What (I think) I Learned in Class Today

Class: Self, Identity, and Conflict
Prof: Dr. Jim Skelly
General assessment so far: comfortably confused

Today we read an excerpt from Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: the last self-help book.  The chapter--"A Semiotic Primer of the Self"--explores the notion of how "the self" can relate to itself and the world it creates through communication using signs.  Percy explains that semiotics, the science that deals with signs and how creatures use them, is central in explaining the ways in which humans interact with each other, themselves, and their environments (both created and natural).  According to Percy, who draws from Saussure's insight, a sign has two elements: a signifier and a signified.  For humans, the signifier is a word.  The signified is the object the word is describing.  When the signifier and signified are joined together, understanding (or misunderstanding) is achieved.  This is called a triadic event, in which a sign is understood by someone else not as some primal signal to flee or attack (this would be a dyadic event in which a sign stimulates a reaction), but as "meaning" or referring to another perceived segment of the environment.  For example, the word chair has no meaning on its own, but when you point and assign that word to a four-legged wooden object, suddenly there is an understanding of what that object is, how it works, how it can be used for our benefit.

So everything has a sign, and all signs, for humans, are words.  We are able to identify and understand everything in our world through words.  I happen to love words.  They are exciting and dependable, and...after having read Percy's work, I'm starting to think that words are also limiting.  We only have one way to relate to our environments and that is through words.  We have no other way of doing it.  It is therefore impossible to concretely communicate with anything other than humans.  It is also--and here's where it gets confusing--impossible to communicate with and/or know yourself.  There is no signifier and signified, word and object, for the self, itself.  Here's what Percy wrote: "The self of the sign-user [you, human] can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which the signifier can be joined to make a sign.  The self has no sign of itself.  No signifier applies.  All signifiers apply equally."

(Doooouche, the sound of my brain exploding).

Think about that for awhile, and you realize that if what Percy claims is true, then you can never know yourself, and you can never truly identify yourself.  This becomes a complication in a world in which identity is our anchor.  Identities define communities, and they can also make them clash.  When identities--which perhaps, are largely defined by a religion--are threatened, people are willing to become violent in order to protect what they perceive is their individual/communal identity.  Consider the law in Uganda that aimed to make homosexuality a crime, punishable by death.  The creators of this law could not deal with an alternative to their identity/reality (one in the same?) because it posed a threat to the fragility of their own identity/reality.

I'll end with a bit more of Percy's insight:

"For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others.  For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another.  I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos."