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Guest Column
by Hervert Allen
Why Semiotics?
Questions About A Suggested Pattern of Semiotics Study
Among Undergraduate Students in Europe and South America
versus Undergraduate Students in the United States
by Herbert Allen
Director of Advertising Studies
Columbia College Chicago
hallen@colum.edu
This article, which is actually a request for directional feedback,
stems from what I perceived as simple questions which I emailed to members of
the Semiotics Committee at the University of Toronto. Here is that request
in its entirety:
In advising foreign undergraduate students who are
transferring into Columbia College Chicago, I have noticed
that students from Europe
and South America tend to have had at least one course in
semiotics.
By comparison, undergraduate American students who are transferring
into Columbia College from American colleges and universities tend
not to have had any semiotics courses. To your knowledge, have any
studies been done on this phenomenon? Why do European and South
American institutions of higher education include semiotics in their
curricula? Also, are any of you aware of foreign accrediting bodies
that can shed some light on this topic? Thanks in advance
for your feedback.
Within a day or so, I received interesting replies
from Robert Bednarik, President of the International Federation
of Rock Art Organisations,
and Drid Williams, currently an Adjunct Professor at the University
of Minnesota. Dr. Bednarik replied “Your question raises the entire
issue of the substantial differences between different schools of thought,
in terms of their academic orientations.” He added, “This
is a very complex issue, to do with historical, philosophical and hermeneutic
aspects…different epistemologies and their historical roots.” For
her part, Dr. Williams observed “…Semiotics has traditionally
been associated with linguistics courses. I think very few (comparatively
speaking) undergraduate students in this country [America] take any kind
of linguistics courses.” After commenting on the importance of
semiotics to her work in human movement, with its focus on “dance,
ritual, sign language, etc.”, Dr. Williams added “I think
that univer-sities in the United States reflect a general lack of interest
in languages, compared to Europe and South America, where the subject
might seem to have more practical appli-cations. Many Americans are monolingual
and see little need for training in other languages—would you not
agree?”
Since the replies of Drs. Bednarik and Williams
pose still more questions, I have, of course, replied to them
and am now awaiting
any further explanations
they might offer. From Dr. Bednarik, I would like explication
on the "...different
schools of thought" to which he refers. Too, what are some of the
complexities that attend this issue in those "historical, philosophical
and hermeneutic aspects" he mentions? And, in the case of
Dr. Williams, her speculation of a monolingual America notwithstanding,
I am left to wonder how educators and pedagogical theorists
here could be myopic to the importance of curricular focus on semiotics?
The interrogation
of various significations of meaning is so fundamental to intellectual
growth, and life itself, that the need for semiotics study seems
quite obvious, quite undeniable, even in a monolingual culture. Too,
that need
is increasingly underscored by the profusion of symbolic content
in both traditional and so called “new” media within the
overarching framework of our highly visual culture.
To the extent that American institutions of higher learning
are myopic here, surely there are other or additional causal factors.
Could it be
that educators and other pedagogical theorists in America feel
(whether rightly or wrongly) that meaning interrogation is simply inherent
to
each discipline and therefore obviates the need for
an individually distinct or discreet focus on semiotics, which
Dr. Arthur Asa
Berger at San Francisco State University refers to as a “master
science” that touches upon all disciplines? And
if that is the case, why, by comparison, do educators and curricular
strategists in Europe and South America seem to feel—and seem to
have traditionally felt—that semiotics should be included in undergraduate
education? Have European and South American educators always
known something more about the importance of analogy and metaphor
in intellectual development?
Have they always known something more about the hermeneutic
tradition overall?
Indeed, in my reply to Dr. Williams, I went out on a limb and posed
this stray thought:
It is said the Greeks use mythology as a means of revisiting
and consulting with the past to discern meaning and inform decision-making
in the present, hence, the notion that culture is dialogic (across time
and otherwise). To the extent this is true, does this sug-gest a more
active diachronic and intertextual perspective among people in older
cultures? Are such people historically more disposed to interrogate meaning?
Is this a defining difference in the education (and the curricular strategies)
of Europeans and South Americans versus Americans?
It should be noted that, as a media artist and instructor
in advertising studies, I come at semiotics from a practical
or “applied” perspective.
My process of constructing and generating meaning is very specific,
very strategic. In creating the advertising message—be it print
or broadcast (visual or aural)—there is a sort of “mise en
scene” imperative
which dictates that “each frame of an advertisement must inform,” must
convey information that I want the consumer or audience to know.
Given this imperative, I felt compelled to develop a very basic
course in applied semiotics, four or five years ago, when I
noticed that our students were creating campaigns
without critical awareness of the symbolic meaning in the content
of their campaigns. Many of them seemed indifferent to the deep
meaning structures (i.e. ideology, metaphors, codes, interpellation,
intertexuality,
syntagms, paradigms, etc.) of advertising messages in particular
and popular culture in general.
The surprising development about this course is
that, though it was originally conceived and developed for
students in the advertising studies
program, the students in other disci-plines taught throughout
the college heard about it and insisted the course should
also accommodate their
disciplines and interests. I revised the course to accommodate
their demands and the course is now taken by students who
major in an array
of other disci-plines (i.e. theater, music, television, film,
sound design, cultural studies, management, fashion, etc.)
as well as advertising.
As they discover the relevance of semiotic thinking to their
respective disciplines and their own processes of semiosis
within their disciplines,
as well as the interrelatedness of signs to operative belief,
their interrogations in class make for lively—and often heated—discussion.
And, though some students are late in completing the considerable
number of
required writing assignments, the course realizes nearly one
hundred percent compliance in assignment completion and student
retention. When asked about the relevance of the course, the
students say
it helps in structuring their ideational process, helps them
think across the curriculum and, most telling, they
say they should have had such a course at the beginning of their
college studies.
As it happens, I have proposed the establishment
of a semiotics institute here at Columbia College Chicago
to give more systemic focus to the study
of media semiotics, at least in our School of Media Arts. If
and when such an institute is founded, hopefully it would
enjoy affiliate relations
with similar established and emerging initiatives here in America
and abroad. Because of this proposal, and because of the course
described above, semiotics in higher education will be among
the topics explored
at the annual Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning
(CASTL) sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching & Learning.
Doubtless, our deliberations at this year’s CASTL Institute will
address, to some greater or lesser degree, the questions I have posed
and the above observations of Drs. Bednarik and Williams. But, as Dr.
Bednarik’s references to “different schools of thought,” the
“
historical, philosophical and hermeneutic aspects,” and “different
epistemologies and their historical roots” seem to suggest, perhaps
this is a topic deserving response from
an even wider audience. To repeat the questions somewhat differently, “Are
undergraduates in Europe and South America more likely to have
had a course in semiotics than undergraduates in America? And,
if so, why?”
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