Embodiment in the Semiotic Matrix:

Communicology in Peirce, Dewey, Bateson and Bourdieu

Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University

Isaac E. Catt

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Philosophy of Communication

and the Recompense of Human Science…………………………………………xx

Chapter 2: The Human Science of Embodied Discourse………………………………..xx

Chapter 3: Body as Sign: The Semiotic Phenomenology Paradigm…………………….xx

Chapter 4: Recursive Logic in Communicology………………………………………...xx

Chapter 5: Ecological Communication: Bateson’s "New Science"…..…………………xx

Chapter 6: Habitus in the Matrix: From Peirce to Bourdieu…………………………….xx

Chapter 7: Culture in Consciousness…………………………………………………….xx

Chapter 8: Conduct: Nature in Culture from Dewey to Bourdieu

.............................................………………… .. xx

Chapter 9: Cultures of Conduct:

Linguistic Habitus and Semiotic Relativity………………………………………xx

Chapter One

Introduction: Philosophy of Communication

This book is intended as both a contribution to the philosophy of communication and the

human science of communicology. Rather than drawing what I think can only be an artificial

boundary between the two, I conceptualize the two areas of concern abductively. Philosophy

may realize its empirical consequences as a human science. In this sense, human science

provides recompense for philosophy of communication, sustains it, giving it a living rationale.

The favor is returned, however, because human science is vacuous without its philosophical

moorings. This relationship is thematized in communicology, as it is both a philosophy of

consciousness and a science of embodied discourse. At least as a beginning point for discussion,

consciousness may be viewed as cultural and semiotic and experience as personal and

phenomenological. The personal and the cultural commingle in communication, and this I

conceive through the synthetic logic of semiotic phenomenology, paradigm exemplar of

communicology. In other words, communication occurs in a semiotic matrix. Inasmuch as the

matrix consists of body and sign relations, the term communication matrix will do as well.

Communication is definable in its occurrence in actuality and reality as embodied discourse. This

is the realm of human meaning. This book explores culture, experience, and behavior so

conceived.

Communicology is thus a means of emancipation from reified thought about culture and

conduct, and it is an opening onto a broader horizon of conversations about the intersection of
homo loquens1 and homo culturalis.2 The speaking animal’s speech is culturally bound. Culture

is the expression of human perception. Culture and conduct abide in reciprocity. Communication

manifests the experience of culture; culture is consciousness of communication. This is not to

say, however, that tensions do not arise; to the contrary, the discursive intersections of social

context provide ample grounds for both trivial and profound semantic contests.

By now, many important philosophers of communication attest that we are the speaking

creatures. Yet, to complete this definition of the human, we must recognize that speaking has

form, that it occurs in and through media, that it is, in short, cultural.3 This I describe as habitus

in the semiotic matrix. Habitus, the realm of conditional human agency,4 is recognizable and

explicable through the unique combinatory logic of semiotic phenomenology. Or, more simply

expressed, we humans reside in the matrix where culture and conduct continuously and

perpetually meet; it is the Lebenswelt, our lifeworld.

In brief, semiotics studies what we have in common as cultural sign systems for

expression, and phenomenology studies how we uniquely experience the world as we embody

signs. However, there is no getting around it, this is a complex affair. A sign can rightly be

accused of many things: a shallow excuse for something deeper, an appearance masking reality,

pretense disguising authenticity, a boundary distinguishing the indistinct, a shadow of meaning,

camouflage for dangerous things, a lie, and so on.

I argue not only that signs mediate all experience but also that signifying is intrinsic as

well as extrinsic to consciousness. As such, signs do not merely re-present a reality otherwise

naked to perception; rather, signs give expressive form to experience. Signs appear in systems as

codes, and these condense experience, creating portability of nascent meanings in recurring

cultural structures, these ranging from every imaginable empirical (embodied) nonverbal code
(proxemics, chronemics, kinesics, vocalics, etc.) to every possible eidetic (symbolic) verbal code

(natural languages, artificial languages, mathematics, musical notations, etc.). Codes subtly yet

powerfully de-contextualize embodied meaning by imposing rules that effectively extend and

substitute constitutive experience with regulative consciousness. This is not something to be

resisted as an externally imposed power from on high; it is rather the necessary cost of

communication. We willingly pay the price, all the while pre-consciously contesting it through

the uniqueness of our own perceptive-expressive bodies. It is as though we were aware already

that culture is sustainable only from below, that codes depend upon the very contexts of meaning

that they seek to undercut. In short, speaking matters. When culture is no longer spoken, it dies.

In addition to describing communication in the semiotic matrix, I advance an original

thesis that is implied in communicology’s paradigm exemplar. This idea has been implicit from

the historic beginnings of the human science of communication but is explicitly recognized for

the first time here: namely, that semiotic phenomenology is a semiotic relativity hypothesis. I

explain that the distinctive lifeworld of the human occurs at the threshold of sign consciousness

in the matrix. Semiotic phenomenology is not only a synthesis of two great European

philosophical movements, structuralism and phenomenology, but it is also essential to American

pragmatism. This view culminates in the contemporary human science of communicology.

The chapters that follow are an organic outgrowth and extension of many public lectures,

papers, and publications I have authored over the last few decades. I think it is fair to say (though

with due humility) that I am among the eldest of the living pioneers in communicology; still, like

Charles Sanders Peirce, I claim to be no more than a “backwoodsman” at this early stage of the

discipline.5 The text is not merely a synthesis of my research; more importantly, it is intended to
advance the human science discipline that studies the experience of discourse. This discipline is

now recognized internationally as communicology.

While social science dominates the field, there are a number of scholars who study

communication from perspectives rooted in the humanities. Communicology is not to be

understood as merely another approach within the humanities version of communication studies,

though there are certainly affinities between the humanities and communicology. Rather,

communicology is a disciplinary challenge to the tacit philosophy that underwrites research and

pedagogy as defined, for example, by the National Communication Association, the International

Communication Association, other professional and academic organizations, and most academic

departments of communication in American universities. Social science dominates

communication inquiry, but my analysis shows this perspective is firmly based in information

theory, not communication theory.

Yet, at the same time, my intent is not to supplant the social science of communication

with a human science perspective. I recognize its many accomplishments. Instead, I advance an

argument for philosophically grounding inquiry in communication. This cannot happen until we

transcend the limitations of information theory on which the social science of communication is

founded, at least as it is usually advanced in the United States. The problem of the moment is

that human behavior is typically condensed as information and reified as a message. The concept

of the message is the core value in the field of inquiry. Virtually all problems of communication

are viewed from a message perspective. This contrasts sharply with the focus on cultural-

semiotic constraints and embodied meaning in communicology. I explain this important

distinction and its implications.

around the world and of course particularly in Europe. It is less visible in the United States and

nearly unrecognized in the communication field. The historical roots of the human science of

communicology may be found in American pragmatism, sociology, anthropology, social

psychology/psychiatry, cybernetics, linguistics, and, of course, European philosophy. I trace

important origins that have never been discussed as such with general and particular themes in

mind. I argue that communicology is the wave of the future as we come to recognize the

limitations of the information-theoretic social science of communication. A twenty-first century

discipline of communication requires more fitting responses to the postmodern condition than

social science is able to provide. The social science disciplinary perspective tends to reflect

rather than interrogate culture and conduct. Its neo-positivist orientation provides life support for

the perennial, seemingly interminable Cartesian theater.

As we dismiss the relevance of Cartesian-influenced debates about human being,

however, we shall also open the way to new and interesting considerations of what it means to be

on the semiotic threshold of being human. Thus, this text has both critical and constructive

dimensions. The book describes the human science of communicology and its paradigm

exemplar semiotic phenomenology as a fruitful approach to understanding human culture and

conduct. Through this unique theoretical and methodological synthesis, I conceive the

reciprocity of culture and person in and as embodied communication in the semiotic matrix. An

important but heretofore unrecognized implication of this conception is that it effectively renders

the longstanding debate about linguistic relativity something of an anachronism. In its place, and

as a direct result of the postmodern turn made possible by communicology, I argue for the

semiotic relativity hypothesis. It is possible to make this claim once we understand that the
semiosis of culture inheres in embodied consciousness, an important lesson of semiotic

phenomenology.

I describe communication in its reversible and reflexive condition as the conduct

(expression) of culture and culture as the experience (perception) of communication. By conduct

I do not refer merely to behavior or message, the normative, reductionist, information-theoretic

condensation and reification of communication that has so long dominated communication

studies. My focus is instead on embodied meaning, the phenomenological intentionality of the

distinctive human habitus. I contend that semiotic phenomenology is needed to adequately

comprehend the matrix. Perhaps simple phenomena can be understood by simplistic theories, but

multifaceted phenomena require responses of requisite complexity. It takes a synthetic theory

and methodology to describe the reflexive condition of existence and experience that is the

reversible semiotic body-lived (corps propre) and the phenomenological lived-body (corps

vécu). That is to say, the person should remain the object of study in the human sciences. I argue

that the conscious experience of being a person occurs at the conjunctive sign of perception and

expression, an idea with theoretical roots in the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Richard L.

Lanigan.6 Neither information nor language is identical with consciousness. Here, I traverse new

terrain by arguing that communication is constitutive of consciousness.

I trace an intellectual history of the specific conception of the matrix that is unique to

communicology. This new discipline is a science quite different from mainstream

communication inquiry and pedagogy. As I proceed, I note the important distinctions between

the human science of communicology and the dominant social science of communication. The

pre-conscious habits described in early American pragmatism are important to the story. I also

rely on the conception of habitus that evolves in the work of French semiotic phenomenologists
Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu. I begin, however, with Peirce in mind, founder of American

pragmatism, and follow the path of his semiotic phenomenology to John Dewey, Edward Sapir,

Harry Stack Sullivan, and Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson. I bring early communicologists

Wilbur Marshall Urban, Ernst Cassirer, and his friend Roman Jakobson into dialogue as I

describe how communicology arrived in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The matrix theme leads me to an additional and genuinely new thesis. I argue that the

unique conception of the matrix specified as semiotic (structuralist) and yet phenomenological

(constructivist) allows us new insight into the long-standing question of linguistic relativity. I

argue not for the specific Whorf hypothesis, as it is frequently called, but for the semiotic

relativity hypothesis. This proposed hermeneutic explication and interpretation of the relation of

culture to conduct is not narrowly limited to information or language but rather encompasses the

much broader semiotic field of verbal and nonverbal codes to which all speakers are obligated in

their attempts to communicate (share meaning) with others. I argue that Sapir, following Franz

Boas, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, following Sapir, intended this broader conception. That is, of

course, if their words are read carefully and if they are properly understood as part and parcel of

the pragmatist tradition. This reading of these pioneering linguists is a new contribution to the

discussion of linguistic relativity. I defend them against Steven Pinker and other linguists who

misread Sapir and Whorf. I add onto these claims recent studies in psychology, ethnology, and

communicology that provide empirical evidence for semiotic relativity. Human beings are not

locked in an iron cage of language; rather, the desire to communicate obliges us to follow

cultural semiotic codes. However, these same codes of conduct are grounds for volition in the

habitus/hexis dialectic now made visible by a human science of embodied discourse.

Here, then, is a brief sketch of subsequent chapters.

philosophical-theoretical, and methodological ground of communicology by comparison to the

dominant social science view of communication. The chapter previews the forthcoming synthesis

of Peirce, Dewey, Bateson, Sapir and Whorf, Ruesch and Bateson, and Bourdieu on the semiotic

matrix. In Chapter 3, “Body as Sign: The Semiotic Phenomenology Paradigm,” I set forth a new

model for describing and comparing theoretical paradigms. This system is then used to depict

semiotic phenomenology in detail. The paradigm shows the influence of Urban, Merleau-Ponty

and Lanigan on subsequent chapters. Chapter 4, “Recursive Logic in Communicology,” brings

particular ideas from chapter 3 into greater focus by describing what it means to do logic-based

research where epistemological reflexivity is valued in the relation of theory to practice. Chapter

5, “Ecological Communication: Bateson’s ‘New Science,’” resuscitates Bateson’s argument for

the ecology of communication, but this time explicitly by means of semiotics and

phenomenology. Jakobson's model of communication is used to show Bateson's implicit

connection to early pragmatism. In Chapter 6, “Habitus in the Matrix: From Peirce to Bourdieu,”

I place Bourdieu’s work in the context of pragmatism and defend his semiotic legacy as

exemplary communicology. Bourdieu extends the matrix concept by showing how it gives birth

to practices. Chapter 7, “Culture in Consciousness,” condenses previous chapters by depicting

culture as integral to phenomenological consciousness. Chapter 8, “Conduct: Nature in Culture

from Dewey to Bourdieu,” describes semiotics and communication studies as ships passing in

the night and argues for the concept of habits as a meeting place for synthesis. This synthesis

focuses on human conduct particularly as understood through Peirce and Dewey’s conception of

human nature and habits and as extended by Bourdieu. However, this brings the nature versus

nurture dichotomy into focus. I defend culture as distinctive of human nature through an
interpretation of habits and the symbol in Peirce. This brings us to contemporary linguistics,

where the innateness hypothesis proposed by Pinker and others is commonly employed to

criticize linguistic relativity, the so-called Whorf hypothesis. Chapter 9, “Cultures of Conduct:

Linguistic Habitus and Semiotic Relativity,” provides an example of the application of

communicological thinking by examining the debate between cognitive linguists and linguistic

relativists. The dominant linguistic approach presumes that consciousness is universal. Relying

on the foregoing chapters and additional recent evidence from psychology, ethnology, and

communicology, I document the case for a semiotic relativity hypothesis extending Sapir and

Whorf. Whorf’s linguistic relativity is defended against the innateness hypothesis of his

linguistic critics. Recent empirical evidence garnered from psychology and ethnology supports

Sapir and Whorf. Semiotic relativity is depicted as an even wider hypothesis. Most importantly

however this debate is reframed and transcended by semiotic phenomenology.

I argue that the phenomenological experience of culture is consistent with the abductive

logic of Peirce, which he also called hypothesis. I interpret his unique hypothesis as a way of

explicating the reflexivity of consciousness and experience—that is, the cultural-semiotic and the

embodied phenomenological habitus. This account of appositional logic in the matrix is

conceptualized as the semiotic relativity hypothesis. Peirce named this realm of the symbol or

Interpretant “the womb of the future,” which on my account is to say that the threshold of

consciousness is perpetually grounded in semiotic relativity, the embodied phenomenological

experience of signs.

NOTES
1
Georges Gusdorf, Speaking (La Parole) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 4; Calvin Schrag,
Experience and Being (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969).
1
Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron, Analyzing Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 2–4. These
semioticians coin the term culturalis as a stylistic device, which I find useful and will refer to again.
1
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. A. Landes (London: Routledge, [1945] 2012;
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
1
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977); The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
1
Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Survey of Pragmaticism,” in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles
Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), 5.488, originally written around 1906. As
is customary, citations from the Collected Papers will indicate volume and paragraph number: 5.488, for example,
signifies volume 5, paragraph 488.
1
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology,
ed. L. Lawlor and B. Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002); Richard L. Lanigan, Phenomenology
of Communication: Merleau-Ponty’s Thematics in Communicology and Semiology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1988); Richard L. Lanigan, The Human Science of Communicology: A Phenomenology of
Discourse in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1992).
NOTES
1
Georges Gusdorf, Speaking (La Parole) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 4; Calvin
Schrag, Experience and Being (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969).
2
Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron, Analyzing Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 2–4.
These semioticians coin the term culturalis as a stylistic device, which I find useful and will refer to again.
3
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. A. Landes (London: Routledge, [1945]
2012; Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
4
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1977); The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
5
Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Survey of Pragmaticism,” in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed.
Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), 5.488, originally written
around 1906. As is customary, citations from the Collected Papers will indicate volume and paragraph
number: 5.488, for example, signifies volume 5, paragraph 488.
6
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of
Phenomenology, ed. L. Lawlor and B. Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002); Richard L.
Lanigan, Phenomenology of Communication: Merleau-Ponty’s Thematics in Communicology and
Semiology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988); Richard L. Lanigan, The Human Science of
Communicology: A Phenomenology of Discourse in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1992).