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Institutional Pedagogy and Semiosis: Investigating the Missing Link Between

Peirce's Semiotics and Effective Semiotics

Article  in  Educational Philosophy and Theory · January 2011

DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00633.x

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 Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2010
doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00633.x
Pesce, S. (2011). « Institutional pedagogy and Semiosis : investigating the missing lien between Peirce’s Semiotics
and Effective semiotics », Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(10), p. 1145-1160. (early view 2010).

Institutional Pedagogy and Semiosis:

Investigating the missing link between
Peirce’s semiotics and effective semiotics
Sébastien Pesce
Dynadiv, Université François Rabelais de Tours & CREF, Université Paris Ouest La Défense

Abstract
My aim in this paper is to show the relevance of an ‘effective semiotics’; that is, a field study based
upon Peirce’s semiotics. The general context of this investigation is educational semiotics rather
than semiotics of teaching: I am concerned with a general approach of educational processes, not
with skills and curricula. My paper is grounded in a field study that I carried out in a school,
L’Ecole de la Neuville, implementing Institutional Pedagogy in France. I first investigate the
relevance of Peirce’s semiotics in such a context. I then propose several definitions for the word
‘institution’, referring to the core concepts of this particular pedagogy, before describing the
concept of ‘institution-sign’, which is considered a useful tool for making effective connections
between several aspects of semiotics. I finally assert that an institution constitutes a tool that
allows teachers to favour semiosis in educational contexts.

Keywords: Educational semiotics, Institutional Pedagogy, semiosis, meaning-

making, fieldwork

1. Why Investigate Institutional Pedagogy from a Semiotic Standpoint?

Implementing applied semiotics is a challenging project, especially in France where the
reading of Peirce is not habitual practice. Peirce is frightening, too difficult, too theo-
retical, and too general. Nevertheless, a few noteworthy French scholars have found a
great ally in Peirce. This is the case for Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Oury and
François Tosquelles.1 There is, furthermore, a strong background connecting these
thinkers (who are or were, for the most part, practitioners): the French ‘Institutional
trend’,2 which is a critical trend in social science, pedagogy and psychotherapy. The
educational part of this movement could be described as a French version of the
American ‘critical pedagogy’. In order to analyse the practices they had developed,
Tosquelles, Oury, and Guattari explored Peirce’s Semiotics. Within this research tradi-
tion, my aim in this article is to explain the actual or potential connections between
Peirce and Institutional Pedagogy and, more precisely, to show that Institutional Peda-
gogy is overall a matter of semiosis. On the basis of this theoretical discussion I intend to
show that Peirce’s semiotics is a fruitful resource when trying to do fieldwork in a context
where the questions of meaning and meaning-making are central.

© 2010 The Author

Journal compilation © 2010 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
2 Sébastien Pesce

A Brief History of Institutional Pedagogy

Institutional Pedagogy is a pedagogic trend born in France in the 1950s. This trend is
the result of a fruitful encounter between Institutional Psychotherapy and Célestin
Freinet’s pedagogy. At this time, the field of mental health was involved in debates
about the way patients were taken care of, treated and considered in general. A critical
movement was growing all over the world, and some edifying testimonies and critics
have since then illustrated this debate.3 In France, Jean Oury, François Tosquelles and
Félix Guattari were involved in the debate. Jean Oury developed a set of alternative
practices as a psychiatrist and used the expression ‘psychothérapie institutionnelle’ coined
by Daumezon & Koechlin (1952). Meanwhile, Jean Oury’s brother, Fernand, started
implementing in his own classroom the methods developed thirty years earlier by
Freinet.4 Fernand Oury worked with Freinet himself, and became one of the leaders
of the Parisian office of Freinet’s movement, l’ICEM.5 But if Fernand Oury used
Freinet’s pedagogic tools, he and his friends of the Parisian office sought to transform
these tools and to develop a richer analysis and theorisation of their teaching practices.
This resulted in a split in the Freinet Movement6 and in new connections between
psychotherapy and pedagogy: Fernand Oury considered that the analytical work made
by Jean Oury or Tosquelles could be useful in his classroom and Jean Oury himself
was interested in using Freinet’s methods with his patients in La Clinique de La Borde.
Finally, during a meeting in 1958, Jean Oury suggested a new name for Fernand’s
practices: ‘Pédagogie Institutionnelle’.
Using the adjective ‘institutional’ in France in the 1950s and 1960s was very pro-
vocative. At that time, the word ‘institution’ referred to what was ‘established’, ‘fixed’,
something upon which citizens were not able to act. But for Oury, Tosquelles and
Guattari, the word ‘institution’ came to mean the very opposite. What is generally
called ‘institution’ (in a pejorative way) is in their works designated by the word ‘estab-
lishment’ [établissement]; and the word ‘institution’ designates the remaining living part
of the establishment. ‘Institutions’ are processes, creative phenomena, meaning-making
activities or supports. An ‘institution’ is not an object but a process as opposed to the
concept of ‘instituted’, a dialectical view developed in this period by a thinker called
Cardan (1964/1967), better known today as Cornélius Castoriadis. Castoriadis is gen-
erally said to be the first thinker who theorised the relationship between instituted and
institution, as two French educationalists remark here: ‘for institutionalists, the concept
of “institution” does not describe a social invariant, external to individuals. Its content
is about the link between individuals, groups, organisations on one hand, and the
existing social norms on the other. Their project, in terms of knowledge, is to unveil
these links, in other words to deconstruct the way institu-ting and institu-ted become
opposed within a social form and how they generate an institutionalisation, i.e. a new
shape, new norms, a new instituted’.7

The Meaning of the Word ‘Institution’

Institutional Pedagogy is a critical pedagogy; for the first institutionalists, the word
‘institution’ is connected to political issues.8 The emancipated student is the one who,

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 Institutional Pedagogy and Semiosis 3

within a group, is able to handle, transform and produce new institutions rather than
being submitted to existing and fixed ones imposed by and reimposing an ‘idéologie
bourgeoise’. But beyond this political aspect, one must notice two important positions of
the institutionalists: a rejection of ‘ossified’ pedagogic methods and a will to exchange
and theorise with professionals other than teachers (social workers, psychoanalysts and
so on). Both these ideas lie in an alternative form of theorising, a praxis; for institution-
alists, practices are a permanent source of theories and these new theories are a basis
for new practices. Such pedagogical tools and practices must never become ossified
(instituted); they must be transformed every day through a process of analysis.9 This
quest leads institutionalists to a broad reflection on the question of meaning and about
the semiotic aspects of teaching and learning processes. Let us now turn to an under-
standing of how institutions become part of semiotic processes.

2. Institutions, Meanings and Conventions

Institutions as Meanings
In a very practical way, an institution is a pedagogic tool: ‘the mere rule allowing children
to use a soap without quarrelling with each other is an institution ...’ (Oury & Vasquez,
1967): an assembly of children, a rule, rituals, ‘master-words’,10 ‘behaviour belts’ are
institutions. This latter institution constitutes a perfect example. Behaviour belts are
borrowed from martial arts; they go from ‘pale belts’ to ‘dark belts’.11 And each of them
is described by a short list of skills, rights and duties.12 The darker a child’s belt is,13 the
more responsibilities this pupil is supposed to take on; he/she is considered to be more
mature, to have a better understanding of the rules and for that reason, he/she is allowed
to circulate more freely in the school, to ‘advise’14 younger children, to organise ‘crafts’
(afternoon activities). In order to obtain a darker belt, a child must ‘ask for a vote’ during
the weekly assembly. The whole group votes for this new belt during one of the ‘Friday’s
Assemblies’: a specific ritual called ‘voting for a belt’ allows each member of the group
(student or teacher) to vote and to give his/her opinion about why a student should or
should not get a darker belt. In that way, an institution may be described as a ‘simple’
pedagogic tool, ‘but we also call “institution” what we institute: the definition of places,
moments, statuses ...’.15
Ardoino (1972, p. xv) gives a broader definition of ‘institutions’; they are: ‘(a) official
social groups or groups tending to become official in any way, within modern society
(corporation, school, union); (b) a system of rules which formally define and organise
these groups; (c) underlying meanings, which are less obvious, more latent, informal,
belonging to the collective unconscious of the group’. Such a definition evokes the idea
of an institution as ‘imagined’ (Stables, 2006). This idea appears in a very explicit way in
Institutional Pedagogy. For instance, regarding schools implementing Institutional Peda-
gogy (and themselves called ‘Institutions’, with a capital ‘I’), Pain (2005) speaks of
‘psychic spaces’ [lieux psychiques]. In this way, we may say that the ‘Institution’ is the
school, not as established, but as a signifying or symbolic entity engaged in a permanent
process of rearrangement. Another important aspect of Ardoino’s definition is the
connection between institutions and ‘underlying meanings’. Each institution is made of

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4 Sébastien Pesce

a concrete part (a pedagogical tool) and of a symbolic part (a set of meanings). As such,
I have defined ‘behaviour belts’ as pedagogic tools. On another level, these belts are
‘made of’ symbolic content. Among many other meanings, we could find: a specific way
of assessing ‘careers’; an institution produced by Fernand Oury; a list of criteria nego-
tiated with children; a rejection of ordinary school assessments; ‘voting for a belt’, as a
language game created by the pupils; a system organising social life, relationships,
responsibilities. Some of these elements pertain to a core meaning shared by all members
(voting for a belt, description of the skills on the belts board). Some of them are ideas,
principles or values; some are places; some are people, and so on.
To say that institutions are meanings, from a researcher’s standpoint, is one thing. It
is another thing to observe a school in which everyone, students and teachers, develop
such a view of institutions. In many situations, people in l’Ecole de la Neuville comment
upon institutions from the perspective of the meanings they carry. In many cases events
occurring in the school are analysed in that way: ‘what is the meaning of such an event
in the frame of the institutions running the school?’ Meanings play an important role in
the pedagogical activity of the group. Each crisis is discussed in a meeting;16 meetings
give people opportunities to talk about the meanings of any event or institution. By
manipulating institutions (for example the belts) children modify a meaningful environ-
ment, an ‘institutionalised environment’.

Institutional Pedagogy: A Pedagogy of/through Meanings

As we have seen above, the core concept of Institutional Pedagogy, ‘institution’, is
intimately related to the concept of meaning. An ‘institution’ (small ‘i’) is a pedagogic
tool and a set of meanings. An ‘Institution’ (capital ‘I’) is a social group, a ‘psychic space’,
an imagined community. Agents within the Institution share the idea that institutions are a
matter of meaning. However, my goal here is not merely to consider the connections
between institutions and meanings, but rather between institutions and semiosis. As sug-
gested above, an important aspect of institutions is that they are processes, not stable
entities. For that reason, we must investigate not only the way institutions carry meanings
but the way institutions allow meanings to be produced. In other words, I am not
interested here in communication (transmission of existing meanings) but in hermeneu-
tics (production of new meanings). My point will now be to show that an institution is
a semiosis. In order to make such a demonstration, I need to make a detour: I will show
that an institution (e.g. behaviour belts) implies a convention of meaning, before holding
that actuating an institution comes down to modifying this convention of meaning.
I have given several definitions of the word ‘institution’ above. I will now emphasise the
meaning of ‘Pédagogie Institutionnelle’. This expression does not merely mean ‘A
pedagogy of/with/using institutions’. Many authors have proposed their own definition,
but the one proposed by Ardoino (1972, p. xiii) casts light on the issue we are dealing
with. Ardoino develops an important epistemological approach of ‘Institutional Analy-
sis’. For this author, one can describe a transformation over time of the types of analysis
made by social scientists. The first stage would be the one of ‘personal/individual
analysis’ (typically, the ‘first’ psychology). The second stage, taking the previous one into
account, would be the stage of ‘inter-individual analysis’, regarding the relationship

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 Institutional Pedagogy and Semiosis 5

between social actors. The third period would be the one of ‘interactional analysis’,
carried out for instance by Kurt Lewin who proposed a rupture with linear and mono-
causal explanations of social phenomena, thanks to a ‘dynamic’ approach. The fourth
stage would be the one of ‘organisational analysis’, accounting for the relationship
between individuals, groups, organisations, systems of information and processes of
communication. According to Ardoino, a fifth type of analysis has been omitted by social
scientists: social science needs to enter this fifth stage, the one of ‘institutional analysis’,
concerned with ‘institutions’ viewed as a set of ‘social and symbolic meanings’ (Ardoino,
1977, p. 164). For Ardoino, the first four levels of analysis are relevant to social research
but the fifth level allows researchers and practitioners to unveil the meanings that
organise the events analysed at the other four levels. If meanings structure individuals,
inter-individual relationship, groups, and organisations, a researcher never fully under-
stands these phenomena without an institutional analysis. A researcher never has direct
access to these meanings; he has to find, within the organisation, some indicators
[analyseurs] which give clues, or hints about the meanings.
This idea of a connection between organisation and institutions can be identified in
many works. We may say, as did Habermas (1984/2001), that ‘meaning’ became pro-
gressively a key concept of social science, giving birth to an interpretative paradigm.
Shank (1995) presents the semiotic approach to education as a logical continuation of
such a movement. The specificity of Institutional Pedagogy regarding this emerging
paradigm lies in a direct translation from this epistemological reflection to pedagogic
practices. If the researcher cannot access institutions/meanings without considering the
organisation, teachers and students cannot transform the social/symbolic reality without
acting upon the organisation. In Institutional Pedagogy, it is agreed that people have to
transform the organisation (i.e. a physical, material, technical layer of reality) in order to
rearrange and modify meanings (a social/symbolic layer of reality). In other words, social
agents within the school have to act upon the organisational aspect of an institution (belts
as pedagogic tools) in order to transform the meaningful part of the same institution.
Teachers could gather children now and then and tell them that they should be in charge
of their own growth, take the responsibility for themselves, but they think that such a
strategy would be inefficient. They assume that certain meanings cannot be carried by
words but may be suggested by institutions and, moreover, built up by pupils through the
experience of institutions.That is why they propose an institution (the belts) allowing the
children to ‘vote for a belt’ and to assess their own growth among peers. Saying to
children that they must take responsibility for themselves, that they are in charge of their
own growth, would probably make sense at a ‘meaning level’, i.e. neither at a ‘sense level’,
nor at a ‘significance level’. I use here the distinction made by Peirce, after Lady Welby,
between the three types of meanings related to the interpretants: ‘meaning’ (immediate
interpretant); ‘sense’ (dynamic interpretant); ‘significance’ (final interpretant). In other
words, such an injunction, even if vaguely understood by the students, may not produce
dynamic interpretants (like feelings, actions, thoughts) and would not be the source of
final interpretants (laws or habits); this injunction would not be efficient if the ideas
behind it were not translated through a lively experience.
The belts are used to carry ideas, principles, values related to the growth of children.
These ‘concepts’ imply ‘meanings’ but they mainly allow the production of other

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6 Sébastien Pesce

interpretants, such as actions, movements, feelings, habits and rules.The semiotic richness
of institutions is broader than the one of words. If institutionalists employ a lot of energy
in working out pedagogic tools it is not because they think the tools themselves will
support the children in their growth. Rather, they think that the meanings associated
with these tools will allow such growth. Because they are incapable of acting immediately
on meanings they act upon the technical aspects of the school that carry these meanings.
Implementing Institutional Pedagogy comes down to handling, acting upon, transform-
ing and negotiating meanings, taking a permanent detour via the handling and the
transformation of the organisation (pedagogic tools, rituals, rules, master-words). We
now have a better view of what in Institutional Pedagogy addresses the question of
semiosis.
Critical Pedagogy proposed many works about quite similar phenomena. In any
‘ordinary school’ many aspects of the organisation carry meanings and impose a specific
ideology. Waller (1932) said this a long time ago and Bourdieu & Passeron (1970)
analysed the phenomenon in France, whereas Woods (1979) did it in the United
Kingdom. One could be tempted to say that institutionalists do with certain kinds of
institutions what ordinary schools did with other institutions! In fact, they do not and
we must stress two main differences. For Waller, Bourdieu & Passeron, and Woods, the
meanings associated with institutions or organisations are implicit; for institutionalists,
they are explicit. In ordinary schools, institutions are produced by teachers (and some-
times imposed on teachers by public policies). Within the framework of Institutional
Pedagogy, they are produced by children and teachers together. In ordinary schools,
most institutions carry fixed meanings. For institutionalists, they are tools used by the
group to create new meanings or to transform existing ones, i.e. to make new semiosis
possible. At this point, the concept of ‘convention of meaning’ becomes essential. In the
schools observed by Woods there is no ‘convention’ about the phenomenon he calls
‘having a laugh’ (Woods, 1979). For the pupils ‘having a laugh’ is a way of rejecting the
lesson; for the teacher the main meaning of ‘having a laugh’ is a sign of ‘distraction’ or
‘disinterest’.Teachers and students do not share the meaning of ‘having a laugh’ nor that
of the lesson itself. For Waller there is no explicit convention about the meaning of
‘ceremonies’ and ‘rituals’. These events carry certain meanings about the school as a
‘corpse’, an organisation, sharing a common culture but this has not been discussed
within the group.

‘Layers of Reality’ and Conventions of Meaning

John Searle (1995) developed an interesting reflection about The Construction of Social
Reality.17 One of his assumptions is that reality is reality, i.e. that there is a material reality
that we do not produce, that we do not create from nothing. What we can produce or
transform is a ‘social reality’. Searle, in order to explore the construction of social reality,
deals with the question of institutions. Such institutions are based upon conventions.
Because certain institutions do exist, certain social facts get a specific meaning in certain
contexts: ‘X counts as Y in C’. A social fact ‘X’, due to the existence of certain
institutions, gets a certain value ‘Y’ within a specific social/institutional context. Each
institution at l’Ecole de la Neuville must be considered as a convention of meaning. Said

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 Institutional Pedagogy and Semiosis 7

during an assembly, the master-word ‘Jean is now an orange-belt’ (X) counts for a change
in Jean’s status (Y) in the context of a sequence called ‘voting for a belt’ (C). The whole
institution called ‘behaviour belts’ frames such a convention. What works here with a
sequence in an assembly works for many other things such as places, conflicts and
infringements. In the case of ‘voting for a belt’, at first sight we might say that a quite
stable institution is being played out in order to ensure a quite known event (changing a
status). In other cases, new conventions are discussed within the group. I will give two
examples:
‘The four stones’. This expression refers to an important place situated in the school-
yard: a tree framed by four stones. When a child is not capable of staying with the group
during an activity and when teachers think they cannot find an adequate response they
tell this child to go to this place. This is a sanction. When a pupil thinks he/she is able to
re-enter the group, he/she requests to leave the four stones and to go back to his/her
former activity. A few years ago, the school suffered a crisis. Many young children left the
four stones and went to play in the garden. A debate during one of the weekly assemblies
was dedicated to this issue. One of the teachers invited the pupils to speak about the rules
associated with the four stones. He gave a definition of this place: ‘the four stones are like
a place, even if they are not, there is no wall [makes a gesture suggesting a wall, or limits],
it is, localised [shows the garden], it’s over there, surrounding the tree’.18 If the four stones
are not a place, but are like a place, it’s because the expression ‘place in the school’ [lieu
de l’école] has a very precise meaning. A place is generally a room (a classroom, a meeting
room, a workshop etc.) associated to meanings and rules. Hence, a mere corridor is not
a place. Saying that the ‘four stones’ are like a place does not come down to saying that
they are ‘somewhere’; the teacher means that they are: first, a physical place; second, a
signifying place. There is a convention describing this place, saying what can or cannot
be done there. The interesting point is that the full debate about this issue (lasting 14
minutes) is about the meaning of this place. Each child verbalises the meanings connected
to this place and the debate does not deal with sanctions. What is at stake is the
opportunity for the younger students to become familiar with the meanings presented by
the elder ones, to let them discover these meanings and understand their origins and
their pedagogic justification. The goal is to renew the convention about this institution,
to recall the ideas, concepts, principles behind the institution itself; it is the only way,
according to the teachers, to guarantee the pedagogic effects of institutions.
The meaning of ‘throwing stones at people’. During a few weeks, some young children
were seen throwing stones at other students. Most of these children were new pupils
(‘white-belts’). The group had decided that ‘throwing stones at people’ should become
one of the ‘main no-nos’ [principales interdictions]. The latter expression refers to an
institution, a list of things that must not be done because they are dangerous. As long as
one respects the rules presented in this list one can move about the school in great
freedom. This list of ‘no-nos’ is made by the group and is slightly amended on many
occasions. One day, Pierre, a ‘yellow belt’, is criticised because he has thrown stones at
another child. The assembly speaks about this event and the group tries to ‘make sense’
of it. In an ordinary school a teacher might try to fix the problem on a binary, moral level;
the child might be ‘punished’. But here that is not what is done. The very question is
about the ‘points’, the criteria on the ‘belts board’. It is agreed in the school that

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8 Sébastien Pesce

Case Pierre throws stones A social fact has been observed, but has no
institutional meaning
Rule Throwing stones is one of the Two institutions are used to read the event from
main no-nos; Main no-nos must an institutional perspective
be observed by ‘yellow-belts’
Conclusion Pierre is not a ‘yellow-belt’. The group, considering a social event, identified
an institutional fact, a signifying one

Table 1: An example of institutional meaning-making

‘white-belts’ are supposed to become familiar with the ‘main no-nos’, whereas a ‘yellow-
belt’ is supposed to know them and to comply with them. The main issue for the group
is to qualify, to categorise, to ‘give an account’ of a social event (throwing a stone) in the
frame of two institutions (‘main no-nos’ and ‘behaviour belts’). After several comments
made by the children a teacher proposes a short sum-up: ‘Pierre, we told him it was
dangerous to throw stones, the week after that he throws stones, he does not observe the
main no-nos, Pierre is not a “yellow-belt”, I’m sorry, or we cannot work with him under
such conditions’. What is produced here, summed up by a teacher but elaborated by the
children, is the translation of a social event into an ‘institutional fact’. Let us sum it up
in Table 1.
In these two examples, as in the case of ‘voting for a belt’, we can observe a semiosis,
a process by which a new meaning is produced or an old meaning is actualised by the
group. In the example of ‘voting for a belt’ the meaning produced is a pupil’s new status.
In the second one, the four stones, based on a geographical area of the garden, the
meaning produced is related to ‘this geographical area as a “place in the school”, as a
signifying location’. In the third example, the meaning made up by the group is an
‘institutional fact’ that was not contained in what was before merely a meaningless social
fact. In this sense, implementing Institutional Pedagogy comes down to making new
semiosis possible. A semiosis is seen as a process by which new meanings are produced
by children within the assembly. My aim in the following will be to propose a concept,
that of ‘institution-sign’. I see this concept as a way of establishing a connection between
Peirce’s semiotics and effective semiotics.19

3. Institution-sign as a ‘Missing Link’

Many researchers have indeed investigated semiotics as a way of rethinking education.
Since the works of Halliday (1978) and Lemke (1990) a sociosemiotic trend has emerged
in educational research. The sociosemiotic trend allows researchers to elaborate a new
model of learning and teaching within which the concept of ‘meaning-making’ is essential.
An important issue in current educational research is the possibility of implementing an
‘effective semiotics’, i.e. of implementing field research inspired by this sociosemiotic
trend and, in a broader sense, by Peircean semiotics. As a response to this question,
Manning (1987) suggests possible connections between ethnographic fieldwork and
semiotics.The same year,Verón (1987) proposes a process for analysing social semiosis.20
McHoul (1996) himself uses the words ‘effective semiotics’ as a subtitle for one of his

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 Institutional Pedagogy and Semiosis 9

books, showing the way semiotics may be a continuation of an ethnomethodological

approach. Stables (2006) claims the necessity of a general approach to ‘researching
effective schools’.
Working as a teacher in L’Ecole de la Neuville, I decided to carry out a field study within
the framework of Peirce’s semiotics. I will not present my methodology at length here,
but I will emphasise the part it played in the proposition of a concept, that of ‘institution-
sign’. My research aimed to build up a ‘grounded theory’ (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). In
this research, theory appeared at two levels. First, as a synthesis of Peirce’s semiotics,
seen as a condition for a first semiotic interpretation of situations. Second, as an
integrated theory, accounting for the processes of semiosis within the school, based upon
the interpretation of the data gathered.21 What I call here an ‘integrated theory’ tends to
organise concepts and principles proposed by several authors and to make them coherent
within the project of accounting for the full process of ‘institutionalisation’.
A first set of concepts was used to make possible a first interpretation of the data
produced. These data consisted of filmed situations that were then transcribed and
submitted to a Conversation Analysis. The main concepts were those deriving from
Peirce’s phaneroscopy, semiotics and pragmatics: the three categories, the triadic sign,
the process of semiosis, the logic of inquiry-doubt-belief and the different types of
inferences. But at a second level I dealt with other semiotic concepts discussed by
institutionalists and by French thinkers related to institutional pedagogy: the concept of
Rhizome,22 worked out first by Deleuze & Guattari (1976/1987) and Eco (1984), and
later by Schüh & Cunningham (2004) in the field of Educational Semiotics; the concept
of ‘Musing’, taken from Peirce and developed by the French institutionalists (Balat et al.,
2004); the ones of Tychism and ‘Transpassible’, the first one taken from Peirce, the
second one coined by Oury (2003) on the basis of Peirce’s pragmatics; the concept of
Umwelt, taken by Sebeok (1994) and Deely (2004) from von Uexküll.23 As shown here,
every concept used to produce this first semiotic perspective on the data have been
coined and/or explored by Peirce himself, by institutionalists or by Educationalists
interested in Semiotics. My main concern was to find a way of articulating these concepts
and to make them relevant within the framework of a field study. The concept of
‘institution-sign’ is the main result of this investigation. I posit, using this concept, that
an institution can be seen as a sign as much as a semiosis.
There is no real need to demonstrate that an institution, as described in this paper, and
more generally by institutionalists, is a sign, a representamen. Indeed, ‘a sign, or represen-
tamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capac-
ity’ (CP 2.228).24 The main purpose of the interviews done in the school was to show that
for the children most institutions could be defined by their meanings; moreover, when
asked to ‘speak about’ an institution, most of them immediately described meanings
rather than practices. The same phenomenon was already shown by the analysis of
interactions in meetings, as I explained above in some examples. Nevertheless, I have to
give some more arguments in order to explain that institutions are signs, not as repre-
sentamens but as triadic signs. A sign ‘addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of
that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it
creates I call the interpretant of the first sign.The sign stands for something, its object’ (CP
2.228). Figure 1 shows the institution as a triadic sign.

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10 Sébastien Pesce

Figure 1: Institutions as triadic signs, translated from Pesce (2008, p. 254)

At a first level, institutions are representamens, that is to say, ‘signifiers’ in Saussure’s

words. These representamens can be objects (the sandglass), places (the four stones),
master-words (‘Jean is now an orange-belt’) or mere words or expressions referring to
institutions (‘orange belt’, ‘voting for a belt’).
Each of these representamens refers to ‘objects’ that can be physical objects or con-
cepts. Institutions, in other cases, do not refer immediately to objects but are related
to them through specific situations. For instance, during the sequence called ‘voting for
a belt’, the ‘belts board’ is at play. According to a genuine definition, the concept of
‘object’ can be understood in two ways. First, the object corresponds to the immediate
representation a sign refers to in the speaker’s mind. At a second level, the object could
be considered as a mere ‘meaning’, as Saussure’s signified. We may feel we have here
one thing similar to a signifier and another thing similar to a signified but we must
nuance the use of these words. First, we saw that representamens are not necessarily
words. The Peircean model allows us to engage in the analysis of a rich semiotic
context. Moreover, teachers, since they are engaged in the consideration of these types
of representamens, can handle such a rich context. The second important aspect of this
model is that objects are not seen as ‘fixed’, univocal and known by everyone: indeed,
the representamen ‘stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of
idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen’ (CP 2.228). In the
school considered here this ‘ground’ is typically something that can always be discussed
within the group. A third important fact is that a certain entity can, in several situa-
tions, have different statuses. Nobody can definitely say that one thing is a representamen
and that another thing is an object. Let us take the example of the sandglass, which
illustrates these three points.

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 Institutional Pedagogy and Semiosis 11

The sandglass is a material object. During the meetings it is put on the ‘president table’
next to two other important things: the notebook and the ‘small bell’. At the beginning
of each meeting the President says ‘let us observe a minute’s silence’.This sentence refers
to an institution. Its role is to organise a transition between the previous activity and the
meeting. In this case the sandglass is an object, referred to by the representamen ‘a
minute’s silence’. Here we observe an institution (the sandglass) that is not a mere word.
In other situations, the history of the same sandglass is discussed: the sand comes from
Corsica, where the school organised travels 30 years ago and the sandglass has been put
here following advice given to teachers by Françoise Dolto; in this case, the sandglass is
a representamen referring to other objects. As we can notice here, the sandglass can,
depending on the situation, be either a representamen or an ‘object’ in Peirce’s sense. In
the second example, the ground according to which the relationship between a represen-
tamen and an object is organised is something unique to the school. It does not corre-
spond to any ‘arbitrary nature of the sign’ and is rooted in a specific culture belonging to
the group. It is incidentally a clear example of something I wrote before: the ‘meaning’
associated with the institution is explicit and can be discussed.
Eventually, an institution is a sign as long as it is connected to a variety of meanings.
If the words ‘behaviour belt’ (representamen) refer to objects (the belts board and a social
object, i.e. a system for assessing children’s careers), it produces new meanings and
nobody can pretend he has full control or knowledge of these meanings produced. By
‘meanings’ I hereby mean interpretants. Because of the characteristics of an ‘institution’
I described above, we can observe the full range of Peirce’s interpretants. The sentence
‘Jean is now an orange-belt’ is, as a master-word, a representamen. When this statement is
made by the President an immediate interpretant is produced in any mind as long as
people hearing this statement are familiar with the school. This representation corre-
sponds to the immediate understanding of the statement. This same statement allows
dynamic interpretants to be produced: Jean will be happy, his friend John will be jealous
and his godfather will be proud (here, feelings are some of the products of a particular
semiosis). Jean, becoming ‘orange-belt’, will pick up a chair reserved to ‘orange-belts’
and next week he will be allowed to organise an activity for younger children (actions).
Eventually, the most important effect is the change in Jean’s status. A convention
determines that a new status (being an ‘orange-belt’) is a piece of social reality fully
produced by the President’s statement. There is a rearrangement of the school social
organisation and this change of status appears like another interpretant, belonging to the
category of ‘significance’.
It is one thing to say that an Institution is a Triadic Sign; it is another thing to say that
an Institution is a semiosis.What I suggested above is that performing an institution (voting
for a belt, doing a minute’s silence) implies a semiosis, i.e. a process by which a
Representamen, an object and an Interpretant interplay within a triadic sign. This refers to
the genuine triadic relationship described by Peirce: ‘a Sign, or Representamen, is a First
which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be
capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation
to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object. The triadic relation is genuine,
that is, its three members are bound together by it in a way that does not consist in any
complexus of dyadic relations’. (CP 2.274)

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12 Sébastien Pesce

Rather than saying that an institution is a semiosis, we can claim that:

a) Performing an institution implies a semiosis;
b) Institutions, as triadic signs, are psychic places where semiosis occurs, or, in other
words,
c) An institution is a pedagogic and social tool used to allow semiosis;
d) Any institution is the result of a process of semiosis.
This last statement refers to the fact that any institution must be considered as a final
interpretant, i.e. a law or habit. If today in the school the institution called ‘behaviour
belts’ can be used in several situations it is because a long process of semiosis over the
years (decades in fact) has shaped this institution as a part of the social life of the school
or, in other words, produced it as a part of the ‘symbolic layer’ constituting the school as
an Institution. Eventually, I consider the institution-sign as a core concept in a semiotic
analysis of Institutional Pedagogy. An institution is a powerful tool allowing the group to
take control over the rhizome and to develop a certain awareness of its own Umwelt.The
word ‘rhizome’ is used to describe the complex and infinite network of objects and
meanings. This concept is an alternative to the classical view of fixed and stable rela-
tionships between a signifier and a signified. Everything in the rhizome can (depending
on the situations) be a representamen, an ‘object’, an interpretant. Performing an institu-
tion comes down to producing a semiosis, as long as it connects elements of the rhizome
and draws lines betweens points of this network. By drawing such lines, the group
becomes conscious of/takes control over/handles its own Umwelt, i.e. an ‘objective world
subjectively known’ (Deely, 2004). The concept of Umwelt refers to the collective
representation of the growth, of responsibilities, of statuses, and of relationships, in fact,
to the whole social world, which is potentially taken into account as an object within the
group’s discussions.

Conclusion: Semiotic Consciousness as a Pedagogical Method

The concept of semiotic consciousness describes social actors’ perceptions of their
semiotic environment and of the processes occurring in this environment (Tochon,
2002). If semiotic consciousness implies a specific relationship to meaning and language,
in the field I observed it becomes the basis of a pedagogic strategy. Therefore, I consider
it a pedagogic method, used by teachers and by the pupils when they are fully engaged
in the school. This strategy lies in a wilful handling of signs and meanings and pursues
a specific goal: a permanent, collective, conscious and organised alteration of a collective
Umwelt, made by the way of semiosis viewed as institutional processes connecting
elements of the rhizome.The group is conscious of its own ability to constrain the words,
more generally, the sign system and people within the group use this ability. Organising
the school, facing crises, organising projects and supporting children’s growth comes
down to handling signs and meanings. What is at stake when the group produces and
‘plays’ institutions is the way people modify, draw, create the Institution, i.e. the school as
imagined. There is a sentence used in the school to describe this broad meaning-making
activity: ‘school-making’ [ faire l’école], that is to say ‘making it’ on a material/physical
level (to organise the activities, to be in the classroom, to sweep out the corridors, to cook

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 Institutional Pedagogy and Semiosis 13

meals, to do the dishes), and moreover on a symbolic level by creating the school as a
meaningful social environment, as an Institution, as a community. ‘Faire l’école’ is an
excellent way for children to ‘get themselves into’ the school, to become a part of it and
to respect its rules (which are everybody’s rules). I use the word ‘inscription’ to describe
the process by which children become a part of the school; we could speak of something
like a ‘sense of belonging’. But there is something more than a ‘sense’ or feeling in that
phenomenon. When a pupil ‘asks for a vote’ in the school’s notebook, we see a strong
example of such a process: by this writing, by this physical inscription, he/she clearly asks
for his/her own career to be expressed in the symbolic forms produced by the groups and
by himself/herself. Such an example unveils an essential stake of educational semiotics:
designing educational contexts within which students may take the responsibility for
themselves, but may do so while taking into consideration the values and principles of
institutions and Society.

Notes
1. See for instance Félix Guattari (1979), Deleuze & Guattari (1987), Jean Oury (2003),
Tosquelles (1962). Genosko (2003) wrote about the relationship between Fernand Oury, Jean
Oury, Félix Guattari, and described Fernand Oury’s first years in teaching, and his collabo-
ration with Guattari.
2. The word ‘institutional’ does not refer to the idea of a ‘formal’, ‘official’ or ‘instituted’
psychotherapy or education: the meaning of the adjective is at the opposite of ‘instituted’.
3. The more famous ones are the ones made by Goffman (1962) and Foucault (1961/1965).
4. Freinet becomes a teacher in 1920, Oury meets Freinet for the first time in 1949.
5. Institut Coopératif de l’Ecole Moderne.
6. See Beattie (1998) about the birth of institutional pedagogy after the ‘fission from the Freinet
Movement’.
7. Translated from Hess & Savoye (1981, p. 4); one can refer to Hazlett (1975), who took from
Lobrot the expressions ‘lived institution’ and ‘projected institution’.
8. I refer here to the critical pedagogy as theorised, for instance, by McLaren (1989).
9. Some arguments developed in this quest for an alternative theorisation of schooling and
teaching evoke the works of Cunningham (1987).
10. A ‘master-word’ [maître-mot] is a sentence used during certain rituals. Master-words are
specific statements, with a perlocutionary power. The sentence ‘John is now an orange-belt’ is
a master-word, and this statement, because of a convention of meaning, transforms, in a given
(institutional) context, the status of a kid. We may consider such statements as complex
meanings of which understanding is made possible by a ‘high context’, to use the model
developed by Hall (1976).
11. White, yellow, orange, green, blue, and brown.
12. For instance, these are the ‘points’ of the green belt: ‘Observes the rules; contributes toward
a good atmosphere; must intervene in case of infraction while he/she is present, and writes a
word in the notebook; gives his/her opinion during meetings ; may be in charge of a department
[i.e. computers, school newspapers, classroom etc.]’.We could perceive here a ‘curriculum’, or
school program, made of the 6 belts descriptions. The ‘points’ are the skills within this
curriculum. Of course, the core of learning and teaching maths, French, English, and so on,
is described in other curricula, within the classes.
13. They do not actually wear a belt, pupils are just said to be ‘white-belts’ or ‘yellow-belts’ etc.
14. A student who advises younger pupils is called a godfather/godmother. ‘Godfathering’ is an
important institution in l’Ecole de la Neuville.
15. Translated from Oury & Vasquez (1967, pp. 81–82).

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14 Sébastien Pesce

16. The word ‘crisis’ does not necessarily refer to ‘problems’. Of course, a conflict or an infringe-
ment of the rules is a crisis. But any event calling for a decision can be considered a crisis: for
instance a project, a reflection about a new organization, the production of a new rule.
17. We may recall that such a title is a critique of the book of Berger & Luckmann, entitled The
Social Construction of Reality (1966). In several papers and interviews after the publication of
his book, Searle developed this critique of Berger & Luckmann and, more broadly, of radical
constructivism. His distinction between physical reality and social reality clearly evokes the
analyses made a few years later by Pinker (2002): we do not create reality, what we are allowed
to create is a set of ‘categories’ on a social or conceptual level. Humankind did not invent
ducks, they do exist, and the fact that ducks are a subspecies of ‘birds’ is not merely a ‘vue de
l’esprit’, but something real. Nevertheless ‘money’ or ‘banks’ are categories created by Men.
Searle gives similar examples of ‘institutions’. Of course, it could be argued against Pinker that
a few years ago, a new Phylogenetic Classification has been published by Lecointre & Le
Guyader (2001/2007), showing recent changes in the ‘categories’ used to classify animal. But
I subscribe to the view Searle and Pinker develop about institutions and social reality.
18. Translated from the original recordings, presented in my doctoral dissertation.
19. I take this expression from McHoul (1996), who published a book entitled Semiotic Investi-
gations: Towards an effective semiotics.
20. ‘Social Semiosis’ according to Verón is not the same as the ‘social semiotics’ described by
Halliday or Lemke.
21. These data are mainly the following: 1. Video recordings of assemblies: 42 sequences where
selected, on the basis of the 750 hours of rush filmed by a filmmaker who was making a
documentary about this school (see Blanchet, 2006); I used Conversation Analysis to interpret
these data; 2. Interviews of the kids (37 of them, almost the whole group), about the
‘meanings’ of particular institutions; 3. A documentary approach, through the analysis of
archives, books, movies produced by the school since 1973; 4. Participant observation, as a
teacher in this school.
22. The concept of ‘rhizome’ describes a network of meanings, and constitutes an alternative
perspective on the way meanings are produced. It could be considered as very consistent with
Eco’s concept of Encyclopaedia, as opposed to the one of dictionary.
23. This latter concept, as most of the former ones, has been explored by Donald Cunningham in
the context of an Educational Semiotics.
24. See Peirce, 1992–1998.

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