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.

Montevideo…

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?

SEBASTIÁN MORENO

Semiotics — at least in its sociocultural tradition (as opposed to bio-, zoosemiotics and other accounts closer to the domain of the natural sciences) — is about understanding processes and structures of signification and sense-making, which are always embedded in cultural contexts and practice. I always loved collections and lists, ranging from musical playlists to collectible cards. When I was in primary school, I was fascinated by the pop culture of the 1990s, which seemed quite distant from the everyday reality I lived in Uruguay. On a different front, I also love Christmas and always found it weird that the imagery associated with this festivity consists of snowmen, sleighs, snow-covered trees, and other signs expressing winter, while in Uruguay Christmas is in the summer. Probably things like these made me start wondering about signs, cultural dynamics and social discourses.

When I was in high school, I enjoyed the literature courses very much, in the context of which I was somehow puzzled when my teachers claimed that “a sword is a sign of power” or that “a rose expresses passion, while a white flower expresses purity.” Why? In which context? Since when? I guess questions like these remained in my subconscious and shaped my academic curiosity. During the last couple of years of high school, I discovered philosophy and started delving into the normative and critical dimensions of knowledge.

After leaving high school, I enrolled in three different bachelor’s degrees: Communication, Philosophy and Literature. Now I am tempted to make sense of this ambitious study plan as a quest for semiotics, which I partially discovered in those programmes, but really I was confronted by semiotics during an exchange stay at the University of Bologna, Italy, in 2017.

SEMIOVOX

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

SEBASTIÁN MORENO

I discovered semiotics during my undergraduate studies in Uruguay. The degree in Communications I was enrolled in included, in its first year, a mandatory course on Linguistics (which in practical terms was actually an introduction to semiotics) and, in the third one, a course specifically on semiotics. The professor of those two courses, Richard Danta, was unbelievable in presenting complex semiotic theory and tools in a friendly and applied manner. He did so by combining several theoretical resources: Saussure, Peirce, Eco, Barthes, Bakhtin, Kristeva, etc. After the first course, I was fascinated with signs, meaning, and everything related to cultural analysis. Then, during an exchange period at the University of Bologna, I took courses from the master’s programme in semiotics, which were fundamental in developing my academic interests and in defining my professional practice.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

SEBASTIÁN MORENO

I do not consider myself a commercial or applied semiotician. Although I have worked in the field of strategic communications for several years and done some specific consultancy using semiotics for the UK-based agency Space Doctors, I am above all a researcher working in an academic environment, and hence teaching, writing papers, books and book chapters, and participating in academic congresses.

However, in the past I worked in a number of advertising agencies, where I served as a strategic planner. My job consisted of thinking about how communications could strategically strengthen a brand’s positioning, and particularly which topics, cultural repertoires, etc. could be used for that purpose. This was a way of doing applied semiotic work, although I was not fully aware of this at the time. Then, I did my PhD in social sciences with a thesis on populist discourse, which used semiotics ad the main analytical framework and proposed a specific account of populism from that perspective.

Currently, I serve as an associate professor of culture and society within a Department of International Studies. While I do not teach semiotics, I do research using it, particularly in the frame of my work with national identities, discourse and signs of the nation. All my academic publications deal with semiotics.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

SEBASTIÁN MORENO

A good applied semiotician is someone who, besides being curious, can show the industry the relevance of semiotics and semiotic thinking, being as clear and as applied as possible without losing the complexity of our discipline. This means that, while anyone could talk about signs and meaning based on personal interpretations, intuition and gut-feeling, only people with some training in semiotics can use instruments such as the semiotic square, the narrative scheme and the actantial roles properly.

On the other hand, a good academic semiotician is someone who manages to do serious and rigorous analytical work (confirming the status of semiotics as a social science) without losing the critical dimension (in close dialogue with the humanities).

A semiotic approach that leaves one of these two dimensions aside misses the point of the discipline.

SEMIOVOX

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

SEBASTIÁN MORENO

• Umberto Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics. Although I knew the book from my undergraduate studies, during a course on interpretive semiotics at the University of Bologna, Prof. Claudio Paolucci made us read the entire book as a mandatory text for the exam, and it was a mind-blowing experience. It is not an easy read, but I definitely recommend the effort to anyone interested in semiotics, and particularly for those interested in understanding the dynamics of culture.
• [Italian semiotician] Gianfranco Marrone’s Introduzione alla semiotica del testo (2011), which has been recently published as an English translation with the title Introduction to the Semiotics of the Text. Whenever I try to explain in English what semiotics is (for example, in books or papers), I find myself going back to this book, which is pleasantly systematic.
• For the third book, I hesitate between Greimas and Courtés’s Semiotics and Language: an analytical dictionary, which is a titanic effort to produce a metalanguage for the discipline, and some of Jean-Marie Floch’s books. I will choose the latter and recommend Semiotics, Marketing and Communication, originally published in French in 1990, since I believe it is a great introduction to applied semiotics. (The author also explains every instrument he uses in detail for non-specialist readers.)

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?

SEBASTIÁN MORENO

Remember, I am not an applied semiotician, but an academic one. Whenever I have to explain to someone what semiotics is, I say it is the science that studies sense-making and signification. I frequently hear people saying that “semiotics is the science that studies signs,” a definition I consider to be somehow outdated. It is not about signs, but signification, also in more complex articulations such as texts, which are composed of many signs, but also practices, interactions, etc.

To those who claim that semiotics is about interpreting signs, I reply that this is not the task of the semiotician. What we do is explain how something can signify, and not actually how (and/or what) it signifies, and specifically not how people interpret a sign/text.

SEMIOVOX

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

SEBASTIÁN MORENO

As mentioned, over the past years I have had the opportunity to work on some applied projects. I have been involved in projects aimed at identifying cultural trends and testing emergent codes that would be used to position products in the market. I have done this with a focus on Belgium, a country I am familiar with because I have lived there for a while, though it is not the culture I grew up in. Therefore, the challenge when working on these projects was to approach Belgian culture as an outsider… but from an insider position. This made me read a lot of literature about the country’s culture, values, narratives, etc., travel the country from north to south and east to west, and try to relate discourses about Belgian culture to its textual output, such as advertisements, iconic brands, pop icons and relevant cultural practices and traditions.

SEMIOVOX

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

SEBASTIÁN MORENO

I believe our discipline has not yet managed to define its identity, specifically outside academic circles. This has led to a situation in which anyone dealing with signs or meaning believes he or she is doing “semiotics,” even when they might only be offering an intuitive comment based on no instruments whatsoever. Doing semiotics (in any form) requires a lot of reading, handling concepts properly and knowing how to apply specific instruments adequately. Moreover, it involves a fluid interdisciplinary dialogue with other fields of research, such as cultural anthropology, cultural studies, etc.

Within the academic world, I am usually frustrated by egomaniac colleagues and political games, since we are a small community that, in my view, needs to grow harmoniously and provide space for anyone who wants to be part of it.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

SEBASTIÁN MORENO

Definitely Saussure. Due to my academic trajectory, I was significantly more exposed to Saussure than to Peirce. Moreover, in Saussure’s work, there is a clear positivist approach, which I appreciate in my attempts of showing how semiotics is an empirically-informed social science and not a theoretical or philosophical reflection on meaning and sense. Saussure was also the founding father of the type of semiotic research I follow and practice, which I find myself calling “sociocultural” semiotics.

SEMIOVOX

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

SEBASTIÁN MORENO

Read semiotic books and articles produced within academia. Do not rely only on your intuition or gut, but make sense of them using concepts, models and instruments produced by semioticians. Learn Italian and French, since it is mainly in Italy and France where the semiotic debate is developing, with many publications available only in those languages. In a nutshell: understand what semiotics is before offering your services as a semiotician.

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