The Patterns of Symbolic Communication

Sui Yan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351597005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

With the classic semiotician Roland Barthes' ground-breaking research of semiotics, symbols are liberated from linguistics and extended to media research, which makes semiotics increasingly important especially in the present-day world dominated by new media.

In this book, the author offers an in-depth critique of the key theorizations of classic semiotics and clarifies some esoteric terminologies such as connotateur, isology, the metalanguage mechanism, the naturalization mechanism, etc. More importantly, combining semiotics with communication studies, the author proposes a number of innovative ideas, such as the leveraging communication, the collaborative communication, the rich variety of signifiers, etc. Besides, this book adds a practical dimension to semiotics studies by investigating diverse patterns of symbolic communication in the real world practices. It will help readers gain insights into the complexity of our life and society which depend on symbols for exchange and communication.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of semiotics and communication. Readers who are interested in symbolic communication will also benefit from it.

1
Socialization of symbols

Evolution of the relationship between the signifier and the signified

As suggested by the title of Roland Barthes’s book The Empire of Signs, mankind has been dominated by symbols, and human life has been subjected to a forest of symbolic representations. In particular, the contemporary life is inextricably connected with an era of consumerism, where the added value created by symbols constitutes a new source of capital in our society.¹ The implication is that not only our lifestyle in the age of post-industrialism and our culture in the post-modernist context but also the totality of our social relationship have all come under the complete domination of symbols. Only by relying on symbols and signs can we possibly acquire the vehicle to conduct exchanges and communications among human individuals, and between human beings and the world. Moreover, symbols are playing an increasingly crucial role in changing our lives, constructing our culture, and shaping our spiritual world.

1.1 Signs, the signifier, the signified, and the referents

One major achievement demonstrated by the celebrated masterpiece Course in General Linguistics, first published in 1916, by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure is that it transcended conventional linguistics by proposing a whole system of principles and methodologies that manifested salient tendencies of structuralism. In particular, the classic differentiation made by Saussure between the signifier and the signified provided a critical foundation for the explorations subsequently undertaken by structuralism into the process whereby meaning is generated, that is, the practice of signification. Those explorations have also furnished us with a unique perspective with which to examine and unravel the mechanisms of how symbolic meanings are produced and disseminated.

According to Saussure, each sign comprises a signifier and a signified. To put it in another way, each sign can be artificially divided into two parts – that which signifies and that which is signified. In order to facilitate our understanding of the signifier and the signified, I would like to embrace the definition, among many others, given by Peirce, who claimed that the so-called sign “is the symbolic representation of “something” by means of “another thing.” Then, what are the things that can be employed to represent something else and come to acquire the attributes of a sign? The greeting “hello” is that “thing” and the something that is represented is an inquiry into the well-being of the person greeted. In this case, a vocalized utterance or speech can be a sign. The Chinese phrase consisting of two characters “书桌,” or the English word “desk,” is the “thing” that stands for a piece of furniture on which an individual can perform activities of reading and writing. In this case, written words can serve as signs, and the written words can come from any language by any race or nation in the world. The red light in the traffic light system can be the “thing” which signals the prohibition of passage by either vehicles or pedestrians on the streets. On the other hand, the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square is the “thing” that symbolizes our remembrances and commemorations of the revolutionary martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the establishment of a new China. In those cases, physical objects can serve as signs. A Western-style suit can be the “thing” which signifies formality and solemnness as befitting an official or formal occasion. Likewise, a pair of blue jeans is the “thing” which represents leisureliness and casualness. A wedding gown can be the “thing” which epitomizes the bride and her marriage. In those cases, the dress one wears can function as symbols. Lei Feng is the “thing” which embodies the ethos of his era in which “serving the people” was championed as a mainstream value. Li Xiang, on the other hand, is the “thing” which is an incarnation of the sportsmanship as championed by the Olympic Games. Wang Jinxu is the “thing” which epitomizes the value of “pursuing industrial production before the enjoyment of life” during that era of history when the entire country of China suffered from severe scarcity of commodities. By contrast, Li Yuchun has become the “thing” which exemplifies a mood of the Chinese society in an age of production overcapacity – “sing whatever you want to sing, live in whatever way you want to live, and buy with loans and on credits.” In those cases, specific human individuals can function as signs. Finally, events can also serve as the vehicles of symbolic representations and examples abound. There is first the Opium War, which marks the beginning of a period of subjugation and humiliation in modern Chinese history. Secondly, we have the “May 4th Movement,” a movement which represents China’s efforts to fight against imperialism and feudalism. Moreover, there is the Wenchuan Earthquake, an unprecedented earthquake measuring 8.0 magnitude in which the all-out national efforts of disaster relief exemplify China’s national spirit of solidarity in the 21st century – “Don’t Cry for Me, Wenchuan! Keep Forging Ahead, China!” Finally, we can cite the example of the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which stands for the advent of the world’s most devastating economic crisis since World War II.

As a matter of fact, not only auditory speech, words, and characters in printed visual forms, physical objects, fashion and clothing, human individuals, and events can be classified as signs; all entities, be they natural or social, physical or mental, tangible or intangible, can be designated as signs as long as they can be employed to represent something else. In other words, virtually everything in our world can be turned into signs by human ingenuity. And the thing “itself,” which we utilize to represent something else, is what can be defined as the “signifier,” the signifying element, of a sign. That which is represented by the thing itself is what we refer to as the “signified” of the sign. The signifier is that which we can hear, see, or perceive in a sign, the auditory, visual, tactile, gustatory, or olfactory element in a sign which, by means of its physical property or physical form, can serve as the medium that carries the content of the sign. The signifier belongs to the expressive layer that carries the content of a sign and functions as the vehicle for conveying the signified, “signifying that which can only be expressed by the signifier itself.” For the auditory linguistic sign, the signifier is the sound which we can hear. For example, if we pronounce aloud the syllable “hao” (good), the syllable’s sound waves constitute the physical property of this signifier. For the written linguistic sign, the signifier is the words and the letters which we see and read, like the individual characters as contained in this book, whose physical existence is the printing ink. As for the physical signs, the signifier is the actual physical object which we witness with our naked eyes, such as the traffic lights on the street or the buildings that line the roads.

Regarding the concept of signified, there are three different interpretations.

The first interpretation is that the signified refers to the concrete physical presences or the objective world which the sign explicates or expounds. In this case, the signified means “the thing that is referred to.” However, such an interpretation runs counter to semiotics, because semiotics is only committed to an understanding of how meanings are made possible rather than what the physical world (all that is referred to in this world) actually is, or whether the meaning conveyed is right or wrong. While this has already become a well-established consensus, some semiologists still tend to confuse the “signified” with “the thing referred to” in their theorizing. Such a tendency can be attributed to the fact that, in some people’s subconscious, they are convinced that signs have the function of replacing the physical objects in the real world. This practice of equating signs with the physical world they refer to is one of the major reasons that can account for the formation of what we can call “the mechanism of naturalization,” an issue on which I will expound in considerable detail in my subsequent discussions.

The second interpretation is that the signified is the representation of the sign in the mind of the sign user, and, as such, it is entirely a form of mental activity in the mind of the sign user. Hence, the signified is a concept which the sign expresses. This interpretation is also the position maintained by Saussure, that the signifier is not a particular thing, but the psychological representation of that thing. “Saussure himself has clearly marked the mental nature of the signified by calling it a concept: the signified of the word ox is not the animal ox, but its mental image.”² For example, in the auditory language of speech, when a person who speaks Chinese articulates the sound of “niu,” or when an English-speaking person produces the pronunciation of [oks], “niu” or [oks] becomes the signifier of the sign “牛” or “ox.” Whereas in our written language, the sign “牛” or “ox” which we see printed on a sheet of paper becomes a signifier, which does not really refer to a specific animal that is grazing on the pasture or the one which is ploughing in the fields, but to the concept of “a domesticated form of large horned ruminating mammals, with hoofs at the end of their feet and with long hair at the tips of their tails.” This very concept is the mental representation of the sign “牛” or “ox” in the mind of the sign user. Such an interpretation is obviously a rebuttal of the preceding interpretation about the signified. The second interpretation is justified in that “some signs absolutely have no ‘real’ existences as physical objects that they refer to, including abstract nouns like truth or freedom or imaginary items like the mermaid or the unicorn.”³ Although a large number of signs like “牛” (or “ox”) have equivalent “objects of physical existence” that they refer to, an equally large number of signs like the legendary animal “kylin” (unique to Chinese culture) and “love” have no such “objects of physical existence” in the real world. In other words, they do not have the objective realities which they are supposed to refer to. Nevertheless, this category of signs has become an indispensable part of our daily communication and cultural interaction as legitimately as the former category.

The third interpretation is that the signified is the “dicible” (a French word meaning “utterable”). This is the interpretation proposed by the philosophers of the Stoic School, which Roland Barthes cited in his Elements of Semiology. Roland Barthes asserts that “the Stoics carefully distinguished the phantasia logiki (the mental representation), the tinganon (the real thing) and the lekton (the utterable). The signified is neither the phantasia nor the tinganon but rather the lekton; being neither an act of consciousness, nor a real thing, it can be defined only within the signifying process, in a quasi-tautological way: it is this ‘something’ which is meant by the person who uses the sign.” According to the interpretation of those Stoic philosophers, the so-called “dicible” refers to what is signified by the signifier, “that which can only be articulated by the signifiers themselves and by nothing else,” not necessarily the concepts evoked by the signs. For instance, a certain sports sweater, as a kind of vestimentary item (not as a linguistic or verbal element), can serve as a signifier, signifying “long autumn walks in the woods,”⁴ instead of a particular shirt of a particular color, size, or fashion which one wears during sports activities, or the concept of the sports sweater – “the shirt worn for sports activities.” However, this so-called “dicible” seems to be exactly the signified of the connotateurs (a French term meaning “connotators”), a topic which will be discussed in the succeeding sections of this chapter. Thus, the idea of the “dicible” is marred due to a confusion between the signified of the denotateur (a French term meaning “denotators”) and the signified of the connotateur.⁵

Based on the foregoing discussions, we can understand that Saussure’s conception of the signified, that is, the second of the above-mentioned interpretations, seems to be a more reasonable interpretation, and hence is more practicable. With this understanding about the notion of the signified, we can realize that a sign is actually a compound in which either an auditory sound or a visual image is blended with a concept. In this combination, “the plane of the signifiers constitutes the plane of expression and that of the signifieds the plane of content.”⁶ Regarding the relationship between the signifier and the signified, some scholars have succinctly concluded that “the signifier is the form of the sign, which is the visible part of the sign, whereas the signified is the meaning of the sign, the invisible part of the sign.”⁷ Since the signified is a mental representation of the signifier that is evoked in the mind of the sign user, it follows that it can be conceived, imagined, and deliberated in the mind and come to acquire a multiplicity of meanings. This is a point which will be separately treated later.

Nevertheless, no matter how the signifier and the signified are defined, our effort to classify those two concepts is simply designed to uncover how the meaning is generated. Such a classification is a deliberate, artificial process, for the sake of theoretical convenience. In the actual process of using a sign, such a classification does not really happen or exist. In real-world communication acts, the signifier and the signified are absolutely indivisible, just like two sides of a coin.

As far as semiotics is concerned, a sign possesses only two related items – the signifier and the signified. There is no such item as “referents” because, as pointed out above, semiotics is only concerned with the system of signs rather than the objective world. It is precisely on this point that semiotics has been accused as being “appallingly destitute of a historical sense.” Therefore, in order to circumvent this appalling lack of historical sense, this present research seeks to bring about a marriage between the semiotic study and the study of historical ideologies in an effort not only to reveal the process whereby meanings are generated but also to explore the relationship between meaning and reality, history, ideology and culture. Therefore, although some leading scholars have provided comparatively clear definitions concerning the concept “signified,” I have ventured to make further clarifications of this concept which, repetitive and redundant as they may seem, may help to shed light on another concept “referents” as we arrive at a full understanding of the signified.

The so-called “referents” are the physical objects, events, or situations that the signs refer to, or the physical objects, events, or situations that correspond to or match the signs. For instance, in a particular context, the sign “desk” can be taken to mean a specific wooden structure in the old house where you lived during your childhood, which is defined in dictionary as “desk.” For another example, in a particular context, the sign “love” can be used to refer to the soul-stirring romantic affair that actually happened between the renowned Chinese poet Hsu Chih-mo and his lover, Lu Xiaoman. In order to probe into the relationship between meaning and reality, history, ideology, and culture, it is necessary not only to apply the concepts of the signifier and the signified but also to make this pair of correlated concepts to bear on yet another concept, i.e. the concept of “referents.” In this way, we may possibly locate the connections between the meanings uncovered by semiotics and our life, our world, and the culture in which we live.

1.2 The relationship between the signifier and the signified: an evolution from the arbitrariness to motivation

A few years ago, when I drove my car, my four-year-old daughter often warned me by reciting the words of the song she learned at kindergarten: “Red says stop and green says go, yellow says wait and you’d better go slow.” When she was almost five, she asked me one day, quite abruptly, with her eyes wide open and gazing at me, “Why do you have to stop on red and drive on green? Who made those rules, the policemen?” I found myself virtually nonplussed, confronted by the young thinker not yet five years old and not yet sign-dominated or socialized. Indeed, who was responsible for the traffic regulations in which the green signal allows traffic to proceed in the direction denoted, while the red signal prohibits any traffic from proceeding? If the police were responsible for making those rules, who were those policemen actually? Were they policemen in China or in foreign countries? Are there any natural connections between the red light as the signifier and the prohibition of traffic procession as the signified? When we see a red light, does it have to signify the “prohibition of traffic procession” in our mind? Is it possible for the red signal to convey an opposite directive – the procession of traffic? When we pronounce [oks] or write the word “ox,” does it have to express the concept of “a domesticated form of large horned ruminating mammals, with hoofs at the end of their feet and with long hair at the tips of their tails?” Is it possible for the sound image [oks] or the print image “ox” to mean “a kind of herbivorous mammal whose head is small, with a long face, ears standing upright, with mane along its neck, its four limbs strong and a hoof for each limb, good at galloping, with long hair on its tail (which is the concept of horse as defined in dictionaries)?” The answers to those questions are definitely negative, because otherwise, human communication would be rendered entirely impossible, and human existence in this world would be rendered difficult. Thus, it is easy for us to conclude that th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Symbolization and symbolic communication are everywhere around us
• 1 Socialization of symbols: evolution of the relationship between the signifier and the signified
• 2 How connotation and metalanguage construct and disseminate meaning
• 3 The nature of connotateurs: the mode of leveraging
• 4 Correspondence between connotation and metaphor and between metalanguage and metonymy
• 5 The sign’s mechanisms of producing and communicating mythologies
• 6 The media’s mechanism of producing opinion by means of symbols
• 7 The richness of signifiers: the mode of selective
• 8 Isology: the mode of hegemony-oriented manipulative communication
• Conclusion
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index