Semiotics and control systems:

Toward a non-classical model of communication

Robert de Beaugrande

Introduction

Semiotic model-building has been persistently ‘classicalised’ by two tendencies: a ‘realism’ that exemplifies the signified with an ordinary object; and a ‘formalism’ that decouples classical reality yet treats the signifier itself as an ordinary object. Significant progress now awaits the formulation of non-classical models, such as might integrate both classical or ordinary reality and quantum reality without any fundamental blind spot or dualism. Such models might be conceived in terms of complementarities, wherein all properties available to perception and epistemology are riding on a conjugate variability between order versus disorder, certainty versus uncertainty, or determinacy versus indeterminacy. ‘Reality’ could be comprehended as an interference pattern projected by waves of alternatives, and perception and communication as processes running in phase with rising curves of order, certainty, or determinacy, but out of phase with falling curves. Semiosis would therefore tend in principle to mask large regions of indeterminacy in proportion to its complexity, and classicalised semiotic models would tend to systematically background this factor in a non-dialectical mode. Only non-classical models can restore the suppressed dialectic that underlies the dynamics of ordinary semiosis.

The determinacy assumption between realism and formalism

 ‘We witness’, according to Anderson, Deely, Krampen, Ransdell, Sebeok, and Uexküll (1984: 18), ‘at every scale, “human” and quantum, similar behaviour in dynamical systems’, be they ‘material systems focusing on energy relations’ or ‘nonmaterial systems focusing on information relations’. However, this factor is so far not sufficiently represented in prevailing theories and models. As the same authorities remark (1984: 15), ‘semiotics has seldom dealt with dynamical systems as a whole; those non-linear, irreversible realities where energy explicitly fuses with information, such as experience, ontogeny, and phylogeny’. Instead, we see ‘the specialization of semiotics in systems seemingly unconstrained by energy relations’. Moreover, due to the endurance of ‘classical’ views of ‘science’, most prevailing conceptions of ‘infor­mation’ have been confined to reductive, non-dynamic, and deter­ministic modes.

This state of affairs reflects antecedent dispositions about the relationship between sign processing (semiosis) and reality. Semiotic and linguistic models have classicalised the domain through two major trends, at least implicitly. One of these trends, more often favoured in practice than in theory, is to classicalise semiosis by referring it to ‘classical reality’, Le., to a world composed of ordinary objects with stable identities. This trend is understandable in view of the persistent project to classicalise the study of language by emulating ‘classical science’, which purports to reflect and explain ‘classical reality’. In linguistics, for example, Bloomfield (1933: 139) argued that a ‘definition of meaning’ must be based on ‘a scientifically accurate knowledge of everything in the speaker’s world. That argument fit the ambition that ‘the methods of linguistics, in spite of their modest scope, resemble those of a natural science’ (1933: 509). He similarly claimed that ‘human actions’ ‘are part of cause-and-effect sequences exactly like those we may observe, say, in the study of physics and chemistry’ (1933: 33). His notion of the ‘scientific’ was thoroughly classical: a ‘universally recognized and accurate classification’ (1933: 139).

In such an approach, semiosis is modelled as a. form of behaviour controlled by the relations between signifiers (or sets of these) and their referential signifieds. In the standard semiotic illustrations for the well known triad of ‘symbol’, ‘index’, and ‘icon’, for instance, the pole of the sign-relation which is not the signifier is typically an ordinary object. Invoking Peirce, Hawkes (1977: 127, emphases added) envisions ‘triadic relations of performance’ involving

actual entities in the real world, based on the kind of ground. These are the icon, something which functions as a sign by means of features of itself which resemble its object; the index, something which functions as a sign by virtue of some sort of factual or causal connection with its object; and the symbol, something which functions as a sign because of some “role” of conventional or habitual association between itself and its object’.

Like many semioticians since Saussure, Hawkes (1977: 129) interposes the principle of ‘arbitrariness’ to adjust ‘the relationship between sign and object or signifier and signified’:¹

where my pointing finger [...] could be said to be the index of a tree; where my painting or diagram of a tree constitutes an icon of the tree, my utterance of the word ‘tree’ (or ‘arbre’, or ‘Baum’, or ‘arbor’) is a symbol of the tree because there is no inherent necessary ‘tree-like’ quality in that signifier: its relationship to an actual tree remains fundamentally arbitrary.

 This move is believed to show that ‘there is no appeal open to a “reality” beyond the structure of language’, as befits ‘the “new” perception’ within ‘structuralism’, spurred by ‘the realization’ that ‘the world does not consist of independently existing objects, whose concrete features can be perceived clearly and individually, and whose nature can be classified accordingly’ (1977:25,17).

But how far does this ‘realization’ go? Note the persistence of such locutions as ‘resemble its object’ or (still more revealing) ‘factual or causal connection with its object’. Even when repudiating ‘the reference to the patterns of “reality”‘, the examples are distinctly ordinary objects — an ‘actual tree’ as a ‘physical leafy object’ or a ‘dog’ as a ‘four-legged barking creature’ — whose realness is by no means questioned (cf. Hawkes 1977:25f, 70, 129, 17). Similarly, to invoke a ‘bias’ or a ‘distorting mirror’, or ‘psychological principles’ being ‘covertly projected’ ‘upon whatever the real world may in fact be’, is to imply that reality is still in place, existing substantially for itself, though inaccessible to ‘objective perception’ (Hawkes 1977: 17, 119, 56, emphasis added)..

Indeed, the prime move in structuralist method — though seldom acknowledged in theory — is to expand, rather than renounce, classical reality by proceeding as if the sign or signifier itself is an ordinary object. Why else should we bother to consider whether the signifier ‘has an inherent necessary “tree-like” quality’? Only if the signifier and its signified are both suspected of being ordinary objects is it so urgent to stress the ‘arbitrariness’ of their relation. If we took it for granted that they are objects of quite different orders, then we would have no grounds to expect any ‘natural’ or ‘physical’ relation.

Consider also the implications when Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified is equated with the ‘ancient’ division between ‘an immediately perceptible signans and an inferable, apprehensible signatum’ (Hawkes 1977:126; Jakobson 1971: 699; emphasis added). Did not Saussure declare that the signifier cannot be immediately perceived, but only through the elaborate mediation of a system of relationships (e.g.: the ‘phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the signs that surround it’ (Saussure 1966: 120)? Or, notice when the ‘phonemic level’ is said to obey a ‘structuring principle’ which ‘overrides the “actual” nature of individual items and systematically imposes its own shape upon them’ (Hawkes 1977: 23, emphasis added). ‘That which actually occurs on the phonetic level’ gets divided into what ‘the structure of the language does not register’ versus what it ‘does take account of (Hawkes 1977: 23). The substantial reality of signans or sound is not questioned, but only the human disposition to perceive what it ‘actually’ is. In effect, the popular regress to the phonemic level, while announced as a repudiation of substantialism, is one strategic step in implicitly giving the signifier the status of an ordinary object while explicitly denying that same status to the signified.

The other dominant trend in model-building — and the one officially embraced in much of post-Saussurian semiotics — has been to formalize ordinary semiosis by representing it in terms of another symbol system, usually a more abstract one governed by ‘rules’. This move makes the signifier refer to another signifier rather than to any reality. Greimas for example ‘sees the signifier-signified connection as, in the long run, infinitely regressive in nature: the connection itself is what generates meaning, not any “real” world beyond it to which it refers’ (Hawkes 1977:121). Greimas (1970:13) concludes: ‘Signification” is thus nothing but such transposition from one level of language to another, from one language to a different language, and meaning is nothing but the possibility of such transcoding’. Formalism allows considerations about the status of reality to be postponed and thus gains ground as realism and behaviourism recede. Structuralists like Barthes and Todorov profited from the shock value “of declaiming that ‘we no longer believe in an external, objective, and unchanging reality, nor in methods which merely seek to transcribe it’; and that ‘for us, “real” and “imaginary” are not mutually excusive categories: they partake of each other’ (summary in Hawkes 1977: 103). Their use of art and literature as instances was a canny tactic at the time; but claims were often extended to communication at large, on the premise — in some ways correct, in my view — that formalist probings of ‘poetic language’ had raised much wider issues.

Still, formalism is more an evasion than a solution to the problem of reality in semiosis. By situating the signifieds within another layer or level of signifiers, formalism — quite unintentionally, I think — ­leaves open the prospect that both levels might consist of ordinary objects, linked by an arbitrary relation. The most famous demonstra­tions of formalism, such as Jakobson’s analyses of poetry, entail a monumental objectifying of the linguistic material, i.e., of treating words and texts as if they, rather than ‘the world’, are ‘independently existing objects, whose concrete features can be perceived clearly and individually, and whose nature can be classified accordingly’ (to expropriate from Hawkes as cited above).

Moreover, linguistics undeniably achieved its most enduring results by focusing on the ‘levels’ of language whose ‘objective’ quality seemed easiest to demonstrate (Beaugrande 1991). In phonology, the highly ordered repertory of ‘phonemes’ identified by ‘minimal features’ carne with the ready-made objective determinism of observable articulatory events and locations (whence ‘dental’, ‘glottal’, ‘stop’, ‘fricative’, etc.) (cf. Wilden 1987:1760. In morphology, words and word-parts were objectified with the weaker determinism derivable by specialists (not by ordinary sign users) from grammar, inflection, and etymology. In syntax, sentences were prominently objectified as linear strings with a directionality of ‘left’ and ‘right’, or ‘surface’ and ‘deep’. In semantics, meanings were objectified as ‘semantic features’ often compared to physical or chemical constituents of matter (Beaugrande 1984b, 1988b).- On each ‘level’, the trend was to analyse language itself as a set or configuration of ordinary objects, whose reality was no longer officially referred to the external reality of the world, but was implicitly affirmed by the emphasis on segmentation or concatenation mandated by the prevailing, ostensibly non-realist, theories.

Why should model-building have classicalised reality and language despite the pronounced intent to decouple the two and address only the abstract form? Perhaps because such trends upheld an important assumption: determinacy is ultimately guaranteed in the sense that it could be established by an appropriate regress, whether it be to reality or to another structural coding subject to interpretive rules (e.g., truth­ value matrices). This assumption permitted semioticians and linguists to defer the whole question of whether and how far ordinary semiosis, which involves no such regress, is determinate —and thus how much determinacy the conception of ‘langue’ or ‘system’ can retain once it has been abstracted away from ‘parole’ or ‘semiosis’.

Meanwhile, the determinacy assumption remained a strategic promise passed along from one generation of theories or models to another without serious scrutiny, let alone fulfilment. In consequence, the study of signification, as found throughout the recent history of ‘semantics’, has been largely a search for modes of determinacy (Beaugrande 1987b). In effect, the semanticist has been compelled to devise some mode of analysis or demonstration that will continually confirm the determinacy assumption. Yet indeterminacy has persisted despite having been theoretically banished. When several semanticists undertook an independent probe of the ‘same’ materials, even using the same mode of analysis, they typically attained very different results. Apparently, the more deterministic the method, the less determinate was its relation to the significations of ordinary semiosis. The more the theorists tried to squeeze the indeterminacy out of a model of signification, the more indeterminacy seemed to move over into the relation between the model and its prospective domain (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Drift of indeterminacy

Indeed, the understanding of new formalisms compounded the problems of understanding ordinary signs and created an enduring diversion.

Bloomfield’s (1933) Language plainly reveals how a strong push for determinacy flips over into indeterminacy (Beaugrande 1987a). He averred that ‘each linguistic form has a constant and definite meaning, different from the meaning of any other linguistic form in the language’ (1933: 158). His recourse was to ‘define the meaning of a linguistic form’ as ‘the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer’ (1933: 139f). This argument referred meaning directly to classical reality, yet un­expectedly made meaning far less determinable, not more so. Bloomfield surmised that ‘the study of speakers’ situations and hearers ‘responses’ ‘is equivalent to the sum total of all human knowledge’ ‘including every object and happening in their universe’ (1933:74, 139). Since this point of reference was unattainable, ‘meaning cannot be analysed within the scope of our science’ (1933: 161).

Like many other researchers, Bloomfield (1933: 26, 146) considered ‘mathematics’ the ‘ideal use of language’, ‘where the denotations are very precise’. However, we might well doubt whether mathematical terms have denotations at all. Mathematics is rather a specialized system for manipulating configurations of formal symbols that differentiate values without stipulating what those values will be in specific cases (cf. Carnap 1934; Hjelmslev 1943). And aspects of meaning not governed by the rules of the system remain uninterpreted, creating a problematic division between the more formal aspects of the sign and its more meaningful ones. As Pattee (1982: 334) remarks, ‘one of the great discoveries in the foundations of logic and mathematics was that syntactical precision could be obtained only by relinquishing meaning. However, in the application of mathematics, as in physical theories, the syntactic-semantic distinctions are very difficult to decouple, because, in most cases, the syntax has evolved only as an abstraction from informal but very meaningful concepts’. We might recall here Einstein’s memorable dictum (cited in Rosen 1978:195): ‘In so far as the propositions of mathematics are certain they do not refer to reality, and in so far as they refer to reality they are not certain’.

In sum, both realism and formalism provide an excellent illustration of the principle that ‘those aspects of scientific endeavour which appear over-determined are likely to be those which prove maladaptive in the longer term’ (Anderson et al. 1984: 14). By insisting on a fully deter­ministic base, our theorists lose control of the domain of signification. Yet the converse project of simply expelling the determinacy assumption from semiosis and semiotics, as held-forth by some move­ments of ‘post-structuralism” is equally elusive. However problematic its influence on model-building, the determinacy assumption has been quite powerful and still dominates many domains under many guises. We need to recognize its motives and consequences, and to situate it in a genuinely dialectical complementarity with indeterminacy (Beaugrande 1989a). To do so, we need to develop a correspondingly dialectical, and non-classical, concept of ‘reality’ such that the relation between signifier and’ signified does not imply ordinary objects at either end. This task cannot be achieved by the self-involved post­structuralist gesture which seeks to replace the traditional deter­minacy assumption with a correspondingly absolute indeterminacy assumption, and which rejects classical science in favour of anti-systems that ultimately lead to particularly devious theologies or auto-therapies (Beaugrande 1988e). Instead, we should consider recent develop­ments in the emergence of non-classical science and their implications for modelling physical and biological systems (cf. Beaugrande 1987a, 1988b, 1989; Yates and Beaugrande 1990).

Quantum reality?²

In 1922, Werner Heisenberg asked his professor, Niels Bohr: ‘If the inner structure of the atom is as closed to descriptive accounts as you say, and if we really lack a language for dealing with it, how can we ever hope to understand the atom?’ Bohr hesitated and then replied: ‘I think we may yet be able to do so. But in the process, we may have to learn what the word “understand” really means’ (reported in Heisenberg 1971: 41). Though we still have not learned this, the aspects of reality so troubling to quantum theorists do point toward a significant and neglected dimension of understanding.

Its unprecedented challenge to understanding is a good reason why the ‘new physics’ deserves to be called ‘new’. ‘Physicists who deal with quantum theory are compelled to use a language taken from ordinary life’; otherwise ‘they could no longer express their thoughts’ (Heisen­berg et al. 1961: 34). Yet it is often unclear how language could designate the newly discovered entities, let alone describe or explain them. To speak of ‘phenomena’ implies ‘appearance’ (at least from the Greek etymology),³ but many of the new entities do not appear in ways we could perceive; we can only detect events that make sense if we assume that the entities ‘exist’.

‘Existence’ too is a slippery notion now that the importance of virtual’ entities has been recognized. If and when they do become actual, they are so short-lived and elusive that they seem to ‘exist’ in a more exceptional than reassuring way. They owe their existence to ‘uncertainty’, a factor firmly established by Heisenberg’s own ‘uncertainty principle’ that we cannot simultaneously measure the precise position and momentum of an entity (say, an electron). This uncertainty holds not because human perception or our instruments are inexact, but because the two quantities are ‘conjugate variables’: the accuracy of one is attained at the expense of the accuracy of the other. This computational problem has the strange effect of allowing the virtual to intrude upon the ‘real’. A particle can briefly ‘borrow’ enough momentum from the uncertainty relation to make an otherwise impossible escape from a fixed position, as when alpha particles get away from the nucleus of the atom. Moreover, since ‘time’ and ‘energy’ are also conjugate variables, energy can be ‘borrowed’ from the uncertainty relation to ‘create’ particles that exist for a tiny instant and are then annihilated. Quantum physics suggests that these ‘virtual’ particles are crucial for modelling the cohesion and interaction of the more persistent charged particles that constitute ‘actual’ matter.

And this point is paramount: models in the ‘new’ physics explain the nature and processes of mass and energy in terms of the effects of entities whose existence is uncertain or hypothetical, but essential in accounting for groups of real results. In models based on electroweak gauge theory, for example, entities are postulated that could be actualised only at enormous energies beyond any we can generate with known technology such as linear accelerators, yet possibly occurring in the very early moments of the creation of the universe. So we have to scan outer space for residual effects of entities that can no longer be actualised at all, yet which may have been the very basis for our own universe.

In addition, the entities of the ‘new physics’ have a most disconcer­ting ability to change identities. Not that sub-atomic particles are individualistic anyway, since all ‘particles of the same type are absolutely indistinguishable’ (Zukav 1979: 202); but at least each type has some distinctive features, such as charge and -mass. Now even that minimum identity seems in question: ‘elementary particles are known which continually oscillate between quite distinctive states’ (Disney 1984: 189). At ‘high temperatures’, for instance, ‘protons, neutrons, gamma-ray photons, electrons, anti-particles, and neutrinos all freely transmute backward and forward into one another in a sort of statistical equilibrium’ (Disney 1984: 190).

The upshot of these puzzles is the counterintuitive, if not paradoxical, conception of ‘quantum reality’. ‘The source all quantum paradoxes appears to lie in the fact that human perceptions create a world of unique actualities — our experience is inevitably classical ­while quantum reality is not that way at all’ (Herbert 1985: 248). In the latter, the base state is a parallelism of possible states or events which acts like a ‘wave’ (all occurring at once) until an observation is performed, whereupon the wave function ‘collapses’ into the single observed outcome. We cannot predict which one this will be in any single case, but only how probable it is for a whole set of cases. If put in ordinary terms, this model should imply that all the alternatives are ‘existing’ side by side in the wave, with no special preference for any one; and pure chance decides the outcome of a single test. The realist wants to ask: if the other alternatives were just as ‘real’, where did they suddenly ‘go’?

A further disquieting implication arises from effects that appear without local causes. In the EPR effect (Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen 1935), you fire two electrons with correlated momentum in opposite directions, where tracking devices are set up. If you measure the position or the momentum of one electron, you instantly know that of the other without measuring. (Fig. 2).

Figure 2. The EPR effect

Somehow the one electron seems to ‘know’ instantly what happens to the other; but that would require information to be transferred faster than the speed of light, the velocity physics insists is a true ‘constant’ and not to be exceeded.⁴ So two possibilities remain, both offensive to classical reality: either your observation itself has transferred the information; or the two events (spin-changes or whatever) are in some non-classical sense ‘the same one’.⁵

These examples could be multiplied, but the point is already clear enough: ordinary logic won’t see you through quantum situations. You want to insist that a single entity cannot take several paths at once; that whether you happen to be ‘looking’ or not has no effect on what’s ‘really’ going on; that you can’t act on a thing by acting on something else at another place; and so on. You would be in good company: Heisenberg felt ‘almost in despair’ over the ‘absurd’ particle-wave dualism; Einstein maintained that ‘all natural science’ rests upon ‘the belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject’; Newton found the idea ‘that one body may act upon another at a distance without the mediation of anything else’ to be ‘an absurdity’ unacceptable to anyone with ‘a competent faculty for thinking’; and so on.⁶

What then of semiotics, which for Peirce was ‘only another name’ for ‘logic’ — ‘the quasi-necessary, or formal doctrine of signs’ and ‘the science of the general necessary laws of signs’ (1958: Vol 2, Para. 227)? As in formalism, logic is seen as a recourse situated not merely outside reality, but also above it. Hawkes (1977: 126) suggests that ‘in Peirce’s view, logic exists independently of both reasoning and fact’. But did not the formalists rather suppose that logic was the ultimate guarantee of the possibility of reasoning and fact? Only in this way could logic be expected to obviate the regress to reality. The Einsteinian belief in the self-sufficient existence of an external world matches up to the formalist belief in the self-sufficient existence of a logical world , both worlds being ultimately classical. Now, quantum reality — pushing Einstein’s theories in a direction he never accepted — shows that neither belief can be sustained, and provides a forceful impetus for non-classical models.

Order, uniformity, indeterminacy, control

One of the still undisputed facts of physics is that all system operate by allowing energy (or ‘heat’) to flow from a higher towards a lower area. The total amount of energy must be conserved; energy can be redistributed, but not created or destroyed (first law of thermodynamics). And the total distribution of energy becomes steadily more uniform (second law of thermodynamics). In the standard conception of ‘entropy’, ‘uniformity’ is interpreted as ‘disorder’; in information theory, ‘uniformity’ is interpreted as absence of structure, hence lack of information. However, these technical and relatively modem uses conflict with conceptions of ordinary reality, where ‘uniformity’ is often associated more with ‘order’. When we say things are ‘in order’, we often mean a tidy state free of oddities or exceptions.⁷ This conflict suggests that thermodynamic theory is non-classical in the sense that ‘entropy’ or ‘uniformity’ can support both ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ in a dialectical complementarity, rather than just one side of a classical opposition. Which of the two options obtains is decided by the perspective applied, and not by some efficient linear causality. I shall be trying to show how these stipulations could be developed in non--classical models of the way reality interacts with human perception and communication.

The provision that entropy must ultimately increase as energy is distributed more uniformly implies two significant alternatives for the structural dynamics of life systems: their complex order and informa­tional configuring is either enabled by a vastly amplified counter­-entropic fluctuation; or else functions as a local region interacting with another, presumably more global, region of entropic degradation of energy, concentrated for instance in the metabolism (cf. Lotka 1925; Needham 1943; Seldenberg 1950; Yates and Iberall 1982). In our models for semiosis are to reflect our models for life systems in general (as proposed by Anderson et al.. 1984), these alternatives must be explored here also. Either semiosis is a process that creates order by means of a temporary fluctuation destined to fade away sooner or later into total randomness; or semiosis is a process that creates order by riding on some compensatory increase in disorder on some other plane, such that randomness need not be the inexorable final outcome (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). The order of semiosis might be compensated either over time or over space (Fig. 3), where ‘time’ is regulated not in fixed units but in dynamic informational-energetic processing cycles, and where ‘space’ designates flow distributions among concurrently available domains, not necessarily three-dimensional physical spaces.

Figure 3. Complementarity of order and disorder

These non-classical conceptions of ‘time’ and ‘space’ may be, I shall suggest later, appropriate ‘dimensions’ for modelling semiosis in terms of the ‘dynamical systems’ envisioned in the position paper cited at the outset: as ‘non-linear, irreversible realities where energy explicitly fuses with information’. Like all processes, semiosis must entail a redistribution of energy; but because small amounts of energy are evidently subjected to enormous amplification during processing, this aspect has seldom been given adequate attention.

The epistemological implications of thermodynamics point to the same conclusion as those. of quantum theory: indeterminacy is the base state of the universe. Yet we should not exalt this ‘indeterminacy assumption’ to any such absolute status as has traditionally been accorded to the determinacy assumption cited in the first section. Instead, we can probe the qualities and dimensions of non-classical reality in terms of conjugate variables, where the determinacy of the one rides on the indeterminacy oí the other. For example, a ‘massless particle’ would be nonsense in classical reality, because mass is a necessary attribute in order to have a particle at all. In non-classical reality, however, such a particle can exist by virtue of its energy alone, since energy is the complement of mass and can be converted into mass under appropriate conditions. Thus, the critical classical test for ‘reality’ (finding the mass) remains undecidable in principle in non-classical reality: we can only make a decision for a specific phenomenon-observer interaction.

Yet human experience seems persistently classical. Apparently, human perception, and all processes interacting with it, including communication and semiosis, operate ‘in phase’ with rising gradients of determinacy, and ‘out of phase’ with falling ones. The peaks in our ‘waves’ of perception line up with the peaks in the ‘waves’ of rising determinacy, creating ‘constructive interference’ and producing additive amplitudes, whereas the superposition of perception with falling indeterminacy creates ‘destructive interference’ and produces cance­latory amplitudes. Fig. 4 offers a somewhat metaphorical means to visualize this phenomenon, which is itself not dimensional, or at least not in any classical sense.

Figure 4. Wave interference

‘Indeterminacy’ here does not mean randomness (absence of all selection and differentiation), but the interaction of concurrent, definable possibilities without a specific selection of just one.

This visual aid should not mislead us to construe the ‘waves’ in Fig. 4 as ordinary objects like waves at the seashore outside my window. Instead, these waves are the greater or lesser certainties or probabilities upon which the presumed properties of all ‘objects’ or ‘realities’ — whether or not they are treated as ‘ordinary’ (classical) — are ‘riding’. The superposition of the two waves represents the entire realm of possibilities, which can never be actualised within one event. On the determinacy wave, the crests represent the best certainties or highest probabilities; on the indeterminacy wave, the crests represent the least certainties or lowest probabilities. But neither end can be absolute. If we could ever be infinitely certain or infinitely uncertain about a particular object or reality, the two waves would completely cancel each other in the ultimate peak of destructive interference. Speculatively, at the same instant we became infinitely certain about something we would also become infinitely uncertain about something else — if not indeed about everything else, since infinite uncertainty should erase all differentiations between domains. The two infinities would cancel each other: then, if the model of ‘renormalization’ holds in this extremity (and many physicists would protest that it is only an abstract computational manipulation),⁸ we could literally put in the new dimensions of the universe by hand.

Yet since in human knowledge, neither certainty nor uncertainty can ever be infinite, the interfering waves will always leave some uncancelled amplitudes. We might say that certainty and uncertainty (or determinacy and indeterminacy) are themselves conjugate variables in both quantum reality and ordinary reality, but with the inverted complementarity which allows both to rise together at the same time (Fig. 5).

Figure 5. Normal and inverted complementarity

However, human perception and experience, being in phase with rising certainty and determinacy, generate the ‘classical’ quality that, as Bohr and Heisenberg noted, human reality seems to have.

As the base state of the universe, indeterminacy can be constrained, but such constraints cannot last indefinitely. The term control can designate any process capable of limiting indeterminacy, that is, of maintaining the hypothesis that indeterminacy is limited, and acting accordingly (Beaugrande 1987a, 1989a; Yates and Beaugrande 1990). Some forms of control are established by physical laws, e.g., the physical constants like the speed of light; or by biological processes, such as the irreversible cycles of energy in life-systems. But many additional forms of control are established by specific transitory acts, i.e., interventions of relatively⁹ brief duration, set against the persistent background of indeterminacy. The ordinary concept of  ‘control’ as the capacity to intervene in the world, such that the rela­tion between the current state and its ensuing states is neither pure chance nor pure necessity, is a special case of the sense proposed here.

Observation qualifies as a control act in this sense. Whatever means are used, the ‘observed event’ is always understood as a selection from within the context of concurrently possible events. In both science and daily life, the observer can ‘understand’ why that selection was made only by considering many more events, since no single observa­tion can tell us what the whole set of possibilities might be. When we repeat the process over and over, entering each new event in our list, we have added the postulate that the universe is repeatable, such that several events at different times and places can, for certain purposes, be considered ‘the same’. To anchor this postulate, we need ‘dimensionality’, the postulate that the universe possesses dimensions susceptible to measurement, such as time and space; otherwise, we have no criteria for telling what might be ‘the same’ or a ‘repetition’. Also, we need to postulate ‘causality’ as the connectedness between a condition and an event, so that we can indeed create the conditions needed for an event to be repeated. But ‘causality’ is a slippery notion, since we can never totally exclude the possibility of a coincidence. So we have recourse to ‘locality’, that is, the condition and the event being proximate in time and space.

Understanding also qualifies as a control act in the proposed sense: to understand anything is to place limits on the range of possible things it can ‘be’ or ‘mean’. The realist derives all such controls directly from classical reality, while the formalist derives them all from systemic nets of relations and oppositions; and both assume a determinate outcome (first section). But we need a more encompassing perspective to deal with understanding as it occurs in semiosis, where ‘the web of sign relations is at all times informational and energetic, spatial and temporal, objective and subjective’ (Anderson et al. 1984:12). In that domain, the goals and resources of the understanding process decide how determinacy and indeterminacy will be distributed within the ongoing ‘web’.

Such control acts are so basic that we have no way of ‘getting at reality’ without performing them. We may of course try to proceed, as empirical science does, in a rigorous and sceptical way, by observing large numbers of events, controlling the conditions as tightly as we can manage, and subjecting our understanding to rigorous debate. But no matter how we proceed, we can’t keep from introducing a set of postulates — like repeatability, dimensionality, causality, and locality — that we cannot prove, because every conceivable mode of proof already presupposes and involves them. They are irretrievably implicated in basic control acts, and thus in all more complex ones too. We may have managed ‘classical reality’ well enough without facing this threat of circularity, but quantum reality is considerably less tractable, and forces us to reconsider our epistemological groundwork.

Scientists agree that no phenomenon can be considered real until it is observed. But I have seldom seen the goal of science defined as to discover not what observation cannot achieve — success being measured by discovering something ‘out there’ which observation could not generate. Stating things this way around seems to pit observation against itself, since it is always involved wherever we might want to believe it is not involved. But we might gain by keeping in view the problematic, dialectical nature of observation, instead of leaving it in the traditional state of transparency regarding classical reality. A negative version of ‘reality’ could be envisioned as the ensemble of entities put in place by some other agency besides observation, even though we must use observation to identify them.

If the two ‘waves’ of determinacy and indeterminacy are ‘entangled’ in our perception, every state or event is perceived through an interference pattern between determinacy and indeterminacy. Hence, the basic non-classical model of reality itself would have to be an interference pattern projected by concurrent alternatives. Due to the phasing of our own perception, determinacy is routinely amplified and indeterminacy reduced, and reality is routinely classicalised. Quantum reality, however, subverts this tendency by offering situations wherein the indeterminacy waves leap into phase with perception.

The vastly higher complexity of ordinary reality produces a correspondingly greater amplification of determinacy than does the far simpler quantum reality (cf. Wilden 1987, on complexity verses constraint). In the latter, indeterminacy cannot be masked by complexity, and the levels of observability are collapsed to the point where indeterminacy is atypically proximate to determinacy — so much so that the transition from the one to the other presents the aspect of a sudden ‘collapse’. If we observe ordinary reality, in contrast, we have a substantial layering of presupposed determinacy, derived from schematic prior knowledge and experience of other instances, to buffer our perception of (or even against) indeterminacy.

So this line, of argument describes ordinary or classical reality as an interference pattern with a perceptually amplified determinacy. What is perceived as reality depends of course on the realm of possibilities that happen to be interacting in any particular interference, but this realm is always more than what we are actively perceiving at that moment- The additional ratio of determinacy is generated by the alternatives we are not perceiving at the moment, but which are ‘related’ to what we are perceiving. Thus, we perceive and understand any one thing, to a great extent, dialectically, in terms of the many things it is not but might be. Only because the latter are backgrounded by complexity do we envision dualisms or absolute breaks between what is and what is not ‘real’, ‘true’, ‘obvious’, ‘evident’, ‘visible’, ‘tangible’, and so on. We generate independent variables in the place of inverted conjugate variables and imagine that we can raise certainty or determinacy indefinitely without paying for it — that we can make it cumulative, transitive, and commutative, the very ideal of ‘classical’ science and formal logic. But now quantum science has penetrated such elementary and fundamental domains that we can ‘perceive’, right within one and the same time and place, whole sets of alternatives that would be incompatible in our dualistic ordinary reality.

If we still hope to ‘understand’ this ‘new’ domain in a determinate way, we might have recourse to large numbers: we can predict the ratio of a certain outcome within a numerous set, though not the outcome of any single instance. However, statistics can be appropriated as a means for rescuing and reinstating ordinary reality only by ignoring the full range of epistemological questions. How and where does reality solidify when we raise the numbers? How can the statistical average, often an ideal case that was never observed, claim to be ‘realer’ than all the actually observed cases put together? How can we resolve the problem that statistics derives order directly and exclusively from uniformity, in conflict with the notion of ‘entropy’ in thermodynamics?

Quantum reality confronts statistics with even more disturbing and obtrusive puzzles, because epistemologically incompatible models yield the same statistical fit for the data. If statistics are interpreted to mean that all quantum entities (‘quons’ is the term proposed by Herbert [1985]) in a given wave are identical,¹⁰ then every single case is the ideal case, and the difference vanishes between a statistical description and an individual description — just what does not work for ordinary reality. Moreover, since outcomes vary, this interpretation implies that identical physical situations yield different outcomes, thus putting in question the postulates of repeatability and causality that lie at the very base of observation as well as statistical data-gathering.

The directly converse interpretation, saying that all quons in a given wave are non-identical, could suggest that reality consists of a vast number of parallel worlds (as in the ‘many-worlds interpretation’, cf. Everett 1957). Whenever several outcomes are possible, they all occur, but in separate universes whose number increases at each decision point (it could decrease only if two paths coincide further down the line, but that would give up some of the non-identity). Aside from being epistemologically unparsimonious, this interpretation undercuts statistics in its own way by implying that data would have to be gathered from a large number of worlds; yet since we can get only one outcome at a time, we are always in just one world. Also, statistics becomes meaningless if all outcomes are always selected.

So statistics cannot be the means after all for taming quantum reality down into a reflex of ordinary reality. Instead, we encounter two diametrically converse interpretations of statistics in quantum reality, each of which undercuts itself epistemologically — and yet when applied to a particular wave function, the two make exactly equivalent predictions! However, if we assume that statistical certainty and uncertainty form an inverted complementarity, then this paradox makes sense: we push toward the two extremes of identity and non-identity (all quons are the same or none are), and the relation between the single and the general case abruptly becomes harrowingly uncertain.

The ‘sum over histories’ model of Richard Feynman (1958) assumes that a single quon takes all possible paths, none of them any ‘better’ than the rest. However, interference comes to the rescue to keep the quon from roaming all over the universe. Every ‘wild path’, such as an arabesque of fantastic loopings, has a parallel path with exactly equal amplitude and opposite phase, and the two paths totally cancel each other. Only the paths of ‘least action” those near the classical trajectory of a straight line, are close enough in phase to produce additive amplitudes and survive. In this model, interference is precisely what saves the quon from utter randomness. So saying that reality is, or is generated by, an interference pattern makes good sense for the Feynman model and suspends the confrontation between the one-world and many-world models. We obtain not ‘the best of all possible worlds” nor even ‘the one most probable world” but a pattern of indissoluble interference among possible worlds. If we could ever cancel an but one (near-infinite certainty), reality could not be under­stood (near-infinite uncertainty). .

In ordinary reality, however, the interferences are so complex and variegated that an apparently ‘wild path’ can survive. The degrees of freedom supplied by human ‘will’ or ‘choice’ generate such an explosion of alternatives that cancelatory parallels are not always available. Also, when the chosen path is foregrounded at the expense of the others, complexity is too great to permit an efficient awareness of how these others create the significance of the chosen one. Such an awareness would register the chosen path to be not so ‘wild’ after all, but elaborately related to the others and enabled by their shared potentiality.

Perhaps some examples might help to clarify the kind of interactions I am trying to describe. Suppose we run an EPR experiment on a hot Tuesday in July in Berkeley, California, using a certain setup. Instead of working with momentum-correlated electrons, we use polarization-correlated photons, which has certain advantages (e.g., — polarization can only take one of two possible values). Sure enough, we find that the polarization measurement for the two paired photons obeys an exact but inexplicably connected correspondence, no matter how far apart they fly or which measurement is done first. When we ‘understand’ this ‘observation’ to be one more instance of the EPR effect, we are disregarding considerable data: the time and place of the test, the manufacturer’s brand of equipment, the personal identities of the experimenters, and so on — even the (sometimes important) difference between electrons and photons. We have thus ‘made sense’ of our observation by cancelling out all sorts of incidental factors which we consider irrelevant (date, location, weather), but which did involve certain (classically) ‘real’ selections among possible events. We thus have produced, in respect to these factors, a falling determinacy which we are predisposed to disregard in favour of the rising determinacy achieved by ‘repeating’, ‘confirming’, ‘verifying’, etc., a particular kind of experiment.

My case would be the same for understanding or observing ordinary reality. I enter my living room and perceive a ‘table’ and so me ‘chairs’. I do not see or know what the table weighs, or exactly how high and wide it is; such quantitative data are irrelevant for its ‘table-ness’. Certain qualitative data, such as style and material (glass and steel) are also irrelevant, as is current state — say, terribly messy (as usual where I live) or terribly tidy (when I expect important guests). Also, I perceive that all the chairs are chairs, even though I don’t know their exact weights or sizes, and they are turned at different angles, and one has a deformed arm and another is hidden by a beach towel draped over it. In some other context, this information might be relevant, but for ordinary perception, it can be left indeterminate.

I did not pick these simple examples in order to enhance my point. On the contrary, the more complex cases, whether in a science laboratory or in ordinary reality, would only show how much more indeterminacy is being accepted as the hidden price for determinacy. To perceive a process (or object) as ‘the same’ for all observers on all occasions is to filter out differences, just as to perceive two processes (or objects) as different is to filter out sameness. Whereas the second law of thermodynamics stipulates that differences will decrease and sameness will increase, human perception allows the two factors to rise together, provided that only one is in focus at a time. The relation between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ in gestalt theory might thus apply to any perceived property: its foregrounded (in-phase) determinacy is paid for with backgrounded (out-of-phase) indeterminacy.

Whether the case is abstract or concrete is “also less essential than we might suppose. Even the most concrete case, such as the existence of matter in the stars and planets, provides no ultimate certainty. Evidence is accruing that detectable matter is only a small part, around 10%, of what the universe should contain. The other 90% or so is ‘missing’, and all the bizarre entities proposed so far as repositories neutrinos, faint dwarf stars, black holes, intergalactic gas, gravity waves, and so on — are unsatisfactory as long as they are subject to the same ratios, such as mass-to-velocity, or mass-to-light, that are believed to hold for detectable matter (cf. Disney 1984). Apparently, detectable matter is just one side (and the smaller one at that) of the universe and hence cannot sustain its traditional function as the ultimate regress for reality (try kicking a neutrino instead of a stone, Dr Johnson).

So I can see no alternative to the thesis that understanding or observing something always involves disregarding — and leaving indeterminate — a compensatory and somewhat greater portion of its possible ‘identity’ or ‘realness’. The more complex the domain, the more I must both attend to and ignore. I could, for some particular purpose, make a different selection and claim that it ‘belongs to reality’ just as much as the other. I have not created some other ‘reality’, but manipulated a complementarity and attained a different interference pattern between the determinacy wave and the indeterminacy wave. I have perceptually collapsed the waves and amplified (classicalised) one path within the non-classical reality that still contains all possible paths. Evidently, expanding control over a more complex domain requires relaxing demands for determinacy on levels which are to be controlled (Beaugrande 1987a; Yates and Beaugrande 1990).

Similarly, the concept of ‘dimensionality’ is meaningful only if we assume that any particular observed value belongs within a range of alternative values of ‘the same’ dimension. In that sense, the observed value rests on the interference pattern of other possible values. On the time dimension, the ‘present’ is understood only with reference to ‘other’ times of ‘past’ and ‘future’, especially when we purport to be observing another instance of ‘the same’ event we had encountered before or are predicting for later. In the space dimensions; no point, line, or object can be imagined except in reference to some other one ‘somewhere else’.

Such considerations indicate that we might do better to interpret a ‘dimension’ not as some measurability for ‘size’, ‘shape’, ‘extent’, ‘duration’, and the like, but as a mode of connectedness. A thing has a dimension if we can plot for it a. trajectory between two or more coordinate values. This interpretation places the focus not on the fixity of dimensions, as in classical science, but on their alterity, the indispensable potential of a value to be other than what may be determined on any one occasion - more fitting for quantum science.

Scientists often have recourse to the ‘constants’ of physical law, values like the speed of light, or the ratio of energy to frequency (Plank’s constant) or of mass to distance (Newton’s constant), whose sameness and fixity seem ultimately to guarantee the possibility of measurement. Yet the question remains whether such constants are better understood as defined by dimensions, or as the source of dimensions. For instance, the speed of light, which is never observed to vary and is stated with reference to the dimensions of space-time, seems in some sense anterior to them, at least since the emergence of the ‘new physics’ gained impetus from the discovery that the speed of light (and values near it) can recalibrate (or ‘distort’) the four dimensions and open up different modes of connectedness (e.g., between future and past).

Bell’s theorem, derived from a variation of the EPR setup and experimentally verified by Clauser and Aspect,¹¹ has put ‘locality’ in question. Manipulations of the detection device for one of a correlated pair seem to instantly affect the results of detection for the other, and the combination of results is not just additive, but regularly indicative of some peculiar connectedness. Perhaps ‘four-dimensionality’ is actually under siege here, being the standard frame of connectedness for envisioning ‘locality’ and defining what it means to be ‘locally’ proximate. If we view a ‘dimension’ as a mode of connectedness, non-locality must be telling us that the customary dimensions are not all there are, i.e., that they do not provide for all modes of connectedness we might detect if we knew how and where to ‘look’.

And in fact, in recent conceptions of ‘superconnectedness’, complexity is mastered and unification attained by postulating more dimensions. ‘The simplest version of supergravity’, for instance, ‘the most beautiful and straightforward mathematical description, involves eleven dimensions’ (Gribbin 1986: 329). Due to our classical experience, our immediate impulse is to wonder why we don’t perceive the others. Perhaps, as Gribbin suggests, they have been folded back upon themselves, as a result of large dissipations of energy in the earliest stages of the universe. The internal structures of ‘matter’ might be waves oscillating in these folded-up dimensions; and the ‘forces of nature’ might be produced from distortions in this underlying geometry.

Or, maybe we don’t perceive other dimensions because we don’t allow for other kinds of connections among matter and energy, whose interchangeability is itself a recent and epistemologically undigested discovery in respect to ‘classical’ reality. Indeed, given the virulent problematics of human perception, maybe we should be wondering how we can perceive the dimensions we do. The three dimensions of space are most well-behaved and cleanly distinct in a Euclidian world, which we do not inhabit, and their ‘obviousness’ results from our long familiarity with Euclidian geometry, which is (appropriately enough) still taught in public schools, yet which abruptly loses its intuitive conviction if confronted with Einstein’s concept of ‘curved space’.

Also, studies of vision indicate that depth, the third dimension, is seldom ‘seen directly’, being usually provided by our perceptual schemas, as demonstrated most powerfully by ‘optical illusions’ (cf. Coren and Girgus 1978). Time, the fourth dimension, is even less ‘experienced’ and more inferred, and was not widely recognized as part of the larger connectedness of space-time until our own era (if even then). If, following the Kaluza-Klein equations, we construe electromagnetism as the fifth dimension,¹² we move even further from everyday perception.

So we need not be unduly astonished that further dimensions would be extremely hard to perceive. If perception is replete with complementarities, perceived reality could be generated by the interference between the dimensions it ‘appears’ to have and those it does not. The ‘missing’ dimensions could be the modes of connectedness for trajectories of even more abstract alterity than those our ordinary perception is able to classicalise. They might have the function of ‘absorbing’ enough indeterminacy to permit the four or five ‘present’ dimensions to be experienced with reasonable determinacy; that is, what we perceive as a mutually exclusive co-ordinate of determinacy and a co-ordinate of indeterminacy would be connected on an inclusive unified trajectory in the non-perceived dimensions. They could also be the dimensions of ‘virtual’ entities when they latter are not in appearance; the enormous energies invested in getting these to appear could introduce the more customary dimensions, though compressing the latter very hard (small space, short time), and could create- the leeway for the variation and interchange of identities of quons.

We can now return to the question of how dimensions might be defined in a non-classical model of reality suitable for semiotic model-building. ‘Time’ would be regulated not in fixed units (days, hours, etc.), but in dynamic informational-energetic processing cycles, which constitute the actual ‘clocks’ of life systems by introducing the thermodynamic irreversibility that strictly physical systems need not have (Yates 1982b). Hence, extremely high energy cycles would naturally recalibrate time (or, from a classical viewpoint, ‘distort it’) — just what is accounted for by relativity theory. ‘Space’ designates flow distributions among concurrently available domains that need not be mapped onto three-dimensional physical spaces connected by mutual access. The flow may also connect classically incompatible paths, many of which are situated in hypothetical space accessible only through non-classical connectedness. These stipulations are strategic for ‘semiotics’ to ‘deal with space-time sensitive to the grid and rhythm of the phenomenon-observer relationship and in the degree of resolution required’ (Anderson et al. 1984: 15).

One way proposed for dealing with Bell’s theorem is to .put in question the assumption of ‘contrafactual definiteness’ — the belief that hypothetical events would have produced definite results. Focusing on this assumption, which is untestable by any classical means, shifts the pressure exerted by Bell’s theorem to a different domain. The ‘contrafactual’ could attain ‘definiteness’ only if connections were made between hypothetical values and observed values, and the question is whether ‘locality’ legitimises such connections — or which ones, and how and why. If locality is construed in terms of ‘four-dimensionality’, ‘contra factual definiteness’ might imply that hypothetical events have some determinacy in space-time, which is just what classical reality would deny. But if locality is allowed for other dimensions besides the ‘big four’, the fixity ‘here’ in the real world might be connected to non-fixity (alterity) in a hypothetical world. This kind of ‘definiteness’ is distinctly non-classical, but I have reviewed some reasons for supposing that — perceptually and epistemologically — all definiteness has to be ultimately derived through just such a complementarity.

Classical science, on the other hand, has generally resisted any such interpretation. There, the ‘correct’ theory or hypothesis is usually considered an exclusivity, rather than an interference pattern partly generated by ‘incorrect’, i.e., rejected, alternatives. Nor is an ‘explanation’ seen as an inverted complementarity between what is explained and what isn’t. Nor again is it customary to say that the ‘exception’ absorbs the determinacy pressed out of the ‘law’, ‘rule’, ‘solution’, and so on. Quantum science, however, seems to indicate that such unconventional conceptions of ‘correct theory’, ‘explanation’, ‘solution’, and so forth, might be productive, now that the facts do not compel us to accept any one version of quantum theory over all the rest, and attempts to solidify things typically lead to still more versions. As I shall argue later on, a ‘correct theory’, or any mode of ‘truth’, might have the functional status of a transitory but reverberating phase of information overload that blocks access to further alternatives. This overload arises from the high investment of energy needed to enforce the extreme classicalisation of some domain so as to suppress all of its divergent potentialities and to sustain the determinacy wave at its peak This account impels us to reinterpret Kuhn’s (1970) historical argument that each new ‘scientific paradigm’ appears as an abrupt and absolute shift in perception and later becomes a classical framework. Though he refers in passing to ‘quantum mechanics’,¹³ Kuhn’s book on ‘revolutions’ is still framed in a thoroughly classical view of ‘what really happened in science’. He shows no awareness of the fundamental shift impelled by quantum theory and its irreducible pluralism of paradigms for the same set of ‘facts’. Nor does he make allowance for a set of facts with no paradigm for them, as has emerged from the verification of the non-additive connectedness predicted by Bell’s theorem. In non-classical science, the ‘paradigm’ loses its Darwinian quality of survival by combat with the implications of wilful ignorance or self-serving dogmatism. Paradigms are not discontinuous, because reality is merely being reclassicalised by manipulating a complementarity (or a set of them) and attaining a different interference pattern between the determinacy wave and the indeterminacy wave. A rejected paradigm remains within the domain of non-selected possibilities interacting to generate the significance of the selected one. Its ostensible ‘disappearance’ is a reflex of information overload.

Semiosis as a non-classical phenomenon

Semiosis has so often been decoupled from reality probably in order to elude the problem that no matter how semiosis may be classicalised, it still evidently provides for many more possibilities than can be found in any given reality. The complexities of perceiving and observing reality, though extremely difficult, at least seem more tractable than the problems entailed in the activity of using signs to signify. To perceive a table or a chair (to revert to the earlier example), however selective it may be, is still more determinable than to apply a signifier such as ‘table’ or ‘chair’ to a particular context; how else could we understand a text like

(1) The chair tabled the motion and gave up the floor.

without having to pass through a disorienting maze of bizarre mental imagery?

Yet this same diversity and inclusiveness also endows semiosis with a special power for precision when the occasion requires. Differentiations which could hardly be recorded, let alone shared throughout a society, are negotiated and categorized in semiosis with an ease that greatly belies the complexities involved. If one assumes reality to be classical, then semiosis seems to be merely cataloguing the objective features that are ‘there’ but could otherwise escape notice. The opposite view would be that semiosis is entirely, indeed sovereignly, responsible for this categorization, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of one’s language determining one’s reality now seems plausible.

Yet once we assume that neither signifier nor signified counts as an ordinary object, then both these views are unmotivated. The sign system is neither driven by reality nor asserts total mastery over reality, but is a complex control system organizing a distributively deterministic domain of signification expressly so as to allow for many possible versions of the ‘real’. Hence, the precision available to well-controlled semiosis supports flexibility, not just fixation.

Even everyday semiosis, if contemplated elaborately enough, can be found to unsettle the mainstays of classical reality, such as repeatability, dimensionality, causality, and locality. It can make connections that are not causal between all sorts of times and places, between the certain and the uncertain, the real and the hypothetical, the manifest and the imaginary, and so on. It can thus lend a powerful sense of ‘definiteness’ to ‘contrafactual’ contexts, even those practically inaccessible to experience. Yet it can also put in question every premise, including the premise of its own applicability, and disappoints hopes for final or untranscendable statements. We can come to know signs from many facets and angles, but only by setting them in motion once again, not by leaving them behind in favour of some ultimately perfectible symbol system or some fully determinate meta-language, such as the formalists envisioned.

And yet semiotic model-building has chiefly been a classicalising enterprise (first section). The central motive — quite apart from ambitions to sustain classical ‘science’ — should be evident by now: the complexity of semiosis and our perceptual phasing combine to enhance determinacy and mask indeterminacy. Indeed, a sufficiently skilled and persistent analysis may at times convey the impression of having determined the ultimate ‘true meaning’ of some sample text. But we have actually only attained a point of exhaustion, at which the high investment of energy and the intense concentration of deterministic (classicalised) information has generated a transitory information, or they may be rather similar. If this diversity could ever be fully collapsed, semiosis would lose much of its power as a control system; as was noted, control can rise only by accepting levels of indeterminacy. Hence, no discourse can be ‘mono-dimensional’ in the sense that its performance would allow only one sign configuration.

Still, some modes, such as a ‘literal’ discourse for monitoring the current situation (see Beaugrande and Dressler 1981), would typically project relatively few dimensions that are not radically divergent. Remarks about the weather, for instance, are fairly stereotyped, and thus make good material for casual communication, because disputes are unlikely to arise and speakers need not invest any individuality. In this regard, Chomsky’s (1957) well-known argument against descriptive structuralism, namely that nearly every sentence is new to the people encountering it, is misleading in suggesting that novelty is uniformly distributed throughout the system. Only in a very literal sense that tends to make the sentence into an ordinary object with stable features can any such uniform ratio of novelty be postulated, for instance, by dismissing out of hand all constraints’ on ‘performance’. Quite a few sentences — or better, texts, — are reasonably predictable not as abstract strings, but as semiotically motivated events in communicative interactions, where genuine novelty is rare because it would impede the usual amplification whereby low energy suffices to project high information.

Novelty is pronounced, however, at the other end of the scale; namely in poetic discourse. The latter is radically ‘multi-dimensional’, in the sense that extremely diverse and unpredictable sign configurations could constitute it and- many significances could be assigned (Beaugrande 1983). In a text like T.S. Eliot’s

(2) Along the reaches of the streets

Held in lunar synthesis,

Whispering lunar incantations

Dissolve the floors of memory

And all its clear relations.

there is no reason to expect ‘memory’ at that point, though after it occurs, we may well fInd motives in hindsight. Or, once we have registered this ‘memory’ and expect to hear more about it, but we read that

(3) Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium

the ‘geranium’ is equally unexpected. Such events carry a high informational value not because they are statistically improbable, but because their accessibility from the current context is improbable (Beaugrande 1980). In terms of Fig. 4, the wave of falling probability must be suddenly flipped into a rising wave, entraining a corresponding repolarisation of energy with potentially unpredictable effects upon perceptual and cognitive switching — whence such reactions as confusion, disorientation, and rejection when expectations are radically overturned. Poetic discourse offers a chance to rehearse such effects within the domain of semiosis and hence to learn to contain them in semiotically mediated phenomenon-observer interactions; but the use of poetic texts in social institutions may have the opposite goal: to impose only one set of authorized interpretations whose status is as non-negotiable as that of classical reality, and in the service of much the same middle-class interests that derive their stability from that mode of reality (cf. Barthes 1957).

The issue of information values is also misrepresented by commonplace ‘semiotic’ demonstrations like this:

In the sentence ‘the boy kicked the girl’, the meaning unrolls as each word follows its predecessor, and is not complete until the final word comes into place. [...] But each word in the language will also have relationships with other words in the language that do not occur in time, but are capable of doing so. [. . .] Part of the meaning of ‘kicked’ derives from the fact that it turns out not to be ‘kissed’ or ‘killed’ as the full relationships of the words in the sentence are unrolled. (Hawkes 1977: 27)

Except maybe in some blinkered sexist world where ‘girls’ are inert objects to be only physically used or abused, ‘kicked’ can hardly be processed as the alternative selected over ‘kissed’ or ‘killed’; I do not appreciate the information of ‘memory’ and ‘geranium’ in (2) and (3) by noticing that they are not ‘mammary’ and ‘uranium’. Systemic contrasts — especially phonemic ones that suggest the status of signifiers as ordinary object — are an inadequate guide for estimating the options that form the actual background of semiosis in context. Phonemic proximity is fairly stable at the system level but, for that very reason, far less relevant at the contextual level, where selection and rejection actually occur, than are unstable associations among significances. Moreover, Hawkes’ notion of ‘words in the sentence unrolling’ seems unduly preoccupied with units and step-by-step sequences at the expense of contextual sense-making.

Selection also appears unmanageable if we suppose that words or signifiers are stored the human memory as they might be in a dictionary. The strongest associations would obtain among words that happen to share sounds or letters, whereas words with associated ‘meanings’ would be widely scattered. On the other hand, if we assume that only the latter kind of associations count, we could not explain the many errors or miscues wherein sign users do confuse words of similar sound or spelling in the manner of ‘President’ Dumbya Bush:

(4) A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes [antidotes] to coming out of an economic illness.

(5) We cannot let terriers [terrorists] and rogue nations hold this nation hostile. [hostage].

The solution would seem to be to assume that the memory stores not words or signifiers, but signs, i.e., signifier-signified relations, which are continually regrouped according to which domains are activated during a given phase.

For the classical scientist, memory has the ominous properties of non-locality and non-causality par excellence. These properties hold not merely because particular ‘types’ of memories are delocalised with respect to the physiology of the brain, but also because few constraints seem to limit which memories can, given appropriate motivation, enter into connectedness with which others. Hence; we can hardly say which or how many ‘dimensions’ (in the sense proposed in the previous section) memory might have, nor is there much prospect that those dimensions could be classical ones. In language understanding, recent findings by Walter Kintsch and associates (e.g. Kintsch and Mross 1985) indicate that immediate perception activates not merely the context-relevant signified(s) of a signifier, but all those it has (when a person is reading about ‘water’, ‘bank’ contacts both ‘river’ and ‘money’). This finding undercuts not merely Bloomfield’s arid claim about each linguistic form having one definite meaning, but also ordinary notions about how memory ought to work in optimally logical and efficient ways. After about 350 to 500 milliseconds, however, only the context-relevant meanings are still active and become control centres for further elaboration and association. The elements of context constitute an inference pattern that decides what meanings qualify as least-action paths. Of course, no context can be isolated from memories of other contexts, which can also act as non-selected alternatives ‘absorbing’ indeterminacy from the selected one.

Contrast this contextual aspect of ordinary semiosis with the abstract formalisms typically proposed by formalists. Like quantum situations, the formalism clears away many levels of, complexity, because it truncates contexts and depends. on a far more restricted set of prior experiences in communicative situations. No longer masked’ by complexity, indeterminacy leaps into phase and confronts the theorist with perplexing forced choices — an abrupt ‘collapse ‘ — that ordinary communication leaves unsettled. ‘Quantification’ is a typical illustration: does a noun phrase ‘refer’ to all the nameable objects, to a unique one, or to some definable subset? Is the ‘existence’ of the ‘referent’ necessarily entailed? Real people don’t settle these issues when they talk, but many formalisms require decisions for every case. However, precisely because contexts have been filtered out, such issues are undecidable in principle, no matter how much energy the theorist may invest in generating information. Here again, overload is imminent.

An interesting intermediate case is the need for semiotic channels to represent quantum reality. The latter is eminently expressible in mathematical abstractions, and some physicists claim it should be only so represented. But this recourse leaves it indeterminable in respect to our abilities to perceive or communicate about it, or to explore its implications for our capacities to understand. So we are frequently impelled to deploy ordinary semiosis, as when we describe electrons as stable hard balls in fixed orbits, or label quarks as ‘up’ and ‘down’, or ‘red’, ‘green’, and ‘blue’. Though physicists warn us not to be misled by these perceptual aids, our comprehension is enhanced by the artificial, or, as it were, prosthetic determinacy borrowed from ordinary experience, upon a domain of reality that resists such experience — not because it is too complicated so much as because it is too elementary. Without this aid, physicists might understand far less, and be unable to communicate with initiates or non-specialists (which everyone is, at least at the start).

The various factors surveyed in this section provide a range of reasons to view the sign or signifier as a non-classical (non-ordinary) object. Its properties can be determined only through semiosis. ‘Phonemic’ and ‘morphemic features’ seem to be stable and inherent (at the system level) only because groups of specialists are likely to agree when attributing them. No such agreement obtains for ‘semantic features’ as putative constituents of the signifier-signified relation, because that relation must be indeterminate at the system level so that it can be made determinate in many ways, including novel ones, at the context level (Beaugrande I 987d). Thus, the sign is a relation between two non-ordinary ‘objects’, because neither the signifier nor the signified can be classicalised except by means of a transitory intervention. Determined attempts may overload the system and produce a point convergence rather untypical for ordinary semiosis, where only a relative determinacy is strategically required. At high intensities, the convergence would arrest semiosis altogether.

No doubt my line of argument in this paper will appear abstruse because it moves on a wave of falling determinacy in regard to established models of semiosis and calls for a perceptual switching against the phasing that favours rising determinacy. Considerable energy and information will need to be invested in order to fill in and stabilize such a model to the point where its implications can be developed. Empirical support will be problematic because the sign user would have to provide evidence of relations and potentialities running out of phase or in the background; foregrounding them, as deconstruction shows, tends to generate a resistant, elusive discourse ill-suited for customary demonstration, let alone proof.

Still, we may utilize the impetus of quantum reality as an occasion, source, and analogue for making such investments of energy and information in order to gain a genuinely dialectical perspective which may be ultimately the most revealing about the nature of signs and semiosis. As Nick Herbert (1985: 249) remarks, ‘one of the greatest scientific achievements imaginable would be the discovery of an explicit relationship between the waveform alphabets of quantum theory and certain human states of consciousness’.

Notes

1. Even this ‘or’ is misleading, since the dichotomy of ‘sign and object’ was dissolved by Saussure, for whom the ‘sign’ was the relation between ‘signifier and signified’.

2. For the standard quantum demonstrations and their various implications, I have been guided chiefly by Disney (1984), Gribbin (1986), Herbert (1985), and Zukav (1979), and by numerous free-swinging discussions with Gene Yates, then Director of UCLA’s Crump Institute for Medical Engineering.

3. When dealing with Bell’s theorem (more about it later), Herbert (1985) opposes ‘phenomena’ to ‘reality’. ‘Phenomena’ ‘inevitably appear classical’, are ‘completely local’, and contain ‘regular patterns of quantum jumps’: ‘reality’ is ‘a seamless whole’ ‘beneath phenomena’, and contains ‘raw quantum jumps’ (1985:248, 229, 242, 244). ‘The majority of physicists’, he says, ‘are phenomenalists’ (1985: 225).

4. Particles called ‘tachyons’ have been postulated as coming into existence already travelling faster than light, but they would have to possess an ‘imaginary’ rest mass (since the rest mass is the mass when the particle is not moving). How such a particle could interact with entities having real rest mass is utterly mysterious. Compare Note 11.

S. Einstein in fact expressed these two possibilities in similar terms, but rejected them as ‘entirely unacceptable’ (reported in Schlipp [ed.] 1949: 85).

6. Quoted in Heisenberg (1958:42); Herbert (1985:201,213).

7. The term ‘social order’ often refers to the degree of uniformity among the members of a given social class, and politicians who call for ‘order’ typically have in mind coercive legislation to restrict the options of citizens. But even in the social domain, ‘order’ is ambiguous: the ‘horizontal’ kind applies Only within the class, while the ‘vertical’ kind actually requires markedly distinct (non-uniform) upper and lower classes.

8. In the usual conception, the infinities enter because there appear to be no limits to energies of an electron plus all of its ‘cloud’ of virtual particles, so infinite masses are also implicated. Renormalization is a mathematical juggling that allows the two infinities to cancel out and leave behind the mass chosen by the physicist to fit desired value. Many theorists consider this a desperate recourse, but it’s hard to do without.

9. ‘Relatively’ is a slippery qualifier here, since fluctuations in thermodynamic entropy have been postulated that could last for millions of years. In human processes, on the contrary, we are likely to be dealing with extreme brevity.

10. Herbert (1985: 117ff) calls this position the ‘orthodox ontology’ or ‘unofficial party line’ of ‘most physicists’

11. See Clauser and Shimony (1978); Aspect et al. (1982). Aspect used ultrafast switches to change the settings so rapidly that no transfers at speeds slower than light (subluminary leakage, so to speak) could have time to occur.

12. Kaluza published his findings — that if you add a fifth dimension to the representation of the gravitational forces as a curvature of the space-time continuum, the added set of equations are exactly Maxwell’s field equations of electromagnetism — in 1921, and Klein incorporated the idea into quantum theory in 1926. Yet following a brief period of recognition (even by Einstein), this work remained obscure until the 1980’s, when its significance was recognized for superconnectedness theories, such as supergravity.

13. The passages in question (Kuhn 1970:12, 48, 67, 158) treat ‘quantum mechanics’ as just one more ‘paradigm’, not a destabilizing of the whole concept of ‘paradigm’.

14. We should be wary of assuming that Saussure intended to make difference as absolute as the isolated quote suggests; he restricted it to cases where ‘the signifier and the signified are considered separately’ — ‘the sign in its totality’ is ‘a positive fact’ (1966: 120). Also, I think it hasty to imagine that Derrida’s claim makes an absolute out of indeterminacy, as is often implied in post-structuralist controversies. Viewed in action, deconstructive method does not purport to lead to any new mode wherein all limits and decisions are infinitely postponed; it too can only restart the (com)motion of signs and move to other resolutions, inverting hierarchical oppositions and subverting differences where possible, yet also reinscribing them in a web of its own (Beaugrande 1983, 1988e).

References

Anderson, M.; Deely, J.; KIampen, M.; Ransdell, J.; Sebeok, T.; Uexkuell, T. 1984 A semiotic perspective on the sciences: Steps toward a new paradigm. Semiotics 52(1-2), 7-47.

Aspect, A.; Dalibard, J.; Roger, G. 1982 Experimental test of Bell’s inequalities using time-varying analyzers. Physical Review Letters 49/25, 1804.

Barthes, R. 1957 Mythologies. Paris: Seuil.