Semiotics in Future

(A Statement at the Concluding Séance of the 8th IASS Congress Lyon, July 12, 2004)
 
In my opinion intercultural semiotic practice will someday widely influence the theoretical panorama and framework of semiotic studies in the world. Being related to the basic structure of human sciences, intercultural or globalization semiotics could lead to an era of the humanist-scientific Enlightenment in future. It is interesting to express this in a French university with the name “Lumiere” which symbolize a new stage of semiotic progress in the cross-culturally expanded academic context. What we have attained in semiotics up to now are mostly the western products. After spreading to the entire world, semiotics could stimulate a global scientific movement once again. In this process Chinese semiotics will play a more and more important role. China indicates three “biggest” in the world: the longest continuing history, the largest population and the richest written historical material. Besides her economic, scientific, technological and social goals, China is faced with an urgent task to modernize her scholarship concerning traditional culture and humanities. This request for the scholarly modernization indicates a desideratum to obtain a more effective methodology for communicating with western human sciences. For this purpose semiotics has proved to be one of the most useful methodologies. In China semiotics has been employed in two dimensions: Firstly, to learn from western theory and share its further development, because western theory belongs to the entire mankind; and secondly, to modernize her own traditional scholarship. The results of the two kinds of semiotic practice could in turn probably exercise a serious impact on the structure of the Western human sciences in future too.
     The essence of semiotic practice is indicated in its interdisciplinary direction in contrast with the traditional philosophical-centrism. Today a crucial crisis at semiotic epistemological inquiry is connected to a prevailing confusion concerning the relationship between semiotic theory and philosophy. If semiotic theoretical reasoning tends to rest its logic on some metaphysic-ontological rhetoric, the trend could imply an operative self-contradiction. Semiotics is a scientific practice based on rational and positive procedures. China’s semiotic experience will enrich and pluralize the typology of rationality and positivism in human life. Nihilist discourse can be the object of research but shouldn’t be taken as the methods as such. Otherwise we mix the two different intellectual practices: the scientific reasoning and the artistic expression. The postmodernist mixture of the two procedures becomes the main barrier for the epistemological advance in current semiotic world.
    Intercultural semiotics is a developing expansion of interdisciplinary semiotics. In fact, intercultural semiotics consists of both western and nonwestern aspects. Both of them will be involved into the formation of the global human sciences in future, which will eventually help improve the general human conditions. Semiotics is still in its beginning period. All achievements concerned are the mere historical sources to be employed for further development in our globalization world. The next stage of semiotics is also a new era for a more comprehensive synthesis of human knowledge in the globalization context. After the two hundred years’ scientific specialization in human knowledge there will be a turning point for a new synthesis of human sciences on a global scale. During this process semiotics will play a leading role in the new century, I think.