Photo courtesy of Nicolas Jung
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.
Montreuil (France)…
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?
NICOLAS JUNG
One of my earliest memories as a cinema-goer (I must have been five years old) was the strange feeling of seeing a colored red-white-and-blue flag in a black-and-white film. My parents loved cinema, and they took me to see Jacques Tati’s Jour de fête, and I think that’s the origin of my fascination with the power of images and their interpretation.
SEMIOVOX
Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.
NICOLAS JUNG
My first encounter with semiotics was a personal one: Georges Molinié, a professor at the Sorbonne University. His seminar on the reception of literary and artistic works and his books on what he called “semiostylistics” first intrigued me (I didn’t understand much of it at first), then fascinated me (I then started a research into the intersemiotics of the arts, working in particular on the novels of Le Clézio and the films of Wim Wenders). What was fascinating at the time was his thought on the co-creation of the work by the author and the reader or viewer of the film — the moment when the work escapes its creator to become the possession of the receiver.
SEMIOVOX
How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?
NICOLAS JUNG
After my initial studies in linguistics and semiotics, I became a teacher of French as a foreign language for twelve years, before resuming my studies in semiotics applied to communication and marketing. I met some passionate people, including Gaëlle Pineda, with whom I now work at Sémiosine and whom you interviewed last year. At the end of this year-long training course, we set up a blog, Sémiozine, and then, for billing reasons, a consulting firm, Sémiosine — the original idea was to make a veiled homage to Roland Barthes and his book S/Z, but Google doesn’t really like this kind of pun…
SEMIOVOX
What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?
NICOLAS JUNG
You need to be patient, persevering, observant, and love the complexity involved in analysis (I was going to say interpretative exhaustion) of a film, an ad, a message, a trend…
SEMIOVOX
What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?
NICOLAS JUNG
The book that inspired me to think differently about film analysis was Essais sur la signification au cinéma, by Christian Metz — I haven’t re-read it since the 1990s, but it’s one of the books that shaped my vision of semiology, along with Georges Molinié’s books and, of course, Barthes’ Mythologies.
The essential book on which our professional methodology at Sémiosine is based (particularly its definition of the notion of isotopy) is Sémantique structurale, by Greimas.
The book we recommend to our students, and to which we go back to when we have specific needs is Précis de sémiotique générale, by [the Belgian linguist and semiotician] Jean-Marie Klinkenberg.
Bonus: [French medieval scholar and symbology expert] Michel Pastoureau’s indispensable works on color, and those of Jean-Marie Floch, in particular those on the valorisation of discourse.
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?
NICOLAS JUNG
“Semiology enables us to understand the communicative fundamentals of a brand (story, values) and the cultural links that bind it to its audience. On its own or as part of a qualitative study, it can enable the client to identify its communication weaknesses and understand the potential rejection of their brand’s message, so that it can be corrected.”
SEMIOVOX
What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?
NICOLAS JUNG
I love image assessments (bilan d’image in French), where we delve into a brand’s entire communication history, from its very beginnings (if the archives exist), to understand the invariants and the places where it has lost its way. When we present the results of an image assessment to the brand, there’s often this moment of realization that you can see in the eyes of the client, where everything becomes luminous, where everything becomes coherent again.
SEMIOVOX
What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?
NICOLAS JUNG
We’re often called when it’s too late. The campaign has been released, it’s a flop, and we’re trying to find out why. Brands should call us before they launch an advertising campaign. It would save them a lot of time and money…
SEMIOVOX
Peirce or Saussure?
NICOLAS JUNG
Saussure, because of his definition of semiology as “the science of signs in social life”.
SEMIOVOX
What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?
NICOLAS JUNG
Read novels, essays, the press, go to the movies, watch TV shows, stay curious about everything that makes up today’s society.
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