Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies*

Abstract

1.1. Pragmatics has been much neglected in literary and cultural studies. In the semiotic sense in which I am using it, it was defined already by Charles Morris as the domain of relationships between the signs and their inter preters, which clarifies the conditions under which something is taken as a sign. From CS. Peirce, G.H. Mead, and Karl B?hler, through M.M. Bakhtin/Volosinov, Morris, R. Carnap, and the Warsaw School, to (say) R.M. Martin, L?o Apostel, and John R. Searle, pragmatics has slowly been growing into an independent discipline on a par with syntactics (the domain of relationships between the signs and their formally possible com binations) and with semantics (in this sense, the domain of relations between the signs and the entities they designate). But what is more, there are since the late 1950s strong arguments that it is a constitutive and indeed englobing complement of both semantics and syntactics. The basic?and to any ma terialist sufficient?pair of arguments for it is, first, that all objects and events are (only or also) signs and, second, that any object or event becomes a sign only in a signifying situation; it has no natural meaning outside of it (e.g., in More's Utopia gold is a sign of shame). This situation is constituted by the relation between signs and their users; a user can take something to be a sign only as it is spatio-temporally concrete and localized, and as it relates to the user's disposition toward potential action. Both the concrete localization and the user's disposition are always socio-historical. Furthermore, they postulate a reality organized not only around signs but also around subjects, in the double sense of psychophysical personality and of a socialized, collectively representative subject. The entry of potentially acting subjects reintroduces acceptance and choice, temporal genesis and mutation, and a possibility of dialectical negation into the frozen