Re-Semiotizing the South African Democratic Project: The African Renaissance

This article reviews the relationship between the semiotic implications of the emerging concept of the African Renaissance, and the historical trajectory of semiotic studies in South Africa. Linked with the residual ideological territories occupied under the rubrics of ‘semiotics’ and/or ‘semiology’ are the ways these discourses have been re-articulated or re-presented within the politics of the post-apartheid era. As a concept of the ‘post’, therefore, the semiotic implications of a projective strategy like the African Renaissance require more than the mindless dyadism of linguistic semiology. The article sketches the outline of the case for a radical appropriation of the semiotics embedded in C.S. Peirce's pragmatism as a way of constituting the reality of ‘Renaissance’ concepts in terms of a Task. The place of semiotics within the broader philosophical and analytical programme is illustrated by means of a table that links semiotics, pragmatism, and radical theory. The table indicates how the issues discussed in this article can be seen to fall under a schema that foregrounds Peirce's realization that aesthetic and ethical concepts are prior to those based purely on logic. As such, therefore, the article suggests that topics in social or cultural semiotics are more readily amenable to semiotic interpretation and analysis under a pragmatic rather than a linguistic methodological regime.