Narrating towards a semiotic vision of freedom

Abstract

The past decades have witnessed a significance growth of interest in the matter of “storytelling”, so much so that it would not be much of an exaggeration to argue that the word “storytelling” might have already become a hype, especially in a world where commercialization has been underwriting almost everything that can be commercialized. A debate has naturally followed. Some authors have cautioned against hyping storytelling, whereas countless more seem to have contributed to its popularization. In the same vein as semiotician Thomas Sebeok, who once commented that “a sign is just a sign”, I would simply like to point out (remind) in the present paper that “a story is just a story”, in which light it is the human being, as a storying animal, that ultimately and truly matters. This might promise to be a key to solving the above-mentioned debate. To take the argument one step further, we may as well highlight a point that the storying animal is but a catchier name than the narrating animal, in the same way as “storytelling” is indeed just another name for “narrating”. What is, then, “to narrate”? The present paper holds that to narrate is to semiotize, and to semiotize (whether through semiosis or through modeling) inevitably creates what I have called the “double semiotic paradoxes of humanity” (Yu, 2024a), shackling and liberating human existence at the same time. Yet still, narrating, as an instance of semiotizing, is as close to true freedom as the human being can ever get. It is a life-affirming and self-affirming action that brings us an opportunity for freedom. Building on Hoffmeyer and Kull, the present paper, as a self-referential narrative about semiotics, incorporates a Zhuangzian approach and proposes a relevant Peircean framework for an inclusive semiotic vision of freedom, which includes intra-semiosic freedom, inter-semiosic freedom, and ultra-semiosic freedom.