Signs of Life

This essay advances an audible semiotics (hearing and listening) by challenging James Williams’ concept of signs in his book A Process Philosophy of Signs (2016). In it, Williams proposes that a sign exists due to, and as, its own intensive life. That is, he decouples consciousness from the semiotic relation in order to advance a materialist ontology. Through this thesis, Williams aims to move semiotic relations outside the limits of visual and linguistic thinking. In doing so, however, he has conflated two distinct activities—life and signs. This positions the sign on material grounds and thereby strips away the creative and interpretive element of ambiguity, which is vital to any theory of signs. This essay shares Williams’ interest in loosening semiotics from its adherence to language and visual thinking. But it challenges his arguments by addressing the topic from an audible rather than material standpoint. Without experience and interpretation—human, animal, plant or otherwise—a sound is only a sound, a process of life, and not a sign. An audible semiotics retains the sensory to seek out other avenues of discovery and thought beyond language and vision. In audibility, a sign returns to its relational element of sensation—its processes of gathering and interpretation. A process philosophy of audible signs thereby affirms two propositions: (1) that “life” and “sign” are not the same; and (2) that the value of semiotics is not a concern over what is, but about how any form of life responds to and interprets a situation. More than review or criticism, the essay advances a positive theory of audible signs. To this end, it narratively deconstructs a “scene” that Williams offers in his own account: a deer’s footsteps on a snowy hillside. By critiquing these accounts cinematically and narratively, we can see how an audible semiotics reinvigorates the vital necessity of ambiguity in hearing and listening, which also points toward the possibilities of audible design in filmmaking. The methodology is discursive and analytical but non-dialectical. That is, situating audibility in a narrative framework offers an other way into the value of signs and semiotic studies across a wide range of disciplines. The central thesis argued, contra Williams, is that signs are not reducible to “life” (and vice-versa), and that only an audible regard for signs can reveal this fact. To situate its arguments, this essay incorporates key aspects of semiotics, psychology, and epistemology. Thinkers engaged, other than Williams, include William James, Wittgenstein, Saussure, Peirce, Barthes and Deleuze. Philosophical in approach, this essay will have resonance as a starting point for considering the possibilities of creative hearing and listening in audiovisual arts and epistemology.