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?

ROMÁN ESQUEDA

I was born into a circus family: My father was a juggler, and I spent most of my childhood traveling with the circus. When I was six, however, I had to remain in Mexico City to attend school. From this point on, my life developed in two distinctive cultures: In one, people from different countries interacted, traveled, appeared and disappeared, risking their life in every show; the other was a more stable, regular, mainstream life. The intersections between these lives and experiences was fascinating to me; today, I understand that life and experience reveals itself via semiosis.

SEMIOVOX

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

ROMÁN ESQUEDA

My thesis advisor recommended [French philosopher] Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as a bridge between communication, philosophy, and art. My intention, at least at first, was to write a thesis on art as a means of communication. In the end, my thesis turned out to be a critique of the then-dominant theory of communication — [communications theorist David] Berlo’s SMCR model. I called instead (naively, I’d now say) for a return to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights into the embodied experience of communication. Studying Merleau-Ponty led me to Umberto Eco, specifically to Eco’s theoretical and philosophical writings on Medieval Aesthetics and midcentury avant-garde art. It was in this manner that I discovered semiotics was the intersection between all of my interests.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

ROMÁN ESQUEDA

In 1988, when I was writing my Master’s dissertation, I began teaching semiotics at a school of graphic design — where students didn’t have the slightest interest in analyzing design semiotically. Instead, they wanted practical knowledge, a set of tools that could help them become better designers. At the same time, a marketing research company asked me to teach them the basics of semiotics, which they thought would be helpful for their work. (They’d eventually hire me as a freelance semiotician.) Faced with the dual challenge of developing semiotics as a tool for design and marketing strategy, I started developing my own methodologies.

After two years of this, I was accepted as a PhD candidate at Indiana University’s Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies; I was fortunate enough to win a Fulbright scholarship. I was told that my interest in the intersections between Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, and Semiotics applied to Marketing was very interesting… but there was no such program anywhere. As a result, I spent a year doing independent research under the direction of [semiotician and linguist] Thomas Sebeok and [fellow semiotic scholar and frequent co-author]Jean Umiker-Sebeok.

I returned to Mexico in 1992, and resumed working in marketing — and as a professor of Design — using my own methodologies. Which we’d now describe as Cognitive Semiotics with a strong empirical basis.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

ROMÁN ESQUEDA

A sense of wonder that leads to experiencing the world, and the self, as an abductive, fluid, dynamic, persuasive profusion of signs.

SEMIOVOX

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

ROMÁN ESQUEDA

• Floyd Merrell’s Signs Becoming Signs: Our Perfusive, Pervasive Universe has exerted a powerful influence on my work. The way Merrell reinterprets Peirce’s semiotics in relation to his [Peirce’s] phaneroscopy / phenomenology, and his analysis that it is impossible to isolate the categories from themselves and from semiosis, is fundamental. Although it challenges most interpretations of Peirce.
• Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception was the first book I read on the relevance of the body for philosophy and as a consequence to subsequent accounts on embodied cognition (and for a cognitive semiotics). The way he leveraged Physiology and Anatomy to develop his phenomenology was my point of departure for my own research on semiotics and Cognitive Neuroscience.
• Aristotle’s Rhetoric has proven very influential in both my academic research and in my marketing research practice. Aristotle’s techné [the skill and knowledge of a craftsman] was my inspiration for developing a practical semiotics that goes beyond “applied” semiotics. Techné emerges from the understanding of human beings’ (and perhaps other species’) persuasive faculty and turns it into a reasoned practice.

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?

ROMÁN ESQUEDA

The fusion of Cognitive Neuroscience and Semiotics is the best way to proceed from “black box” intuition to well-grounded decision making.

SEMIOVOX

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

ROMÁN ESQUEDA

I see Cognitive Semiotics as a scientific empirical discipline. Therefore the most enjoyable and rewarding projects are those where I can follow the results of our hypotheses and develop better marketing research and persuasive strategies.

SEMIOVOX

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

ROMÁN ESQUEDA

The semiotic landscape is very rich and diverse, so I can’t generalize. But I do think we need to practice a more empirical and critical approach within Semiotics. We need to critique taken-for-granted concepts like communication, meaning, culture, etc. I think this sort of thing is changing thanks to Biosemiotics and Cognitive Semiotics.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

ROMÁN ESQUEDA

Peirce’s phanerosocopy, pragmatism, and semiotics are of great interest to me. Peirce has a very strong influence in most recent embodied, enactive Cognitive Science — which is the context within which I do my work.

SEMIOVOX

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

ROMÁN ESQUEDA

Be critical of semiotic theories. Study their philosophical and scientific underpinnings… and do a lot of empirical testing on them.

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