Possibilities and Paradoxes of Interpretations of History of Semiotics: the Case of Sophistry and Greek Rhetoric
Abstrakt
The aim of this paper is to consider basic and possible problems of (meta)historiography of semiotics from the systematical point of view. Firstly there is a fundamental paradox connected with metahistorical perspective on semiotics: semiotics itself is often used as an analytical tool for description of (meta)history, especially in a structuralistic point of view: e. g. in M.
Foucault's Order of things, where the theory of sign is essentially connected with the Saussurean style of thinking. In this way of thinking epistemé is rationalistic and universalistic model - metastructure - which is the base for all sign systems and all kinds of sign production in a given epoch.
But the way Foucault discovered this is essentially connected with traditional semiological way of reasoning (dyadic structure of sign, idea of structure and essential differences etc.) and with an illusion of objectivity of this view (which is later abandoned, after Archeology of Knowledge). The point is that we are facing the same hermeneutic/semiotic (perhaps vicious) circle which we can find in another perspective on history (and also on metahistory).
This perspective is ""more traditional"" and is connected with philological and comparative studies of historical sign theories: like in the works of U. Eco, G.
Manetti, C. Marmo E.
J. Ashworth, A.
Eschbach, J. Trabant, S.
Meier-Oeser etc. We are talking about history only from a given viewpoint on history.