Reimagining Communication: Meaning

Michael Filimowicz, Veronika Tzankova, Michael Filimowicz, Veronika Tzankova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351007900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

Reimagining Communication: Meaning surveys the foundational theoretical and methodological approaches that continue to shape communication studies, synthesizing the complex relationship of communication to meaning making in a uniquely accessible and engaging way. The Reimagining Communication series develops a new information architecture for the field of communications studies, grounded in its interdisciplinary origins and looking ahead to emerging trends as researchers take into account new media technologies and their impacts on society and culture.

Reimagining Communication: Meaning brings together international authors to provide contemporary perspectives on semiotics, hermeneutics, paralanguage, corpus analysis, critical theory, intercultural communication, global culture, cultural hybridity, postcolonialism, feminism, political economy, propaganda, cultural capital, media literacy, media ecology and media psychology. The volume is designed as a reader for scholars and a textbook for students, offering a new approach for comprehending the vast diversity of communications topics in today's globally networked world.

This will be an essential introductory text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and scholars of communication, broadcast media, and interactive technologies, with an interdisciplinary focus and an emphasis on the integration of new technologies.

1

Reimagining Semiotics in Communication

Paul Cobley

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Introduction

Any lay definition of communication is likely to put “meaning” at its very center. Such a definition, provided by humans, would no doubt take human interaction as its paradigm and the casual or formal transfer of meaning in such interactions as natural, inevitable and straightforward. The question of meaning in the scientific study of communication, by contrast, has been riven by profound difficulties. “Meaning” has been the site of an enduring dilemma regarding the possibility of it ever becoming an entity susceptible to rigorous interrogation. At the seat of this dilemma are the troublesome components that are at play in any act of meaning. If meaning is to be investigated as an organic phenomenon, circulated and disseminated by living beings, then the key to meaning is surely to be found in the dispositions of those beings as they transmit or receive meaning. Even if such beings are conceived as traversed by meaning, the question of whether meaning as an occurrence is left untouched in meaningful interactions is very much moot. Alternatively, it is possible that meaning is not to be considered as a phenomenon or process that traverses its participants. A corollary of this is that meaning is only to be found through the study of what it constitutes for the living beings that enact it.

Put another way, either meaning is a process or quantity that exists outside of its bearers or, on the other hand, it is to be found within – or at the very least, is inexorably bound up with – its bearers’ dispositions. Any putatively scientific study of communication, one which wished to avoid speculations or assumptions about the psychology of individuals and groups, would therefore have to eliminate from the equation the conduit for and the terminus of meaning, as well as any biases accruing to them. Indeed, there has been a continuing thread through communication studies in the last century in which meaning itself has been completely, deliberately and heuristically omitted from considerations.

Probably the originator of that thread is the work of information theory and that of Claude Shannon in particular. Shannon presented a highly influential model of the communications process in which “transmission” is the key feature. An information source in the model, with a message, uses a transmitter to produce a signal, which is received, by a receiver, which delivers a concomitant message to a destination. Although Shannon (1948, 379) does concede that the matter of signification, significance or meaning is prevalent in communication, ultimately he considers it extraneous to the task of measuring information. As Lanigan (2013, 59) writes,

The meaning of human interaction is the paradigm for all theories and models of communication. Yet semantics – interpreted meaning – is irrelevant for studying information as a mathematical phenomenon – signal behavior – in electrical engineering. Unfortunately, the warning by mathematician Claude Shannon (1948, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c), inventor of information theory, against drawing analogies between information and communication processes has been ignored for decades (Gleick, 2011, 242, 416). The meaning problem was suggested to Shannon by Margaret Mead during his first public lecture on the theory at the Macy Foundation Conference on Cybernetics held 22–23 March 1950 in New York City. In short, information theory studies the signifying physical properties of electrical signals, whereas communication theory studies the meaning of human interaction.

What Lanigan points out, here, is the tendency of meaning to impinge, broadly in an unwarranted fashion, on issues of information theory. Equally, it might be argued that information theory perspectives have impinged upon the central issues of meaning in communication theory. That is to say, there is a temptation to omit or overlook humans’ (or other organisms’) predispositions amidst the flow of meaning in communication.

In what follows, it will be argued that semiotics has harbored the potential to settle some of the issues featured in the dilemma of meaning, issues that have bifurcated the fields of communication studies and information theory. As an “approach to meaning,” semiotics’ progress has sometimes been blighted by a penchant for assuming that the participants in meaning are generally to be considered as stable entities, mere channels for meaning. Criticisms of this approach have tended to emphasize the importance of readers’ or audiences’ meanings which semiotics has supposedly, at different times, neglected unduly. As will be shown, such criticisms were not entirely cogent because they were focused on, at best, a mid-most target for appraising meaning: a quasi-sociological audience, stable and cognitively independent in its implementation of meaning. Meanwhile, semiotics developed a much more sophisticated perspective in which communication was not to be taken as a perdurable process but, instead, was distributed across species, ineluctably tied to cognition and capable of definition in a fashion that was reconcilable, if not of a piece with, the scientism of information theory. Meaning, as central to communication, was recast neither as a fully material fixed entity, nor as simply the sum of humans’ (or other organisms’) dispositions. This is not to argue that the development of a new perspective on semiotics in communication was teleological, a narrative of progress in which there is learning from past mistakes. Rather, the reimagining of semiotics has grown out of the false starts, misinterpretations and detours that have characterized semiotics’ fate in the study of communication. It is instructive to consider some of those now.

Founding Studies of Meaning

One of the founding, landmark texts on the issue of meaning is closely tied to the enterprise of semiotics in the twentieth century. Following on from articles which appeared as early as 1910, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards published in the UK The Meaning of Meaning (1923), an attempt to set out a scientific investigation of meaning contributing to a “science of Symbolism” (1923, v). Interestingly, Ogden and Richards already envisage that their study implicates cognition rather than just communication since their investigations “arise out of an attempt to deal directly with difficulties raised by the influence of Language upon Thought” (v). In an eclectic mix of references, including supplementary essays by Malinowski and Crookshank, Ogden and Richards attempt a comprehensive overview, in a manner that is almost inconceivable to the contemporary academy, of words, symbols and perception in the question of meaning. In one sense, their remit is to broaden the attempt of Bréal (1900) to establish a new area of semantic studies. This involves not just a theory of the sign and reference, although Ogden and Richards do offer that. Arguably, what is interesting for the current discussion is that The Meaning of Meaning also attempts to address meaning as a cognitive process, as opposed to a “volitional” or communicative process (1923, 50–76). Already haunted by the figures of two of semiotics’ founders, Welby and Peirce (Petrilli, 2009, 2015), in this way the volume provides an important staging post in the route to contemporary semiotics, despite the misquoting and misinterpretation of Peirce in particular (Fisch, 1986 [1978], 345).

Perhaps even more well-known than Ogden and Richards in communication studies is the foundational separation of syntactics, semantics and pragmatics in “semiotics” (Morris, 1938, 52). The division corresponds to, respectively, the relationship between signs, the relationship between signs and their objects, and the relationship between signs, their users and the general context in which signs are implemented (Cherry, 1978, 233). There have been questions over whether this subdivision is efficacious and, indeed, whether it is not undermined by itself being subject to a large series of subdivisions (see Lieb, 1971). Certainly, the division has been taken up in linguistics, where pragmatics has become a major industry, with academic journals, books, professorial appointments and degree courses, in contrast to semantics (whose star has been in decline or collapsed into pragmatics) and syntactics (which, as a named field, never really took off). Yet, the key issue for communication in this subdivision concerns not so much the division itself as where it has been put to work. Morris (1938, 3) introduced the term “semiosis” to designate the process “in which something functions as a sign.” This was not a question of linguistics. Indeed, Morris was very careful to ensure that his terminology – sometimes derived from Latin, sometimes derived from Peirce – evoked semiosis beyond the human. This is not a small point since it is the junction by which one route for investigating communication has been taken and one route has been neglected.

Just two years after Morris’ formulation, far from fledgling Anglophone communication theory, geographically and intellectually, Jakob von Uexküll published his “Bedeutungslehre” as part of Treatises on Theoretical Biology and its History as Well as on the Philosophy of Organic Natural Sciences (1940). Translated into English as “The theory of meaning” in 1982 at a moment of burgeoning interest in von Uexküll’s work in semiotics, the 50+ page essay presented the question of meaning from the standpoint of non-human animals’ habitats and niches. Crucial to his discussion of meaning is the observation that animals live in relation to objects. That is, there can be no “neutral object” for non-human animals; rather, such creatures are always in a relation to the objects that they encounter. Non-human animals do not theorize objects nor do they consider their mechanisms. Instead, the implications of objects are always accommodated to the specific senses harbored by the animal and the specific niche which it inhabits. From this observation arises von Uexküll’s term, Umwelt, which is often translated from German as “environment” but in this context refers to the animal’s sensorium. The notion of Umwelt suggests that all species live in an “objective world” that is constructed out of their own signs, the latter being the result of their own sign-making and receiving capacities. The theory of meaning that von Uexküll laid out here and in other works suggested that the key to understanding meaning was certainly to assess how it was lodged in the bearers of meaning, but also how it concerned objects that existed independently of those bearers. In addition, of course, von Uexküll showed how meaning is a cross-species phenomenon, heralding a departure from some of the anthropocentrism that characterized much of the study of communication in the twentieth century. Such anthropocentrism was particularly in question across disciplines by the time that “The theory of meaning” was published in a new translation in 2010.

As foundations for semiotics and for an understanding of meaning in communication studies, all three of these perspectives held great promise. The Meaning of Meaning, Morris’ Foundation of the Theory of Signs and “The theory of meaning” all posited, in different ways, that communication was not a matter of pre-formed individual humans manipulating freely available signs. Instead, signification was presented as a cognitive process which already determined how semiosis – an array of dynamic signs rather than a single isolable sign – worked to produce meaning for the participant in that semiosis. In the latter two of these foundational texts, meaning and semiosis were presented in their accrual across species rather than just in the human. Despite the flurry of high-profile reviews of The Meaning of Meaning and its continued existence as a reference point for individual observations about signification (Gordon, 1997), its disparate perspectives have not really furnished scholars with the resources for an umbrella movement or specific current of thought in the academy. The syntactics/semantics/pragmatics distinction has remained a reference point; yet, as noted above, semantics has largely been collapsed into pragmatics, syntactics is not a named sub-discipline and pragmatics has been largely pursued in linguistics, with only infrequent ventures beyond (e.g., Wharton, 2009). In relevance theory, pragmatics commenced an elementary interest in cognition (Sperber and Wilson, 1986). Von Uexküll’s theory of meaning implicates human and non-human animal cognition. This work was kept alive by semiotics, particularly in the writings of Thomas A. Sebeok, especially after 1979. Von Uexküll was also of interest to the followers of Deleuze and Agamben, as is evident from the editorial material that accompanies the 2010 translation of “The theory of meaning” along with Forays into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. What interested both sets of aficionados of the work of von Uexküll was the conception of signification beyond the realms of the human. In the mainstream of communication studies, this concern had certainly been in play since Shannon and had developed in relation to machines throughout the 1950s and after with the Macy Conferences on cybernetics (Dupuy, 2000) and in relation to animals in the growth of animal communication studies from the late 1950s onwards (Maran et al., 2011). Yet where cybernetics did embrace other species’ communication in addition to machine communication, it did so in terms of systems rather than in respect of meaning processes.

The unifying perspective on these pressing matters for communication was only to arrive in the guise of contemporary semiotics. What impeded the arrival of that perspective constitutes an instructive set of circumstances in respect of communication studies in general.

Semiotics in Communication Studies: False Starts, Misinterpretations and Detours

Most accounts of semiotics in communication studies trace the former’s beginnings to the work of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Interestingly, the foregrounded topic in such tracing is “meaning,” a term and concept that Saussure fastidiously avoided in his Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics 1916; translated into English in 1959 and 1983) Based on the notes of his students, for Saussure died before he could conceive the volume, Saussure’s Cours projects “semiology,” “a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life” (1983, 15; italics in the original). Rather than just tracking the ways in which signs have been used to refer from objects from one epoch to the next, semiology was to institute a “synchronic” interrogation of the very conditions upon which sign...