A series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — our commercial semiotician colleagues, from around the world — whose “output” we admire.

Prague…

SEMIOVOX

What’s the best TV series you’ve seen recently?

ĽUDMILA LACKOVÁ BENNETT

I recently re-watched the first episode of Gilmore Girls, a TV show I loved as a teenage girl. So much has changed! The main character is a 16-year-old girl, a confident, emancipated nerd studying literature and aiming for a journalism degree. As the show progresses, she becomes a successful, independent woman. Most university scenes focus on literature classes, which I believe would be unlikely today; not in a popular TV show: she’d probably be a data scientist working on training AI models. Computer science would replace literature, and coding nights instead of book-reading nights would be the new romantic ideal.

I worry that the concept of an intellectual as a role model has faded, highlighting the decline of the humanities and literature. Books have become more of a cultural historical artifact as museum-like objects about which people remain highly curious. The famous book tower in the city library of Prague, pictured here, is a perfect example. The tower is built from over 8,000 books and mirrors inside, to create an optical illusion.  In front of the city library, tourists stand in a long line to take a picture inside the book tower. Across the street, the national library of the Czech Republic, where people are supposed to actually read books in the building’s beautiful baroque interior, seems haunted and empty.

SEMIOVOX

What work of literature (old or new) would you recommend to someone trying to make sense of today’s world?

ĽUDMILA LACKOVÁ BENNETT

I recommend any book by Italo Calvino, but my favorite is Invisible Cities. This book is a perfect example of semiotics in prose, using a model of a city for semiotic modeling through a beautiful poetic style. It says a lot about the tension between nature and culture, describes a (generic) city as a cultural object, and how our interactions in cities frame our cognition and the categories we use to make sense of the world.

After walking in the city streets, contemplating billboards, shops, and street name tags, we cannot avoid applying these categories to natural objects also. For example, we identify shapes in the clouds, transporting cultural categories into natural categories. 

SEMIOVOX

Anything else about your media diet that you’d like to share?

ĽUDMILA LACKOVÁ BENNETT

In classical media theory, “media” is defined in opposition to “unmediated communication”. Media are mediating information, experiences, values, or ideologies. But can we communicate without all those layers of extra meaning? Can we get to the core without unnecessary superfluousness? Since I started studying semiotics, I have been obsessed with trying to find “the unmediated”. But does it exist? Language is also a medium, and face-to-face communication is mediated through language.

At the end of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, the main character, facing death and reaching a point of insanity after an almost endless chain of mediated clues over clues, trying to find the answer and make sense of the world, finds peace finally in a memory from his childhood: a memory of almost-non-mediated experience, playing a musical instrument. No words, no language, complicated syntax, just one note to make sense of the world and feel connected with the world. Maybe this is the only way to make sense of today’s world.

We need the unmediated experience… but semiotically, this is quite impossible. Peirce taught us that there is no cognition without signs and signs referring to other signs. Thus, any “medium” which can at least get us closer to the unmediated experience — a musical instrument in Foucault’s Pendulum, or a madeleine in In Search of Lost Time — any medium transporting us to our unmediated, bodily selves, will make the best sense of today’s world, or the worlds from before or the worlds from after: hear it, taste it, smell it, feel it.

MEDIA DIET: GIANLLUCA SIMI (Brazil) | HIBATO BEN AHMED (France) | MARIE LENA TUPOT (USA) | EUGENE GORNY (Thailand) | YOGI HENDLIN (Netherlands / USA) | INKA CROSSWAITE (Germany / South Africa) | SÓNIA MARQUES (Portugal) | ĽUDMILA LACKOVÁ BENNETT (Czechia) | BRIAN KHUMALO (USA / South Africa) | JIAKUN WANG (Shanghai) | FRANCISCO HAUSS (China / Mexico) | ASHLEY MAURITZEN (England) | STEFANIA GOGNA (Italy) | BECKS COLLINS (England) | ANTJE WEISSENBORN (Germany) | MARIANE CARA (Brazil) | MARTHA ARANGO (Sweden) | PAULINA GOCH-KENAWY (Poland) | COCO WU (Singapore / China) | JOSH GLENN (USA) | JENNIFER VASILACHE (Switzerland) | ANDREA BASUNTI (England) | SARAH JOHNSON (Canada) | MARIA PAPANTHYMOU (Greece) | VICTORIA GERSTMAN (Scotland).

Also see these global semio series: MAKING SENSE (Q&As) | SEMIOFEST SESSIONS (monthly mini-conferences) | COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | COLOR CODEX | DECODER (fictional semioticians) | CASE FILE | PHOTO OP | MEDIA DIET.