Semionaut | Signifying Everything

Jungle Adventure

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

When I was a child I wanted to marry God. As a young woman, to be a nun and a missionary, fighting misery. I went to the jungle. There in the tropical rainforest together with progressive priests, interpreted God’s word. With a mixture of catholic fervor and political naivety we learned more than we could teach.

Some years after, I was enlightened once more. This happened on the Aztecs’ land, at university in Mexico. I was searching for a methodology that could explain why some advertisements caught my attention immediately and why some others passed by completely unnoticed. I found the answers in semiotics.

The zigzag of my life brought me to Sweden. I changed sunny México for the Swedish darkness. My world was turned around in all senses, but a girl’s dream to do something meaningful still followed me.

The message here was of course different. It was about semiotics. Being inspired by the British pioneers, I decided to follow my vocation. To introduce semiotics to market research, I spread the word through seminars.

I clearly remember my first lecture. I wanted to appear credible, so I tried to adapt myself to Swedish cultural codes. There I was, a Colombian semiotician trying hard not to gesticulate, talking in a measured way and looking calm. Not very successful – boring in fact. I decided instead to be myself and keep on going.

I managed to introduce semiotics despite my Latin-ness (or maybe thanks to that) and the high suspicion that the methodology aroused. It was perceived to be subjective, not being based on talking to consumers. I tested different ways to break through for a period of time until, finally, the opportunity came and I took it.

An ordinary day. A colleague who was searching for ways to interpret collages from focus groups asked me if I could see further and deeper than her own interpretations. The answer was affirmative, and the META-COLLAGE WAS BORN. Today it is one of the most popular terms connected with semiotics in Swedish market research, for better or worse.

The consumer’s pictures were transformed into visual stories. I saw an endless source of information within the images. A visual chaos lying there, waiting to take form through strong story-telling. The credibility problem was solved. The clients believed in what they saw. The pictures were of course, chosen by consumers. They represented the emotional values of the brand, not only with words but with concepts, symbols and images. Adjustments were made on the journey. An additional collage was needed: the one that represented the optimal brand, to capture the relevant emergent tendencies.

In some ways I’m back on the jungle, trying to convert the heathens of research. I have already managed to saved some, but the mission is not complete yet. I carry on saying that even without the consumer’s answers a semiotician can really see beyond – into the territory of culture. I already see the signs, that the day is coming …

Posted in Americas, Clients & Brands, Europe, Experts & Agencies, Global Vectors, Semiotics, Sequencing, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Whose line is it?

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

One would have thought that plagiarism is a serious business. Certainly in literature. This spring (2010) we learn from the German press, the leading publisher Ullstein and the young female author of the book Axolotl Roadkill, that plagiarism may actually be an important emerging code. Especially in literature.

In this novel a 16-year old aspiring author, Helene Hegemann, writes about drugs & sex like a 38-year old nightlife junky and is instantly proclaimed the new literary star of Germany. Bestseller listing follows. Unfortunately, it turns out that most of her book is copied, often word for word, from many people, but most of it from the blogger Airens. No credits, no footnote references, unequivocally plagiarised.

This sort of thing (apparent literary fraud) used to mean the end of the road. But not for everybody. Not for Tony Blair in the notorious ’Dodgy Dossier’ on Weapons of Mass Destruction, for example, used in UK to persuade Parliament to support the invasion of Iraq. And now not for Helene Hegemann.

Helene Hegemann, reportedly, is not only unrepentant but apparently proud. She tells us we live in a word-of-mouth society where any content is everybody’s content. Therefore, content is about proliferation of information and re-shuffling of ideas, not about authorship or ownership.

Without diving into any unnecessary discussion around the ’art of intellectual referencing’ – either old (Shakespeare from numerous sources, Goethe copying Shakespeare, the phenomenon termed in German Weltmitschriften’, in English ’minutes of the world’) or more recent (music & song sampling, postmodern quotation as stock-in-trade of film, theatre and ad direction) – the fact appears to remain: Helene Hegemann copied large chunks of prose from an internet author and sold that content at a premium.

How does she get away with this?

• The book industry wants to sell books – free content on the internet does not help that endeavour (unless it can be repackaged and sold at a price).

• The Über-author is a learned concept in mainstream popular culture since ist inception with scratching in the 1980s.

• It’s one of the dilemmas of the web itself, where thoughtlessness is more than tolerated, sometimes celebrated – and perceived worthlessness can be the result.

Bottom line: Axolotl Roadkill looks like a case of daylight robbery. But then Helene Hegemann is not legal age, yet. So a moral license for pupils and students to download their school assignments from online sources? Or symptomatic of much larger economic issues around counterfeiting, piracy and intellectual property guaranteed to keep the lawyers busy, perplexing the world of information commerce and the new creative classes for at least a few years yet?

Posted in Culture, Europe, Making Sense, Technology | No Comments »

Living Autopsies

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

Once, the body was text: a second surface for the inscription and production of identity. But now, a host of technologies and practices are cutting through this outer skin, opening up the body's third interior for all to see.

While postmodern codes of the body revelled in its outwardness (its ability to encode identity through costume and appearance), we’re now delving into its inner landscape, with airport body scanners, biometric market research and even ‘neuro lit crit’ all re-framing the body as ‘content’ rather than as ‘form’.

Showing how advertising is picking up on this drive to get ‘under the skin’, a recent UK Department of Health campaign to curb alcohol abuse features scan-like images of the ‘damage you can’t see’.

Meanwhile, last year’s BBC 3 reality TV show ‘Make my body younger’ put participants through a ‘living autopsy’, scanning their insides to reveal the impact of their unhealthy lifestyles.

The overt codes here draw on the Enlightenment discourse of anatomy and dissection, in which the opening up of the body stands for the heroic scientific elucidation of its dark secrets.

But, just as the Enlightenment theatres of dissection played to shock, disgust and fear as much as to noble scientific rationalism, so today’s ‘living autopsies’ find echoes in darker cultural material. For instance, films like Hostel, Captivity and the whole ‘torture porn’ genre provide a stage for the theatrical cutting (or more likely slashing) open of the body and the revelation of what’s within.

These films may seem worlds away from a Department of Health campaign – but, like all the examples mentioned here, they belong to a context in which the body’s interior is increasingly being put on display. The theme is even extending to the nature-documentary genre, with the UK TV series 'Inside Nature's Giants' opening up animal corpses to look at them anatomically.

Posted in Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence, Europe, Making Sense | No Comments »

The Peace Symbol

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Anti-Nuclear or Peace Sign. Designed in 1958 and based on the semaphore signals for letters N & D. Created by Harvard Physics and History of Science professor Gerald Holton it first appeared at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) march from Aldermaston to London in February 1958. It then spread to the U.S. when an American student who was on the March took a bag of the badges back home. Blogspot from 2008 celebrating 50th birthday.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Culture, Europe, Global Vectors, Making Sense | 2 Comments »

The Land of Mothers

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Is Russia really as patriarchal? Some signs from social advertising.

For almost a year Moscow citizens and it’s guests can observe this cute picture in the underground. This is a social advertising aimed at strengthening the institution of family in Russia. It quotes Francis Bacon: ‘Love to motherland begins with the family’. Matrioshka signifies both parts of the quote: it is the obvious sign of ‘Rusianness’ and has well-known meaning of fertility.

What is interesting here is the gender profile of the family. The biggest, the central doll is female and there are just 2 male figures, the role of which is unclear. Is the bigger one a husband? Then he is presented in the subordinate position to his wife (significantly smaller, childish shapes, stays on the side). Or a son? In this case she is a single mother.

The picture may be interpreted as a reflection of modern life. Crisis of masculinity is a popular topic in Russia. It is usually explained by the events of 20-th century, including huge loss of male population during wars and repressions, peculiarities of communistic social system and global processes of feminism. The family picture with dominant figure of mother is almost a norm in contemporary Russian culture.

On the other hand, old historical symbols are used in the picture. The characters are shaped and dressed far from modern standards. They are not Barbie-dolls, they are Russian dolls. This is how Russian people looked two centuries ago. The background reminds a tablecloth in great grandmothers’ kitchen. As a matter of fact, return to local traditions has been an important social trend of the last decade and national symbols have become very popular. In this context, the ad actually says ‘this is the traditional Russian family, how it should be’. Is this an example of how modern views change perception of the past? Or does this advertisement represent archetypal image of the Russian family?

Here are some links about matriarchal traditions and image of Mother in Russia:

http://eng.plakaty.ru/posters?cid=5&full=1&page=6&id=40
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Motherland
http://eng.plakaty.ru/posters?cid=1&id=773
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-66355314.html
http://www.berdyaev.com/skobtsova/veneratio_Bogomater.html

Notes:
Joanna Hubbs “Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture”
Ireneusz Szarycz “Morsels on the Tongue: Evidence of a Pre-Christian Matriarchy in Russian Fairy Tales”

Posted in Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence, Europe, Making Sense | 1 Comment »

Snake in hand

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

X-ray and infra-red technology revealed, beneath roses held by Queen Elizabeth I in anonymous sixteenth-century painting displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2010 for the first time in 90 years, an earlier depiction of her right hand clutching what appears to be a black snake with blue-green highlights. ;What’s going on here we wonder. Artistic subversion of royal iconography? A Tudor Dan Brown moment of some kind? Clearly an enigma to set the popular semiotics machine in motion.

Some possible explanations:

• Historian David Starkey identified the serpent as being a symbol of wisdom at that time, and an apparent favourite of Elizabeth’s from the evidence of a discrete green serpents on an orange taffeta dress in another portrait.

• Why then the revision and painting out? The posy replacing the snake may have expressed second thoughts, at the time or later, around the serpent being an ambiguous image also strongly associated in Christian iconography with evil and original sin.

• Roses, in contrast, would have been an unproblematic icon of the Tudor dynasty, as well as the posy being a conventional female prop in portraiture.

With Freud and by now a decade or two of graphic online porn between us and the occluded serpent it’s hard to overlook the phallic connotation noted by art history blogs and press coverage of a snake “coiled suggestively around her right hand” (Arifa Akbar in The Independent). But donning our semiotic hats and trying to look at all human beings (including us in our own times and places) as aliens it can be salutary to look at the hand and snake trying to think ‘wisdom’ or ‘evil’ rather than the sense that might strike us first as obvious, natural and universal.

Imagine a future time when the cultural orthodoxy shares with Jorge Luis Borges this view of our psychoanalytic received wisdom today: “I have read Jung with great interest but with no conviction. At best he was an imaginative, exploratory writer. More than one can say for Freud: such rubbish!” Then we would look at the symbol interpreted as a phallic suggestively uncoiling snake and, with Foucault responding to the classification of animals in Borges’s Chinese Encyclopaedia, wonder at “the exotic charm of another system of thought” and “the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

NOTES
Arifa Akbar, “The Virgin Queen, the serpent and the doctored portrait”, The Independent, 5 March 2010, p.3

Posted in Art & Design, Culture, Europe, Fuzzy Sets, Making Sense | 1 Comment »

Dynasty Re-Loaded

Friday, June 25th, 2010

It’s the bottom lip that does it. The son – we know it’s his son because the evidence of inherited genes is so strong – betrays physiological and psychological traits the father has long learned to control (or suppress). Too full, sensual, prone to tantrums – the lip is already commanding. Touch, taste, speech – its right to consume and direct is supreme. We are rendered mute in turn as we witness this triumphant transition of biological property through the medium of the absent mother. Not the compassion of the Mother and Child; instead, something much harder. Not the heroism or pathos of the single parent, but an imperial re-versioning of the Self. A perpetuation moving in an ever-refining upward movement, accompanied by the discreet tick-tock of an eternal clock mechanism. The greyscale of it all, the muted fugue in fascistic elegance, the hint of panelled room (the boardroom, the hallway of the Hamptons house, the suite at the Waldorf, the reception corridor of the INSEAD business school?). The readiness of the photograph to succeed to a line of imagined painted portraits (imagined, because the stress on ‘Begin Your Own Tradition’ cannot hide the pained newness of the dynastic ambition here).

Father to Son: Protection, grooming (not in an unhealthy way, we hope), schooling (private, West of England, Swiss, East Coast – all the connotations of Privo-land), all-governing, rhizome-like networks, the senior accomplice in dealing with Mama and all her issues/pills/limited female brain, the hope that he will emulate and speculate. The unspoken expectation that the son is to be the father’s perfecting mirror.

Son to Father: loyalty (for now), admiration mixed with some useful fear (of bank accounts being frozen, perversities exposed, onerous, even weird family rituals being exacerbated), the disciplined, invisible hands and wrists (masturbation/trembling pathologies kept temporarily at bay), the still-growing boy-into-man saga (will he bypass the ‘rebel’ stage?), the binding of wills to serve one purpose (fascism).

Chronos (chronometer) kills Saturn; reborn, Saturn in turn eats his young (consuming lips) and Zeus in turn kills Saturn. The cycle is assuaged by the promise of inheritance, one that measures eternity

NOTES
Image: http://www.selectism.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/patek-philippe-advertising.jpg

Recommended reading:
Pierre Bourdieu (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
David Cannadine (1996), The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy

Posted in Categories, Clients & Brands, Europe, Making Sense, Socioeconomics | No Comments »

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