Warning Signs

The Semiotics of Danger

Marcel Danesi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350178311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Warning signs are all around us. In ancient Egypt, tombs were lavishly adorned with signs and symbols warning of the dire consequences that would befall any robbers and thieves. And yet these signs were often read as provocations and challenges. Why was this? And how could we more effectively communicate dangers from our world, such as toxic waste, to future civilizations? This book examines and evaluates the kinds of signs, symbols, narratives and other semiotic strategies humans have used across time to communicate the sense of danger. From paleolithic cave art and ancient monuments to the dangers of nuclear waste, carbon emissions and other pollution, Marcel Danesi explores how danger has been encoded in language, discourse, and symbolism. At the same time, the book puts forward a plan for a more effective 'semiotising' of risk and peril, calling on linguists, semioticians and agencies to face up our collective responsibilities, and work together to more clearly communicate vitally important warnings about the dangers we've left behind to civilizations beyond the semiotic gap.

1

Perceiving and Communicating Danger

Prologue

Working as a fire-prevention engineer in the late 1920s, Benjamin Lee Whorf recounted an experience he had in his essay, “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language” (Whorf 1956: 135), which alarmed him so intensely at the time that he decided to pursue the academic study of linguistics shortly thereafter. The incident in question occurred during one of his inspection visits to a chemical plant where he noticed the workers carrying out tasks in a careful and cautious way inside a room with full gasoline drums, avoiding the smoking of cigarettes; but in another room, containing gasoline drums labeled Empty, he noticed instead that they smoked carelessly around the barrels. Whorf surmised that the workers were unaware of the danger that this posed: Had someone flicked a cigarette stub into one of the empty drums, there would have been an explosion. Whorf believed that this carelessness was related to the Empty label itself, which predisposed the workers to disregard the danger. He explained his assessment as follows (Whorf 1956: 135):

Around a storage of what are called ‘gasoline drums,’ behavior will tend to a certain type, that is, great care will be exercised; while around a storage of what are called ‘empty gasoline drums,’ it will tend to be different—careless, with little repression of smoking or of tossing cigarette stubs about. Yet the ‘empty’ drums are perhaps the more dangerous, since they contain explosive vapor. Physically, the situation is hazardous, but the linguistic analysis according to regular analogy must employ the word ‘empty,’ which inevitably suggests a lack of hazard.

This anecdote illustrates in microcosm that human beings rarely perceive reality directly, including the presence of danger in some situations; rather, they tend to filter it through the signs they use, such as words or pictures. Of course, all humans have an instinctive sense of danger that goes beyond the language they speak or the pictures they devise. But this sense can be turned off or on (so to speak) by language or pictography. The gasoline drum incident shows how it was turned off by a word label, which impelled the workers to think that the drums were harmless, because of the word’s meaning as “containing nothing.” That meaning was mapped onto the situation, obscuring the danger that the drums actually posed.

Whorf’s ideas became known and discussed widely after his death in 1941, leading to debates and research on the relation between language, thought, and reality that are still ongoing within linguistics (Seuren 2013; Danesi 2020). In the case of dangerous situations, this relation requires special attention, as the example above makes clear. By identifying the source of the misinterpretation, one can then come up with appropriate or viable solutions to rectifying the situation at hand. For instance, it might have been preferable to attach labels like Explosive, Combustible, or Volatile to the gasoline drums rather than Empty, since these describe the kind of danger that the drums actually presented. A pictogram of an explosion, such as the one below, could also have been used, showing the danger inherent in the drums via iconicity—the semiotic term for signs that represent something by resemblance (Figure 1.1).

It was an intuitive grasp of the relation between warning signage and the perception of danger that likely spurred the US Department of Energy to seek the advice of semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok in 1981, assigning him the task of devising an effective warning system about the dangers at the Yucca Mountain radioactive nuclear waste site in Nye County, Nevada, that could withstand decay in meaning 10,000 years in the future. This will be called “Sebeok’s problem” in this book, defined as the problem of creating effective warning systems, relatively free from misinterpretation, and able to withstand meaning deterioration in the future. The project led to a (then) new branch of semiotics, “nuclear semiotics,” which will be discussed in Chapter 3. It was the first time that semioticians considered the connection between signs and danger in a Whorfian way—that is, in terms of how signs mediate the perception of danger, turning the danger sense either on or off.

FIGURE 1.1 Explosion image (Wikimedia Commons).

Nuclear semiotics initially caught the imagination of the general public, receiving unexpected attention from the mainstream media—arguably because of the expanding danger of nuclear wastes and radioactive pollution at the time, and because of the seemingly offbeat solutions put forth by Sebeok and other semioticians. Dangers from human litter have always existed since prehistoric times—people have always produced waste materials, burned them, tossed them into waterways, buried them, or dumped them haphazardly above ground. These consisted mainly of food scraps and substances that were broken down by natural decay processes. Consequently, the dangers that they posed were minimal. However, nuclear wastes do not break down in a similar way—hence, the need to warn people about them both in the present and in the future. The original goal of nuclear semiotics was to ensure that the warnings related to such wastes would retain their alerting power well into the future. As such, it opened the theoretical door to the semiotic study of danger and how signs mediate our perceptions of it. However, this line of inquiry was never pursued in any continuous way, other than a special 1984 issue of the Zeitschrift für Semiotik, which was dedicated to considering Sebeok’s problem from various angles.

Solving Sebeok’s problem semiotically today would imply broadening its scope to encompass dangers that have existed since the beginning of time, in contrast to the threats posed specifically by nuclear waste sites. In this book, the term existential danger is used to refer to any situation that imperils the existence of living things, if allowed to continue without refrain. Existential dangers are massive in scale, and include the threats to human survival posed by climate change, nuclear warfare, pandemics, or unchecked human-generated pollution. The semiotic study of such dangers would lead potentially to asking key questions about the choices people and institutions make, as well as how people themselves perceive imminent and impending dangers. A semiotic analysis of climate change, for instance, would allow for a particular kind of Whorfian framing of this phenomenon as an existential threat to human civilization—a framing that might turn on the danger sense of many people.

Existential dangers posed by floods, volcanic eruptions, and other natural phenomena greatly preoccupied ancient peoples, as can be seen by the fact that they inscribed them on cave walls and recounted them in myths. These ancient warnings have withstood meaning decay, having become an intrinsic part of human history. In an expanded nuclear semiotic paradigm, therefore, solving Sebeok’s problem would entail studying cross-cultural warnings, past and present, extracting from them common patterns in how danger is perceived by all humans, and how this can putatively be applied to understanding how people grasp current dangers, from climate change to the rise of infectious diseases. This line of inquiry might be suggestive of how to best motivate people and societies to take precautions and averting actions.

Perceiving Danger

The meaning of the term danger cannot be easily pinned down. Generally, it refers to any situation that sets off an inner sense of uncertainty, apprehension, or fear with regard to its potential for causing harm, injury, pain, suffering, trouble, difficulties, or death. This sense can be triggered by an imminent peril, such as the threat posed by a fire, or by an existential threat, such as that posed by climate change to human survival. Sigmund Freud (1894) saw the sense of danger as connected to a defensive response system guided by anxiety (Angst), fright (Schreck), and fear (Furcht).

Any situation can activate this response system, depending on context or individual. The following are typical situations that set it off to varying degrees, activating specific responses or strategies (Öhman and Mineka 2001):

1Physical: situations in the immediate physical environment that pose an imminent danger, thus raising the anxiety and fear level considerably—aggressive animals or humans, fire, strong winds, etc. Defensive responses include: running away, raising one’s hands in a defensive posture, fighting physically, finding a protective shelter, etc.

2Biological: bacteria, viruses, mold, fungi, harmful plants, dust, vermin, etc. that people have learned to fear as presenting specific kinds of dangers to the body through upbringing. Defensive strategies include: staying away from certain locations where pathogens may reside, avoiding the intake of certain substances, immunizing oneself medically (such as via vaccinations), avoiding places where dust can become injurious, etc.

3Chemical: toxic chemicals, explosive materials, radioactive wastes, etc. that are known to be dangerous from either experience or background information. Defensive strategies include: avoiding contact with the substances, using medications or therapies that can counteract their impacts, etc.

4Objects: exposed wires, spiked fences, burning materials, etc., that people know can be harmful from experience or an instinctive sense of fear or anxiety with regards to certain physical features (spiked fences) or events (combustion). Defensive measures include: avoiding contact with the objects, devising ways to protect oneself (such as protective clothing), moving away from the situation, etc.

5Places: places and locations that may lead to situations of danger, such as narrow ledges on mountainous terrain, labyrinthine dark caves from which escape is problematic, nuclear waste sites, etc. The sense of danger in this case is partly instinctive and partly activated by background knowledge. Defensive strategies include: avoiding the places and locations, gaining expertise on how to move around in (or on) them, etc.

6Existential: this refers to the sense of apprehension or anxiety that may be activated (consciously or consciously) because of environmental warning signs, such as weather events (increasing hurricanes, tsunamis, etc.) that might be traceable to climate change. Defensive responses include: using science to combat or prevent the causes of such dangers, developing social strategies for altering the behaviors that contribute to or are involved ...