Roman Jakobson once observed that “for all human beings, and only for human beings, language is the vehicle of mental life and communication.” Richard L. Lanigan takes this statement as the starting point for exploring how communication theory and semiotics converge as two faces of the same human comportment. His goal is not merely to describe how communication and semiotics relate, but to ask why they must be explicated together as humanity moves forward within the symbolic systems of its cultures.
The central answer, Lanigan suggests, lies in the human trait of wonder—the experience of astonishment at speech itself, the moment in which language becomes the perceptual foundation of consciousness. This ékstasis, as he calls it, defines the embodied character of mental life. Human beings not only speak but perceive their own speech as meaning; they are conscious of consciousness. In this process, “the perception of language founds an ability to express the mind’s consciousness.”
Following Peirce’s formulation that others also possess this communicative capacity, Lanigan describes expression and perception as intertwined. The act of communication is not a transfer of information between isolated subjects but a mutual causation in meaning—what Peirce had called “mental causation in the modality of discourse tropes.”
Human beings first learn language from others and then use it to discern both similarity and difference, between the self and the other, between “me” and the “not-me.” This dynamic is what Lotman described as auto-communication: a reflexive process in which speaking and hearing coincide, and language appears as performance, both verbal and gestural. The embodied competence that results—learning through hearing and seeing others—constitutes what Lanigan calls the cultural foundation of semiotic life.
Culture, in this sense, is competence: our entry into all semiotic systems. Performance, conversely, is the awareness of selfhood—our entry into communication systems such as linguistics, logic, and mathematics. The human mind, therefore, operates simultaneously within two basic sign-systems: those of mind and culture, of logic and language.
This simultaneity distinguishes human beings from both machines and animals. Machines must be built and maintained by humans; animals lack the capacity to move referents in space and time through symbolic mediation. Human beings alone possess this symbolic power: the ability to perceive, to express, and to communicate.
Here Lanigan turns to Ernst Cassirer, who defines the phenomenology of being human as the conjunction of three capacities:
- The ability to perceive objects — the world of icons studied by natural science.
- The ability to perceive expressions — the world of indices studied by the human sciences.
- The ability to communicate by speaking — the world of symbols created and learned by human beings.
Humans combine these capacities as both “art and science,” as Cassirer writes. The act of perception, notes Fuchs, is never a mere reception of stimuli or images but an apprehension of gestalt units, meanings, and affordances: a “mediated immediacy.”
For Lanigan, this combination finds its paradigm in the Discourse Model of Communication, where symbolic meaning mediates between Addresser and Addressee. It is prior to and broader than the Exchange Model of Information, which merely transmits signals between Sender and Receiver. The first belongs to Communicology—the human science of discourse—while the second remains confined to informatics, a “computer metaphor or metonymy of the mind.”
In this initial movement of his argument, Lanigan situates communication and semiotics as a unified inquiry into what makes human consciousness possible. Language is not only a tool for representing thought but the very condition for the mind’s awareness of itself and of others. Wonder, therefore, is not a marginal emotion but the origin of meaning: the moment in which expression becomes perception, and consciousness recognizes itself in the act of speaking.
Reference: Richard L. Lanigan, Communication Theory and Semiotics, in Bloomsbury Semiotics, Volume 4: Semiotic Movements, London–New York, Bloomsbury.