Subject: an open letter to semiotics friends (18-3-29): a proposal and an article attached Youzheng Li Dear Semiotics Friends, As an independent scholar, being free of the institutional restriction of any academic organizations, I have constantly thought about the problem of a more desirable form of freely expressing the humanity-theoretical thoughts in our new century. Owing to the current seriously limiting conditions at financial, technical and institutional levels our scientific thinking and writings in the humanities can only be made public through the channels embodied in highly limited number of officially established journals in different fields. That means the availability of expressing our scholarly thoughts have been obviously restricted by the physical conditions of the existing academic Establishments. In China the similar problem might be more serious but we could partly overcome the difficulty of expressing our scholarly thoughts in internet over there; namely besides insufficiently available official periodicals we can easily express our scientific thoughts in some quasi-independent public websites to quickly and effectively implement our freedom of intellectual expressions. I don’t mean those websites associated with the official periodicals as their online editions but mean a quasi-independent public websites that are still governed by some institutions but open for freely posing scientific articles of scholars, including both the original or officially published pieces. All those posed articles online may be further selected later for more formal publishing or even republished in e-form. This way of scientific dialogues in Internet can make scholars express their own thoughts timely or realize actually their freedom of expressions of ideas without being strictly bound by the limited material conditions concerning publishing or by professional-institutionalized regulations. But why we have to wait for much longer time and the limited chance for being authorized for official publications in regular printed journals? Because we are professionalized beings and the final aim of our publications is determined by our profitable requirements while not mainly for the purpose of free dialogue of thoughts. By contrast with those ancient thinkers, who were not professionalized and thus cherished pure aim for freely expressing their original idea to possible reading public, our ways of thinking, writing and expressing today have to go through a professionally-determined media-sifter that has become more and more complicated and time-wasting for passing. Yes, people would say that the situation is just normal in our modern time! It seems that we have a reason to patiently follow the predetermined regulations for retarding our research speeds caused by various professional bureaucracy and poorer economic conditions. But from a really semiotic angle we also have a reason to quicken our speed of research when we are facing the urgent, great task of realizing the original semiotic ideal that can only be carried out by means of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches. This scientific orientation is however naturally inconsistent with the predominant fixed professionalized academic frameworks that are mostly based on the principle of various discipline-central autonomies. Because of the above talk I really wish someday we could make more wisely use of the refreshed potential of Internet, e-publication, e-library and document-reservation on the base of cloud-technology to shape a more convenient and even freer mode of publishing and reserving of humanity-scientific writings in addition to the current institutionally controlled periodicals. That means, considering the present-day situations we need to adopt a double way for handling our publishing requirements. Such a new invention of idea-publishing based on various e-technology could help us to partly get rid of the institutional control of a variety of academic authorities most of which are logically contrary to the genuine-interdisciplinary orientation owing to their scholarly attitudes formed in a utilitarian context. We could only expect that some more intellectually ambitious younger scholars in next generations might decrease the impulse for practical-profitable desires and much more increase the passion for scientific idealism in near future.
What written above might be part of a planned article of mine about this topic in future. That I mention it here is due to an occasional matter about a new article of mine contributed to and once approved by Semiotica. The unexpected failure of its publishing in the journal leads me to try using this private way to make it appear in our community at first. Despite my being a “corresponding author” of that journal my several inquiries sent to the editorship about a certain treatment of its publishing have got no reply, that makes me sure that a change of mind of the editorship occurs without knowing the reason. This article attached here is taken by me in fact as the most important piece among all my Semiotics articles. It was indeed once approved by Marcel Danesi, the editor in chief, about one year ago but it has never been put in their publishing schedule till now (this is the only certain message I got from them in earlier time). Because they continue keeping silence and I am unable to guess out what has suddenly happened there causing the change of their idea without letting me know it, I decide to “published” it in such a private way at first, and then I would include it into my new printed Selections. This article intends to make a functional segregation between the social-political-economic-directed materialist developing line (history-1) and the humanist-scientific, high-cultural-intellectual developing line (history-2) in human history. The latter has been progressed until to its new type of human sciences in our times. The genuine semiotic-way of thinking is becoming the very epistemology-methodology strategy which becomes the very tools to advance human-scientific theorization, which should be handled as an intellectually pragmatic autonomy that shouldn’t be wrongly or uselessly mingled with or engaged in the channels working in history-1. In other words, there exists only an external rather than internal interaction between history-1 and history-2. Therefore we shouldn’t apply the values, norms, methods, aims which are fixed according to utilitarian and profitable principles applied in history-1 in our practices of doing human sciences belonging to history-2. After understanding the functional separation in terms of this historic-philosophy we might be able more relevantly to reorganize our strategy and tactics for our huge mission for renovating human sciences in general as well as semiotics in particular. The included letter of Marcel Danesi below could be used (perhaps not legally while might be morally) as the evidence of the authorship of this article. I also hope international colleagues, especially younger scholars, could build up a public scholarly forum online someday for freer and easily-accessible discussions and dialogues about the prospects of human sciences, including semiotics. 銆2018-3-29 in SF銆 ** **
05-May-2017
The review process was very positive and I do to see the need for major revisions.The SEMI production office will contact you for proofreading in the near future.Your article will be published ahead of print as soon as possible, and in the printed edition at a later time.
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