Photo courtesy of Ivan Islas
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.
Mexico City…
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?
IVÁN ISLAS
A megacity like Mexico City is an inexhaustible source of imagery and symbolism: urban design, cars, roads, buildings, signage, not to mention brand communications and other symbols of people’s lifestyles. When I was a child, I would use my toy railroad set and other objects to create a small city of my own — the subway line of which I’d design, including its logos and station signs. Whenever the Mexico City Grand Prix would occur, I’d build Formula One track; and I also remember building Olympic Games stadiums — complete with logos for each sport. Sign systems have always fascinated me.
SEMIOVOX
Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.
IVÁN ISLAS
In a university course on Language Theory, we were assigned Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. I barely understood the semiotics aspect of the novel, but I was enthralled with its medieval atmosphere, and of course all the detective elements: decipherment, suspicion, mirages, concealment. By the time I graduated, though, I’d read Gadamer and become very interested in hermeneutics as the art of interpretation. I enrolled in a Semiology course, and under the direction of a pioneering professor I read Peirce, Saussure, Eco, Sebeok, Morris, and others.
SEMIOVOX
How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?
IVÁN ISLAS
I worked for various companies, in various communications roles — typically in collaboration with designers. In order to achieve effective communications — whether the emphasis was on clarity, aesthetics, or mere persuasion — I’d use the tools of semiotics, to add logic and rigor to the process.
SEMIOVOX
What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?
IVÁN ISLAS
We’re surrounded by messages. The semiotician asks: “How have these been configured?” A semiotician must have a restlessness to learn the answers to such questions — and a rational, logical approach to getting answers.
Research and analysis may seem like two different undertakings, but the semiotician must have the patience and capacity to do both.
Like a mathematician, a semiotician must be comfortable with abstraction. We must position ourselves in a “metalanguage” that can feel quite arid and remote… and use that language to develop complex explanations.
SEMIOVOX
What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?
IVÁN ISLAS
- The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. These works are fundamental in order to understand the core of Logic-semiotics. For those who sympathize with Peirce’s perspective, some of these papers are essential.
- Eco’s Trattato di semiotica generale (A Theory of Semiotics). I consider this book essential since it covers a wide range of topics from several semiotic theorists. Eco was the great popularizer of Peirce’s work in the second half of the 20th century.
- Iuri Lotman’s La semiosfera (The Semiosphere), which in Spanish is in three volumes. Lotman is a great exponent of the semiotics of culture, and is particularly good on the dynamics of cultural change.
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?
IVÁN ISLAS
My approach is to talk about the scope in terms of understanding the entire communication process. Semiotics studies communication in its whole complexity and extension. It is, also, a discipline that understands the logic of the significance of individuals within communities, which is why it will shed light on their values, their beliefs, their desires, but also on their limits.
It’s not a magic wand, but rather a powerful tool.
SEMIOVOX
What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?
IVÁN ISLAS
I most enjoy projects that involve not only “decoding” but “recoding” — in order to produce a practical output, some sort of messaging. One particularly memorable project that I did with my students involved analyzing the situation of violence that our country has experienced for some decades now. Our semiotic work resulted in a video installation expressing our own position.
SEMIOVOX
What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?
IVÁN ISLAS
In my country, although potential clients understand that semiotics can be used to “decode” communications phenomena, and “recode” messaging, they have very little understanding of semiotic techniques or methodologies. So semiotics is seen as a complex discipline that’s fascinating… but also off-putting. People are scared off by what they perceive as its complexity.
Also, to the extent that people know anything about the history of structuralism, they tend to think of semiotics as something that stopped being relevant in the 1960s — that is, after “post”-structuralism happened.
SEMIOVOX
Peirce or Saussure?
IVÁN ISLAS
Peirce, without hesitation. He was a genius, and it’s unfair that he’s so little recognized today. His accomplishment — to explain what happens in the human mind when someone “knows” something — is unparalleled. And he built a powerful theory to help us understand our symbolic and logical condition; you only become more excited as you read further into his work.
Saussure is also fascinating! But his focus is narrower than Peirce’s.
SEMIOVOX
What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?
IVÁN ISLAS
When you first begin to study semiotics, to read the theory, it’s difficult — so be patient! If you stick it out, you will definitely be able to figure out not only the theory and methodology, but how to apply these in your own fashion.
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