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.
Zutphen (Netherlands)…
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?
YOGI HENDLIN
As a biosemiotician and musician, my early interest in paralinguistic modes of meaning-making came from hiking in mossy mountains of California and the Canadian Rockies, the trills of birds, and compositions of jazz, classical, and rock luminaries. Understanding that the shape of the room contours the sound of the orchestra, that the number of people in the seats and the textiles used in the plush chairs is part of the performance, that if the first violin went out partying the night before a different intensity comes through, are all paratextual elements to the music itself — these nonetheless inextricable elements of musical creation and reception got me feeling into the looping effects of organism and environment, figure and ground. These introductions to Umwelt in its pattern dynamics provided a terroir of experience where the warm data deemed liminal actually spun up my favorite states of being.
SEMIOVOX
Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.
YOGI HENDLIN
As a Rhetoric major at UC Berkeley, the lawyer Felipe Gutterriez had us read J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. Learning about perlocutionary and illocutionary force introduced me to speech acts — words as deeds — as well as the life of signs beyond our intention or meaning. This play between connotation and denotation, author intention and audience reception, further radicalized by internalizing Gadamer’s hermeneutics, opened a window on philosophy of science including the almost Nietzschean notions in Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
Semiotics as a field was never interesting to me in school, because at least the French version seemed so formalist, so faux mathematical, so 1960s physics envy for something that has for me much more the ripples of sensate, nonlinear dynamic, than an iron linear logic. As useful as they are, the rote application of Greimasian Squares reminded me of Lacanian Graphs of Desire — they struck me as accidental and absurdly deterministic. As a philosopher, I am crushingly interested in reality, and veritably allergic to reified formal models that keep us in the cloud cuckoo land of abstraction. As a pragmatist (in the Peircean sense), abduction requires tailoring to the context (in real time). In the words of the Nobel Prize-winning genetic biologist Barbara McClintock, good semiotics requires developing a ‘feeling for the organism,’ of which Nora Bateson’s school and methodology of Warm Data has taken up the baton.
SEMIOVOX
How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?
YOGI HENDLIN
How I ended up working on the business side of semiotics is the most unusual of stories. During my doctoral dissertation research on interspecies discourse ethics under Konrad Ott at the University of Kiel, Germany, I came across some special issues of the Zeitschrift für Semiotik discussing zoösemiotics, a term originally coined by Thomas Sebeok in 1963. This was my first introduction to semiotics simpliciter, interspecies semiotics, then eventually biosemiotics. I felt like I had discovered a previously hidden world of treasure, with an entire ambit of research existed precisely on what I sought to investigate. After that, in 2014, I had the opportunity to present at the University of Tartu’s Nature, Inc conference, and my fascination with biosemiotics only ramped up, attending all the Gatherings in Biosemiotics I could. In 2019, my article “I am a Fake Loop: The Effects of Advertising-Based Artificial Selection” discussed from a biosemiotic perspective how advertising corrodes the epistemic commons and leads to human devolution, winning the Biosemiotic Achievement Award that year. In 2021, I became Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biosemiotics. It was at the 2022 Gatherings in Biosemiotics in Olomouc, Czechia, that I heard Malcolm Evans throw down the gauntlet, cutting through the academic dithering, and getting to core questions of biosemiotics and its role in alleviating the metacrisis. We got in contact, and eventually this led to an exchange of essays and a call, in which we both beamed at the prospect of working together. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I met Noël Theodosiou, founder and CEO of Luminious, and I began advising on bio(semiotics). Because of the sterling ethics of our team, I relax into creative mode, and our respective polar disciplinary backgrounds generate productive tensions nested in mutual respect, often leading to breakthrough insights, analysis, and novel methodologies.
Another unlikely element in this story is that since 2006, I have been working with the largest repository of publicly available corporate documents in the world, amassed at the University of California, San Francisco from the industries globally most damaging health and environment (tobacco, fossil fuels, agrochemical, etc.). So, I had already been learning about the ‘product defense industry’ and how corporations self-identify for almost 20 years, writing dozens of articles in medical and public health journals about our findings. I knew I had no desire to ever be on the other (much better paid) side of the industries whose malfeasance I had painstakingly evidenced and brought to the disinfecting light of public exposure. Notwithstanding this very strong (anti)corporate education, I remained interested in getting into environmental consulting for some time. My entry into commercial semiotics, thus, has been a slow burn. Dipping one toe in at a time to test the ethical waters, I’m satisfied to find a team that exceeds my threshold of right conduct, allowing me to work on projects in alignment with my commitments as a public health scientist, such as how life sciences companies can better uphold the expectations of their social contract. Being able to learn how the business works, while steering clients to multisolve to take bold leadership moves integrating environmental and health equity into the very flesh of their organization for the firm and the world’s long-term benefit, is both an inspiring and humbling task.
SEMIOVOX
What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?
YOGI HENDLIN
Semioticians are guardians of meaning. That’s a sacred responsibility.
Familiarity with many different models of analysis, openness to challenge, ability to flow and update judgment according to new data and feedback, and the ability to listen differently are crucial. The integrity to select for the greater whole, and the wisdom to have some idea what that means, is ultimately the provision for those directing our collective attention.
SEMIOVOX
What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?
YOGI HENDLIN
- The world of Jakob von Uexküll, such as Theoretische Biologie and more accessible in English, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning is foundational for understanding more-than-human semiotics.
- There is no better introduction to biosemiotics than Jesper Hoffmeyer’s Biosemiotics: an examination into the signs of life and the life of signs. Paul Cobley’s The Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics is also a winner for applying biosemiotics.
- A big part of biosemiotics’ work is helping us not degenerate into empty signs, a Baudrillardian creation of ungrounded meaning based only on representations without an object. Umberto Eco’s Interpretation and Overinterpretation is a classic in this domain. As is René Girard’s work in (anti-)mimetics.
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?
YOGI HENDLIN
The systems thinker Donella Meadows often quipped about the asymmetries of acquiring versus preserving value with the following metaphor: we pay a lot of attention to increasing the flow of water into a bathtub rather than stopping up the outflow of water by plugging the drain. Due to human instinct bias, instead of plugging our leaks, we tend to obsess instead with opening the faucet more. Good semiotics helps staunch future negative side-effects of sloppy marketing.
When this comes to business, the writing is on the wall for the need to pay attention to reducing the reasons leading to liability, class actions, bad press, and the loss of social license as humanity wakes up to the unpaid externalities of our current market system. Attending to SDGs, CSR, ESGs is a good start, but it is the minimal legal compliance (and often in practice, not even that), not what people actually want to buy, or what will engender trust and goodwill. Or the worlds we all want to live in.
My motto for clients is: “we select wider.” Meaning, that we’re playing a different sort of interdimensional chess than the plauding market forces approach based on Phishing for Phools. Go with us, and we will do our best that you don’t create a situation where you’re pissing away all of your out-of-integrity earnings by doing things right in the first place.
Then, you don’t end up like the Sacklers.
SEMIOVOX
What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?
YOGI HENDLIN
I find high leverage, cross-department projects most stimulating. Effective semiotics campaigns are informed by future products down the pipeline, to seed future portfolios, as well as interacting with R&D, not just marketing departments. How products are conceived, from their functions and efficacy, to their context of use and specificity of users, are crucial ingredients for designing comprehensive semiotic analysis and interventions. If there is semiotic dissonance between the marketing of the product and the product itself in its design and impacts, people will feel it, detect it. Thus, finding those synergies between the upcoming product portfolio and the prefigurative marketing of current products, with an eye to reducing that dissonance, is a more comprehensive work package, but with long-lasting benefits to the astute company.
SEMIOVOX
What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?
YOGI HENDLIN
Commercial semiotics, like commercial anything, runs the risk of being gobbled up by the demon of instrumentality, becoming a hired gun for anything. In our era of polycrisis, something like a Design Manifesto for semiotics (a Semiotic Manifesto?) might help at least orient the field. Semiotics is a powerful tool — necessitating an equal measure of constraint. In biosemiotics, we speak of ‘enabling constraints.’ When constraints are loosely coupled, they can allow more creative options than the chaos resulting from no constraints or the complication of governing constraints. I’m curious: what would a self-conscious but unpretentious ethical semiotics look like? Hopefully, it would be more effective than prevailing forms of greenwashing or schoolmarming ineffective to date.
SEMIOVOX
Peirce or Saussure?
YOGI HENDLIN
Peirce. Signs are triadic, not diadic. Reality (Umgebung) doesn’t exist as something any being can fully appreciate; all we can understand in our environment (Umwelt). Abduction is how thought and learning work. Pragmatism is the architectonic theory of semiotics, of which Peircian semiotics derives from this metaphysics.
With respect, Saussure of course contributed much to semiotics. But as a process philosopher, Peirce tickles my fancy.
SEMIOVOX
What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?
YOGI HENDLIN
The medium is changing. Film and audio are now eclipsing written forms of communication; opening up new senses and sensibilities. Learn the new signals: what makes that video clip enticing? Count the seconds before a film clip shifts perspectives, angles, or scenes. Could you sustain that same pace of cuts for a two-hour movie? Or does it only work for a 1–3 minute vignette? How does your body feel when you look at an ad, or use a product? Does it feel creepy when your phone spies on you and feeds you ads relevant to your last conversation? Do you click on them? (I hope not.) What hopes or doubts arise? What sort of interleafing of meaning subtly coaxes audiences to shift their ambitions from finite to infinite games?
Cultivating your inner landscape and sensitivity to the world around you — what feels pleasurable and what feels painful as you roam — will develop into your inner compass for being able to understand what sort of semiotics are long-term beneficial (attractive, trustworthy, helpful, collectively liberating), and which are cheap tricks.
MAKING SENSE WITH… 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 series: COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | MAKING SENSE WITH… | COLOR CODEX