Reading Between The Signs

NEARLY 80 YEARS after the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure came upon his discovery that the sign, doublefaced by nature, hides its meaning behind the surface of language, editor Marshall Blonsky claims in his introduction that the science of semiotics has reached a point of critical paralysis, suspended somewhere in between the realms of theory and practice, and undermined by the literal crisis in meaning that it originally set out to study.

The 46 brief essays in On Signs are live experiments in language that speak to the state of the art of criticism and test the limits of applying the reading process to various aspects of cultural behavior.

To a semiotician's practiced eye, society's every phenomenon and event is a text inviting interpretation, an opportunity for writing oneself into the margins of the scene as reader-critic-author. Not that the margins are without their privileges. Blonsky observes--as no less than a cataclysm--the recent deaths of Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, whose posthumous presence in the collection reflects how the "death of the authors" has ironically inaugurated a backward-looking era for cultural literacy. At the same time, Blonsky's exclusive salon is also visited by still-vital voices such as Umberto Eco, Fredric Jameson and Julia Kristeva. The result is a surprisingly accessible sourcebook on the fallout of postmodern self-expressionism that tries to rescue semiotics from exclusive appropriation by French aesthete-intellectuals and present its current practice as an applied science for decoding the loaded meanings of everyday situations.

The essays, broad-ranging in content as well as in presentation, are collected under three headings. Part I, "Seeing Signs," initiates one into the underworld of hidden meanings, exposing the rampant process of fabrication in which symbols are manipulated to guide mass ideology. In "Strategies of Lying," Umberto Eco performs a structural operation to demonstrate how Nixon's image-making speeches were variations on the same mythic elements composing Little Red Riding Hood. Michel de Certeau's "The Jabbering, of Social Life" reduces politics to a social organ polluting the environment with mindless dogma. The heralding of the Reagan Age is also blamed on a carefully-devised strategy of ignorance that is not without its humor:

Ronald Reagan is like Ronald McDonald, like Donald Duck... all of them are icons, all are interchangeable in the Fun House this country has become. For an instant, Eco and I shared an unconscious, a kind of delirium in which Ronald (Mc)Donald produces Donald and the RR of our president makes for the DD of the Donald Duck that, for once at least, Reagan himself thought he was like.

The phantasm of popular "culture" evoked by Blonsky's associations plays on the familiar theme of America the Bland.

In "Electronic Ceremonies," Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz examine the media's responsibility for the performance-as-reality, recalling how Charles and Di's royal nuptials were transformed into a product for public consumption by the mass invitations sent out via television, the "class equalizer." Roland Barthes's "I Hear and I Obey..." goes to obscenity's other extreme, reducing audience participation to instinctive impulse. Guido Crepax's comic strip, "The Story of O," illustrates how it is in the insidious positioning of narrator and audience that pornographic outrage finds expression; as Barthes observes from the sidelines, O's sexual organ is her ear.

Part Two, "Understanding the Meaning of Signs" is a retrospective glance at semiotics' coming-to-consciousness. One has Jakobson's ode "Dear Claude, Cher Maitre," addressed to the father of structuralism, Levi-Strauss, and Jacques Derrida's "To Speculate-On 'Freud,"' acknowledging semiotics's intertextual as well as interdisciplinary legacy.

The idea of artistic representation as a political act is most graphically evidenced in Susan Meisala's still-life narrative of death and torture in South America. The mute photos preserve the senselessness of reality in living art, throwing out bodies to a horrified audience and demanding that they be "read." In Part Three, "Signs of Life," Edmund Desnoes compares the state of advanced capitalism--which renders the United States a fragmented society where the cluttered images "never make a whole"--with the "underdevelopment" of Latin America, where "everything is centripetal, everything is striving after unity and an axis."

In "Cuba Made Me So," he attacks the Aryan North's stereotyping indifference to Latin American culture in reappropriating the image-making process:

The Latin American photographer has the possibility, and the means, for naming the things of our world, for demonstrating that there is another kind of beauty, that faces of the First World are not the only ones.

Altering the frame of perception changes the system of values.

AT THE END of his treatise on "The Semiotics of Semiotics," Wlad Godzich professes the self-conscious hope "to have been doing semiotics and not merely to have been writing about it." It is Barthes, however, who executes the language of language with consummate grace. Whether he is posing with candid self exposure in a Playboy interview ("I had a super skinny morphology throughout my youth") or indulging in speculation about the culinary orgasms of Brillat-Savarin ("BS desires the word as he desires truffles") or performing with routine ease a classic clinical dissection of text ("A Textual Analysis of a Tale of Poe"), it is with an incomparable delicacy of taste that he transforms personal fetishes into profound insight.

Barthes perfects self-consciousness as style. "Day By Day With Roland Barthes" delivers up the pleasures of the quotidienne with a painfully-attuned sensibility: "It is a moral effort to write small." In "How To Spend A Week in Paris," Barthes becomes bag-lady, retrieving aesthetic fragments from among the cultural litter.

Encumbered towards the end of his life by a tormented body, Barthes's fantasy of self-effacement represents the supreme death wish, the desire to become "the walking paradox who draws attention to his desire not to draw attention." In its headless, anonymous authority, On Signs is a body eclectic, composed of thin tissue samples of each author's textual corpus. The selling appeal of its entire package lies in its utility. Whether looking at the applications of semiotics in the bra-manufacturing industry or delivering newly-translated (and still largely incomprehensible) canonical texts and theories of reading, the collection provides a dense assortment of textual pleasures that at least temporarily defers the problem of what is there to be read.