CHAPTER 4
HISTRIOGRAPHY AND SEMIOTICS: RECONSTRUCTING HISTORY BEYOND THE LIMITS OF THEORY AND PRACTICE
Chukwuemeka Anthony Ebiriukwu, PhD
Introduction
The prevailing notion that sees history as dealing with a finite definite past has seemingly left research into historical events with no room for perceptual and factual expansion. Thus, presumably, historical matter was placed in the past, the historian in the present, and the reader in the future.1By this presupposition implies that any historical account of a given event comes to an end, that is, has been placed on a halt. Perhaps what may have sustained this continuum of reasoning is not far from Georg Wilhelm Friedrick Hegel’s notion of philosophy of history. Hegel’s conception of history is that it is teleological, further eventuating into what he and Karl Marx described as “dialectical materialism.” Hegel, however, noted that history ends when one puts it down into writing. This idea of putting to halt historical events is undoubtedly the major problem faced by historians in the writing of history and, of written history today. The reason for this position is predicated on the fact that the suggestion of history being brought to a halt when put down into writing obviates the importance of the historian in the examination of the historical process. The implication of this to history as a discipline is that it places history as a subject at dead end since it does not confer relevance to the historian’s perspective in the interpretation, evaluation and analysis of a historical event.
I am not an historian and therefore may not offer this piece from the perspective of a professional historian. However, my experience as a theatre artist and critic offers me the opportunity to encounter semiotics, and knowing its importance in the evaluation, criticism, analysis and interpretation of texts in virtually all sister disciplines in the humanities, but in history, I found encouragement to put up this contribution that may help in the consideration of semiotics as a sub-discipline of history in the humanities in Nigerian universities. This move is fore grounded upon the fact that being relatively new in the field of history in both Western and American scholarship, it is therefore not unlikely that semiotics as a phenomenon may not even have been thought for consideration in the curricula of the discipline of history in greater percentage of higher institutions and colleges worldover.
Conceptualizing Semiotics and Historiography
As scholars in the humanities, we must understand that the fundamental business of the humanities is to write, rewrite, interpret, evaluate and analyze human relations and experiences in written texts - the text itself being semiotics, that is, an object embodied in signs, symbols, metaphors and significations subjectable to individual interpretations, evaluations and analyses. The reading, writing, interpretation and analysis of history in texts seem to present history as text, hence, the importance of an enquiry into the subject matter of semiotics in the discipline of history.
Semiotics is not a new phenomenon in scholarship, especially in the humanities. It has acquired a household name in majorly all spheres of the arts, including sociology, psychology, philosophy, fine arts, plastic arts, paintings, the sciences and more especially in the languages and drama and theatre. Semiotics also represents a major communication approach in cultural studies. In these academic spheres, semiotics occupies the main-stay of communication and meaning. In drama and theatre, for example, it is semiotics that makes up more than 85 percent of the communication model - what is referred to as the mis-en-scene of the theatre. These are the unspoken aspects of the theatrical performances, and they include the costume, make-up, scenery, lighting, props, sets, facial expressions, et cetera. These offer their own meaning to the performance through their signs, codes, symbols, metaphors as acceptable by the receiving population. In other disciplines, semiotics also occupies prominence as phenomenon for meaning and signification. In psychology, Sigmund Freud had mooted the idea and phenomenal importance of semiotics for the proper understanding of myth and their evolutionary processes. In the languages, Levi-Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure were also precursors of semiotics having assigned meanings and significations to words. However, this is away from history as a discipline where semiotics is seen as a suspect word.
Both Berger and Solomon described semiotics as a general science of sign usage. Expatiating on this, Gary Shanks posited that the idea behind a general science of sign usage is that human culture can be understood as a series of codes, and that each of these codes is like a little language. Shank notes further that:
According to the doctrine of semiotics, signs are a type of events that are necessary for reality as we know it to exist. If this is the case, then we should expect semiotic ideas to be found in the earlier forms of human inquiry, this is indeed the case. Signs in terms of medical symptoms and hunting and in diagnoses of all forms, have been a key part of inquiry since the beginning of history. 2
What to make from Shank’s explanation is that semiotics has always been part of history. Thus, being the science of sign usage, semiotics can be said to be the study of sign process taken as “...any form of activity, conduct, or any process that involves signs including the production of meaning.”3 In his study of the semiotician Umberto Eco, Caesar Michael noted the following about sign and semiotics:
A sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself, to the interpreter of the sign. The semiotic tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications. Unlike linguistics, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems. 4
Caesar’s explanation is very important in reassessing the place and notion of semiotics as perceived by historians. This perception, perhaps, is misguided especially given thecrucial difference between the understanding of non-semiotic reality in the Peircean and the Saussurean approaches, the difference in understanding to which Lotman and Uspenkij, in their editorial commentary, noted that:
If in the former it exists as the object of logical models, then in the latter it acquires features of empirical reality. For this reason, the first approach opens the way only to logical models, while the second affords the hope of reconstructing extra textual empirical reality by means of the text. At this point the aims of semiotics converge with traditional aims of historical research. 5
Thus, there are fundamentally two recognized traditional systems of semiotics and which, according to Lotman, are categorized as Atomistic and Holistic Semiotics, and understanding the operational modes of semiotics implies that we must understand the relative differences between these traditional approaches. The atomistic semiotic tradition derives from Peirce and Morris which exists as objects of logical model while the holistic semiotics, which derives from Saussure, acquires features of empirical reality, and accordingly;
The researcher’s attention is focused on the sign in isolation, that is, on the relationship of sign to meaning, to addressee, and so on, whereas in the case of the second tradition, the researchers concentrate their attention on a language, that is, a mechanism which uses a certain set of elementary signs for the communication of content. This fundamental difference brings along a different approach to non-semiotic reality and to the semiotic study of history. 6
Dobie Ann explains that Saussure swept away the nineteenth-century correspondence model between words and things and gave us language that is connected only conventionally and arbitrarily to the world outside it.7In his approach to language as a communicative paradigm, Saussure conceptualized the language system in terms of signs. The concept of sign, according to Saussure, are composed of two parts - the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the written or sound construction, while the signifiedconnotes the meaning. The problem the historian has with this conception of meaning in communication as espoused by Saussure is that it does not represent the methodology with which the historian approaches historical narratives. For the historian, this antithetical mode of viewing words as conceptualized by Saussure decries the historian’s approach to history because he made it no longer possible to speak of a word as a symbol that represents a thing outside of it, as it has conventionally been known. Because a signifier does not refer to some objects but to a concept in the mind, it is language, and not the world external to us, that mediates reality.8 Conceived in this way therefore, the historian considers signifier as ahistorical because by it we see only what language allows us to see both outside and inside a context. It does not simply record our world or provide labels for what is in it. Instead, according to Saussure, language constitutes our world; it structures our experience. By this therefore it means that there is an arbitrary relationship existing between the signifier and the signified. This is an anathema to the historian’s communicative paradigm in the narrative process of transmission of meanings, and which is why the historian sees as suspect the word semiology, as proposed by Saussure, and which the historian also confuses as meaning the same thing with semiotics. Saussure’s semiology harps on the investigation of the meanings through signs that are observable in cultural phenomena. However, this investigation is only chiefly focused on language as the primary signifying system and that any research into any other operative system must follow this methodology through language study. This is against the historian’s traditional model of historical narrative. Though related to it, but is different from the semiotic approach to sign studies and meaning in transmission of thoughts.
Working simultaneously, but in a separate environment with Saussure as he espouses his theory of semiology, was the American semiotician Peirce Charles Sanders. Peirce, it was, who founded semiotics. As defined above, Peirce conceives semiotics as a science of the study of signs, and for him:
A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. 9
Away from Saussure’s therefore, Peirce sees a sign as composed of a triadic relation among representamen, object and interpretant - a kind of an infinite show of definition. In his observation and critical inquiry into Umberto Eco’s critical assessment of Saussure’s view of signs as signifier and signified and, Peirce’s conception of sign and its triadic relations, Jeffrey DiLeo observes that whereas Saussure’s sign implies the existence of an actual antecedent object, e.g., a word or thing, Peirce’s does not, for the “sign” as such is replaced by the “sign function” or “sign relation.”10. Commenting on this, Eco emphasizes that Peirce’s very definition of “sign” implies a process of unlimited semiosis. What this means for the historiographer is that he is not limited in the interpretation of facts of history as captured in the source. This is so because according to DiLeo in his critical observation of the differentiating paradigms in Saussure’s semiology and Peirce’s semiotics as critiqued by Eco:
Instead of the recognition of meaning dependent upon the sign user’s ability to isolate discrete semiotic units (signifier and signified), there is for Peirce and Eco a sequentially irreducible and theoretically limitless process of interpretation, in which a sign includes the idea or interpretant to which it gives rise. In turn, this interpretant becomes a sign which is open to the same interpretive process of unlimited semiosis. 11
For Peirce’s semiotic principles therefore, is a vast degree of perceptual freedom for the historian since according to him:
The object of representation can be nothing but a representation of which the first representation is the interpretant. But an endless series of representations, each representing the one behind it, may be conceived to have an absolute object as its limit. 12
The attention to semiotics as a veritable tool and approach to sign significations and meaning stems from semiotics conception as applying the structuralist principles not just to language but to the study of sign systems in general and the way meaning is derived from them. Therefore, while semiology pays more attention chiefly to the study of the signs of the language (linguistics) and relies on it in the interrogation of meaning into other aspects of social behaviour, semiotics goes beyond it to include the study of the external facts to examine the nature of the human experience. For these, Western and American scholars have, in the last few decades, found it imperative to include the study of the semiotics of history in the discipline of history in the humanities.
In her contribution to the development of the converging of history and semiotics, the American historian, Brook William in an article, gave reason why she made a shift from her discipline of history to semiotics. She captures this drift below:
I drifted outside my discipline, one fall day, on October 3, 1978, to register at the Third Annual meeting of the Semiotics Society of America (SSA), as the first historian who became a member of this society. In my discipline, ‘semiotics’ was a suspect word. Historians confused it with ‘semiology’ which they saw as an exclusively linguistic model of human experience, one which visited upon the discipline a theory accruing from modern philosophical idealism a theory that provided no form of reference for the mode of inquiry historians use.13
These confusing paradigms of meanings between semiotics and semiology, as observed by Williams, of her American historians, may present even more dangerously the conception and perception of semiotics by Nigerian, nay, African historians, who patterned their historiographical methodology in the way and manner of the West. This, perhaps, may account for why the idea of a semiotics of history has hardly been conceived in the educational curricula of the country’s educational system. Because we are a consumptive society, our historians are perhaps waiting for Western and American historians to develop fully semiotics of history in their cultures before, perhaps, borrowing the fully developed ideas from them hook, line and sinker. What I am saying is that I have hardly encountered any article written by a Nigerian historian mooting the idea of semiotics of history. However, if the contrary be the case of my claim, (as may arguably be), then what perhaps may exist is a scratchy and sketchy suggestive appeal to include the phenomenon into the curricula of the discipline of history in Nigerian educational system. At this juncture, it will do well we look at the subject matter of histriography so as to situate it properly in our discussion of the semiotics of history in this study.
We will start by stating that the main purpose of history, as we know it, is to look at events, look at happenings, look at periods, and look at people from the past. We look at all these from the perspective of things that existed and/or happened in real historical times. They are evidences with verifiable facts. What this means is that as a reality conceived in the past, history does not change, perhaps, because, it never changes. We would by this note here that as a thing known to have taken place in a pointable finite past, history contains hundreds and thousands and millions of facts and real truths; truths and facts that are verifiable in concrete terms. For instance, it is a concrete and verifiable truth that Lord Lugard amalgamated the Northern and Southern protectorates in 1914. It is an obvious fact that Nigeria got her independence from the British in 1960. It is not in doubt that the Nigerian-Biafran civil war lasted between 1967 and 1970. These all took place in real finite pasts and the evidences of their facts leave no one in doubt. However, considered as historical events standing on their own, the possibility of distortions in their inherent and intrinsic facts remains palpable. Thus, different persons are likely to give differing accounts of their perceptions of the events. This, perhaps, is the point where the role of the historian and of semiotics becomes important and needed.
Historians look at the facts of history, examine them, analyze them, evaluate them, interpret the available evidences on them, articulate their findings and where possible, develop theories about them and finally draw their conclusion from the information gathered on such historical events. As the historian does these, he is engaging in the art of historiography. Historiography could thus be said to define the study and methodological approaches applied by the historian in the gathering, evaluating, examining, assessing, processing, articulating and interpreting of information needed in the writing and development of history. It is noted that when studying historiography, or the history of history, it is important to realize that every historian presents ideas in a different way. That is because they have perspectives that affect how they think.14 Theabove source further informs us that historiography is the writing of history. Historiographyis a meta-level analysis of descriptions of the past which usually focuses on the narrative interpretations. Generally, therefore, while history looks at people, periods and events from the past, historiography is concerned with how these events have been interpreted and understood over time. What is implied here is that despite existing facts of history, people interpret and give accounts of such events from their individual perspectives. Thus, as a study of how history is written and its applicable methodologies, and how our assessment and understanding of history changes over time, historiography considers the approaches used by historians and seeks to understand how and why their theories and interpretations differ. While the past itself never changes, history - in other words, our understanding of the past - is always evolving, the source furthered. Accordingly, the joining of history and semiotics puts us on the threshold of revival of such fundamental concepts as causality, thus making the perception of history acquire semiotic emblem and semiotic thinking acquiring historical features.
Reading and Writing as a Historian
We have already seen from the above review how our assessment and understanding of history change over time. The above also shows that the historian’s writing of history presents our understanding of the past as always evolving. Historiography thus uses knowledge gathered from different sources about the facts of a past event to reach a newer understanding of the event in the present and consequently opening up for newer possibilities of interpretations in the future. What this implies is that history is never a closed entity. To understand the writing of history therefore is to be aware that history is ever confronted with newer facts aimed at the reconstruction of the historical past. The role of the historian in these ever-changing facts of history is to make a sense of these facts through research, interpretations and analysis. Many historians use information gathered from sources available to them to evaluate and interpret their understanding of a given historical event. Thus, when two or more historians are reviewing a given event found in a known text, it is very much possible that each of them will come out with different perspectives to the facts of that historical event. This possible lack of agreement about the facts of history makes it difficult to come to a conclusion of what constitutes the facts of history of particular events. More so, the fact that the analyzing historians may come from different cultures, backgrounds and divides of that history may even make it more difficult to come to a consensus conclusion of what constitutes the facts of the history in question. However, they share similar interests in the evolutionary processes of that history. A historiographical analysis of a given historical event therefore,
...must begin with the assumption that examining the relation between a text and its context will illuminate not only the given work but also the culture that produced and consumed it. In the end, you may not agree with everything you find in either of them, but you will emerge with a deeper understanding of how and why a text is meaningful.15
There are therefore always kinds of competing meanings in the presentation of the facts of historical events in written texts. What is implied here is that facts of history are usually reconstructed when interpreted, analyzed and retold and put down in written form. The reality of this is that for the mere fact that the truth of such historical event are coming from different sources but in variegated accuracies implies that the facts of history are always open-ended - facts of history are subject to review and new offerings. The fact that the event took place in a pointable concrete time means that its reporting is likely to be objective. But again, we know that such narratives are coming from different individuals with different perspectives to the facts of the event implies that there is the possibility of subjective inclinations to the objective reporting of historical events. It is against this backdrop that DLeo points out that a principle considered very important by Eco was that the process of decoding signs is not entirely mechanical, for the interpretant not only draws from the semantic storehouse, but also adds to it.16 Thus, as historical events considered as semiotic fields, historians are warned not to place as absolute facts obtained from such texts, because, as semiotics, a text is meant to be an experience of transformation for its reader and hence, serving as the structured model for an unstructured process of communicative interplay.17 As for Eco, as observed by DLeo, the open text from which the historian sources his information of the facts of a given historical event is an expanded sign to be disambiguated by a reader whose cooperation is provoked by the manipulative strategy of a scheming author. This fact therefore denounces objectivity as tenable paradigm in history. It also denounces subjectivity as paradigm in narrative discourses in the transmission of information. It was in this vain that Emeka Nwabueze declared that:
Because meaning is always deferral and cannot be completely grasped because there is no fixed system of knowledge and therefore no finite, absolute meaning in a text, the deconstructionist believes that there is a multitude of competing meanings in a text each of which denies the primacy of the other. 21
Following from this, Ebiriukwu Anthony avers that “meanings in texts are indeterminate, and journey through a transformational presence.”22. Thus, to interpret and evaluate historical texts, the historian must first understand that there are no absolutes in the facts of history such that the internal dynamics of historical facts change with the constant revision of historical texts. This means that information in texts are saddled with ambiguities that need to be disambiguated or rather sustained. Therefore, in reading, writing and rewriting history, the historian must be able to not only just ask himself certain questions but to also see that he provides to himself answers to such basic questions. Such answers should also have the potentials of provoking further questions. For the historian therefore, pertinent questions that demand imperative answers in historiography are questions such as:
§ What were the issues in history from the perspectives of people outside the historical situation under consideration?
§ What do you think that history mean to these outsiders?
§ What do they understand about the actual events in that history?
§ What things would you confirm you feel certain did occur because everyone seems to agree in their statement it occurred?
§ What things are mentioned by some persons and omitted by others as did occur or did not occur?
§ Are there issues you think are left out in writing or rewriting of that history?
§ How do you think issues left out or omitted match up statements about the causes of the event?
Having considered all these, the historian would go a step further to interrogate the sources of the writings in the text from which he sources the facts of the history. Thus, if the history in the text is presented as a collaborative discourse, the historian, as a duty, would have to compare the principles and stories told by the different participants knowing their different backgrounds, cultural and sentimental affiliations so as to present an authentic and reliable narrative of the facts of the history. Aside from these, the historiographer needs also to look at some private individuals’ statements regarding that history. It is important that the historian understands that each statement made by individuals regarding the facts of a given event has a question associated with it that the historian has to answer or make a few notes about that could help in the historiographical auditing. The historiographer also needs to look at the subjective dimensions to the causalities of the history. That is to say: is there human bias in terms of individual or group economic interests in the making of such history? The historian also needs to know how and why particular actions, or ideas came to be, the outcomes of particular actions, that is, the effects and consequences of known actions, things that altered or remained the same over a period of time, and the relative impact or importance of different people, idea that geared up in the historical process or narratives of such events. Considered in this manner, the historian now understands that his work in the narrative of historical events goes beyond the conception of the facts of the event. There is always the possibility of new facts or evidences supporting or challenging existing facts for purpose of collaboration.
Why Semiotics of History?
One problem among historians is the issue of trust. Brook Williams noted that historians, by discipline and disposition, moreover, tend to take unkindly to theory in general, especially any theory that fails duly to weigh and consider the mode of reasoning they use in the practice of history.23 Lending credence to William’s observation, David Harlan decries this lack of faith towards theory by his fellow historians, thus:
Historians are a skeptical lot. They tend to feel that one should trust one’s nose, like a hunting dog. They are afraid that if they once let themselves be distracted by theory they will spend their days wandering in a cognitive labyrinth from which they will find no way to depart. 24
By this fundamental fear to theory arises the indifference historians hold to the discourses on such conceptual theories as deconstruction, hermeneutics, postmodernism and semiotics which they think hold no objective truths. However, as a critic of most fundamental phenomena that hold tenaciously to objectivism, reality has shown that there is nothing like objective truth. I will not in this study delve into the criticism and philosophical impasse underlying the subjectivity (idealist) and objectivity (realist) arguments since they are now looked at as over-flogged issues. Williams sums up this closure when he posited that:
In traditional usage the terminology of “objectivity” as opposed to “subjectivity” fails in its explanatory power, simply because all human experience is an admixture of mind-independent relations and mind-dependent relations objectified within semiosis. 25
This implies that there is no ultimate base in the truth to objective narrative to which the historian holds tenaciously to as constituting his basic approach to facts of historical discourses. This reality therefore calls for a shift in methodology and approach to historical research by the historian.
Because history deals with culture and human experiences, it deals with all of human nature in which all objects of human experience are evaluated, examined, interpreted, analyzed and read as codes replete in signs, and signs being semiotics and as such open to variegated interpretations, it becomes only reasonable that the historian turns to semiotics for rescue. The interface that exists in human nature, experience and culture has always presented itself as paradigm for historical narratives and authentification. Williams posits that:
This perspective situates human history within the semiotic inter-wave of relations between nature and culture. The resultant integral model of human experience is no longer predicted on language alone, however unique and important a place language holds within anthroposemiotics. Whereas the linguistic paradigm had compartmentalized culture and nature so as to treat intertextuality as a self-contained whole, the newer model situates human experience at the intersection of nature and culture. 26
It therefore behooves on modern historians to understand that to give history an expanded outlook into the future, that the reading and writing of history and historical events must view history to precede subjectivity and, as well, supersede objectivity, and this must anchor on
The semiotic perspective” which “requires a terminology that overcomes at the outset the implied oppositions - so deeply embedded in histriographicsl discourse - of “objectivity” to “subjectivity” within experience... (that) is opened by the sign in a way that is proper to the greater simplicity of the newer paradigm.27
Thus, relevant to the semiotics of history is the issue of sign in data collection and the analysis of history that presents historical facts as open ended accommodating a possible revision and inclusion of new facts wherein the fictive and the non-fictive interact upon one another in the historical transformation of either into the other in the forming of human opinion. Thus, moving away from the traditional approach to the narrative of history,
The semiotic approach considers the events of the past in the context of the history of culture, i.e., of the changing worldview. This approach involves the reconstruction of the system of representations that determine both the perceptionof certain events in a given society, as well as the reaction to these events, which is the direct impulse of the historical process. In this case, the historian is interested in the cause-effect relationships at the level that is directly related to the event plan, directly and not indirectly. Thus, the historian tries to see the historical process through the eyes of its participants, deliberately distracting from the objectivist historiographical tradition retrospectively describing events from an external point of view. 28
When one looks at the book, There Was a Country,29a historical personal account of Chinua Achebe’s narrative of the Nigeria/Biafra war, one would see a narrative account of that war approached from a semiotic perspective by the writer. Achebe did not just give an account of that war considering only the three years that it lasted, he gave account of the factors that triggered it, what transpired within the three years, what happened thereafter, and why Nigeria has remained in its current state of developmental inertia. Achebe pointed at visible signs in the war to concretize the facts of his own version of the war and what it portends for the future of Nigeria and the African continent. Those semiotic signs include some of the technological inventions of the Biafran scientists and the many inroads they made in other science and technological areas. Though the text, as written by Achebe, has continued to generate heated argument both from those who see it as representing the realities of that war and those other Nigerians who think otherwise, the fact however remains that the semiotic artifacts of that war, as invented and manufactured by those Biafran scientists more than five decades ago, and still available for human reach and examination, have remained vitiating paradigms for those who have argued against Achebe’s account of that war. What I am saying is that by Achebe’s account, the intrinsic facts of that war have not changed; that is, that the Biafran scientists, by the necessities of that war, manufactured their own machine guns, bombs, rockets, pistols, weapons of mass destructions, built their own refineries, et cetera. These fundamental facts coupled with the many inroads the Igbo of Nigeria have continued to make in the areas of science and technology despite the harsh economic strangulations the successive Nigerian administrations have continued to place on the region since after the war lend credence to Achebe’s positing that the Biafran’s would have fared better in terms of technological development in particular and development of human happiness in general had the region been allowed to have its own sovereignty. Argued this way and supported, especially given the fact that the factors that led to that war are still in multiple feasibility within the Nigerian nation, people have since then aligned with Achebe in averring that Nigeria would fare better if all regions go their separate ways. Achebe achieved this feat in the text because, through a semiotic representative analysis of the events in the history of that war, he was able to explore the cause-effect of it directly to the people of Nigeria and the Biafrans - a negative effect that has no near solution. Such is the power of semiotics in the narrative of historical facts.
As a text therefore, Achebe’s There Was a Country, just like any other text conceivable,is a sign that is open to an interminable examination, interpretation and analysis depending on the trajectory of the Nigerian socio-cultural and politico-historical situation and the disposition of the analyzing historian. The book contains data from that war, and those data still exist today as semiotic emblems from the war such that one can physically access them in the museum. These are symbolic and concrete historical deposits of that war that constitutes realistic data source for the historian. Therefore, for the fact that the historian must continue to deal with facts and data, he has no option but confront semiotics.
Conclusion
From all indication, it is very apt to conclude this study by positing that the idea of causative history can never be completely dialectical especially when under the narrative of one historian. There must be differences in the narrative as reported or written down by a couple of historians for the purpose of achieving some measure of objectivity. Thus, like journalists in a football match, the mob of historians who report same events of history from differing standpoints raise against reason the notion of objective facts as tenable approach to research in the discipline of history. This fact makes history not a closed entity but one always open to further examination, interrogation and revisioning. History deals with culture and human experiences that are replete with learnable signs. Signs or particular objects mean different things to different people. They may even mean different things to the same people depending on their psychological disposition or sentimental attachments at given times. But one thing remains, and which is, that the object of sign remains as it is, unchanging, but not subject to definite assigning of meaning. Therefore, the idea that history is put to a halt when written down in texts is a ruse. Itself being an open sign, a text being a semiotics makes the narrative of history in it only transitory couplings within the semiotic field of interpretive possibilities. 30. Therefore, facts of history in texts, as put down by any historian or group of historians, are not blocked at the end of written history, but rather are open to expansion as to accommodate the perspectives of future historians. Important to the historian, therefore, is that in writing or rewriting a historical account, appropriating the facts of such events from contributions from other historians as written down in texts automatically makes the historian engage in a semiotic activity. This is so because the lines of the texts or even the culture from which the historian draws his information requires and, as well, constitutes a notion of signs. Thus, the intertextualization of historical facts in the discipline of history can be, and are only, achieved through semiotic principles. Fundamentally, the historian, whether consciously or unconsciously engages in his evaluation of history by subjecting the sources of that history to semiotic manipulations. Since therefore the historian must deal with texts, he is unconditionally constrained to deal with semiotics.
For the Nigerian therefore, the current trend that requires an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship becomes the reason this chapter finds it imperative to call on our historians to find the use of semiotic approach in historical studies as a noble endeavour geared towards the practical realization of the desire to reposition history as a discipline in contemporary scholarship. History cannot afford to remain aloof and passive in the desiring synergy currently making waves in modern scholarship in the interdisciplinary approach in the humanities. As the earlier semiotics of history is integrated in the curricula of the discipline the better for historians who have continued to seek a rational for the inclusion of their own perspectives in the narrative processes of history such that with the emergence of new facts of a given history, such historians can have a strong foundation to base their argument as possessing the freedom as historians capable of integrating their own perspectives in the changing paradigms of the nature of historical reconstruction. To this end, it will do to advice historians to jettison the idea of seeing history only from the perspective of a phenomenal event but one capable of generating meaning and shaping human opinion both in the present and, as well, in the future. As is obvious in the narrative of Achebe in There Was a Country, historical events should be seen as “event-messages,” for it is their meaningfulness that allows the imposition of semiotic analysis. Viewed this way, this will make the historian not just a passive receptor and narrator of history, but an active critic and writer participating in the recreation of history through the ever-expanding facts in the semiotics of historical reconstruction.
Endnotes
1. Juri, Lotman, Semiotics and the Historical Sciences. In Goranzo, BO; Florin, Magnus (eds.)
2. Shank, Gary, Psychology and the Semiotic Horizon. In. Semiotics 1990 Karen, John and Terry. (New York: University Press), 1993.
3. Juri, Lotman and Uspensky, Boris. On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture. (Mihaychuk, Georgia: Trans.) New Literary History 9(2), 1978 (1971)
4. Juri, Lotman. Atomic Versus Holistic Semiology: Signs System Studies 30 (2), pp.513-527, 2002
5. Juri, Lotman and Uspensky, Boris. The Semiotics of Russian Culture. Shukman, Ann, Ann Arbor (eds.), Department of Slave Languages and Literatures, (Michigan;: University Press), 1984.
6. Ann, Dobie. Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism. (Wadsworth: Cengage Learning), 2012.
7. Ann, Dobie. Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism. (Wadsworth: Cengage Learning), 2012.
8. Pierce, Charles Sanders. “Unidentified Fragments.” in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Charles Hartsborne and Paul Weiss (eds) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1931, pp. 2.228.
9. DLeo, Jeffrey. The Intertextualozation of Theory in Foucault. In Semiotics 1990. Koren, John, and Terry (eds.), (New York:University Press), 1993.
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