Abstract
Semiotics was for some reason bypassed by the cultural current that at the turn of the twentieth century gave birth to the three basic modern social sciences: economics, political science and sociology. All three study ‘us’ in the deluge called ‘modernity’ in the same way in which anthropology studies ‘them’ in the wake of colonialism, the other side of the coin called ‘modernity’. That semiotics never became a master discipline in modern academia is a weird thing because one would imagine that in an era that many have for a good reason called ‘information society’, the ‘time of communication’, or the ‘time of the sign’, there would be great demand for a discipline studying the general patterns of signification.
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Notes
- 1.
Originally, this part of the book was planned to consist of two chapters. However, for copyright reasons transcending the understanding of an ordinary professor, the other one, titled Modernity, Postmodernity and Reflexive Modernization, had to be left out of the book because its earlier version was published as a journal article with a very restrictive publication rights contract (Heiskala, 2011). For the information of those readers who may be interested in it, here is the outline of the article, which starts from the fact that in the sociological tradition, modernization has usually been understood as increasing differentiation. Theorists as different as Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Parsons all shared the view that modernization meant the opening of new horizons. The publication of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition transformed the discursive universe: contrary to the tradition of differentiation-theoretical sociology, the pamphlet interpreted modernization as a process in which the plurality of local cultural traditions was destroyed and their various narratives were rearticulated into a unified modern canon under the repressive metanarratives of science, progress and the Enlightenment. At first, sociologists were at odds with this new interpretation until Beck, Giddens and Lash brought up the idea of modernity in two phases in their Reflexive Modernization and related publications. According to them, ‘traditional modernity’ was based on cultural closures, such as unified class-identities, nationalities and fixed gender identities, but it was followed by a ‘second’ or ‘reflexive modernity’, where several traditions lived side by side, just as the postmodernists claimed. An intense debate emerged. In addition to describing the debate, the chapter asks: did we learn anything from the debate on reflexive modernization and, if so, can the lessons learnt be used fruitfully in the study of contemporary society? The answer seems to be negative for the most part. However, the modernization-theoretical approach can still be seen as a useful tool for framing research questions and contributing to the diagnosis of the era. This is how it can still provide a point of departure for research but not deliver all the answers, which is the task of empirical social research rather than abstract theoretical schemes of orientation.
References
Heiskala, R. (2003). Society as Semiosis. Neostructuralist Theory of Culture and Society. Peter Lang.
Heiskala, R. (2011). From Modernity Through Postmodernity to Reflexive Modernization. Did We Learn Anything? International Review of Sociology, 21(1), 3–19.
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Heiskala, R. (2021). Introduction: Towards Semiotic Sociology and Social Theory. In: Semiotic Sociology. Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79367-8_1
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