Introduction
Semiotics of Cultures and Cultural Sciences

The field of culture is now divided by political currents that claim to be based on identity-based culturalism, such as American cultural studies, which focus on race or gender identities or on Russian culturology, which emphasizes ethnic identity. In these circumstances, the cultural sciences' innovative project must be reaffirmed and taken further to take account of the duality between local cultures and world culture: the semiotics of cultures and cultural anthropology are of major importance here.

Beyond academic issues, the critical attitude of the sciences and the arts come together to overcome stereotypes of belonging and promote freedom of thought.

Very pronounced in France for academic reasons, the separation between scientific culture and "literary" culture has harmful effects: it favors not only neo-positivist currents, but also anti-rationalist ones, such as deconstruction, which revile the sciences, dismissing the very notion of truth and placing the pleasure of the text above all else. Culture cannot be divided and cannot be based on exclusion.

The humanities and cultural sciences naturally have a vocation of knowledge that they share with the other sciences. They develop their own methods to objectify their fields of research and describe the singularities of cultural objects.

Their contemporary epistemology is in need of renewal, with authors such as Cassirer, Leroi-Gourhan, Merleau-Ponty and Simondon. Moreover, the very project of structuralism, in its methodological requirement, has not failed in any way.

Cultural objects obviously call for a specific program of knowledge, and a rational or even scientific study of the arts is now finding new fields to describe with access to ever more extensive collections, whether digitized or not.

The arts benefited, long before the sciences, from the illusions now described by the neurosciences. The interpretation itself obeys philological constraints and the description of meaning is guided by the letter.

This study takes the side of a semiotics which, in order to account for the complexity of cultural formations, knows how to master fundamental dualities, such as content and expression, synchrony and diachrony. This program, clarified by the discovery of new manuscripts by Saussure and what has been called neo-saussurism, is now asserting its scope - well beyond the considerations arising from the sciences of communication and cognition. Clarifying the status of the theories and descriptions will allow for true interdisciplinarity around new observables, both within the cultural sciences and with other scientific departments.

Semiotics has long been hesitating between two vocations: sometimes it defines itself as a discipline among others, and sometimes as a kind of metadiscipline whose mission is to redefine within itself the whole of the cultural sciences, or even a part of the natural sciences. Between the two, the image of a "pilot science" has gained support, because of the ubiquity of the signs themselves.

Here, we wish to contribute to the debate on the epistemological status of semiotics in its relationship with the cultural sciences: it cannot, of course, make them obsolete or replace them, since each contains semiotics that are more or less explicit, and often "at the practical level". It is up to semiotics to reflect particular semiotics in order to be able to unite them and strengthen their unity.

I.1. The renewal of Saussurism

I.1.1. Saussure's boldness

Saussure's methodological reflection favored an epistemological renewal. On the one hand, he took a critical starting point in the radical challenge of unquestioned beliefs and prejudices that abounded in the grammatical tradition. This presupposed a unified reflection rejecting inconsistencies as well as eclectic compromises. On the other hand, Saussure's methodology excluded the naive metaphysics of reference and all other considerations external to language, to be based on the description of the languages themselves, as seen, for example, in the masterful theory of the syllable. In other words, Saussure seemed to draw from his objects, languages, the very principles of their description: this was neither positivism nor inductive empiricism, however, because he did not proceed by simple generalization, but, through the theory of points of view combined into dualities, he modified the very notion of objectification - which implies a break with traditional ontology, through what has been called a deontology.

The scope of his theoretical gesture was immense, since it concerned the very status of theory - such as linguistics and cultural sciences have "borrowed" from the natural sciences, or even from the logical-formal sciences. Much has been philosophized about Saussure to the point of making him a kind of philosopher of language, without really realizing that the philosophy of language becomes a philosophy of languages, as objectified by linguistics, and thus a philosophy of linguistics (Rastier 2015, pp. 221-257).

However, his theoretical gesture went beyond languages to cover all sign systems, so that the very project of semiotics derived from it and therefore became necessary. This was not a definition of new fields (all sorts of particular semiotics have existed for a long time), but rather their consideration from a unified point of view. This is why semiotics can be considered both as a discipline and as an organon for the cultural sciences as a whole, without these two definitions contradicting each other.

By a benign retrospective illusion, one can also see in Saussure's project a programmatic epistemology, but Saussure was not a prophet and remained the bearer of a radical demand rather than a detailed "program" in due form. He neither anticipated nor called for the various currents that claimed to be his, even to the neo-Saussure of our days, and perhaps he would be severe toward them. Anyway, after a century, the fruitfulness of his dissident principles remains intact and deserves to be better exploited.

I.1.2 Critique of models

Are "semiotic models", first and foremost, in the Greimasian tradition the "semiotic square" and is the fundamental narrative structure universal? The neo-Grammarians - like today's generativists who succeeded them - saw "linguistic laws" in the image of physical laws. This is precisely what Saussure rejected.

Semiotic models are logical concretizations, or even simply graphical representations of such fundamental laws - in which we have seen cognitive principles, or even more general mathematical morphologies that would justify a "naturalization" of semiotics. In this hypothesis, it would be legitimate to encounter them, or even to project them everywhere, since laws of this nature owe their luster to the ubiquity of their verifications.

The question remains open, and I would gladly plead for a cautious attitude: the cultural sciences are historical and comparative; they can claim to be general without erecting the regularities they objectify as universal. Moreover, one cannot conclude from the general to the universal, especially since cultures are very unevenly documented and ethnocentrism has not disappeared.

I.1.3 Semiological issues

To define semiology, we refer first of all to the paragraph from the Cours de linguistique générale1 devoted to it. However, if we consider the handwritten sources and the students' notes, we can see that the editors of the Cours have retained and in fact imposed a restricted conception of semiology, making it a science of sign systems, which remains compatible with the grammatical conception of language as a system. This conception has largely prevailed and the introductions to semiology willingly list these systems (games, uniforms, road signs, etc.).

Such an additive conception of semiology is very reminiscent of the Tractatus de signis and other treatises that followed one another over the centuries until Peirce's work. However, the ambition of historical and comparative linguistics goes beyond the description of grammatical systems, as it contributes to the project of a general anthropology whose lineaments Humboldt traced.

Yet, in reflecting on the relationship between the two extremes of the duality between the social and the individual, Saussure emphasized that all sign systems are institutions: language is one of them, unique in its kind, writing is another, and so on. Since the social dimension ultimately predominates, the different sign systems can only be understood in relation to the societies that institute them. It is therefore to the project of an anthropology - no longer philosophical, but historical and comparative - that semiology must be related. It derives in fact from the Humboldtian program that Saussure radicalized and is in line with the wishes of the author, who confided that only the almost ethnographic aspect of languages was of interest to him. He thus obliquely denounced the issues of the neo-grammarians who confined themselves to an "internal" study of languages and thus prefigured the chomskians of today.

I.2. The need for structuralism

I.2.1 Structuralism and morphological thinking

Structuralism is...