Photo courtesy of Max Matus
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?
MAX MATUS
In 1996, at the age of 17, I was living with a Dutch family as an exchange student from Mexico — and we had a meal out at Alfonso’s, a Mexican restaurant in Den Haag. I was experiencing culture shock, and my host family thought this would help!
The first image I encountered in Alfonso’s was a human-sized cactus, which was smiling and wearing a sombrero. I laughed — I’d never seen anything like this in a Mexico restaurant. I also hadn’t seen images from cartoons (including Speedy Gonzales) and Western movies, not to mention a painting of a drunken fat man wearing white cotton clothes and carrying a gun, in restaurants back home. But of course this was not a Mexico restaurant but a Mexican restaurant. This experience made me curious about how particular objects (e.g., cactus, tequila, serapes, a certain type of music), knowledge (e.g., a ritual of drinking tequila), and affections (e.g., overwhelming passion, relaxed behavior) were attached to the idea of Mexico in non-Mexico cultures. This awkward encounter made me interested in “Mexican-ness,” and how (and why) it is produced.
SEMIOVOX
Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.
MAX MATUS
When I was earning an undergraduate Anthropology degree, I returned to this question of “Mexican-ness” by studying Oaxacan restaurants in Los Angeles — an experience that showed me how crucial symbols and discourses related to ethnicity were when it came to commoditizing foods. In 2009, I started a Master’s degree program in Semiotics at Tartu University; once again, I decided to revisit this question. I analyzed how Mexican restaurants in European cities use various signs and discourses in order to commoditize food products, paying exclusive attention to the semiotic realm.
My main interest focused on how the transfer of information between different media is a process of what Jakobson called “intersemiotic translation.” My master thesis analyzed how landscapes translate into commoditized foodscapes in Amsterdam and Madrid. After finishing that program, I felt that something was missing: the passion and the voice of the intersemiotic translators themselves, in this case the Mexican restaurant entrepreneurs who translated Mexican landscapes into commoditized “foodscapes.” I started a PhD program, with the goal of analyzing how affections and passions relate to process of intersemiotic translation. Out of the vast pool of “Mexican” symbols that these restaurateurs could draw from, they chose particular symbols — why? They wanted to affect consumers’ bodies in a joyful way, in order to find success.
I eventually realized that Mexican restaurant patrons and Mexican restaurant entrepreneurs alike have “read” from the same “book”: let’s call it Mexican Landscapes. In many cases, the entrepreneurs have lived or felt in love in the landscapes they are translating — they were born or have traveled there. They choose to translate particular symbols from this imaginary book into the features of their restaurant; they arrange these entities under a specific dominant and what Bakhtin would call its correlated “chronotopes” in order to provide coherence to the translation. Consumers accept or dispute those translations because they have experienced Mexican landscapes, too: dwelling in them, traveling, surfing the Internet, watching movies. Everyone is working from the same book — which is a book of multiple beginnings and no end.
SEMIOVOX
How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?
MAX MATUS
My own methodology combines Gabriel Tarde’s economic anthropology of passion with the kind of cultural semiotics I studied at Tartu; and I also rely on Deleuze [who was not a semiotician, but drew heavily on semiotic and structuralist modes] and Latour’s material semiotics.
My PhD thesis analyzes how the desire to affect and be affected by foreign bodies informs the commoditization of food products offered in Mexican restaurants in Amsterdam, Madrid, and San Francisco. I argue that actors’ attachments to passionate networks enable diverse Mexican “foodscapes” (intersemiotic translations of landscapes) to be enacted. In these translations, food commoditization is based on relationships with entities in Mexican and U.S. landscapes. In their efforts to enact these affective foodscapes, entrepreneurs arrange entities according to particular themes, genres, and chronotopes; they provide coherence to the translations; and they enable their repetition, opposition, and adaptation.
After finishing my studies in Europe, I came back to Mexico and in partnership with a colleague who’d studied Anthropology, opened the consultancy Semiosfera. Our methodology is mainly based in Tarde’s economic of passion frameworks and Tartu-style cultural semiotics.
SEMIOVOX
What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?
MAX MATUS
Deleuze would tell us that we are unaware of the implication of a sign until we discover its meaning in a pragmatic way. However, because a sign is always signifying any interpretation is temporary. A continual search for the meaning of signs is necessary; one of the basic facts about a sign is that its meaning can never be fixed once and for all. To trace the evolution of a sign’s meaning, in order to understand the sign’s hidden essence, we need passion. Never lose that passion!
If this sounds too abstract, think of Proust’s madeleine and Borges’s lost paradise (a vast library). These writers offer powerful examples of the passionate pursuit — both practical and existential — for the meaning of a sign.
SEMIOVOX
What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?
MAX MATUS
- Spinoza’s Ethics helped me to understand semiotics from a non-human-centric perspective. All beings experience affections; all beings can affect and be affected. Spinoza opens the way to understanding Deleuze’s semiotics.
- Jakob von Uexküll’s monograph “A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men” helped establish biosemiotics as a field of research. Also: zoosemiotics, ecosemiotics.
- “Theses On The Semiotic Study Of Cultures (As Applied To Slavic Texts),” from Structure of Texts and Semiotics of Culture by B.A. Uspenskij , V.V. Ivanov , V.N. Toporov , A.M. Pjatigorskij and Juri Lotman, is the foundation of the Tartu-style semiotics of culture
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?
MAX MATUS
I say: “I do research based in anthropological and semiotic methods to analyze the practice and meaning of social action and its cultural implications.”
SEMIOVOX
What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?
MAX MATUS
The ones that merge semiotics with anthropology and are able to change social patterns and culture in specific settings.
For example, some years ago we did a project to help the Mexico City’s metro provide a better service — by developing better sign systems to facilitate travels and enhance consumers’ experience. This project necessitated the application of deep ethnographic research and heavy semiotic analysis.
Another example: Hired by a multinational company with a high turnover rate, we spent weeks doing field research and analyzing the data through a semiotic lens. Using Lotman’s “semiosphere” model, we helped show the company how to develop a more inclusive corporate culture.
SEMIOVOX
What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?
MAX MATUS
In Mexico semiotics is perceived as something very interesting… but also very abstract and difficult to apply.
Also, since many semiotic consultancies do not offer field research, there is a perception that it’s easier and quicker than consumer research — and therefore should be inexpensive.
Finally, because clients usually only deal with one representative from a semiotic consultancy, they don’t understand that the research and analysis often involves many people. So again, they believe it should be relatively cheap.
SEMIOVOX
Peirce or Saussure?
MAX MATUS
My approach is based on Deleuze’s conception of the sign and his theory of power, which is closely related to Spinoza’s understanding of affections and affects. Within this conception of the sign, I also follow Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
The meaning of any sign, in my understanding, is nothing but the conceivable practical effects it has. A sign increases or decreases my power to affect or be affected by other bodies. My particular engagement with a sign promotes the constitution or destruction of relations with other bodies.
SEMIOVOX
What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?
MAX MATUS
- Engage with Semiofest or a similar community of applied semioticians.
- If possible, go to graduate school for Semiotics. If that’s not possible, take online courses in the subject — some of these are very interesting and practical.
- Read what applied semioticians write about their work.
- Try to get a job in a qualitative consultancy with semiotic expertise — then open your own, after being well trained.
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