Again a Definition,
When casually speaking with colleagues, I continually again am asked to define semiotics. I am not sure anyone
can, or even who the idea should be attributed to since its resurgence in the mid twentieth century. Perhaps Derrida’s
deconstructionism claims the word, but I find the ideas (if not the word itself) prevalent in the 1960s
authors I have spoken about so far in these blogs (Barthes, Sontag). I suppose
my thinking puts semiotics as a subset of postmodernism. We can attribute that
word in its general sense of meaning today to Lyotard. In 1979 the Frenchman
tried to explain the differences he saw in critical thinking in the couple of
decades before he was writing. He claimed the trend was to escape defining
modernist culture as large ideas, instead breaking down aspects of culture in
smaller units. As I see them, the popular “Mythologies” of Barthes and the “Camp”
aesthetics of Sontag engage in this breakdown.
Taking a cue from Lyotard, we can look at postmodernism as an evolution in thinking
from the modernism that had existed prior to the 1950s. Semiotics is a code
word during this era. In A Theory of
Semiotics by Umberto Eco from the 1970’s, a decade before he would break
into putting his ideas into the action of fiction-writing, Eco attempts to
explain semiotics as a way of coding acceptable signals for the order of things,
either in writing, art, or general cultural life.
I came to Eco in the 1980s while studying music theory. I remember
the excitement of relating culturally accepted progressions of chords to the
mystery-solving philosophies of The Name of the Rose. One great thing
about that novel, Eco’s first, was that anyone could read it and relate the philosophies
behind it to their own life. In terms of the music theory I was studying, I
found that Eco himself in a brief reference related the search for signals to
music theory. In a note in the first chapter of A Theory of Semiotics,
Eco finds it amusing that music theorists would be turning to semiotics. He
maintains that Western music theory since the eighteenth century has been a
prime example of signs and signals. Semioticians have more to learn from music
theorists, he claims, than music theorists have to learn from semioticians.
Perhaps, then, music theory turned briefly to semiotics as a way of validating itself.
Personally, I find that music theorists are constantly trying to validate their
findings. No matter how insightful a theory can be, the creativity of musicians
always manages to find exceptions to the would-be rules. My attitude is
probably a bad one and one reason why I did not stick with the discipline.
The search for new ways to describe music led me to
semiotics in the 1980s, though even in ethnomusicology, where semiotics seemed
to me to be used more prevalently than anywhere else at the time, the interest
would die out before the turn of the century. The attempt to describe the
musics of the world led theorists to look beyond the constrictions of Western theory.
But even the notion of signs and symbols felt restrictive in relation to the
burgeoning studies in relating art to culture – avenues of inquiry such as
feminism, race relations, class structures and their influence on the product
of music and other art. And, in keeping with Lyotard, the attempt here was to
break down these large inquiries into smaller units. Cultural thinkers attempt
to define specific examples, often popular in the conception, in smaller, more
immediate ways that have more to do with direct effect on the receiver than on
any universal theory.
Anyone today can still delight in the world of William of
Baskerville and his search for a murderer in a medieval Italian monastery,
relating that mystery to the mysteries of our own lives and interests.
Likewise, the postmodernist philosophies that are still debated and expanded
on, show us that we can think and rethink the notion of signs and symbols to
fit our own specific circumstances and more fully explain our immediate
reactions to each cultural phenomenon we encounter.
Eco, Umberto. The
Name of the Rose. 1st English translation by William Weaver,
1980, Warner books.
-----. A
Theory of Semiotics. 1st English translation, 1978, Indiana
University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 197, trans. By Geoff
Benington, 1984.
