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| Sonesson on song! |
Having forayed into vistas and avenues
hitherto considered tabooed by the defenders and glorifiers of the canon - the tabooed philistines, the tabooed schools of resentment, and the tabooed –isms, that have for
long been anathema to the canon (thanks much to Harold Bloom!) have now become
the cynosure and the centrestage of all literary eyes!
Thanks much to the twentieth century,
which advocated a vigorous scientific approach to literature! Something akin to
a literary mathematics or a literary science per se, shaping our experience and understanding of our ‘lived realities’ in a much more comprehensive way than it was hitherto possible!
Almost all the major literary theories
of the twentieth century have been very much influenced by this science of the study of signs, thanks
much to Saussure and his ilk!
Well, how do signs give us meaning? Or in other words, how is meaning created? and how is it communicated?
As cultural beings, all our actions
and thoughts are always already automatically affected and influenced by a set
of cultural signs, cultural codes and cultural messages, which help us to
interpret them instantly, impulsively and instinctively!
Don’t we always do that?
Why do we stop at the colour red at a traffic signal?
Well, the colour red at a traffic signal, is a cultural code, governed by a
convention, which has, by default, given us a ‘cultural conditioning’ to stop
our vehicles impulsively, the moment we see the colour red! In short, we are ‘culturally conditioned’ beings who are
governed and dictated by signs and codes every moment and every day of our
lives!
Language is one such code!
In that respect, everyone of us is by
default, a semiotician because we always tend to interpret, albeit unconsciously, the meanings
of signs that we see all around us!
So we are all practicing semioticians
by default! Ain’t we?
And the signs that we interpret, the
signs that we decode, need not be visual signs alone! They could be aural also!
The moment we hear the hoot of a police vehicle, or the siren of an ambulance, we
could always recognize its unique aural note even from far away, without
necessarily seeing it!
Such is the power of semiotics in our everyday
lives!
That's endowed us all with the power to interpret signs, the
power to make meaning out of signs and the power to make sense of our lives as the
‘Heideggerian’ dwellers on this planet!
Semiotics then, is a prospective tool that
helps in delivering the real intention of a message, with the utmost clarity,
without even a bit of confusion, (ambiguity) to the intended recipient!
Cognitive
Semiotics, is a branch of semiotics, that
studies how meaning is created!
Have we ever thought about how we
create meaning in our thoughts, in our actions, in our perceptions, etc?
Curious, ain’t it?
How do we make meaning of something in
our thoughts? [Aaaahh! it’s like Derrida’s lines on thinking about the
structurality of structure!]
But then, it’s relatively much simpler over
here!
As ultra-sophisticated animals, [we human
beings,] how do we experience things as meaningful? How do we produce meaning? What
are the criteria for constructing or producing meaning?
These are some of the questions that Cognitive Semiotics seeks to address!
In short, Cognitive Semiotics studies –
How language impacts or influences a
reader!
How a picture impacts or influences a
spectator!
How a sound impacts or influences a
listener!
To put it in another way,
When I look at a beautiful Picasso
painting, how do I say it is beautiful? How does it make meaning to me, for me
to say it is beautiful?
Be it a natural everyday phenomenon, like a
sunrise or a sunset! How do I ascribe meaning to it, and say that it is so
lovelyyyy to me?
Or take for example, a piece of
literature! A humorous read from P G Wodehouse! How do I say that I enjoyed
reading it, and how does it make sense/give meaning to me?
Or when I watch a movie, how do I say
it makes sense or meaning to me?
Cognitive Semiotics gives us a
possible, [or a possibly effective] answer at that, by helping us study the
nuances of sign formation and its connect with language that assist in the creation
of images, symbols, metaphors, and even narratives!
In short, Cognitive Semiotics helps
analyse the human production of meaning in our various cultural expressions, artworks,
texts, etc!
Cognitive Semiotics has been much popularized
in recent times by Professor Goran Sonesson!
Well, Dr. Goran heads the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics (CCS) at Lund
University, Sweden. Through his research, he seeks to apply semiotic theory to
the study of pictures! It’s a wonderful conceptual area, which goes by various
names like pictorial semiotics or the semiotics of pictures! Something akin to
visual semiotics!
So here, at the University of Madras,
today, 19 February 2019, Professor Goran
Sonesson spoke to a packed audience of ardent minds, on some of the
features of Cognitive Semiotics!
He spoke today on our perception and
understanding of pictures, in his erudite talk that delved much into ‘Pictorial
Semiotics’ (a domain of Cognitive Semiotics that studies pictures with the aid
of semiotic theory!).
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| In rapt attention! |
How do we make meaning, how do we make
sense of what we see in a picture?
To aid us in this interesting task,
Goran Sonesson takes the help of children and apes, who become his research
subject for this interesting study!
He takes children and apes for his
research, for a reason!
To Goran, they stand in for the behavior
of early Homo sapiens!
Through this experimental study, he
proposes to find out, what we really know (that we say we know) about pictures!
For this, he refers to Judy DeLoache and her collaborators who
have done ample research in the field of early cognitive development and
symbolic functioning in children!
Judy focuses on how children get to
understand or make sense of pictures, which are in fact, what Sybille Kramer
would call, mere ‘graphic inscriptions on a formatted surface’!
I quote from Judy DeLoache –
I have found early symbolic
development to be a fascinating area in which to do research. Often, I have found results that surprise and
intrigue not only me, but other researchers and parents. Parents of 2-1/2-year-olds are amazed when
their child fails the scale model task.
Children of this age watch an experimenter hide a miniature toy in a
model of a room, and are told that the experimenter will hide a larger version
of the toy in the “same place” in the room itself. Nevertheless, they have no idea where to find
the large toy. Similarly, parents of
9-month-olds have been surprised at the extent to which their infants try to
treat pictures of objects as if they were real objects.
This ‘cultural technique of
flattening,’ pictures/images on paper, or this ‘semiotic flattening’ is totally
artificial, according to Sybille!
Hence to study this picture, requires,
what Judy calls ‘dual representation’! That means, a child should ‘perceive’
and ‘mentally represent’ the relation between the object and what it stands
for!
‘Achieving this dual representation is
a formidable challenge for very young children,’ she admits! And that’s
because, ‘Symbol-referent relations that seem simple and obvious to adults are
neither simple nor obvious to young children, in large part because they focus
too much on the object itself to the neglect of its relation to its referent.’
[On an aside, it would also be
pertinent to note that, even film studies today, has taken a cognitive leap, or
a cognitive turn! In fact, Cognitive film semioticians feel that, they represent
the next stage of semiotic film theory, or the ‘maturation’ of semiotic film
theory. Warren Buckland, in his famous read, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film,
published in 2000, does an interesting, and an inspiring take on this Cognitive
Turn in Film Theory, in his very first chapter.]
To
be continued…
References
Thinking
with Diagrams by Sybille Krämer, Christina Ljungberg
(Eds.)
The
Cognitive Semiotics of Film by Warren Buckland
Judy DeLoache’s faculty page at
facultydotvirginiadotedu/deloache/
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