MEMES VERSUS SIGNS On the use of meaning concepts about nature and culture

Repetition, for a god, is a sign of majesty, necessity' s seal. The title' s question is not in the least meant as jocular. I am not making light about Thomas A. Sebeok' s passing away in 2001. My purpose is to remind semioticians about the void that his passing away left in the theoretical edifice of the discipline. He understood semiotics as a study that simultaneously and with a unified conceptual apparatus studies both nature and culture. An idea about unification of these domains of research is currently raising its head at some other quarters, and it seems to be gaining credence. The idea in question is the study of so-called ' memes' , those elementary cultural phenomena that are taken to be analogous to genes in the study of biological nature. The thesis of this article is that this study, so-called ' memetics' only re-invents an old wheel, the subject matter of semiotics. Furthermore, in those respects where the new approach deviates from the old one, it turns out to be an inferior alternative to semiotics. Nevertheless, although apparently an inferior alternative, ' memetics' seems to be about to steal the show from semiotics in the study of nature, culture, and their possible mediation. Sebeok' s great achievement was in performing what might be called a modern synthesis in semiotics. This expression stems from the history of biology. Biologists mean by modern synthesis the accomplishment of R. A. Fisher and others in the early 1930s, when they discovered and demonstrated that Darwinian evolution and genetic evolution do not contradict each other, as had been the received view for a while. Quite to the contrary, those two bodies of thought actually give support to each other. Darwin' s theory of natural selection holds good, because the genetic theory holds good, and vice versa. In a similar way, Thomas Sebeok demonstrated that the study of nature and the study of culture can give support to each other when semiotic concepts are used as their mediators. Not any old sign notion will do, however, what is needed is a triadic sign-concept that might be called ' prope-linguistic' , to paraphrase an expression of C. S. Peirce' s. This means that the concept of sign is not developed from language or linguistics (as is the case in Saussurean semiotics, also known as semiology), but rather vice versa. Sebeok (2001b, p. 180) saw …