Semantics and Semiotics, part II

I am afraid that I am muddying the water more by my definitions than I am clarifying. I hate when that happens. Of course these are complex disciplines, and they are even further confused because they overlap. For instance, I don't think you can really jump into semiotics without some basic understanding of poetics or cultural anthropology (ethnography).

Another thing that makes it difficult is that the boundaries are still being wrestled over. I am tempted to say that semiotics is semantics applied to all of human communication (and by some of us Catholic nuts to the communication between God and humans, but this gets into really long-winded conversations that I do not have time for right now - please bring it up later). However, a more learned semiotician might object to this, saying that semantics is a particular discipline and that, while semiotics comes out of semantics, has grown and developed as to really be seen as something completely apart. He would probably be right, but I will stand with my simple distinction. I am a bit of a simpleton, and it works better for my gin-addled brain.

So here are a couple of examples of how semiotics can work:

A semiotician and a semanticist are walking down the road. They see a car cut another car off. One of the cars is driven by a 30-ish fellow with a "Kiss me, I'm Italian" sticker, as well as olive skin, dark hair, etc. The other is driven by another 30-ish fellow, but with a Harris tweed driving cap, a missing front tooth. and a shamrock pin. They pull over and the Italian starts yelling loudly and gesticulating madly. The Irish fellow gets out and quietly seethes, getting redder and redder, his fists clenching up. The Italian makes a gesture and the Irishman says something and the next thing you know they are coming to blows. A policeman walks up, calms everyone down and begins making his report.

The two academics offer their services as witnesses. The policeman says, "fine, go ahead." The semantics fellow talks about the words exchanged, looking at nuances of meaning and goes into some detail about the etymologies, and how they related to Gaelic Irish and Latin and Italian, and the possible shades of meaning that can be construed by the parties. The semiotician says, "well, yes, that is all true, but if we look at the gestures, even the choices of clothing, the care given to the cars, we can find evidence contraindicating the purely verbal exchange. For instance, when the Italian fellow said "figlio d'un puttana," he had his third and fourth fingers pointing to his own heart, a gesture we find in the third altarpiece of the Church of San Lorenzo in the village of Pienza, painted by an anonymous master of the 16th Century. Now, we know that the visual language of that time and that place were heavily influenced by late Byzantine visual language, so we look for a similar gesture in Ravenna, where we find one in the mosaics outside the restroom of the Orthodox Baptistry. Sure enough, the gesture belongs to Judas, so we have to take the later Tuscan gesture to have at least some degree of self-condemnation. When our Italian here was doing this as he said, "figlio d'un puttana" he was pointing the blame at himself. That the Irishman said, "sod it you git" was his own blatant misinterpretation of the cultural norm. I would say that the Irishman completele provoked the fisticuffs."

At this the semantician said, "well, that may be, and for the Irishman to have used such an Anglo Saxon term and in that context would imply that he was suggesting that the Italian perform immoral acts with his mother, prostitute that she may be..."

At this neither the Irishman, the Italian, nor the cop could take much more, and they got together and said, "this is crazy! Neither of them knows of this 16th Century altarpiece or any of this. How can you claim that they are some encyclopaedias?"

"Ah," said the semiotician, "but we see this gesture used in every single Fellini movie, every episode of Mike Buongiorno's show, even in political discourse. He would not have to know the exact origin, I just used that to use a precise example to clarify what it meant. He absorbed the meaning of the gesture every day in his upbringing."

So the cop agreed, and fined the Irishman for starting the fight.

Now it so happened that there was another semiotician lurking nearby, one who had made a thorough study of early Irish manuscripts. He stepped in and said, "now, this is entirely unfair. As you transalpines might not know, this gesture is found all over the Book of Kells to signify hostile intent. Padraig O'Fircthmornngnihm, an eighth century priest, brought over a copy of the Ravenna mosaic, but was confused as to who was making the gesture, and interpreted it as an early form of flipping the bird. You will find twelve references to it in Finnegan's Wake, and Malachy McCourt used it on the Tonight Show twenty years ago."

The cop was thoroughly confused. "But I thought you guys were supposed to bring out the hidden meanings of things! You are just making it all more complex.

"No, we aren't," said the first semiotician. "You are understanding more and more about the subtle layers of discourse. The problem is that it is a complex situation. Now, you could take all this complexity and become paralyzed, but that is to get so wrapped up in minutiae that you forget that a fight broke out and an immediate solution is called for (this is basically what certain French cultural theorists do on purpose - show the extreme cases of difficulty and claim that those cases prove the impossibility of any coherence anywhere, but, in spite of looking cool in berets and smoking Galoises and being hip, they are completely wrong). That is why when you are off duty you should pick up "Interpretation and Overinterpretation" by Umberto Eco. We have pointed out possible layers of meaning, but you have to look at the roles of the authors of these gestures as well. We call that the intentio auctoris, and that is what your job is to find out. Were these words and gestures 'fighting words' or not?"

The cop thinks for a moment and says, "but surely you are not saying that these men are just slaves to the flow of language."

"No, not at all!" says the semiotician. "We are all Catholics here. We believe in free will. It is just that in using language we are wielding a powerful tool, that comes with a lot of extras loaded on."

"OK, I buy that," the cop says, "but it would really seem that this is not super useful here. Now, when I am looking for relations between Giotto and Dante, I can see how this would help me, because a slight variant on a speech might drasticly change the theological tone of the Divine Comedy, but here..."

"Not only is language a powerful tool, but so is semiotics. It would seem that you are perhaps using the wrong tool by calling our expertise up."

"But you offered your services," the cop interrupted, testily.

"Well, yes, but your job as reader is to apply the right tool to the right job. We talk about the intentio lectoris, the intent of the reader, in this case the empirical reader, namely you. We offered our tools, but it is your job to decide if our tools are the correct ones. We might think that the case calls for it, but we are implying an intentio lectoris that can be called the intent of the model reader."

Realizing that his colleague was putting his foot in it, the second semiotician suggested, "well, we are really delving into metalanguage here. The reader of the sign would have to be the Irishman. The policeman, us, we are doing a metareadinn of the sign. If we are looking for intentio lectoris, it must be on the part of the Irishman."

This went on late into the night, although they moved it to a cafe. At the end they decided to let bygones be bygones and start a symposium on the use of gesture in a cross--cultural context, focusing on late Byzantine art and the Book of Kells.

I hope that makes it as clear as Guiness or espresso!