i was an under-age semiotician

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SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW | ESSAY

I Was an Under-Age SemioticianBy STEVEN JOHNSON OCT. 14, 2011

It is an occupational hazard of being a writer to be appalled by the prose style youdeployed in your youth. Most of the time the flaws reflect unchecked enthusiasm, orliterary clichs that have not yet worn away, or a certain inability to settle on adefined voice. But reading my own college juvenilia, I have a strange and almosttotal sense of disconnection. This is from a paper I wrote at the age of 19:

The predicament of any tropological analysis of narrative always lies in its owneffaced and circuitous recourse to a metaphoric mode of apprehending its object; therigidity and insistence of its taxonomies and the facility with which it relegates eachvagabond utterance to a strict regimen of possible enunciative formations testifies toa constitutive faith that its own interpretive meta-language will approximate orcomply with the linguistic form it examines.

I was a sophomore in college, and my voice on the page sounded like that of a60-year-old Sorbonne professor, badly translated from the French.

But writing those sentences and there are thousands like them still tracingtheir vagabond utterances on my hard drive turned out to be a critical part of myeducation. I was, you see, a semiotics major at Brown University, during aremarkable spell in the 1980s when semiotics was allegedly the third-most-popularmajor in the humanities there, despite being a field (and a word) that drew nothingbut blank stares at family cocktail parties and job interviews. Ah, semiotics, adistant relative once said to me during winter break. The study of how plants growin light. Very important field.

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The obscurity of the field was partly the point. In Jeffrey Eugenidess new novel,The Marriage Plot, which takes place in part at Brown in the early 1980s, theheroine first stumbles across the semiotics program when a friend comes home witha copy of Jacques Derridas Of Grammatology: When Madeleine asked what thebook was about, she was given to understand by Whitney that the idea of a bookbeing about something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it wasabout anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being aboutthings.

Greek for the science of signs, semiotics as a field dates back to fin de siclephilosophers and linguists like C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand De Saussure; in moderntimes it is most commonly associated with Umberto Eco. The general thrust of puresemiotics is a kind of linguistics-based social theory; if language shapes our thought,and our thought shapes our culture, then if we are looking for a master key to makesense of culture, it makes sense to start with the fundamental structures of languageitself: signs, symbols, metaphors, narrative devices, figures of speech. You couldinterpret a Reagan speech using these tools as readily as you could a Nike ad.

Yet when I arrived at Brown in the mid-80s, there were dozens of splintergroups huddled beneath the semiotics flag: Derridas deconstruction, post-Freudianpsychoanalysis, postfeminism, poststructuralism, cultural studies. (We were post- alot of things, it seemed at the time.) Insiders rarely talked about semiotics, in fact.The umbrella term was just Theory, with a capital T. Theorists like Derrida andMichel Foucault were heroes on many college campuses around that time, butsomehow having a dedicated major that announced your allegiance instead ofhiding behind a more traditional degree in philosophy or English made theaffinity more pronounced.

Some of this was posture, to be sure. Going to college in the moneymaking 80slacked a certain radicalism, Eugenides writes. Semiotics was the first thing thatsmacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated andContinental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism,hermaphroditism with sex and power.

Embracing semiotics came with certain costs. In my own case, I spent most of


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my mid-20s detangling my prose style. (It got younger as I got older.) I now spendmore time learning from the insights of science than deconstructing its truth claims.I slowly killed off the desire to impress with willful obscurity. During my grad schoolyears, I took a seminar on Derrida to which Derrida himself paid a surprise visit,modestly answering our questions with none of the drama I had imagined readinghis written words on the page. He seemed, amazingly, to be saying something, ratherthan just saying something about the impossibility of saying anything. In one cringe-inducing moment, a peer of mine asked a rambling, self-referential question thatbegan by putting under erasure the very nature of an answer. I remember breakinginto a broad smile when Derrida responded, after a long pause, I am sorry, but I donot understand the question. It seemed like the end of an era: Derrida himself wasasking for more clarity.

But there was more than just the-latest-from-France fashion to semiotics inthose years. As a good friend once observed, it left many of us with an intoxicatingsense that the everyday world particularly the world of media contained a secretlayer of meaning that could be deciphered with the right key. (Some of that allurewas packaged neatly into the Symbology discipline of the Da Vinci Code novels.)As we grew older, many of us started using different conceptual tools, but it was thatinitial rush during our semiotics years that got us started: that exhilarating feeling ofbeing 20 and gaining access to a hidden world of knowledge. By the time I startedwriting books about technology and media in my late-20s, the sentences wereshorter and the arguments less prone to putting themselves under erasure, but whatanimated my work was the sense that computer interfaces or video games had asubtle social meaning to them that was not always visible at first glance. Thatperspective was also the legacy of my semiotics years, and it turned out to be muchmore durable than the prose style.

I know of very few friends from that period who continue to practice Theory as itwas taught to us then. But a striking number of semiotics students have gone on toinfluential careers in the media and the creative arts. (Perhaps anticipating thisdevelopment, during my tenure at Brown the concentration was renamed ModernCulture and Media.) NPRs Ira Glass, the novelist Rick Moody, the filmmaker ToddHaynes, Eugenides himself all spent their formative years in the semioticsprogram. The antihero of Sam Lipsytes hilarious 2010 novel, The Ask, takes


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theory classes at a college clearly modeled on Brown. (Lipsyte was in fact myroommate for most of my college career; I like to think the stinging parodies ofsemio-babble in that book were modeled on his other friends.) A long list of aspiringsemioticians went on to play important roles in the early days of digital media.Looking back, I suspect the semiotic worldview with its constant emphasis ontextual play gave us conceptual antennas that helped us tune in to thehypertextual chaos of the Web when it first emerged.

Semiotics, for all its needless complications, still taught us to look for newpossibilities in the ordinary, turning signs into new wonders. For all our talk aboutbeing post-everything, the most interesting thing about us turned out to be what wewere pre- .

Steven Johnson, a co-creator of Findings.com, is the author, most recently, of WhereGood Ideas Come From and the editor of The Innovators Cookbook.

A version of this article appears in print on October 16, 2011, on page BR35 of the Sunday Book Reviewwith the headline: I Was an Under-Age Semiotician.

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i was an under-age semiotician

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