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Семиотика - курс лекций ... Наука о знаках ... CODES, CHRONOTYPES AND EVERYDAY OBJECTS ... Betsy Cullum-Swan Department of Sociology P.K. Manning Department of Sociology School of Criminal Justice both of Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan USA 48824 INTRODUCTION Semiotics is the study of how signs convey meaning in everyday life, but not all signwork is immediate, visible, or even a noticeable aspect of social life. It would appear that making visible the semiotic work of everyday objects requires an articulation of ethnography, or close cultural description, with the tools of semiotics. Ethnographic work will result in the explication of the underlying codes and principles that order surface phenomena. It should serve to clarify the polysemic nature of communication. Semiotics, the science of signs, since it deals with differences in context that produce meaning, rather than the reality of "the world out there," provides a rich vocabulary of terms and techniques for analysis of the codes and signs that constitute the reality of social relations. The principles that underlie how signs mean within a system of relationships, have to be extracted from the features of everyday life. The semiotic model, relying on the comparison of differences within a context, can be employed to isolate changes in the functions of signs, sign vehicles, paradigms and codes and to analyze meanings. Stability and continuity combined with requisite variety are fundamental features of communication. Signs are incomplete (Peirce, 1931); fundamentally context-dependent and possess imminently multiple meanings. Context, or what is brought to the communicational situation, inumbrates the sign, and is shaped by equivocality and ambiguity in messages. Constitutive conventions firmly link the expression and related content to produce a sign. To accomplish stabilized communication, people depend heavily on institutional contexts and interpretative processes (Goffman, l959, Culler, l977). But such stability is not simply as matter of interpersonal communication and experience. Personal communication and interaction are increasingly shaped by mass media-produced imagery. Increasingly, mass- produced images and once-processed impressions replace personal experience with events, and floating signifiers (those without clear signifieds), or simulacra (Baudrillard, l988) abound. As simulacra or images are widely reproduced and reified, especially by the mass media, they become commodities, and an unquestioned social reality. The media become the locus of the illusion of reality (Denzin,l986:196). The "reality" to which such imagery refers is the reality created by imagery (other images), fraught with rich connotative, ideological and mythological meanings (Barthes, 1972), and the forms of hyperreality (signs about signs taken to be objective or universal opinion or truth) that media produce and reproduce. The point is that other images, rather than immediate personal experience or local knowledge of events, become the source of veridicality. Objects, the topic here, are of course are no less shaped and given reality than social relations. They are caught in the mesh of intersubjective reality amplified by the media. The analysis of communications, especially that about objects, will require more than the application of semiotics. It requires a fully explicated imaginative ethnography involving principles derived from semiotics (Eco, l979). Barthes (1983:27), for example, suggests that once a system of relations is identified, one should use "the commutative test." This means that given an identified structure of relations, one alters an element and examines the social consequences. By examining alterations in elements of a structure in conjunction or separately, one can identify a general inventory of "...concomitant variations... and consequently... determine a certain number of commutative classes in the ensemble of a given structure" (Barthes, l983:19-20). These variations in relations within a system may also be patterned chronologically, as chronotypes (Bahktin, 1937) . Our analytic procedure requires careful description of a structure, fashion, the marketing of differences, its units, paradigms and codes. Fashion refers on the one hand to the physical and material world, and, on the other, to the symbolic world of the idea of difference and changes in dress. Semiotics provides a vocabulary : the vestimentary system (that describing clothes), the code(s) or rules that articulate instances of dress, paradigms or associational contexts that organize the meaning of units. Our topic is the garment, "t-shirt." This label originated post-World War Two, but is currently in common use. THE T-SHIRT IN THE FASHION SYSTEM Fashion is a dramatic example of the production of items for display and the display of these images for mass consumption. Fashion produces images to market and sell alterations in appearance; fashion is, as much as anything, the marketing of differences. 2 Fashion is itself a highly differentiated system. 3 Our interest is not in "high fashion," but "low fashion," and in explanations for the rapidly changing character of a banal object, the t-shirt. The t-shirt now plays a functional role in any ensemble of clothing, as well as in the fashion system itself. The shirts worn now as underclothes or as outer garments in warm weather, sometimes called "t-shirts" (an iconic metaphoric name derived, presumably, from their shape), "vests," or "underwear," are rather banal everyday objects. From these humble utilitarian beginnings, the shirt has risen, at least metaphorically, to assume an important symbolic role. It has become one of the prime emblems or icons of modern life, encoded in changing codes and carrying sign functions. It is a sign vehicle whose functions not only express selves, but the social and political fields in which it exists. What follows, unfortunately, is not a proper social history of the t-shirt. We rely on observations gathered on the streets of several university towns, in tourist areas and souvenir shops in Chinatown in San Francisco and the French Quarter of New Orleans. It should be noted that as a socio-semiotic analysis, unique, individual meanings of a shirt are not discussed. The fact that a person is attached to a shirt because it was once his brother''s, father''s, or boy friend''s, a gift from a loved one, or has rich associations with a past event, place or time, is important at the individual level. These features can be associated with shirts encoded in any of the following ways. We have no data on this (other than our own well-loved t-shirts). The analysis proceeds as follows. The first task for a semiotic analysis of t-shirts is to identify the system and the fundamental units or syntagms (11 are identified) within the vestimentary code of that system. The second task is to sort out the five associative contexts or paradigms that organize the meaning of these units. The third task is discuss the shirt with the seven codes that organize both units and paradigms. Discussion of the codes and examples thereof constitute the bulk of the paper. A concluding section speculates on the role of temporal change in codes and the salience of key elements or units in three chronotypes or eras. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK The eleven unitsx Eleven syntagms (units) are interchangeable elements necessary for the production and consumption of a T-shirt. These are also relevant to the imminent transformation in the shirt''s meaning. Some 11 communicative units (that convey organize how the shirt communicates meaning), it would appear, have been transformed in the last one hundred years in North America. They appear to be related to the evolution of the shirt from a home made item worn beneath visible garments, to a very complex signifying public garment. These units are : where the shirt is made ; the materials used to make the shirt ; the values expressed by the shirt, including both expressive and utilitarian values; where it is intended to be worn (setting-public vs. private wear; front vs. back stage) ; the cut of the shirt ; the nature of its adornment; the color(s) of the shirt ; what it represents or symbolizes publicly; the social roles or statuses it connotes ; its association with other garments in a fashion system ; and the nature of the reflexivity of garment. Although this is not an exhaustive list of potential units, it captures many of the key aesthetic and semantic aspects of the shirt as a sign vehicle. The paradigms The units cluster together in a non-random fashion. They can be further organized into metaphoric or paradigmatic clusters of meaning. These make explicit certain themes in the "vertical organization" of meaning. Five paradigms set out the t-shirt''s changing meaning : the technology used to produce the shirt (material, source, location of the creation of the shirt); the functions or purposes (social values), both expressive and utilitarian, of the item; the primary setting(s) for use (setting, roles and statuses claimed); style (cut, adornment, color, role in the fashion system) and the nature of the involvement of the self in the object (the self and representational themes). These metaphoric clusters also contain a set of metonymic relations. They offer clues to what patterns of presence or absence of units determine the overall configuration of the object. However, certain underlying principles or codes reveal the rules governing how shirts are perceived and used. The remainder of the paper outlines the patterning of these syntagms and paradigms by codes. WHAT IS A T-SHIRT?: SEVEN CODES A code is a set of principles that organize the patterning of signs semantically and syntactically. Codes, encoding and decoding, are essential features of signwork (See Guiraud, 1975: Chs 3-5). At least seven non-exclusive codes encode the t-shirt as an object. By seeing the shirt as a function of preformed codes, one shifts attention from the shirt as an object to its perception and use. let us list the relevant codes in order : the utilitarian code, the mass-produced manufactured code, the code of leisure (the t-shirt as a visible outer garment); the code of complex and fluid expressive signs; the code for problematic icons; the code of the shirt as a walking visual pun, and the t-shirt as a copy or double. Code 1: The shirt as a utilitarian undergarment The "t-shirt" is a soft, plain, uncolored, sleeveless or short- sleeved, usually cotton, garment originally worn under another shirt, blouse, or heavier overgarment. Called now a "t-shirt," "vest," or "singlet," it was a useful and functional item of apparel unmarked with insignia, slogans, sayings, or emblems. It served the private and unseen purposes of protecting the wearer from the harsh, perhaps prickly, material of heavier outer garments such as sweaters or wool shirts, absorbing sweat, giving support to breasts, or simply conserving heat and permitting air to circulate around the body. Made to wear under heavy outer shirts, they were once called "undershirts." The degree to which these utilitarian functions were sex-differentiated remains arguable. 4 When "home made," the shirt, the makers and wearers of the shirt, shared a value system, exchange values, and imagery governing the exchange. Code 2 : The shirt as a manufactured item Probably in the early part of this century, these undergarments became widely available, mass-produced manufactured items. They were and are sold in mail order catalogs and in department stores such as J.C. Penney, Sears, Roebuck, and Co. and Hudsons'' Bay. Although the upper and upper middle classes continued to employ seamtresses and tailors, the middle masses shopped and bought underwear by mail or in shops. No longer were most undergarments individually home spun or made, nor were they hand tailored and sewn. Large companies, with their own brand names, "Jockey," "Fruit of the Loom," "Munsingwear," "Sears," or "J. C. Penney," manufactured and sold them. Competition arose as other companies began selling underwear. The t-shirt now was distinguished in part by labels and to a lessor degree, by minute variations in cloth and style. Brand names and associated stylistic variations became bases (since the shirt itself was a simple and undistinguishable item of apparel) for competition, invidious advertising, and marketing. A commodity, it differentiated people by class and life style. The shirt became a distinctive unit in a system of monetary exchange, a commodity produced for sale. Code 3: The shirt as a visible outer garment Perhaps in the early 1960''s, t-shirts became visible outer garments. As visible items of dress, they served as status symbols that differentiated status and taste groups, even within social classes. T- shirts were previously unacceptable to the middle classes, because they were viewed as the leisure wear of the tired, "working man at home," shown in the media stereotypically as white, soaked with sweat, stained and torn. The t-shirt as outer wear in the ''fifties had additional and important stylistic or connotative meanings. As shown in movies and plays e.g., " A Street Car Named Desire," it symbolized the raw passions of the unsocialized and proto-rebellious working classes. It signalled animal vitality. The modest, short-sleeved t-shaped, undershirt became more popular a ... |
