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Semiotic visions
by Joshua Glenn| Boston, USA
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
tags: americas, contributions from, disciplines, header navigation, lateral navigation, making sense, semiotics
"My religion was semiotics," National Public radio host Ira Glass ("This American Life") told an interviewer in 2004. "Before semiotics I was, like, a middle-class kid who didn't know what he believed …. Semiotics, basically, was exactly the way I defined myself."
Glass was referring to his experience earning a degree from Brown University's one-of-a-kind semiotics degree program. When I was an editor at The Boston Globe's IDEAS section in the early 2000s, we published a story about the lasting influence of Brown's program. It read, in part: "From its founding as a fledgling program in 1974 to its morphing into a full Department of Modern Culture and Media in 1996, Brown semiotics produced a crop of creators that, if they don't exactly dominate the cultural mainstream, certainly have grown famous sparring with it. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, Academy Award-nominated director Todd Haynes and legendary indie producer Christine Vachon, "Ice Storm" author Rick Moody, pop-science writer Steven Johnson — all walked the slanting corridors of Adams House, a sad cottage at the fringe of Brown's Providence campus."
Here's how writer Paul Greenberg explained semiotics in that essay: "[S]emiotics is about how we derive meaning from context. … Ferdinand de Saussure… posited that no word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a 'signifier,' i.e. the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the 'signified,' or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued 'sign.' Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts. But a working semiotician doesn't go home after splitting a few signs. Signs operate within 'codes' (a.k.a. languages) which are themselves building blocks of larger structures, like narratives." I have cut the snarky bits; click on the link above to read them.
"Semiotics … was like a conspiracy theory to beat all conspiracy theories," Ira Glass told Greenberg. "It wasn't just that authority figures of various sorts did things that were questionable…. It's that language itself was actually a system designed to keep you in your place, which when, you know, you're 19 or 20 is pretty much exactly what you're ready to hear…. Oh my God, what are we going to do with this powerful information?" "It was as if you had these, like, magic lenses that you could put on," agreed Steven Johnson. "It really had the feeling of `We've cracked the code, other people don't know.'"
Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel, The Marriage Plot, takes place in part at Brown in the early 1980s — and in it, the semiotics program is depicted as encouraging pretentious, obscurantist thinking and writing. “When Madeleine asked what the book [Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology] was about, she was given to understand by Whitney that the idea of a book being ‘about’ something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it was ‘about’ anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things."Also: “Going to college in the moneymaking ’80s lacked a certain radicalism. Semiotics was the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism — with sex and power.”
This past Sunday, in the pages of The New York Times Sunday Book Review, the lead review of which is dedicated to Eugenides' The Merriage Plot, Steven Johnson recounts his own Brown story. He is less harsh than Eugenides. Though Johnson acknowledges that Brown's semiotics program did encourage pretentious, obscurantist thinking and writing, he mostly recalls that "it left many of us with an intoxicating sense that the everyday world — particularly the world of media — contained a secret layer of meaning that could be deciphered with the right key."
Here's how Johnson explains semiotics: "Greek for the 'science of signs,' semiotics as a field dates back to fin de siècle philosophers and linguists like C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand De Saussure; in modern times it is most commonly associated with Umberto Eco. The general thrust of pure semiotics is a kind of linguistics-based social theory; if language shapes our thought, and our thought shapes our culture, then if we are looking for a master key to make sense of culture, it makes sense to start with the fundamental structures of language itself: signs, symbols, metaphors, narrative devices, figures of speech. You could interpret a Reagan speech using these tools as readily as you could a Nike ad."
Though he eventually started writing books whose "sentences were shorter and the arguments less prone to putting themselves under erasure," Johnson concludes, "what animated my work was the sense that computer interfaces or video games had a subtle social meaning to them that was not always visible at first glance. That perspective was also the legacy of my semiotics years, and it turned out to be much more durable than the prose style. … Semiotics, for all its needless complications, still taught us to look for new possibilities in the ordinary, turning signs into new wonders."
31 October 2011 at 11:51 am
Josh Glenn says:
Responses, in this week’s NYTBR, to Steven Johnson’s essay:
To the Editor:
Steven Johnson’s essay “I Was an Under-Age Semiotician” (Oct. 16) paints an all-too-familiar portrait of semiotics as jargon-laden and ridiculous. But there’s one saving grace: He and several peers apparently found a “secret layer of meaning” and developed “conceptual antennas” sufficient enough to secure “influential careers in the media and the creative arts.”
Characterizing the practice of semiotics in this way — as obtuse but also as a way for the elite to get further ahead — is depressingly ironic and wrongheaded. Dating back to Roland Barthes and his writings on myth, semiotics at its best is an instrument against power, a way to reveal how mainstream media narratives normalize and perpetuate an unhealthy, unjust status quo.
I’ve been using a streamlined, almost jargon-free version of semiotics in my undergraduate Methods of Media Criticism class for more than a decade. Whether the subject is a commercial for the New York Stock Exchange, a magazine feature on the “world’s most beautiful people,” vigilante action movies, or television programs in which the poor are invisible, running from the police or denying paternity to talk show hosts — semiotics and other methods of analysis empower my students to see the hegemonic bill of goods their culture regularly sells them. And they understand it all just fine.Marco Calavita
Rohnert Park, Calif.
The writer is an associate professor of communication studies at Sonoma State University.
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To the Editor:
In his essay Steven Johnson has fun (as he has in the past) with the prose style he developed in the semiotics program at Brown University. (He quotes from a paper he wrote “at the age of 19”: “The predicament of any tropological analysis of narrative always lies in its own effaced and circuitous recourse to a metaphoric mode of apprehending its object. . . . ”) As a founder of the program, I remember Johnson, and he did write that way. But some semioticians wrote with clarity — Tzvetan Todorov and Umberto Eco, for example — and I rather think I did so myself. But students take what they want, or what they need at the time, and the good ones find ways to use or abuse what they learned — or both.Robert Scholes
Barrington, R.I.
The writer is a research professor of modern culture and media at Brown University.
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To the Editor:
Having taught at Brown for 16 years, including a course on Charles Sanders Peirce, the modern founder of sign theory, I found Steven Johnson’s essay to be a depressingly accurate characterization of the academic times during his college years. However, readers should know that his identification of semiotics as a field of study by linking it with Peirce, an American philosopher, and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is a serious, albeit common, misconception. Saussure’s version is defective next to Peirce’s, and not curable by patch-up. That it was Saussure’s ideas about signs, and not Peirce’s, that gave rise to the Continental form Jacques Derrida and others propagated — and gullible American academics swallowed whole — should not be so glibly elided. Peirce is the greatest intellect the Americas ever produced, and it is his whole philosophy, including his semeiotic (note the spelling and the singular number) that now bids fair to prevail as doctrine.
MICHAEL SHAPIRO
New York
The writer is an emeritus professor of Slavic and semiotic studies at Brown University.
21 October 2011 at 10:49 pm
Joshua Glenn says:
Yes to all your questions, Malcolm.
21 October 2011 at 3:41 pm
Malcolm Evans says:
Refreshing to see semiotics defined in accessible language by people who aren’t trying to sell the methodology. There’s still a little something missing. The world awaits the killer definition, the right story or metaphor. Or formulation of the benefit. What is it that makes such a big difference to all those whose perceptions were changed by it – who see the world differently? And interestingly there are people making a living from semiotics who weren’t affected in this way. is it true that those who succumb all know each other? Wear a badge indecipherable to others? Is there a primal conversion narrative analogous to being taken into a space vehicle and made love to by an alien? Is there a secret sign that will be made manifest one day, at which point they will all act mysteriously in accord to achieve something we couldn’t even imagine today. Like when you witness one of those ridiculous baroque sunsets happening in really life and you half expect to see an angel slide down a slanted ray of light with the whole biblical crew tumbling pell mell in close pursuit. And you think “Holy shit, have I got this all wrong and I wonder if there’s still time to repent?”