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Norbert Wiley The Semiotic Self University of Chicago Press, 1994 ISBN 0226898164
In Search of the Semiotic Self
In this book, Norbert Wiley offers a new interpretation of the nature of the self. Establishing a connection between the semiotic self and the nature of democracy, he makes a strong case for an autonomous self that can be seen as an internal conversation in which the present self (I) talks about the past self (me) to the future self (you).
Norbert Wiley starts by drawing a line between the terms "identity" and "self. He approaches the self as the universal semiotic structure that houses more specific identities, e. g. ethnic, religious, social semiotic contents. With this distinction in mind, Norbert Wiley sets out to develop a pragmatic theory of the self from a semiotic perspective.
Norbert Wiley juxtaposes two versions of semiotics-American (triadic), based on the sign, interpretant, and object and European (dyadic), based on the signifier and signified. He admits that by "semiotic" he is referring to the theory of meaning held by the American pragmatists (p. via). It is common to identify European semiotics with Saussurean theory of signs; however, this approach overlooks other traditions. For instance, M. M. Bakhtin's approach to the semiotic mediation of mental life (Wertsch, 1985a) and, especially, L. S. Vygotsky's semiotic analysis (Lee, 1985) can hardly be called "dyadic". Even though formulated in different terms, their analysis of mind displays many parallels with the ideas of American pragmatists, as will be shown later in the review.
In the first chapter entitled "The Politics of Identity in American History", Wiley analyzes two major theories for explaining the self and its identities-the faculty psychology of the founding fathers and the semiotic theory of the classical pragmatists. He argues that these two theories cannot meet the current challenge of explaining America's politics of identity. He sees his goal in revitalizing neo-pragmatism and offers a complex theory of the self, taking the ideas of two major American semioticians-Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead-as the basis for this neo-pragmatic synthesis.
Wiley brings the theories of these two semioticians together by linking them to the sign-object-interpretant structure of the semiotic triad. He sees the self as a constant process of interpretation in which the...