Semiotika ISSN 1392-0219 | eISSN 2424-547X
2023, vol. 18, p. 236–241 DOI: https://doi.org/10.15388/Semiotika.2023.8

Obituary for Göran Sonesson (1951–2023) 

Fred Andersson
Åbo Akademi University, Finland
E-mail: franders@abo.fi
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9161-5136

Received: 04/08/2023. Accepted: 25/10/2023.
Copyright © 2023 Fred Andersson. Published by Vilnius University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

 

Colleagues all over the world were moved and shocked by the news that Göran Sonesson, professor emeritus of semio­tics at Lund University, passed away on March 17 this spring. Few outside his closest circle of family and friends expected this to happen. Although gravely ill, Göran seemed to be as active as ever. During 2022, seven scholarly articles and book chapters were published with him as single author, and he helped organize the 15th world congress of semiotics in Thessaloniki. Göran’s publication list is immense and contains texts written in the four European languages that he spoke and wrote with ease: Swedish, French, Spanish and English. He spoke all four with the unmistakeable southern Scandinavian accent of a person born and raised in Malmö. These languages were certainly not, however, the only ones he understood: trained as a linguist, Göran’s life and work revolved around the exploration and understanding of natural language and other semiotic systems. He leaves an intellectual heritage that, now being translated and disseminated on a steady basis, will be of lasting significance for the understanding of human and non-human language and communication. In the Nordic countries, Göran was unique in his field. He was the first, and hitherto the only, scholar to receive the title of professor of semiotics in Sweden. The appointment came as a well deserved reward after some 25 years of scholarship and leadership that prepared for the special branch of semiotics of which he was one of the leading founders: Cognitive semiotics, or semiotics as a joint effort of linguistics, cognitive psychology and evolutionary theory. The Centre for Cognitive Semiotics, led by Göran and originally a project funded by the research foundation of the Swedish central bank (RJ), has been a permanent division of the Centre for Languages and Literature (SOL) at Lund University since 2014. After Göran’s retirement in 2018, his close colleague Jordan Zlatev, professor of linguistics, has led the centre.

At Lund University, it is not only his colleagues from the language departments that have reason to remember Göran and the four
decades of his uninterrupted presence at the university. For a long time, he was closely affiliated with the department of art history, and his work on visual semiotics has been constantly referred to in debates on the identity and methodology of konstvetenskap (Kunstwissenschaft, Art Studies) in Sweden. The idea that art history could benefit from the interdisciplinary knowledge of Göran originally came from Sven Sandström, a former holder of one of the Lund University chairs of art history, with a specialization in studies of contemporary art and society (nutidens konst och samhällsliv). From 1982 until 2008, Göran had a working space at the department of art history, and continuously received external funding for his individual research and writing projects. In 1986, he established his weekly seminar in cultural semiotics that continued until 2009, when it was replaced with the current seminar in cognitive semiotics.

Before his contact with the art historians in Lund, Göran had been a student of the influential linguist and narratologist Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992) at EHESS in Paris. With Greimas as super­visor, he defended his doctoral thesis in 1978. Written in French and reprinted in a Swedish edition the same year, the thesis aims at a comparison between linguistic and anthropological studies of social behavior: when we speak to each other, our speech is an element of the total sphere of human action and interaction, but can human action be fully understood within the methodological framework of linguistics, and is semiotics necessarily identical to the application of linguistic models in the study of any kind of meaningful activity? As a young scholar and a follower of Greimas, Göran was expected to answer these questions in the affirmative. The central doctrine of Greimas and his “school” was that all meaning must be regarded as arbitrary or conventional until the opposite is proved: even in representations seemingly based on natural and perceptual recognition, as for example in pictures, the “reality effect” must be accounted for as a function of arbitrary codes at a structural “deep level”. The objective of the workshop for visual semiotics, founded by Greimas and supervised by him in 1970s and 1980s, was to reveal the structure of these codes and develop the new termino­logy necessary for their description. With the work of Jean-Marie Floch, Felix Thürlemann and other members of the workshop, the textual or “structuralist” approach to the semiotic analysis of pictures was established. This approach fundamentally involves Greimas’s distinction between two layers of meaning or “language” in any picture: the figurative language (creating depiction) and the plastic language (also called “planar language”), the latter being the meaning still carried by the picture when all depictive content is reduced or mentally ignored. It is important that the term used by the Greimas workshop to designate the semiotics of depiction was “figurative language”, not “iconic language”, because in the conventionalist doctrine of Greimas there was no room for iconicity or iconic signs.

There is reason to believe that Göran soon felt that many of these structuralist assumptions and pretentions were quite contrary to his own intuitions. His interest in the structure of action in everyday life led him into the phenomenological tradition and the reading of Edmund Husserl’s investigations of the relationship between world and consciousness. Husserl’s conception of the Lifeworld (Lebenswelt), and his method for introspective re-examination of any notion or perception that we tend to take for granted, have clear connections to the psychology of visual perception that was starting to emerge in Germany during his lifetime. Both Husserl and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, whose semiotic legacy was largely ignored by the Greimas “school”, were to guide Göran in his conviction that neither perception, nor Peirce’s semiotic concept of “icon”, can be overlooked in a non-dogmatic study of pictorial meaning. New cultural experiences also contributed to his development: during 1979–81, before his return to Sweden, he worked in Mexico City as a guest researcher, studying the language and pictorial writing system of the Maya. While his teacher Greimas could readily discredit the whole idea of the iconicity of visual images with the sweeping argument that alphabetic script is visual but certainly not iconic, the same claim could hardly be made for Mayan script. During his Mexican period, Göran embarked upon the extensive examination and criticism of earlier and current theories of visual semiotics that was to be collected in his magisterial work Pictorial Concepts (Lund University Press, 1989). In Mexico, Göran also met his wife, the dancer and dance teacher Ana Tejera Sonesson.

As a growing number of scholars will probably realize, Göran’s close acquaintance with art history and a range of other humanistic disciplines makes his work relevant also for students of historical iconography. The preface of his Pictorial Concepts opens with a reference to E.H. Gombrich. Regarding the origins of the concept of “sign” in Western philosophy, he writes that, “[…] to those who still remain with the idea that semiotics is an ahistorical science, we will suggest that semiotics is best viewed as a particular intellectual tradition, which hands down a series of connected problems through the centuries”. And he continues: “As it happens, these problems are roughly the same as those treated by the French ‘ideological’ school [active at the end of the 18th century, my comment], to which semiotics is historically connected, as well as by the participants in the discussion about the Geisteswissenschaften, which means that they are the basic questions common to the human sciences and to all social practise; but semiotics takes a more empirical approach to these questions – or rather, it tries to bring wide-ranging theories in somewhat closer connection to what we have, and can produce, from empirical evidence.” As everyone who participated in Göran’s seminars in Lund can testify, he consistently put this program into practice. It provided a stark contrast to the conception of semiotics usually held at the time by art historians turned semioticians, as exemplified by Mieke Bal’s and Norman Bryson’s much quoted essay “Semiotics and art history” (1991), in which the authors describe the semiotic alternative as essentially anti-empirical and anti-realist.

As a teacher and seminar leader, Göran was as steadfast and committed to reading and commenting texts as in his research. His manner of teaching and supervising was not based on any high-pitched persuasion or charismatic lecturing. His seminars were a patient examination, page by page, of the philosophical or scientific work presently under scrutiny. Those who could not adapt themselves to the slow pace, or who were probably more interested in pursuing their own personal agendas than in reading the texts at face value, soon realized that they had to go somewhere else. With his enormous learning, Göran naturally had his major share of speaking time, except at seminars with invited lecturers; but one always felt that one could comment and reply at any time, and that he would never silence criticism. Although his own comments could be devastating, and his opinions on competing theorists and theories quite dismissive, we mostly realized that his sceptical attitudes were well founded.

As a co-founder and long-time president of the International Association for Visual Semiotics (AISV/IAVS) and the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies (NASS), furthermore as leader of the CCS in Lund, and as organizer and editor of numerous conferences, anthologies and journal issues, Göran managed to coordinate and balance the multitude of competing and individualistic vocations that he once characterised as the “Babylonianism” of semiotics.

There are no words, or pictures, to express how much he is missed.