The Semiotic Method 5r1w31

The Semiotic Method from Signs of Life in the U.S.A. Edited by Sonia Maasik and Jack Soloman To interpret and write effectively about the signs of popular culture, you need a method. Without a methodology for interpreting signs, writing about them could become little more than producing descriptive reviews or opinion pieces. There is nothing wrong with writing descriptions and opinions, but one of your tasks in your writing class is to learn how to write academic essays, that is, analytical essays that are well ed by evidence. The method we are drawing upon in this book—a method that is known as "semiotics"—is especially designed for the analysis of culture. Whether or not you're familiar with this word, you are already practicing sophisticated semiotic analyses every day of your life. Reading this page is an act of semiotic decoding (words and even letters are signs that must be interpreted), but so is figuring out just what your classmate means by wearing a particular shirt or dress. For a semiotician (one who practices semiotic analysis), a shirt, a haircut, a television image, anything at all, can be taken as a sign, as a message to be decoded and analyzed to discover its meaning. Every cultural activity for the semiotician leaves a trace of meaning, a kind of blip on the semiotic Richter scale, that remains for us to read, just as a geologist "reads" the earth for signs of earthquakes, volcanoes, and other geological phenomena. Many who hear the word "semiotics" for the first time assume that it is the name of a new, and forbidding, subject. But in truth, the study of signs is neither very new nor forbidding. Its modern form took shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the writings and lectures of two men. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was an American philosopher and physicist who first coined the word "semiotics," while Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was a Swiss linguist whose lectures became the foundation for what he called "semiology." Without knowing of each other's work, Peirce and Saussure established the fundamental principles that modern semioticians or semiologists—the are essentially interchangeable—have developed into the contemporary study of semiotics. The application of semiotics to the interpretation of culture was pioneered in the 1950s by the French semiologist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) in a book entitled Mythologies. The basic principles of semiotics had already been explored by linguists and anthropologists, but Barthes took the matter to the heart of his own contemporary , analyzing the cultural significance of everything from professional wrestling to striptease, from toys to plastics. It was Barthes, too, who established the political dimensions of semiotic analysis. In our society (especially in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal), "politics" has become something of a dirty word, and to "politicize" something seems somehow to contaminate it. But Barthes's point —and the point of semiotics in general—is that all social behavior is political in the sense that it reflects some kind of personal or group interest. Such interests are encoded in what are called "ideologies," which are essentially world views that express-the values and opinions of those who hold them. Politics, then, is just another name for the clash of ideologies that takes place in any complex society where the interests of all those who belong to it are constantly in competition with each other. But often the ideological interests that guide our social behavior remain concealed behind images that don't look political at all. Consider, for example, the depiction of the "typical" American family in the classic TV sitcoms of the fifties and sixties, particularly all those images of happy, docile housewives. To most contemporary viewers, those images looked "normal" or natural at the time that they were first broadcast—the way families and women were supposed to

be. The shows didn't seem at all ideological. To the contrary, they seemed a retreat from political rancor to domestic harmony. But to a feminist semiotician, the old sitcoms were in fact highly political, because the happy housewives they presented were really images designed to convince women that their place is in the home, not in the workplace competing with men. Such images— or signifers—did not reflect reality; they reflected, rather, the interests of a patriarchal, male-centered society. If you think not, then ask yourself why there were shows called Father Knows Best, Bachelor Father, and My Three Sons, but no My Three Daughters? And why did few of the women in the shows have jobs or ever seem to leave the house? Of course, there was always / Love Lucy, but wasn't Lucy the screwball character that her husband Ricky had to rescue from one crisis after another? These are the kinds of questions that semiotics invites us to ask. They may be put more generally. When analyzing any cultural phenomenon, always ask yourself questions like these: — Why does this thing look the way it does? — Why are they saying this? — Why am I doing this? — What are they really saying? — What am I really doing? In short, take nothing for granted when analyzing any image or activity. Take, for instance, the reason you may have ed a health club (or decided not to). Did you happen to respond to a photo ad that showed you a gorgeous girl or guy (with a nice-looking guy or girl in the background)? On the surface of the ad, you simply see an image showing—or denoting—a patron of the club. You may think: "I want to look like that." But there's probably another dimension to the ad's appeal. The ad may show you someone with a nice body, but what it is suggesting—or connoting—is that this club is a good place to pick up a hot date. That's why there's that other figure in the background. That's supposed to be you. The one in the foreground is the sort of person you're being promised you'll find at the club. The ad doesn't say this, of course, but that's what it wants you to think because that's a more effective way to get you to . Suggestion, or connotation, is a much more powerful stimulant than denotation, but it is often deliberately masked in the signifers you are presented with every day. Semiotics, one might say, reveals the denotative smokescreens around you. Health club hip drives, you may be thinking, aren't especially political, (though actually they are when you think of the kinds of bodies that they are telling you are desirable to have), but the powerful effect of a concealed suggestion is used all the time in actual political campaigns. The now infamous "Willie Horton" episode during the 1988 presidential campaign provides a classic instance. What happened was this: Some Republican ers of George Bush's candidacy ran a series of TV ads featuring the photographic image of one Willie Horton, a convicted rapist from Massachusetts who murdered someone while on parole. On the surface, the ads simply showed, or denoted, this fact. But what they connoted was racial hatred and fear (Willie Horton is black), and they were very effective in prompting white voters to mistrust Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis and to vote instead for George Bush. Signs, in short, often conceal some interest or other, whether political, or commercial, or whatever. And the proliferation of signs and images in an era of electronic technology has simply made it all the more important that we learn to decode the interests behind them. Semiotics, accordingly, is not just about signs and symbols: It is equally about ideology and power. This makes semiotics sound rather serious, and often the seriousness of a semiotic

analysis is quite real. But reading the text of modern life can also be fun, for it is a text that is at once popular and accessible, a "book" that is intimately in touch with the pulse of American life. As such, it is constantly changing. The same sign can change meaning if something else comes along to change the environment in which it originally appeared. Take the way shoelaces have changed their meaning in recent years. A few years ago (fashion systems move quickly), American high school students began wearing hightop basketball sneakers (preferably Nike or Reebok) with the laces unlaced. At the time, our students explained why they did this: "Because it's more convenient," they told us, "keeping them unlaced makes it easier to put them on and take them off." This is a functional answer—one that appears "natural" and therefore politically neutral. But then, if mere function or practicality were behind it all, why were kids lacing their sneakers the year before and why are they lacing them again now? Or why weren't they wearing loafers? To answer such questions, we first must look at the difference between a laced and an unlaced sneaker. In itself, the difference between lacing and unlacing a sneaker means nothing. But consider it as part of the teen fashion system of the late 1980s. That is, compare it to the other accessories and ways of wearing those accessories that were in fashion then among American teens. Consider baseball caps. If you were to wear one, would you put it on bill forward or bill backward? Or take overalls. Would you wear them with the straps hanging or buckled? Now, how would you interpret a young man wearing a baseball cap bill forward, with buckled overalls and laced Keds hightops? How would he differ from one wearing his cap backward, dangling both straps of his overalls, and wearing unlaced Nike Air Jordans? The differences are everything here, for in the last few years, an observer of fashion example number one who knew the code would interpret him as an unfashionable hick, while example number two would have ed as dressing in the height of teen fashion. But why was it fashionable to wear one's baseball cap backward, shoelaces untied, and overall straps unbuckled? To answer these questions, we must take our fashion statement and associate it with related popular trends from the period, including music, television, and the movies. In short, we have to look at the whole spectrum of pop culture to see what was going on and whether any of it relates to our fashion sign. So, what music was hot when unlaced Nikes came into fashion? Heavy metal? Yes, but metal fans wore motorcycle boots with chains on them—black leather, stuff like that. Meanwhile, the postpunk scene was getting into Doc Martens. So what else was important at the time? Rap, of course. "Straight outta Compton." And what did rap fans wear at the time? Baseball caps worn bill backward, unlaced hightops (preferably Nikes and Reeboks), and flapping overalls (or, perhaps, baggy tros). Now, who else dressed this way? Who, in fact, started it in the first place? If you answered "black street gangs and rap stars," you are on to the system through which we may interpret such things as shoelaces and baseball caps. In semiotic , a sign system is a kind of field of related things, and their meaning comes from how they relate to each other. Unlaced shoelaces may mean nothing when taken by themselves, for example, but when viewed within the system of teen fashion in the late eighties, a system that included the growing popularity of the imagery of the urban street gang, they may mean a lot, projecting an image that anyone who knew the system could quickly pick up. To those in the know, the system even had a name: hip-hop. At this point in our analysis, we can ask some simple questions whose answers may be quite complex. Why, for example, was it so important to wear Nikes or Reeboks? Why did some kids literally kill for a certain brand of shoe? What images did these brand lines project that Keds

did not? And why, finally, did a fashion sign once associated with street gangs, and thus with a racial and economic underclass, become such a popular fashion sign among middle- and upper-class kids? To answer such questions, you must first make a distinction between what a fashion sign might mean to you personally and what it signifies to society at large. You may have some very private reasons for dressing as you do, for example, and many of the signs in your life may have deeply personal meanings (your favorite blue jeans, for instance, may remind you of your first date). But in a cultural interpretation, you want to focus on the social meaning of things—what they mean to others. To discover the social dimensions of the signs in your life, you will want to explore as much of the American cultural spectrum as you can. In the case of unlaced sneakers, you may want to look at what was popular at the time in teen television programming. Do you , for example, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a sitcom featuring a kid from Compton (a code word for the black ghetto) who moves to Bel Air (code for extreme white affluence)? Or perhaps you recall In Living Color, a teen-audience variety show that featured, among other regulars, Homey the Clown, a white middleclass-bashing street parody of Bozo the Clown (that icon of the lily-white suburban sixties) whose appeal crossed over (like the Fresh Prince) from Compton to Bel Air? Such popular shows belonged to the same system of teen fashion that shoes and caps belonged to and can help you to decode what was going on among America's teens at the time they appeared. Rather than pursuing this interpretation, we will stop to let you draw your own conclusions. Try to recall what you yourself thought. Did you reverse your cap because everyone else was doing it, or because you wanted to identify with your favorite rapper? Did you feel that your way of dressing conveyed a political message, or were you just being fashionable? If fashion was all there was to it, ask yourself why the styles of an urban underclass became fashionable to suburban kids? In practice, the interpretational process we are inviting you to begin may occur in the blink of an eye, as you quickly size up the meaning of the innumerable signs that present themselves to you in an average day. Some signs may even look rather "obvious" to you, but that's because you've already made the interpretation. Ordinarily, however, our interpretations stop at the threshold of the more probing questions—just as we have paused here—at the questions that ask not only whether something is fashionable but what it means that the thing is fashionable in the first place. That's what cultural semiotics is all about: going beyond what a sign is to explain what it means. That is also what analytic writing is about: going beyond the surface of a text or issue toward an interpretation. The skills you already have as an interpreter of the signs around you—• of images, objects, and forms of behavior—are the same skills that you develop as a writer of critical essays that present a point of view and an argument to defend it. There is a difference, that is, between asserting an opinion and presenting evidence in a carefully constructed argument. All of us can make our opinions known, but analytic writing requires the marshaling of ive evidence. A lawyer doesn't simply assert a client's innocence: Evidence is required. Similarly, when we conducted our analysis of unlaced Nikes, we brought together ing evidence from the teen fashion system of the late 1980s to refute the claim that function alone was behind it all. By learning to write semiotic analyses of our culture, by searching for ing evidence to underpin your interpretive take on modem life, then, you are also learning to write critical arguments. "But how," you may ask, "can I know that a semiotic interpretation is right?" Good question —it is commonly asked. But then, it can be asked of the writer of any interpretive essay.

and the answer in each case is the same. That is, rarely can one absolutely prove the truth of any argument; what you do is persuade your audience through the use of pertinent evidence. In writing analyses about popular culture, that evidence comes from your knowledge of the system to which the object you are interpreting belongs. The more you know about the system, the more convincing your interpretations will be. And this is true whether you are writing about shoelaces or about more traditional academic subjects. There are several essential principles to follow as you attempt to persuade your reader of the force of your interpretations. The most crucial is that the meaning of a sign is determined by what that sign may be related to 'within a system. We tested this principle by looking at unlaced sneakers —which, in themselves, may indeed mean nothing at all, or only that someone has forgotten to lace them up—and then by relating them to other signs within a fashion system. Similarly, an interpretation of the popularity of rap music might proceed by associating rap with the cultural signs (like teen fashions) that belong to a related system. But often our interpretations of popular culture involve issues that are larger than the latest fad. How, for instance, are we to analyze fully the widespread belief—as reflected in the classic sitcoms mentioned earlier—that it is more natural for women to stay at home and take care of the kids than it is for men to do so? Why, in other words, is the concept of "housewife" so easy to accept while the idea of a "househusband" may appear somewhat ridiculous? How, in short, can we interpret some of our most basic values semiotically? To see how, we need to look at those value systems that semioticians call "cultural mythologies." As we have seen, in a semiotic analysis we do not search for the meanings of things in the things themselves. Rather, we find meaning in the way we can relate things together. We've done this with shoelaces, but what about with beliefs? This book asks you to explore the implications of social issues like gender norms and free speech that involve a great many personal beliefs and values that we do not always recognize as beliefs and values. Rather, we think of them as truths (one might think, "Of course it's odd for a man to stay home and take care of the house!"). But from a semiotic perspective, our values too belong to special systems from which they take their meaning. Semioticians call these systems of belief "cultural mythologies." A cultural mythology, or "myth" for short, is not some fanciful story from the past; it is a kind of lens that governs the way we view our world. Think of it this way: Say you were born with rosetinted eyeglasses permanently attached over your eyes, but you didn't know they were there. The world would look rose-colored to you and you would presume that it was rose-colored. You wouldn't wonder whether the world might look otherwise through different lenses. But there are other kinds of eyeglasses in the world with different lenses, and reality does look different to those who wear them. Those lenses are cultural mythologies, and no culture can claim to have the one set of glasses that sees things as they really are. Mythology, like culture, is not static, however, and so the semiotician must always keep his or her eye on the clock, so to speak. History, time itself, is a constant factor in an ever-changing world. Consider once again teen fashion. Since we began writing this introduction, a new street fashion has come to our attention, a kind of hip-hop/grunge fusion in which Seattle meets Compton. Do you recognize what we mean? Have you worn what we mean? What's it all about? Can you connect it to anything else in your life or in the life of America? So it's your turn now. Start asking questions, pushing, probing. That's what critical writing is all about, but this time you 're part of the question. Arriving at answers, conclusions, is the fun part here, but answers aren't the basis of analytic thinking: questions are. You always begin with a question, a query, an hypothesis, something to explore. To help yourself raise provocative questions, keep in mind the two elemental principles of semiotics that we have explored so far: 1. The meaning of a sign can be found not in itself but in its relationships (both differences and similarities) with other signs within a system. To interpret an individual sign, then, you must determine the general system in which it belongs.

2. What we call social "reality" is a human construct, the product of a cultural mythology that intervenes between our minds and the world we experience. Such cultural myths reflect the values and ideological interests of their builders, not the laws of nature or logic. Perhaps our first principle could be more succinctly rephrased, "everything is connected." and our second simply says, "question authority." Think of them that way if it helps. Or just ask yourself whenever you are interpreting something, "what's going on here?" In short, question everything. And one more reminder: Signs are like weather vanes: they point in response to invisible historical winds. We invite you now to start looking at the weather. Cell Phones To give you an idea of how to go about analyzing consumer objects and behavior, let's look at a product that on the surface seems completely functional—a tool, not a sign. Let's look at cell phones. As you learned in the introduction to this book, the semiotic interpretation of a cultural sign can usefully begin with a historical survey of the object you are interpreting. Such a survey can reveal how the meaning of an object can change depending on the circumstance in which it is found. This is strikingly true in the case of cell phones, which, while practically ubiquitous today, were once rare and expensive. They first appeared for public use in 1982 and were originally hard-wired into automobiles (often limousines), which is why many people who that time still call them "car phones." In such a context, cell phones were potent status symbols, sending an image of unusual wealth and prestige, the exclusive equipment of VIPS. Something of this meaning lingers when we think of cell phones and their s, but just barely. Because in an era when cell phones can be acquired for free (provided that the consumer also sign up for an activation contract, of course), and when even the latest digitized models cost only a fraction of what the original models cost, the cell phone is so common that it can't send a status message anymore. Everyone seems to have one. But that doesn't mean that cell phones no longer have a semiotic significance or that no image is associated with them. It simply means that the significance of the cell phone has changed as its history has changed. To interpret the current significance of the cell phone, we need to situate it in its immediate system of related signs and products. One product that is extremely similar to the cell phone, and which thus belongs to the same system, is the pager. The history of the pager is quite similar to that of the cell phone. Once pagers were carried almost exclusively by high-status professionals who needed to be in constant with their places of business. This was particularly true for physicians, who commonly carried pagers when they were "on call" (this was before the advent of even the earliest cell phones), and so pagers acquired something of the status of their professional s. The image sent by pagers changed radically, however, when they came to be the standard equipment of drug dealers, who would use them to set up clandestine drug deals. The former status image declined as a new one emerged: To carry a pager was to send an image of gangster toughness and, for many American teens, gangster coolness. Once a signifier of professional prestige and responsibility, the pager shifted systems and became part of the code of a bad-assed youth culture. But now pagers are carried by little children whose parents haven't gotten them cell phones yet, and so they too have changed significance, hi fact, as cell phones become more and more common, pagers themselves seem to be dwindling in significance. Not too long ago, pagers were hot stuff. Now, everyone is talking about cell phones. Of course, one of the reasons cell phones are such a lively conversation topic is purely functional: They are dangerous to use while driving a car and so are coming to be banned in a number of localities. But even here a social semiotic is at work. It isn't likely that cell phones would attract so much controversy if they didn't also send a rather negative image. With almost everyone owning one, it might seem strange to say that cell phones today have a somewhat negative image,

but they do—a point that is demonstrated every time someone apologizes for owning one. Have you ever heard someone say, or have said yourself, that "I own a cell phone, but I only use it for emergencies"? Or have you ever seen the bumper sticker that reads, "Hang up and start driving"? We wouldn't make such apologies or post such messages on our cars if we didn't feet that, somehow, there was something wrong with cell phones. And what is wrong lies in their cultural significance, not in the objects themselves. To see what this significance is, let's look further into the system in which cell phones appear. What often comes to mind when we think of cell phones today is their association with a certain kind of consumer, especially people driving sports utility vehicles (SUVS) and luxury sedans like the Lexus. There is a functional reason for this: Cell phones have become necessary equipment for the sorts of businesspeople, such as real estate professionals, who must spend a great deal of time in their cars and whose business activities make it important (as well as pleasurable) to drive status automobiles. At the same time, many middle-class parents find that cell phones are very good ways of keeping track of their children and SUVs have become the automotive choice of the middleand upper-middle-class American mom these days. Indeed, all you need to do is utter the phrase soccer mom, and immediately an image of a woman driving a Ford Excursion while chatting on a cell phone may come to mind. Now, part of the negativity in this image also has something to do with the history of the cell phone, particularly that intermediate era when cell phones were no longer the prerogative of the extremely powerful and wealthy but were still expensive enough to be out of ordinary consumers' reach. At this time, roughly the late 1980s, cell phones were the common possession of the notorious yuppies (an image reinforced by a 1980s song called "Car Phone," a parody of the 1970s hit "Convoy"), and were widely despised accordingly. Ironically, even when millions of non-yuppies and anti-yuppies carry cell phones, the old taint lingers. But only lingers. For, with the cell phone being such a common possession, its significance is now less a matter of who owns one as how it is used. Here we can look at the behavioral component of the system to which the cell phone belongs. And what we find are not only people who drive dangerously while gabbing on their phones but also compulsive s who chat away in restaurants (causing some eateries to ban cell phone use) and theaters. What all three behaviors share is the way that they reflect a certain privatization of public space, the way, that is, that cell phone s perform in public what was once a highly private act: talking on the phone. Once telephone conversations were conducted in the privacy of one's home or office—or, if in public, with the door to the phone booth shut. Now such conversations, whether for business or for pleasure, take place on the road, in the restaurant or theater, in shops, on the sidewalk, indeed just about everywhere. And here lies a good part of the current negative image of the cell phone, though most people are probably not conscious of it. For to treat publicly shared space as if it were one's private preserve, annoying or endangering others for one's personal pleasure, is, in essence, antisocial behavior. No one minds when people use their own private space privately, but when public space is treated as if it were private, something is taken away. The sense of a shared, common environment with its own set of rules to govern the social interactions that take place there is lost. And while we may not always be explicitly aware of it, this is one of the reasons we resent cell phone s, even when we use cell phones ourselves. At this point, as is often the case with a semiotic analysis, we can broaden the scope of our investigation to see what other current cultural phenomena can be associated with the cell phone's privatization of public space. We've already considered one such phenomenon—the SUV. For SUVs are not simply a mode of transportation, or even just status vehicles. Many who purchase them say that they would have preferred another car but feel safer in an SUV. Whether they put it explicitly or not, what they mean is that if they get into an accident, they want to be in the car that "wins." This may seem like perfectly rational behavior, and according to a highly individualistic (perhaps selfish would be the better word) code of conduct, it is. But looked at from a more communitarian perspective, the

desire to prevail in a car accident, the unconscious decision to kill rather than be killed, is less than social behavior. Similarly, the increasing number of Americans who withdraw behind the literal gates and figurative moats of gated communities also can be seen to represent a mode of antisocial behavior (it's no accident that they often drive SUVs). In a dangerous world, this behavior too is perfectly rational, but what it signifies is a society that is becoming so mistrustful that it is becoming atomized into suspicious individuals whose homes and cars are becoming fortresses against everyone else. The cell phone fits neatly into this system insofar as many of its s own them for safety purposes, whether it be to keep in touch with children who no longer seem safe in the public realm or with family . Many women carry them because the streets aren't such a safe place for women anymore. The September 11th attacks augmented this significance in an especially grim way. Stories of final conversations from engers and crew on doomed airlines and employees in the World Trade Center lent a new dimension to the image of the cell phone as a safety device. In this sense, it became a signifier within an American system threatened by terrorism, a shift in meaning that undermined, at least for a while, the negative image of the cell phone as the frivolous instrument of inconsiderate people. Once again, we can see from this semiotic adjustment how ordinary objects can be signifiers of changing historical conditions. The cell phone is such a rich source of semiotic significance that its analysis could go on considerably further, investigating, for instance, the way that it can be seen to reflect a workaholic world in which people feel the need to conduct their business anywhere and anytime, or the way that it has contributed to a new consciousness that demands constant communication (in both cases, the rise of e-mail is a part of the cultural system behind the meaning of the sign). But we'll stop here and leave those analyses to you. The point is that when you interpret a cultural sign, the actual object is not what is meaningful in a semiotic analysis. What matters is the overall cultural system, the social context, in which that object appears. A highly portable, wireless communication box is not a sign in itself: it becomes a sign only when seen in relation to other objects and other signs.