what I found.

At first Communication Research took all models and concepts from linguistic categories and mathematical theory of communication. Then, in its following development, Communication Research began progressively to recognize the role of non-linguistic behaviors (Hall, Birdwhistell). This process led to the birth of Non Verbal Communication as an autonomous area of study, where Communication is conceived no more as linguistic sending, but as a complex interactional behavior.

Although this, Non Verbal Communication (already in Birdwhistell) used to apply to Non Verbal behaviors the same categories or mirrored-categories used in the previous linguistic-informational conceiving.

That has many methodological consequences (for example see the difficulty to describe gesture meanings), but theoretical consequences are worst. It exceed the limits of the present work an accurate exposition of them, but in short I can say that using information as meaning and transmitting of information as Communication, Non-Verbal Communication conceived non-verbal sign systems as analogous of language, and separated each of them trying to systematize them as languages (then building a syntactics and a semantics).The contradiction of this view was not to be found in the isolated describing of each system, but it comes out with evidence when we go with it to an understanding and describing of multimedial Communication. It is clear, in facts, that, following that view, we have an interaction composed as a sum of systems each transmitting (or transporting) an independent meaning, but it is simple to see that there can be opposite simultaneously meanings, for example a sentence and a gesture, whose result is a meaning which is not vehiculated from those systems, nor a sum of vehiculated meanings, but simply something else. If we assume this, can we still say that each system transmits an autonomous meaning? If no, we cannot say also that there are separate systems, since the same notion of system implies a given number of signs each having a meaning (although nobody can say what it could be).

All the matter is more complicated and contradictory if we assume that information can be transmitted involuntary as in Poyatos (See my criticism in Teobaldelli: 1993-94; 1995), but I don't want to go on this theme now. I want simply say that following the results of my analysis I was forced to think that the semantic view of meaning should be in some way in error, since multimedial Communication (which includes most of human Communication) cannot be explained and described through the mechanical association of separated travelling meanings.

The question is then that we find within communication's modeling a dichotomy communication/signification due to what I defined the linguistic informational view of Communication.

This analysis didn't solve my starting questions, anyway it has given to me some useful indications for a possible modelization of multimedial communication as follows:

• to distinguish between ‘interaction’ and ‘communication’ on the base of meaningful intentionality.

• to distinguish, consequently, between ‘transmission of information’ and ‘communication’.

• to link the notion of communication to that of signification in a way that could make possible to consider and to describe the co-action and co-operation of various media; in other words, to take in consideration the process of signification in its multimodal and multimedial complexity.

The following step could be that of including into this theoretical setting a notion of signs system (and if possible also to clarify that of ‘communicational system’ and any possible relations among them) that could be compatible with it.

Then a task I had to satisfy at this point was that of clarifying through a retrospective analysis if these notions of ‘signification’ and ‘signs system’ were in some way or form already available in the semiotic science.

Thus we arrived to the central theme of this work.

Introduction.

One of the basic problems of the communication's conceptualization seems to be its disjunction in theoretical terms from signification's process. If communication is transmitting of information context has no importance; it is enough to analyze the message, or to decode on the ground of the rules of the code which constitutes it, and then we will obtain the meaning of communication. This is the general setting of Communication Theory, which is yet unable to give, as we have already seen, valid heuristic categories, with the help of which it could be possible not only to describe the communicational process in its morphological aspect, but to furnish also a scientific valid explanation for what concerns the significational process it involves. And, we have to remark it, the basic gap seems to be rightly a semiotic one, in the sense that the significational models adopted from communication theory to explain communication as a concrete interaction gives too many errors and distortions provoking several contradictions within the communicative theories themselves.

Now, in my humble opinion, the first question we have to turn ourselves is thus:

• How has been communication conceived within semiotics?

The communicational modeling proper of the semiotic studies is yet always mixed up to, or belonging to, the particular semiotic conception of such author or school. Anyway I think possible to resume it from the variety of theories and analysis into two main groups:

• At one side there are those who adopt a-critically the informational model.
• At the other side we have instead those who don't define any communicative model, if not for an indirect way through the treating and defining of the concepts of 'sign', 'signification' and 'culture'; anyway they conceive communication more something like a process of social interaction.

The problem, to our tasks, is that these two groups are not corresponsive of two different semiotic schools, there are rather within the same school different conceptions living each among the other, and otherwise different schools have similar communicational views but different semiotical theory. All that gives problems to anyone who would like to make a coherent treating of it which follows also chronologically the conceptual development.
In any case the informational model seems to have imposed within semiotics its supremacy in a most direct way in the late 20 years, so as the same term Communication has been losing the original connotation of communion to that of transmitting. In the first pionieristic studies, for example those by Peirce and De Saussure, communication doesn't have a autonomous role, as autonomous concept (semiotics born as a matter of fact, either by the philosophical side and by the linguistic one, fundamentally as the science of signs) until the second half of our century by assuming this new feature of transmitting of information taken from Communication Theory.

The focus is directed thus, more toward the relation sign-meaning, toward signification, rather then toward the concrete communicative process; although some authors (for example Morris) assume the concrete communication as the fundamental referring point. To the intentions do not correspond in facts any praxis, and communication as a concrete phenomenon is thus circled to a little space on the basis of the conceiving the sign-meaning correlation as the founding and exhaustive key of the semiotical practice.

Although 'to do' would be the necessary condition for the applicability of propositions, the sensible elements of signs and the global context are set aside for a research of the semantic objectable elements. To our goals, and on the basis of the considerations made in the previous chapter, I believe useful in this chapter to let derives the analysis of communication's conception within semiotic studies from the introductive analysis of signification and sign as concepts. The specific goal of that analysis will be that of verifying if the semiotic models of signification differ from those adopted by Communication Theory. Above all it will verified if they are able to take in account of the communication phenomenon as a multimodal and multimedial one. That is to say:

• which is the communication/signification relation within semiotics?

Semiotic has always founded the notion of sign and the relative notion of sign system in a general way, i.e. avoiding any direct reference to a specific system, or for what concerns our discussion, to verbal system.

De Saussure thinks that verbal language is only one among others sign systems although the most important, on the other side of the ocean Peirce and Morris conceived semiosi, less or more explicitly, as a process concerning either linguistic and non-linguistic signs. That can let us think that a multimedial semiotic perspective, a perspective taking in account the contemporary integration of various significant systems, would already exist in the ambit of semiotics, although at least as a pure possibility.

Unfortunately it isn’t so simple as we will see now analyzing shortly the semiotic traditional setting of the sign and of the relation communication/signification in the specific conceptions of various authors.

The fundamental concept at the base of various theories of sign, even in its many variants, is that of classical philosophy according to which aliquid stat pro aliquo. The question is to analyze this stat in order to understand which feature it assumes in the various theoretical conceptions.

De Saussure, it is well-known, introduced as an alternative to nominalism, the conception that a sign doesn’t stat for something, but it links indeed a concept to an acoustical image. In this sense, considering also the distinction langue/parole, we can say that signs become part of a socially shared whole where to each sign corresponds a carried idea and an acoustical image (being it either a phoneme or a word) that carries it. This conception seems to fit very well to verbal language but it has several hard consequences if it is applied to other systems, and I think that a first confirmation is the fact that when De Saussure draw up a list of examples of languages he includes high -conventional and formal systems, like the deaf-and-dumb alphabet and military-signals together with verbal language. He thinks as a matter of fact about a high conventional relation between sign and what to it corresponds, a relation socially shared as above mentioned; it assumes then a static and riff feature. This relation creates insurmountable difficulties in the analysis of semiotic products like advertising, television serials, computer animation, difficulties due to the fact that most of those products often change their physical semiotic aspect avoiding consciously ‘conventionality’. The verbal system itself can be difficulty explained in the case its signification were built through a complex textual whole like a book, because the relation of this macro-sign, with what to it corresponds, is really more complex than that of a single sign, and it cannot be explained summing the various single associations sign/sense of the signs which composes it.

But it is my opinion that the problem is deeper and it hides in the folds of saussurian conception arising from the distinction langue/parole according to which we assume an hypostatical notion of verbal system abstracted from the concrete daily communication, and then we try to lead back the second, conceived as variant, replica or pragmatic tokens, to the first. In this sense the equivocation of De Saussure (and of a great part of semiotics) can be clarified; the ‘sign’, the abstract entity of concrete (phonetic) enunciation, is inserted as function among phone-action and the concept it carries. Thus signification is what stays (or ‘corresponds’ to use De Saussure words) between the sign and the carried concept and not between phone-action and the carried concept. And any phone -action is to be explained through this association signs-concepts without considering its concrete occurring situation. It is possible to object, in my opinion, that this conception perverts the nature of signification as a concrete process by abstracting from its physical feature and by re-interpreting it from a point of view that I would define hyperuranic and surely appears to be metaphysic. The idea of sign rises to judge of the original sign, i.e. the concrete phone-action.

The morrisian conception could appear in this aspect more ductile, because of its defining ‘sign’ as something functional and then concrete: the basic idea is that sign act as a preparatory stimulus; once satisfied some pre-conditions, it substitutes in some way what it stands for, i.e. an object/state-of-affairs, and it satisfies a need. In this way the sign indicates a reality and communicates it, makes it known by installing a ‘communancy of signification’ through a communicative means.

Such setting offers perhaps something more from a communicational point of view, but from the significational one, it is not enough complete, because it furnishes only a vague description of the entity ‘sign’ so that it could be fast all. Then the morrisian failure seems to be inverse to the saussurian one, and it consists in the absence of a serious reflection of signification.

The same theory of denotation lead us back to the observations made for De Saussure; i.e. the process of signification is reduced to the sign/interpretant 's association, without taking care of the question if this relation would be only a constructive relation of a meaning which is in reality more complex and of a different nature.

But the most sorrowful point within semiotic (and also linguistic) studies is the fact of thinking possible to explain the process of signification through such a concept of sign.

If from an heuristic point of view it is useful to build theoretical categories, it is as well very important to maintain firm the belief that such categories are precisely heuristic, and descriptive, rather than prescriptive.

According to this, we can say that a particular whole of phone carries a concept, but we have also to consider this association as just one constructive element of a wider semiotic production, i.e. signification, so as a brick in masonry, and to construct a theory of ‘sign’ and of ‘sign system’ based on the macro-architectonic of the system; the question is then to lead particular back to general and not the contrary. A telecast, a book of tales, or any other semiotic production is something more complex than a sum of signs and things which they stand for. This complexity is describable and interpretable only through an approach capable to avoid a separation of the significant process from the concrete communicative one.

To let me explain I would like to do a simple example. If we assume that would exist a building system called masonry whose elements are:

• a class of ten bricks having different forms and colors;
• a class of binding and refining material, i.e. cement, quick-setting cement, stucco, plaster and putty.

With this system am I able to build many things: high walls, low walls, partition walls, boundary walls, arcades and benches and so on, with various forms and colors, choosing the most various associations. Then using the single concept of brick does help me to understand the variety and complexity of the various forms and colors of the complex buildings I can make with?

It is clear that I wouldn't be able to do anything without having the brick, but is it enough to say that the concept of brick is the explanation of that all?

We have seen thus the basic more or less general conception of sign within classic semiotics. From a certain point onward a new variant comes in, the informational one.

According to it the idea that ALIQUID STAT PRO ALIQUO is substituted by the idea that ALIQUID TRANSMITS ALIQUEM.

The question is:

• How this happens, and which are its consequences?

Writes Jürgen Trabant at this regard:

Semiotics assumes the entire world as its own object of study since any thing is able to transmit information and then is a sign.

Thus for example are signs a ray of sunlight which by beating a stone arrives to our view, or the chaotic and disturbing honking of a car coming to our ears form the street underneath.

From this point of view semiotics seems to present itself as a new philosophy of knowledge, whose ground explicative concept is that of information: the human beings knows the world because the world informs him (voluntary or involuntary) of itself. But it exceeds the limits of this work to analyze the philosophical implication of this view.

Then the association between the information (sign) and what is by it transmitted is the new basic idea of signification. We have seen that the informational view within Communication Theory includes a hard dichotomy between communication and signification.

Then a new question arises:

• Which is the relation communication/signification emerging from the semiotic informational view?

We can easily answer to that question by analyzing the most strong semiotic informational theorization, that of Eco (1968; 1975).

2.2. Communication/Signification within Eco's semiotic theory.

According to Eco (1968) semiotics is a general theory studying any cultural process as a phenomenon of communication, but it is divided into two areas of study:

• a theory of codes that concerns the ambit of signification; and

• a theory of marks production as a research ambit that is specific of a semiotic of communication.

The communicative process, for what concerns its basic elementary structure, is conceived in terms of informational model. This communicative or informational process becomes significant only thanks to the code, to the system of signification that associates present entities with absent entities. According to Eco the apperception of the receiver and the interpretation process he acts, are not necessary conditions of the relation of signification, while it is a sufficient condition the correspondence, fixed by the code, between something ‘standing for’ and its ‘correlate’. Eco fixes the autonomy of the system of signification as semiotic autonomous construct, abstract and independent from any communicative act, while on the contrary any communicative process among human beings presupposes necessarily a system of signification or code which consists in the specific type of such system and includes then a syntactic system (a series of signals regulated by combinatory inner laws); a semantic system (a series of contents) and a behavioral system (a series of possible behavioral answers of the receiver); these three subsystems being bound by a rule which consists in the code itself. This rule associates elements of the syntactic system with those of the semantic system or with those of the behavioral one. The systems constituting the code can subsist independently, and for this reason Eco defines them ‘s-codes’ (subcodes). Eco believes that a code fixes ‘general types’ which are then realized when the rule produces them, generates them as tokens. In this sense Eco assigns to a theory of codes the task to explain the rules of linguistic competence, of textual building and of contextual disambiguity. He proposes a semantic able to solve in its domain problems commonly ascribed to pragmatics. The theory of codes has then the task to analyze and to describe those requisites which, being socially acknowledged, must be registered as rules of codic (and decodic) procedure. In this case Eco himself recognize, that considering the semantic system as a dictionary, i.e. as abstract competence, we clash against the semiotic practice that moves and changes continuously the correlation type-token by transforming some tokens in types.

Eco is forced to revise his theory of codes indicating the necessity to define semantic fields and axes only inside the communicative conditions of a determined message. He concludes saying that the supposed independence of the system of signification from the system of sign production, remains legitimate only as ‘regulating hypothesis’.

2.3. Some hypotheses of reconjunction and/or resolution.

A contribute to a mediation between the two domains of communication and signification comes from Prieto (1975a); he includes as a matter of fact, either communication and signification among the research domain of a general semiology (trying to solve the academic opposition, within the French semiology, between a semiology of communication and a semiology of signification).

The study of communication in general has the task, for Prieto, to calculate the possible codes in order to understand the specificity and originality of linguistic phenomena; the study of signification would try indeed to explain behavior, social living in its becoming signification.

It is evident that the sphere of signification presupposes in this formulation, the sphere of communication, where signification itself takes place. This conception, writes Prieto (1975b) is based on a twofold postulate concerning on one side the object of linguistic: language is in fact an association of sound-senses, but it is also the structure which determines this particular way to know sounds and senses. Language is precisely a structure and a way to know, and the study of semiotic structures is the study of the knowledge built and used from human groups and then also the study of the forms that the praxis of human groups assumes.

On the other side, language is a mean used by human beings to communicate; only such 'function', in Prieto's opinion, offers the chance to explain the structure which constitutes language, because each knowledge, conceived as the real knowledge of a really existed subject, is always ineluctably bound to a function; this function can permit the explication of the structure on which such knowledge is founded, or as Prieto himself writes, any knowledge is always inserted in a practice. Language and semiotic structures make possible the practice of communication, but communication is at the same time the field where language and semiotic structures exist.

I think that we can accept the general scheme of Prieto's theorization; as a matter of fact the problem is to reformulate the relation communication/signification so that it could be possible to take in account on one side the concrete context and the relation between signs and sign system, on the other side the different types of signification (micro- macro-architectonic one) within the concrete communicative praxis.

An other effort to exit from the semantic/pragmatic opposition is that outlined by Kristeva (1969). She tries to bring semiotics further from what she calls the "linguistic ideology of sign as representamen" which sees the subject as the center and end of communication. She sees in this view an extreme rationalism which reduce the communicative praxis.

The solution is that of re-conceiving under a translinguistic perspective the communication as a process. She propose then to substitute to the couple communication/signification that of practice/productivity.

We have reached then the basic problem, that of the relation between communication and signification; if we look back to semiotic studies as a matter of facts, we note the general tendency to divide the two ambits either from a methodological and from a theoretical point of view.

Communication as concrete interaction, as complex building of sense constituted by different sign systems, seems not to find the right place within semiotics. Signification is reduced to the mere sign/meaning correlation seen as the ground of communication; in this sense communication is only the act which it can be made possible thanks to the significational properties of signs or of sign systems.

But let we try to better understand the implications of such a concept of sign in relation to its systemic feature.

Within semiotics, linguistics a communication sciences we do not find rigorous and interrelated definitions of language, code, and medium.

De Saussure for example conceived as synonymous langue (i.e. the abstract general system of language) and code. Within communication theory the code assumes a general meaning of repertory of signs and/or signals, while the medium is sometimes seen as code, sometimes as sign system and sometimes again it is identified with the channel of transmission.

Some other authors consider the code as the verbal system, some others extend it to non-verbal languages and some others again to objectual system (Poyatos for example).

At this regard in the last 30 years it is maybe to complain about a use excessively easy (and lacking of scientific rigor) within semiotics and communication's theories of categories and concepts not well defined or analyzed. To insert a teacher within media because it connect the knowledge with alumni (see for example Faultisch: 1991; 1994), or to conceive the typographic sign /a/ as multimedial sign because composed by the verbal and by the typographical language are really deviant results of such a situation.

The chaotic and disorganic feature of semiotics if at one side mirrors the light and easy use of ground concepts, at the other side it represents a serious theoretical lack which indeed only a few scholars seems to take in account.

The question is:

• What do we mean with sign system?

Since it is a basic semiotic concept we must have an idea of it.

Well, also at this regard we have a multiple and chaotic mess of conceptions.

To not exceed the limits of this work I will not analyze them deeply, anyway it would be sufficient to analyze the most common and acknowledged conception.

With sign system it is meant commonly a system composed by three sub-wholes:

• a whole of signs,
• a whole of meanings associated to the previous elements;
• and a whole of rules of associations of such signs.

In this sense the road signaling is a sign system, language too, and so on.

Now let we consider the following question:

• is this whole of sign/meaning relations well defined?

It is surely so in some cases, so as in the Morse alphabet or in the road signaling. It is not in other cases such as in the verbal language or in the kinesic system.

And then the question is:

• How can we include them within such a category of sign?

And: do we can think that some signs associate themselves with other types of signs to express (to build) a meaning which cannot be expressed by a single system?

It is the case of most of daily face-to-face communication.

Language for example, in the concrete face-to-face significational process is always accompanied by deittic indications, prosodic features, gestures and so on.

Who can assure us that such a co-presence of different signs would not be necessary?

If we admit such a possibility how can we define such systems according to the above conception of sign system?

Is there no substantial differences between the road signaling and the verbal language?

And regarding the multimedial communication, can we not think that the multimedial communication would resolve the semantic partiality of each single system by integrating it in a system which could be wider and semantically more complete and complex of it?

Writes Lotman in regard to the atomistic conception of sign proper of semiotics:

It seems to me clear that the same notion of sign system gives a lot of problem when applied to the concrete praxis of communication.

Thus I'm convinced that most of theoretical problems existing within semiotic and communicational studies depend by a modeling which perverts the communicative process by canalizing it within stiff prescriptive categories, such as that of the informational model, or that of the logic-semantic model, of communication.

The problem arises then from the fact that the concrete communication is not related with the process of signification, i.e. a atomistic and abstracted relation of signification is superimposed to the concrete one; this superimposition is possible by the fact that an abstract closed system is verifiable at its inner side without problems. If we never look outside we still remain happy.

I do not want to say that it would not possible to build explicative and descriptive scientific models. The problem is, that such models, to be what they should be, should not superimpose something in a prescriptive way to what they should describe and explain.

Let we think for a moment to all those type of textually mediated communication which we call art. The emotional and sensible aspects of meaning can maybe be reduced to the category of information?

Can be explained by associating the single signs which compose it to the single meanings?

Can be explained in terms of connotation?

Or maybe it is better to consider the hypothesis that elementary signification (sign/meaning) would be only a first level of human communication, and consider then communication as a process which put in act more complex significational processes which are not reducible to its elementary single elements?

My final hypothesis is thus that the general theoretical semiotic setting swings among two planes, which are not reducible the one to the other, and this has as concrete result a dichotomyc trend on communication/signification relation.

Those two planes seems to never meet each other in a unifying theoretical platform.

Which are the possibilities we could have to describe and to explain successfully the semiotic aspect of interaction by distinguish it from all that can be considered as not relevant?

Our analysis of semiotics, as a matter of fact, didn't resolved any problems. As we have seen, on the contrary, there are more problems that solutions (as always happens): if we use the informational model in an absolute sense, we have no more possibilities to distinguish within the concrete interaction, behaviors oriented to the voluntary building of a meaning from behaviors which are not oriented at all.

We can narrow Communication by using the sign concept of classic philosophy and by saying that communication is only what stay for something else. Yet, in this way we are able only to analyze the inner signification of a system which is built in vitro, and not that of the concrete communicational phenomenon. To apply this conception to the concrete communication in facts, means to obtain the same result of the other conception, i.e. any thing can stay for something else.

All that lead us to think that it would be allowed to ask ourselves if semiotics is nothing but a modern metaphysical theory which deals with an abstract world of ideas called signs, and meanings, or nothing but a discipline which deals with all through general and undefined categories, so that in a way it is possible through such a discipline, to say all and its contrary.

As a matter of fact if it cannot explain and ordinate scientifically the communicational process which is then its object of study? All the culture as phenomenon of communication or rather signification conceived as an abstract and universal correlation between possible signs and meanings?

In such sense I maintain firm my belief that, at the actual state, semiotics appears to be more a new metaphysics rather than a scientific discipline with an empirical ground. The fact then that there are many works of application on concrete fields doesn't change too far the situation. Also the classic metaphysics used to take care of the world after having fixed its referring system.

Thus I conclude this paper with two more questions:

• Do we need to think back again to the semiotic acting leaving aside unuseful and contradictory categories which perverts the analysis, as suggested from Kristeva?
• Would that enough to legitimate the wishes of semiotics to be a n accomplished science?

A solution could be that of conceiving communication/signification as a highly correlated and necessary complex process which needs of new categories, categories which should be rightly conceived in order to explain and to describe such complexity (see at this regard my first personal propose in Teobaldelli: 1993-94; 1995); yet it is sure that such a re-conceiving needs also, in my humble opinion, to be preceded by a strict confrontation at least with epistemology and with the theory of knowledge, that is to say with the philosophical thinking (see Teobaldelli 1998).

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