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.

Buenos Aires…

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?

XIMENA TOBI

One of the games I most enjoyed, growing up, was “Detective” — deducing the invisible from the visible, following traces, and inferring explanations.

SEMIOVOX

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

XIMENA TOBI

In 1991, I took a semiology course during my first year of university. One day in class, we analyzed the same news item as written up by competing newspapers. The differences in the approach to (and treatment of) the information were striking; I remember vividly how astonished I was. When I walked out of that class, I said to my fellow students something like: “Whaaaaat? Newspapers don’t tell the truth?” It was a real epiphany, for me.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

XIMENA TOBI

I was fortunate enough to spend nearly 10 years working as assistant to two of Argentina’s best living semioticians. Under their influence, I learned to observe and describe before explaining, and to detect “signs” and the relationships that link them to other signs. I also learned that the meaning of any given text is never absolute and unique, because that meaning is always conditioned by the text’s relations with other texts. Clearly, my school was Peircean…

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

XIMENA TOBI

Theories and methodologies can be learned, but developing the ability to observe and listen, and the patience to analyze — rather than jumping to hasty conclusions — is the most important thing.

SEMIOVOX

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

XIMENA TOBI

• Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. The first book I read in my first semiology course at university. Barthes’ use of the term “connotation” to explain what a “myth” is [the illusion of denotation, i.e., the “naturalizing” illusion that the sign and the signifier are identical] made my head explode.
• Eliseo Verón’s La Semiosis social [which can be translated as The Social Semiosis]. Influenced by the triadic sign theory, [the Argentine sociologist, anthropologist, and semiotician] Verón developed the TADS (Theory of Social Discourse Analysis) and its methodology for analyzing the infinite semiosis. Peirce’s triadic sign theory is Verón’s theoretical frame rather than his object of study.
• José Luis Fernández’s Vidas mediáticas [which can be translated as Media Lives]. Published in 2021, this book draws upon 30 years’ worth of analysis of mass media and social media in order to develop a semiotic theory of “mediatizations” — showing the complex mechanisms through which media construct social reality and influence other sectors of society. Fernández [Professor of Semiotics of Media, University of Buenos Aires] is my teacher, and this book is my semiotic “home.”

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?

XIMENA TOBI

I am a person who first of all asks and listens, and secondly, proposes.

Before I sell semiotics to a client, I ask them to tell me what their questions are, what they want to find out. The most common questions clients ask are about consumers: What do consumers think about x topic? What do consumers prefer about x brand? If that’s the case, then I will present semiotics in relation to consumers. I explain how semiotics will help to frame what consumers will tell us — later on, via a qualitative phase of research. Semiotic analysis will allow us to tease our everything implied (but not said) by the consumers.

SEMIOVOX

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

XIMENA TOBI

I am less excited about brand analysis than I am about the analysis of customs and cultural practices. SemioticaStudio — which I founded with Gabriela Pedranti in 2009 — has analyzed what “work” means in Spain, to name one memorable example. Most recently, we’ve analyzed what traveling means for Mexicans; and we’ve studied Argentinean eating and drinking rituals.

SEMIOVOX

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

XIMENA TOBI

Semiotics is a framework for looking at and analyzing any social phenomenon — and for this analysis, we require a reasonable amount of time. It’s frustrating whenever an agency perceives semiotics as a rough-and-ready tool like a screwdriver, and expects that we can deliver meaningful insights overnight.

I’d also like to see semioticians doing more to build bridges with other disciplines. No matter how complex a semiotician’s analysis may be, today’s world is more complex. So a multidisciplinary approach would be best.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

XIMENA TOBI

My own semiotic orientation is “ternary” — which is to say, Peircean. I most often work from Peirce’s “infinite semiosis” approach [which assumes that further signs will always both precede and proceed from any given sign]. However, I don’t subscribe to any fundamentalisms — I learned from my mentors that each object of study requires a unique theoretical approach. So if I’m doing linguistic analysis, say, I am happy to use a Saussurean method. The important thing is to explain and solve the client’s various questions of reality.

SEMIOVOX

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

XIMENA TOBI

This work is learned by doing it — which requires patience, and even more importantly, a willingness to learn. Like an apprentice pilot logging hours of flight time, then, I recommend logging as many “analysis hours” as possible.

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