Session 6: Semiotics of cultural space

‘Geosemiotics’ (Scollon & Scollon 2003)

Ron Scollon Suzanne Wong Scollon

Signs must be studied as ‘signs in place’ ! The property of indexicality is a property of all signs.

That is so because all signs must be located in the material world to exist…we advocate paying less heed to abstract meaning potential and more towards actual, real-world meaning.

Erving Goffman (1922-82)

• ‘Interaction order’– The individual constructs

and communicates a sense of ‘self’ in the course of interaction

– Social interaction is organised• The (public) ‘front stage’

is organised to convey a particular conception

• The (private) ‘back stage’ serves to project another (more truthful?) ‘self’

Geosemiotics

Interaction takes place in an environment (which is made of visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile and thermal signs) and is directly indexable. Each person brings a personal history of experience, knowledge and interests, motivations and dispositions into any moment of interaction. Geosemiotics is the study of the ‘indexicability’ of the material world.

We simply cannot act in the world without ‘giving off’ (indexing) a personal identity or a social position/role. We see others as performers in a certain physical space. Places also participate in discourses that tell us something about the organisation of social interaction (private-public; vernacular-modern...)

We all have our ‘sign equipment’ at our disposal when engaging in social interaction.

VISUAL SEMIOTICS VS. GEOSEMIOTICS

The sign inscription (font, design, colour) and the sign placement (upper-lower; left-right; center-periphery) within a frame, image, picture

(decontextualised semiotics)

vs.

Signs in the material world

(contextualised semiotics)

Two possible points of view concerning discourses in place in the material world

(Scollon & Scollon 2003)

Place orientation: Discourse orientation:

A particular discourse is distributed widely across many different times and places; whatever might be found in any single place leads out to many other places and times. The semiotic interaction between the constitutive elements of a place, however, is unique.

Every place features a semiotic aggregate of many discourses all in interaction with each other; these discourses produce a particular place as a unique place on earth

Semiotic resources for the production of theinteraction order

We can ‘read’ from the picture what the clients could read in that precise moment (the lived social circumstance)

We all know (client included) that the waiter depicted is only performing his social self (front stage); as clients we are not interested in the waiter’s ‘backstage’ behaviour

CIVIL INATTENTION (E. Goffman)the act of acknowledging another person’s existence without imposing upon him/her, thus creating

a sense of boundary and privacy within the context of a public or shared space

The signs we choose not to pay attention to / not to interpret verbally …

…tell something about our personal front and our social selves

Case study: the railroad sign code and subjective interpretation of signs

(Bade 2011)

• In his article, David Bade (2011) recounts an accident between a train and a van which involved an acquaintance and his family. The facts as Bade recalls them are that the van-driver drove around the lowered crossing gates after the train had passed on his side of the tracks, and was hit by a second train travelling in the opposite direction on the far tracks. The whole family of five was killed instantly as a direct result of the driver’s course of action.

• The incident is remarkable, according to Bade (2011: 713), insofar as – “that particular crossing was marked by a standard railroad crossing

sign in front of the tracks and equipped with crossing gates to prevent passage, flashing red lights and ringing bells. In addition, the oncoming train as well as the just passed train were blowing their horns as they each approached their respective crossings”.

With all these signs, how did the driver of the van fail to get the message? Did those signs communicate nothing to him?

the interpretation of railroad signs is subject to the same kind of indeterminacy characteristic of spoken and written language

• David Bade goes on to reconstruct the incident involving his friend on the basis of his own history of experience with railroad crossings, and imagines a situation in which the signs are in fact ambiguous: the signals continue ‘operating’ for some time even after the train has passed (in fact, after the train has passed a certain number of yards beyond the crossing). Thus, even though there is no longer any danger involved, the signals continue to ‘sign’ danger. It makes sense to assume that experienced car-drivers are aware of this ‘inconsistency’, i.e. after the train has passed, they make the signals mean ‘no danger’. Even though it is against the law, impatient drivers may drive through the crossing by driving round the lowered gates. In such situations, the allegedly unambiguous nature of the railroad sign system (as put down in the manuals) enters in conflict with the human sign-maker experiencing the event of the train passing by:

 – In such cases we tend to believe our own perception/interpretation of the

situation we are in and to discount the technical apparatus as irrelevant in the present situation […] The meaning of the signs from the perspective of the designers of the systems is invariant in time, but for those waiting on a sign or using one in a given situation, the timing of the sign is itself significant. (2011: 718)