Semiotic Buddha: Quest for Enlightenment

Semiotics is an emerging buzz-word in the marketing research circles in India. I am fascinated by this mysterious colourful box (not a black box) of semiotics. While attending a semiotics workshop at IIML, Noida last week I was delighted to see that Indian researchers are open to embracing the semiotic mind-set. It was also heartening to see that Indian brand managers are also seeking semiotics as a strategic input in brand-building. However, not many of seem to have a clear idea about this discipline. Chris Arning beautifully compared semiotics with meditation. We all know that meditation (semiotics) is useful and fascinating, some of us practice it, but none of us fully understand how it works. This metaphor made me realize that I am a mere disciple on an eternal quest for semiotic enlightenment, with a goal to become a Semiotic Buddha – the one who understands the ultimate Semiotics. ;)

My first rendezvous with semiotics was during my master’s program in communications at MICA. The course at MICA was my first step towards understanding semiotics. The workshop this week was the second step. Now, my goal is 998 steps away. Being a first year PhD student, I feel that this is the best time for me to start walking on this path of academic exploration. In a series of blog posts on semiotics, I would be periodically sharing a beginner’s perspective on what I read over the next couple of years. I hope that this endeavour would help other beginners like me on their journey as well.

I begin this blog series by sharing my understanding of how semiotics differs from traditional qualitative research. These thoughts are based on the discussions we had at the workshop, supplemented by some preliminary reading on cognitive psychology.

How is Semiotics different from traditional Qualitative Research?

The subject matter of semiotics is ‘interpretation of meaning’ – to decipher how consumers create meaning in their minds when they witness any stimulus. Any individual, who uses his mind to interpret something, would be using certain habitual or routinized modes of thinking. These habitual modes of thinking are created through a learning process (conditioning) that the individual goes through in his entire life. There are many things in his environment that influence the way his mind is wired to think (develop schemas/ semantic networks in his mind).

Semiotics looks at the elements from the individual’s cultural environment deemed to have shaped the semantic structure of his mind. For example, being an Indian, I would have grown up watching a certain kind of movies and TV shows and I must be absorbing cultural content that is currently being shared around me. All these cultural ‘texts’ would be depicting the idea of ‘success’ in a certain way. These depictions or codes of success would have subconsciously entered into my mind and would have modified the wiring of my schema of ‘success’.

Suppose a researcher needs to understand the schema of success – what does ‘success’ mean to the consumer? A traditional qualitative researcher would conduct a focus group discussion or an in-depth interview with the consumer and elicit his verbal responses to the idea of success. Although this method has the potential to give rich content, the hard truth is that consumers would not be aware of their own subconscious schemas and it would be difficult for them to articulate the same. Furthermore, deliberative elicitation would lead to rationalization of thoughts and we would not be able to uncover the raw subconscious structure. Chris Arning used another beautiful metaphor of the surface of the ocean vs. the wave current underneath the surface. Traditional qualitative research would capture whatever appears on the surface, but may not be able to dive into the depths sufficiently.

But if the consumer is not able to tell me what is in his mind, who will?

We do not have a machine that can let a researcher travel into the subconscious mind of the consumer and to take photographs of the semantic networks in his mind ;). But semiotics shows us the way forward. The basic premise of cultural semiotics is that individuals consume cultural content and absorb the semiotic flow of these texts into their memory. These individuals then mimic the semantic structure reflected in these cultural texts. Hence, if we analyse the cultural content that surrounds the individual and decode the semantic structures within these texts, we can construct a replica of the semantic structure that exists within the consumer’s mind. This is the reverse engineering technique followed by a semiotician.

Traditional qualitative research is inside-out, whereas semiotics is outside-in. Hence, semiotics does not involve interviewing of consumers. The population/ sample to be studied consist of cultural texts like ads, movies, music, materials, packaging, blogs, etc. The sampling of content follows the general sampling principles of traditional research – aiming for a balance of parsimony and representativeness. These texts are deconstructed and analysed using semiotic analysis tools and theories. Semiotics uses a rich bag of techniques and theories for analysis. The colourful, enigmatic box of semiotic theories and techniques is what remains to be explored. I would be exploring these theories and techniques one by one and would share my thoughts on them in my future blog posts. I invite critical feedback on my posts from researchers (practitioners and academic) and students. Let’s all discuss, debate and learn together :)

Critically Yours

As researchers, and more so as human beings, each one of us has a tendency to be critical about many things we perceive around us. It is a vital skill to possess. Without the ability to critically 'read' the content shared by the outside world, mankind would not have been able to develop and evolve culturally.

What does it mean to be critical? Is it only about finding faults and bashing the creator of any content? No. Being critical means being wakeful while reading (or watching, hearing) any content. One should not blindly accept any content at face-value without analyzing and convincing oneself about its credibility. Being critical also means being mindful and conscious of our own thoughts - the content being created inside our own mind.

When we look at any content in the form of a text, a film, an ad, a speech or any form of communication or behavior, our mind starts the critiquing process. However, most of us use our personal biases and jump to conclusions. One needs to take into consideration all the authors of the content that is being critiqued - who created the content, shared the content, distorted the content, interpreted the content.

The interpreter (the viewer) is as much the co-author of the content as the creator because the viewer tends to project his self image on the content and create personal meaning. The 'culture' or the history of the larger social group that the viewer and the creator are a part of also plays a role in the creation of meaning because it shapes shared reference points of interpretation.

Although each one of us have our own idiosyncratic method of critiquing the content we consume, I would like to give a glimpse of the typology of Literary Critics from the domain of Consumer Culture Theory propounded by Barbara Stern (1989):

1. New Critics – focus on ‘what is said’ than ‘what it means’
2. Archetypal Critics – organize textual elements into packages of collective psychological, cultural thought patterns (archetypes)
3. Psychoanalytical Critics – analyze the psychological relationship between the reader and the text – how the reader creates personal meaning
4. Structural Critics – uncover multiple possible meanings of a text from a semiotic perspective
5. Deconstructionist Critics – understand meanings from binary opposites – defining based on what something is not.
6. Socio-cultural critics – explore foundations of ideologies like classism, racism, sexism, etc. that shape literature.

The above modes of literary criticism provide huge scope for analyzing the content from multiple vantage points. An uninformed critic may use any personalized technique that is skewed towards only one of the above techniques. Not only researchers, but the awareness of these methods would help people from all walks of life to become mindful critics.

Reference:

Stern, Barbara B. (1989), “Literary Criticism and Consumer Research: Overview and Illustrative Analysis,” Journal of Consumer Research, 16 (December), 322–34.

What is "Ideal" Cinema?

In the midst of the heated debates stirred by PK, one needs to look back and think about what is the purpose of cinema and what is "ideal" cinema? As film-makers, should we strive towards portraying reality or consider cinema as a piece of idiosyncratic  art 'authored' by the filmmaker? As viewers, do we project ourselves on the movie and 'create' personal meaning and interpretations from it? Or are these interpretations seeded by the film-maker? Are all possible interpretations of a movie under the control of a filmmaker?

This article reviews some of the ideas and theories present in the literature on media and film studies.

Is “Real” the “Ideal”?

Film critic Andre Bazin makes a distinction between “those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality”. He feels that any manipulation of the image or the dramatic sets and lighting stands in the way of releasing film’s true potential for realism. Reality has no place in this hallucinatory world of illusion; its beauty is in its dreamy detachment from the grounded, solid world outside the screen. 

 “Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and its ugliness.” He appreciates neo-realism as “a kind of humanism” first and a “style of filmmaking” second. He seems much taken by the idea of shooting an entire film about a man to whom nothing happens for ninety minutes.

But it is equally as impossible to make a film without making some sort of statement and imposing some type of perspective on the viewer. It cannot help but express in some way the views and feelings of its creator. The very act of making a film is already tampering with reality by capturing it in an artificial form. The purest form of Bazin’s vision of the ultimate realistic film, with no visible montage, no plot, no artificial or suggestive elements, and no signals sent to the audience to aid in its interpretation, is perhaps contradictory to the very purpose of this art form’s existence.
In the 1850s, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) condemned realism as a "war on imagination." 

For Bazin, this realism was enhanced through certain stylistic techniques and choices, including its tendency toward on-location shooting, which helped confirm the existence of a world beyond the screen. Deep focus and minimal editing promoted an ambiguity of vision that more closely resembled the spectator's perception of reality. Throughout the ages, Bazin argues, mankind has dreamed of being able to see the surface of the world faithfully copied in art. Bazin ascribes this wish to what he calls the "mummy complex" - an innate human need to halt the ceaseless flow of time by embalming it in an image. 

For critics such as Jean-Louis Comolli, realism was simply a bourgeois ordering of the world that served to maintain capitalist ideology, while for British feminist scholar Laura Mulvey realism, as all film forms, is structured by the unconscious of patriarchal society. Mulvey insists that film should not be understood as a record of reality, but rather as a reorganization of reality in a way that is fundamentally unjust to certain people, most particularly women and minorities because of its informing patriarchal ideology. 

Michael Iampolski, for instance, describes films as a series of "quotes" that interrupt the narrative and send the spectator back to other texts. Spectators understand what they are watching by patching together all these references, not by referring to a world off-screen. 

Auteur Theory and Authorship

Translated from the French, auteur simply means "author”.  Given that collaborative context, who might be considered as, or who might claim to be, the "author" of a film? If authorship is claimed, on what basis of evidence might the claim be made? Claims were made for the director to be considered the most likely member of the filmmaking team—in industrially organized commercial film production—to be the author of a film. However, this did not mean that every film director should be considered an auteur, or author, or the author of a particular film. Indeed, in many ways it could be said that the director as auteur should be considered the exception rather than the rule. 

Does a film need to have an author? Perhaps, to qualify as "art," a film needs an author, an artist. The question of authorship is important in every art form, whether for reasons of intellectual property rights and the art market or for reasons of status and identification. Painting and sculpture have usually offered reasonably clear examples of the individual artist as author, as have the novel and poetry. But other arts can pose considerable problems for straightforward identification of authorship. A playwright may be the undisputed author of a play text, but who authors a play text in performance? In the twentieth century, many theater directors claimed authorship on a par with playwrights (although television drama has usually preferred the writer as author). A composer may be the undisputed author of a musical score, but what about music in performance? 

CINEMA used a tool for propaganda in history

In countries like the Soviet Union, leaders recognized the power of film to influence social and political attitudes. Because of the inherent domination of visual images and the illiteracy of a good deal of the Russian peasantry, the silent cinema was an ideal tool for presenting ideas and information about the fall of the czar and the rise of the industrial and agricultural proletariat. Whereas Lenin had said that cinema was the most important art, Stalin wrote that "the cinema is the greatest medium of mass agitation. The task is to take it into our hands." Encouraged to produce epics that extolled the "leader of the Russian people.”

Leni Riefenstahl's landmark propaganda film, Triumph des Willens ( Triumph of the Will , 1935), still provokes controversy. Commissioned by Chancellor Adolf Hitler Triumph of the Will was meant to be the official documentation of the Nazi Party Congress of 1934. Yet the film also promulgated fascism and the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) as the bases for renewed German nationalism and patriotism. Hitler repeatedly stressed that one could not sway the masses with arguments, logic, or knowledge, only with feelings and beliefs. Indeed, all the signifying mechanisms of the cinema—camera angles, lighting, editing, set design, and music—were marshaled to appeal to a malleable mass audience. 

What does Cinema mean to the spectator? Identity? Pleasure? Escapism?

Borrowing from semiotics and psychoanalysis, Metz sets out to show that the cinematic image brings together a series of visual, musical, and verbal codes that the spectator then deciphers in an attempt to make meaning. Film and the photographic image do not provide any type of direct access to the real, according to Metz, but are rather one instance of a symbolic system. Resemblance, in this view, is based upon codes and conventions; the screen is not a window onto the world, but a mirror, reflecting back to spectators their own ideologies and sense of identity.

A major source of cinematic pleasure for the viewer is scopophilia - the pleasure in looking and in being looked at. Scopophilia can develop into a perversion, obsessive voyeurism, which involves gaining satisfaction from 'watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other'. Scopophilic pleasure is available in the cinema, since the viewers watch in an enclosed world, where images appear apparently regardless of who is watching. Thus the spectators seem to be looking in on a private world, and can project their desires on to the actors. 

Modern cinema could be said to resemble Plato's cave in the way in which the viewer is immersed in a fabricated reality. They suspend disbelief throughout the time they are inside the cinema they become part of their chosen film, and as a result become the prisoners of a contemporary cave. The walls of the cave can be equated to our inner eye-lids where we view dreams while sleeping. When the dream story is being “projected” in the cave, we believe it to be true, at least for the moments we are engrossed in it.

Note: This review was as a part of a course on Film Studies I took at MICA (2011)