What makes a semiotician tick? SEMIOVOX’s Josh Glenn has invited his fellow practitioners in the field of commercial semiotics, from around the world, to answer a few revealing questions.

Calgary…

SEMIOVOX

When you were a child/teen, how did your future fascination with symbols, cultural patterns, interpreting “texts,” and getting beneath the surface of daily life manifest itself?

MANAR R. EL WAHSH

For the first ten years of my life, I was raised outside of Egypt. Upon returning, every sign was fresh and intriguing to me. This brief displacement (ghorba as we call it in Arabic) in my early childhood sharpened an outsider/insider perspective, and with it many invisible symbolic treasures revealed themselves to me. Cairo really is brimming with signs! Parts of the city were built a millennium ago. The architecture, signage, urban design inherited from Ancient Egypt, Coptic, and then Islamic eras form layers upon layers of culture and signs, a feast for a semiotician.

This fusion is really clear in many aspects including fashion, and they have always enchanted me. As a little girl, I paid attention to everyone’s sense of fashion, especially their use of jewelry. Tradition, culture, and religion intersect in women’s jewelry, which still fuels my fascination with Hamsa, Khamsa, or the Hand of Fatima. While religion frowns upon seeking protection from such amulets, many practicing women still wear those symbols to ‘protect’ them from the evil eye. Many choices of jewelry are there to accessorize and protect, including the use of the ancient Eye of Horus. So, clothes and jewelry are worn in a way that delivers meaning, even a paradoxical sense between prohibition and admiration. The use of amulets such as Khamsa represent symbolic shields enforcing the idea that the female body needs safeguarding from powers seen and unseen, upholding symbols resulting from a mix of traditions that still affects what we wear and how we wear it.

SEMIOVOX

Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.

MANAR R. EL WAHSH

My first encounter with semiotics was in my MA and then PhD programs. My supervisor introduced me to theories from cognitive semiotics like conceptual blending and conceptual metaphor, and later multimodality. Working on diverse types of data allowed me to appreciate the transdisciplinary nature of semiotics. I applied these frameworks and theories to religious texts/prayers, films, literary work, art, games, which was really expanded my understanding of how meaning is constructed and interpreted. My research also intertwined with various linguistic branches like stylistics, discourse analysis, semantics, among others, which enriched my experience in academia.

Everything about the study of semiotics excites me. While I didn’t know what it was before starting my MA, I am grateful that it became an integral part of my specialization. No programs are dedicated entirely to semiotics in my region (it’s only a part of the linguistics program you study individually), which made it difficult to find support like you would in many other more ‘famous’ studies.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

MANAR R. EL WAHSH

Semiotics for a living found me. A few years ago, I was invited to give a semiotic consultation for a project focused on the Egyptian market, an experience I didn’t know existed outside of academia. It gave me a key to a lock I hadn’t known existed. The project prompted me to examine murals of the Egyptian revolution (which have been since erased); elements of architecture shared between Egyptian churches and mosques; ancient Egyptian floral motifs that still find their way in many elements of contemporary design; as well as the presence of Egyptian artists and designers in virtual spaces. Since then, I have joined many projects that allowed me to discover more about symbols in Egypt, including visual and auditory metaphors that form eating, drinking, and socializing habits in Egypt.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

MANAR R. EL WAHSH

My main area of expertise is metaphor — so I see a good semiotician as, essentially, a metaphorist. In our everyday life, we don’t just react to metaphors, we produce them, the world itself is shaped by metaphoric entailments. A good semiotician knows that signs rely heavily on metaphor, and they shape communication in all their forms whether they are textual, verbal, visual, etc. A good semiotician is also an interdisciplinarian, who knows that semiotics thrives by moving freely from one domain to another. Such intellectual mobility uncovers symbols’ meanings that would otherwise remain hidden. Metaphors can be detangled so we can map abstract ideas into concrete, more experiential entities. In this sense, a skilled semiotician is an analyst and an artist who mixes disciplines and symbols.

SEMIOVOX

What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?

MANAR R. EL WAHSH

• Daniel Chandler’s Semiotics: The Basics offers a clear yet comprehensive introduction to semiotics. The book also suggests many resources, including a Going Further section — as well as journals, websites, and groups to join.
• An Introduction to Functional Grammar by [British linguist] Michael Halliday is a challenging book and a very lengthy one, but it establishes the groundwork for numerous significant contributions in semiotics and linguistics in general. It will make delving to Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen a walk in the park. (Or you can go for Multimodal Metaphor by Charles Forceville, Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, eds., instead).

• George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By is an especially important book to understand conceptual metaphor. Understanding that it is the byproduct of blending is explained in The Way We Think by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.

SEMIOVOX

When someone asks you to describe what you do, what is your “elevator pitch”? How do you persuade a skeptical client to take a chance on using this tool?

MANAR R. EL WAHSH

What we do as semioticians is search for meaning, literally, pun intended. Whether we recognize it or not, as humans, we engage in an implicit process of connotation that is not personal or subjective but rather a social, intersubjective, and collective way to view the world.

As Peirce puts it, “It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semiotic.” This holistic view is how we approach semiotics. So, what I bring to the table is the ability to decode symbols that can push forward any business and offer a new, fresh perspective to understand a person, a brand, and to be able to communicate how this brand is experienced more intentionally. What a semiotician offers is an authentic reading of their culture that only they can provide with their knowledge and appreciation of symbols on the one hand, and their immersion in their culture on the other.

SEMIOVOX

What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?

MANAR R. EL WAHSH

The most enjoyable and rewarding semiotic project I worked on was not tied to one specific product but was about what inspires Egyptian designers and creatives in general. It was wild and sometimes maddening, but the final project really gave an idea of what it is like to be an artist in Egypt. It was my first attempt at commercial semiotics, so the excitement came from discovering how abstract theories and tools can offer concrete insights and reading of the ‘real world,’ turning detached observations into strategic value.

I find semiotics projects that extend to read space and cities’ symbols to be extremely exciting. Using semiotics, you can appreciate how symbols and language shape the collective identity of a place and its residents and inspire them to create art and design products. Such codes abound in a city like Cairo, often hidden in plain sight.  

SEMIOVOX

What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?

MANAR R. EL WAHSH

A frustrating aspect about the perception of semiotics is the belief that it is a luxury, an abstract discipline tucked away and practiced only by academics, which significantly limits its potential.

I’d love to see more global agencies incorporating semiotics in their work, especially in regions where it remains confined to academic circles. I have always found it more possible to connect with semioticians remotely — but I’ve never met or worked with semioticians in my own city(ies). I hope the practice of semiotics expands to include many more cities and agencies.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

MANAR R. EL WAHSH

Building on Saussure, Greimas’ work on conceptual opposition has always been rewarding for me. His semiotic square offers semantic mapping of conceptual frameworks that moves beyond the simple either/or of binary oppositions, which, I find, gives fresh insights that I would not otherwise see. Sometimes the world needs to be viewed in terms of two opposing terms or ideas. Also, Saussure’s syntagmatic and paradigmatic model gives an interrelatedness of signs and meaning making, which is very crucial in the interface of syntax/semantics, which are central to the study of linguistics.

However, Peirce sees signs as part of the experiential world, which offers an understanding of the sign that Saussure does not. He offers an interest in signs’ interpretants. This appeal to pragmatics, how we make sense of everything by relating to our experience in the world is crucial. It highlights our active role in making and understanding metaphors and signs.

On both their shoulders we stand, and it will always depend on the project’s nature.

SEMIOVOX

What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?

MANAR R. EL WAHSH

While you may not find many people studying/teaching or practicing semiotics in your area, you can still find a vibrant global community online. Connect with them, have virtual coffee because they will make your journey more rewarding.

Follow Semiofest. Every event discusses a different theme; you will find something that resonates with your approach to semiotics.

Also, keep an open mind about the different nature of media that shape our global culture. Film, TV, music, books, video games, board games, any kind of games, podcasts, anything can be looked at semiotically. Don’t confine yourself to one form of meaning making.

Be curious and follow symbols wherever they may lead.

MAKING SENSE series: MARTHA ARANGO (Sweden) | MACIEJ BIEDZIŃSKI (Poland) | BECKS COLLINS (England) | WHITNEY DUNLAP-FOWLER (USA) | IVÁN ISLAS (Mexico) | WILLIAM LIU (China) | SÓNIA MARQUES (Portugal) | CHIRAG MEDIRATTA (India / Canada) | SERDAR PAKTIN (Turkey / England) | MARIA PAPANTHYMOU (Greece / Russia) | XIMENA TOBI (Argentina) | & many more.

Also see these global semio series: MAKING SENSE (Q&As) | SEMIOFEST SESSIONS (monthly mini-conferences) | COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | COLOR CODEX | DECODER (fictional semioticians) | CASE FILE | PHOTO OP | MEDIA DIET.