Semiotics and Society

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SYMPOSIUM: SIGNS, SYMBOLS, AND SEMIOTICS

Semiotics and Society

Arthur Asa Berger

Published online: 22 November 2013

#Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract This essay introduces some of the basic concepts that can be used in applied semiotic analysis and discusses the work of some prominent semioticians, such as Ferdinande de Saussure, Charles Sander Peirce, Umberto Eco, and Roland Barthes. Barthes’bookMythologiesis identified as a seminal text in applied semiotic analysis. Marshall McLuhan’s book The Mechanical Bride is discussed as being semiotic in nature, though he doesn’t use the term. The utility of semiotics utility in studying teeth, facial expression and other aspects of people watching and communication is also dealt with.

Keywords Semiotics . Signs . Signifiers . Signifieds . Iconic . Indexical . Symbolic

Semiotics is the science of signs, a sign being anything that can be used to stand for something else. We might notice the term in articles and books we read but most people don’t know very much about it. There are, it turns out, more than 11,000 books on semiotics listed on Amazon.com and I found 2,970,000 sites in my Google search on the subject. So semiotics isn’t as obscure as we might imagine.

Maya Pines offers us an important insight into what semiotics is all about. She writes:“Everything we do sends messages about us in a variety of codes, semiologists contend. We are also on the receiving end of innumerable messages encoded in music, gestures, foods, rituals, books, movies, or advertisements. Yet we seldom realize that we have received such messages, and would have trouble explaining the rules under which they operate”. Semiotics, Pines explains, teaches us how we find meaning in all the objects and other kinds of messages to which we are exposed.

A Very Brief Primer on Semiotic Theory

There are two “founding fathers” of semiotics—the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Saussure’s book,Course in General Linguistics, comprised of lectures compiled by two of his students, is considered to be one of the most influential books published in the twentieth century. He used the term

“semiology” (from the Greek work for sign, sēmeion) but Peirce’s term, “semiotics”, has become the dominant term for the science of signs and has replaced semiology.

In hisCourse in General Linguistics Saussure offered what we might describe as one of the charter statements about semiotics (1915/1966):

Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these systems.

A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from Greek sēmeion “sign”). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. (p. 16)

Saussure divided signs into two parts: every sign is made of sound-images orsignifiers and the concepts generated by the signifiers, signifieds. What complicates matters is that the relation between signifiers and signifieds is arbitrary and based on convention. That mean, we have to learn what the signifieds mean and have to recognize that their meanings can change.

Thus, long hair in men used to signify“artistic”but now long hair has lost that meaning; it can mean anything nowadays: poets, truck drivers and baseball pitchers now often have long hair.

He also explained that the meaning of concepts is relational and that they take their meaning from their opposing concepts in A. A. Berger (*)

Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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a set of binary oppositions. As he wrote (1915/1966:117)

“Concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system”. Thus, it is the relationships between and among concepts that provide us with their meaning. The“most precise characteristic”of these concepts“is in being what the other are not”. In language, for Saussure,“there are only differences”and binary oppositions are the basic way we find meaning in things.

The second founding father of semiotics, C.S. Peirce, wrote an enormous amount of very dense theoretical work on semiotics, but for our purposes—and our interest here is in applied semiotics, his trichotomy of kinds of signs is of most importance. He explained that there are three kinds of signs:

icons, indexes, and symbols.Icons signify by resemblance, indexessignify by cause and effect, andsymbols signify on the basis of convention. As he explained:

Every sign is determined by its objects, either first by partaking in the characters of the object, when I call a sign an Icon; secondly, by being really and in its individual existence connected with the individual object, when I call the sign anIndex; thirdly, by more or less approximate certainty that it will be interpreted as denoting the object, in consequence of a habit (which term I use as including a natural disposition), when I call the sign aSymbol, (quoted in Zeman1977, p. 36) Thus, a photograph would be iconic (it signifies by resemblance), smoke coming out of a house would be indexical (it signifies by cause and effect) and flags would be symbolic (one must learn what flags signify). The term“iconic”now has another meaning and is used loosely to refer to people, places, objects, and so on, that are noteworthy or of some importance.

Thus, an iPhone is an iconic smartphone.

Peirce wrote that a sign“is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity (quoted in Zeman 1977, p.27) which emphasizes the role of the interpreter of signs, and suggested that the “universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs”

which means that semiotics becomes the master science.

These statements about signs, signifiers and signifieds from Saussure and about icons, indexes and symbols from Peirce, provide us with some very basic concepts that enable us to analyze phenomena, of all kinds, from a semiotic perspective.

Saussure and Peirce differed in their notions about symbols but for our purposes, this difference is not important. One other interesting thing about signs is that they can be used to lie.

A contemporary semiotician, Umberto Eco, explained that the fact that signs can be used to lie is crucial to semiotics. As he wrote:

Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken

as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot be used “to tell”at all. I think that the definition of a“theory of the lie”should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics. (p. 7)

Eco’s cautionary note about signs alerts us to the fact that many people“lie”with signs. In some cases the lies are trivial and inconsequential but lying with signs can be very serious. A brunette who dies her hair blonde is making a trivial lie, as is a bald man wearing a wig. But a person who impersonates a physician can do a great deal of harm, as does a mole who pretends to be working as a spy for one country but is really working for a different one.

Applications of Semiotic Theory: People Watching and Facial Expression

Although there aren’t a large number of academics who work as semioticians it is reasonable to argue that everyone is a practicing semiotician, though they may not realize it. And that’s because, for example, we’re all curious about the people we look at when we are people watching. We often“watch”people when we sit in cafes or restaurants but we also scrutinize them when we look at the facial expressions of our wives, of our husbands and of our children, of actors and actresses in plays, films and television programs, and of politicians. We consider things such as hair styles, hair colors, eye colors, body structure, body language, styles of eyeglasses, brands of smart phones, purses, clothes, watches, smart phones, and so on…ad infinitum.

Paul Ekman, a psychologist who did important research on facial expression, argued, inFacial Expression Understanding, a report to the National Science Foundation (written with Terence J. Sejnowski), that facial expression provides information about our emotions and moods, reflects cognitive activity such as boredom and perplexity, can reveal truthfulness and lying, and can offer information about mania, schizophrenia and depression. And, what is more remarkable, this material can be monitored by using technological devices.

Face technology, Ekman and Sejnowski suggest, can revolutionize medicine, law, and education, among other things.

Applications of Semiotic Theory: Teeth as Signs

A cosmetic dentist, Jeff Morley, made the front page of the Wall Street Journal a number of years ago, arguing that our

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teeth play an important role in our careers. He suggests that if our teeth aren’t straight and white, employers, will be put off when we smile. They won’t be conscious of the reason they have negative feelings about us, but it will be our uneven and yellow teeth that will hold us back and, ultimately, may destroy our careers. The article, by Marilyn Chase, read:

A dental practice here (in San Francisco) is luring patients with a warning that people consciously or unconsciously

“read”one another’s teeth for clues to character.

Morley offered some insights into what teeth tell about people:

“What it comes down to is this: Buck teeth imply people are dumb. Large canines imply aggressiveness. Weak chins imply passivity, while strong chins imply a macho, studly personality”, he asserts.“I don’t know who made these up, but the fact is, they’re cultural standards.” What Morley is suggesting is that teeth are read as signs, the same way that hair styles, hair colors, eye glass styles and countless other things are read as signs, and these signs reveal important things about people.

Applications of Semiotic Theory: Roland Barthes and Mythologies

Roland Barthes’Mythologies, published in French in 1957 and English in1972, is one of the most important and most influential books of applied semiotic analysis. The first part of the book, devoted to “Mythologies”, has chapters on such topics as professional wrestling, soap powders and detergents, margarine, toys, steak and chips, the strip tease, and plastic.

The second part of the book is devoted to“Myth Today”, a theoretical study of semiotics and politics.

In the preface to the 1970 edition of the book, Barthes writes:

This book has a double theoretical framework: on the one hand, an ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture; on the other, a first attempt to analyze semiologically the mechanics of this language. I had just read Saussure and as a result acquired the conviction that by treating “collective representations”as sign-systems, one might hope to go further that the pious show of unmasking them and accountin detailfor the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into universal nature.

Barthes explains in the original preface to the book that he wrote the essays inMythologies between 1954 and 1956 in which he wished to“reflect regularly on some myths of daily

French life”. He was inspired to do so by his impatience with how French media confused the historical with the natural. As he explains,“I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorate display ofwhat-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view is hidden there”. What he did was transfer his use of semiotics from literature to material culture and iconic aspects of French everyday life.

In the first essay in the book on“The World of Wrestling”, he offers a number of semiotically informed insights into his topic, wrestling in France:

it is not a sport but a spectacle of excess

it is an excessive performance of suffering, an externalized image of torture

it offers excessive gestures exploited to the limit of their meaning

it offers signs in wrestling endowed with absolute clarity in the physiques of the wrestlers are all important signs it provides the public with the image of passion, not passion itself

It is based on ethics, unlike American wrestling which is a battle between Good and Evil

It is based on the search for a“bastard.”

What this list does not capture is the style of Barthes’

writing. Let me offer a quote from the chapter on wrestling which provides us with an idea of his style—his discussion of the French wrestler Thauvin:

As in the theatre, each physical type expresses to excess the part which has been assigned to the contestant.

Thauvin, a 50-year-old with an obese and sagging body, whose type of asexual hideousness always inspires feminine nicknames, displays in his flesh the characters of baseness, for his part is to represent what, in the classical concept of thesalaud, the“bastard”(the key-concept of any wrestling match), appears as organically repugnant.

The nausea voluntarily provoked by Thauvin shows therefore a very extended use of signs; not only is ugliness used here in order to signify baseness, but in addition ugliness is wholly gathered into a particularly repulsive quality of matter: the pallid collapse of dead flesh (the public calls Thauvin la barbeque, “stinking meat”}, so that the passionate condemnation from the crowd no longer stems from its judgment, but instead from the very depth of its humours.

In wrestling, Barthes found a topic extremely rich in signs and the chapter is, by far, the longest in the section of the book on“Mythologies”.

Barthes used semiotics (though he used the term semiology) to explore many other topics, including a fascinating book on

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Japan calledEmpire of Signs. In this book, which deals, among other things, with Japanese eyelids, rawness in Japanese food, the empty center of Tokyo, chopsticks, Japanese packages, bowing and Pachinko, he explains that he was fascinated by a symbolic system detached from Western European symbology.

His purpose, he writes, was not to “photograph” Japan but to capture“flashes”of Japanese culture. The book, then, is similar in nature to what he did for French culture in Mythologies. He wrote many books on topics such as fashion, photography and love, and there are 5,000 books on Barthes at Amazon.com and more than two million sites that mention him on Google. What Barthes does, so brilliantly, is show how semiotics can be used to illuminate and explain interesting, and in many cases neglected or overlooked aspects of everyday life. If publishers could find several dozen laundry lists from Barthes, I have no doubt they would be published as well, with comments by some scholars about their significance, and numerous grad students would write doctoral theses on them.

Yuri Lotman andUniverse of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture

Yuri Lotman, who was a central figure in the Tartu, Estonia school of semiotics, wrote about many different aspects of the science. InUniverse of the Mind, he offers a semiotic theory of culture. The book has three parts:“the text as a meaning generating mechanism”, “the semiosphere”, and “cultural memory, history and semiotics”. We can see, from the titles of each part of the book, the range of Lotman’s interests. In the second part of the book, Lotman discusses the“asymmetrical”

construction of the semiosphere, that is (1990:“apparent in the relationship between the centre of the semiosphere and its periphery”. Later, he discusses “boundaries” and writes (1990:131)

Every culture begins by dividing the world into “its own”internal space and their external space. How this binary division is interpreted depends upon the typology of the culture. But the actual division is one of the human cultural universals. The boundary may separate the living from the dead, settled people from nomadic ones, the town from the plains; it may be a state frontier, or a social, national, confessional, or any other kind of frontier.

Then Lotman suggests that the asymmetrical nature of the human body is (1990:133)“the anthropological basis for its semiotization”and discusses a number of bipolar oppositions found, he asserts, in all cultures, such as high/low, right/left, top/bottom, male/female and living/dead.

Lotman’s notions of center and periphery and his focus on bipolar oppositions, which he derives from Saussure, are important concepts that inform much semiotic analysis of cultural phenomena. From a semiotic perspective, a culture can be seen as like a text and thus susceptible to analysis of its parts and their relationship to one another. What he writes about texts in his bookThe Structure of the Artistic Textcan be applied to cultures as well (1977:23):

Since it can concentrate a tremendous amount of information into the“area”of a very small text (c.f. the length of a short story by Ćhekov and a psychology textbook) an artistic text manifests yet another feature. It transmits different information to different readers in proportion to each one’s comprehension: it provides the reader with a language in which each successive portion of information may be assimilated with repeated reading. It behaves as a kind of living organism which has a feedback channel to the reader and thereby instructs him.

For Lotman, it was semiotics that was the key that can be used to unlock the secrets found in a culture and theUniverse of the Mindis an important example of how semiotic analysis can reveal interesting things about culture and societies as well as literary and artistic texts.

Applications of Semiotic Theory: Marshall McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride

Although Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man, published in 1951, doesn’t overtly use semiotics, I would suggest that it ranks as one of the most important semiotic studies published in the Twentieth century.

In the book we find short chapters on topics such as the press, the“front page”ofThe New York Times, theTime magazine formula,Li’l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, and on numerous advertisements for Lifesavers, the Great books, shaving, Lord Calvert liquor, Squibb Cod Liver Oil, Charlie McCarthy, Crime Does Not Pay and many other topics.

McLuhan offers jazzy questions and comments in bold type before each essay and, as we might expect, employs his signature style in the essays. McLuhan deals with popular culture, media, and everyday life and his essays use his topics to explain their social, cultural and political significance. Let me offer an example of his writing from his essay “The Mechanical Bride”.

To the mind of the modern girl, legs like busts are power points which she has been taught to tailor, but as part of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hip with masculine drive and

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confidence. She knows that a“long legged gal can go places”. As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her taste or her unique self but are merely display objects like the grill work on a car. They are date-baited power levers for the management of the male audience.

The book is full of insights and revelations that are possible because of McLuhan’s immense erudition, his ability to find connections we don’t recognize between things, and his use of what I would describe as semiotic analysis.

Semiotics in Society

If the meaning of signs, and, in particular, the relation between signifiers and signified is based on convention and is not natural, it means that we need society and its institutions to teach us how to interpret signs and symbols. This fact has important implications for our thoughts about the relation between individuals and society. As Jonathan Culler writes in the revised edition his book Ferdinand de Saussure (1986:86, 87):

For human beings, society is a primary reality, not just the sum of individual activities…and if one wishes to study human behavior, one must grant that there is a social reality…Since meanings are a social product, explanation must be carried out in social terms…Individual actions and symptoms can be interpreted psychoanalytically because they are the result of common psychic processes, unconscious defenses occasioned by social taboos and leading to particular types of repression and displacement.

Linguistic communication is possible because we have assimilated a system of collective norms that organize the world and give meaning to verbal acts. Or again, as Durkheim argued, the reality crucial to the individual is not the physical environment but the social milieu, a system of rules and norms, of collective representations, which makes possible social behavior.

If meaning is a social product, if the relation between signifiers and signifieds is based on conventions and if we

must be taught what symbols mean, semiotics argues that we are social animals and the way we find meaning in the world is connected to the social milieu in which we are brought up. The view, held by many people (think of Margaret Thatcher and many libertarians) that society doesn’t exist, that it’s just an abstraction, and that only individuals exist is something we learn, ironically from society—from its institutions and from the theories of certain writers and political theorists. So semiotics teaches us not only about how to find the meaning of signs but also that these meanings are based on society and it codes; society creates meaning in signs and these meanings can change.