Estrategia 1. Reducción de emisiones en el sector industrial,

In traditional semiotics the concept of ‘rule’ plays an important role. The idea is that, just as people can only play a game together once they have mastered its rules, so people can only communicate, only understand one another, once they have mastered the rules of the game of language – and/or other semiotic modes. As a result, the ‘rule book’ or ‘code’ became the key to doing semiotics, the key to understanding how people make and communicate meaning. The rules of this ‘rule book’ were of two kinds. There were first the rules of the ‘lexicon’, the rules that stipulate what observ- able forms (signifiers) will be used to signify what meanings (signifieds), and second the rules of ‘grammar’, the rules that stipulate how signs (signifiers coupled with signifieds) go together to make messages, for example, the rule that in series of adjec- tives the numeratives come first, so that the three brown bears is correct, but the brown three bears is not, or the rules of colour harmony, that say that yellow and blue go well together, but magenta and blue less so. De Saussure used the term langue for the rule book, and parole for its actual use in producing speech. Langue, he said, exists:

… in the form of a sum of impressions deposited in the brain of each member of a community, almost like a dictionary of which identical copies have been distrib- uted to each individual’ so that ‘ language exists in each individual, yet is common to all, and … not affected by the will of the depositaries.

(de Saussure, 1974 [1916]: 19) Again, in Roland Barthes’ words:

[Langue] is the social part of language, the individual cannot by himself either create or modify it; it is essentially a collective contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate. Moreover, this social product is autonomous, like a game with its own rules, for it can be handled only after a period of learning.

(Barthes, 1967b: 14) In this kind of formulation rules rule people, not people rules. Social semiotics sees it a little differently. It suggests that rules, whether written or unwritten, are made by people, and can therefore be changed by people. To represent them as if they can not be changed – or not changed at will – is to represent human-made rules as though they are laws of nature. On the other hand, two provisos need to be made. First, not everybody can change

the rules. To be able to change rules you need power, whether it is the power of govern- ments – for example, in legislating spelling reforms, as has recently been done in the Netherlands and Germany – the symbolic power of influential language users – film and television script writers, song writers, advertising copy writers, etc. – or the more limited influence of ‘opinion leaders’ in groups of friends. Second, there are different kinds of rules, and different ways of changing things. Think of the way parents might try to instil rules into their children. They may simply impose them – ‘Do it because I say so’. They may reason with the child – ‘What would happen if everybody did that?’ Or they may try to give the right example and hope it will be followed up. The same applies to semiotic behaviour. In the army, dress is prescribed by explicit rules. There are no such rules for what university students should wear when they go to lectures, but that does not mean that anything is possible. There is the influence of role models such as singers and movie stars, and there may be peer pressure to conform to, or fashion dictates to follow.

In social semiotics the ‘rule book’ approach is not entirely rejected. It is a good way to describe how semiotics works in certain contexts, where explicit and detailed rules are enforced. But it cannot be applied to each and every situation. Therefore social semiotics works not only with an inventory of past, present and possible future semiotic resources, but also with an inventory of different types of rules, taken up in different ways in different contexts. The major part of this chapter provides a frame- work for this, a framework for exploring questions like: Who makes how many and what kind of rules? How are these rules learned? How are they justified, or critiqued? What happens if you don’t follow them? But before I start with this, I need to intro- duce two further relevant concepts from traditional semiotics.

Arbitrariness

The first type of rules, ‘lexicon’ rules, stipulates what should be meant by what signifier. It couples signifiers with signifieds. A key question in semiotics has been the question of what motivates this kind of rule. Why this signifier – for example, a knitted brow, or red – for this signified – for example, ‘disapproval’, or ‘danger’? De Saussure gave a radical answer to this question. There is no reason. The rule of the lexicon is entirely arbitrary. As a result it can only be obeyed, there is no ground for arguing either its appropriateness or its inappropriateness. The proof is that the same signifieds are signified entirely differently in different languages (1974 [1916]: 67):

The idea of ‘sister’ is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds s-õ-r which serves as its signifier in French; that it could be represented equally by just any other sequence is proved by differences among languages and by the very existence of different languages: the signified ‘ox’ has as its signifier b-õ-f on one side of the border and o-k-s (Ochs) on the other.

He added that this arbitrariness ‘protects language from change’ (ibid.: 73), allows it to be based solely on tradition. We use the words we use because ‘they have always

been used this way’. And he extends this to other semiotic modes as well. Gestures, for instance, may have ‘a certain natural expressiveness’ but are ultimately ‘fixed by rule’ and ‘it is this rule and not the intrinsic value of the gestures that obliges one to use them’ (ibid.: 68). Onomatopoeia, speech sounds that imitate other sounds (for example, glug- glug, or tick-tock) may seem to contradict this, but, says de Saussure (ibid.: 69), they are a marginal phenomenon and ‘never organic elements of a linguistic system’.

De Saussure does not discuss other semiotic modes in detail, but Saussurean-inspired semioticians who have done this have often added three concepts from C.S Peirce (1965: 156–73): icon, index and symbol. These are three types of sign that differ in the way the link between their signifiers and signifieds is motivated. While in the ‘symbol’ the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary, wholly conventional, in the ‘icon’ there is a relation of partial resemblance – the signifier looks in some respect or to some degree like the signified, in the way that a picture of a tree looks like a tree and the steepness of the slope of a graph resembles the rate of growth of some phenomenon, although not, of course, the phenomenon itself. In the ‘index’, finally, there is a causal relation between signifier and signified, for example, if a footstep signifies the recent presence of a person, it does so because it was actually made by that person. Icons and indices are therefore motivated signs. It is possible to say why their signifiers are appropriate for their signifieds. But that reason is still formulated as objectively existing, built into the system, so to speak, rather than as brought about in the act of sign production or interpretation.

Arbitrary signs (‘symbols’) do exist, for example, randomly assigned identification numbers, or the colours on a London Underground map, where red stands for the Central Line, black for the Northern Line, and so on. But in most cases we choose signifiers because we see them as apt for our purposes of the moment. While the reasons for such choices are clear to see when we create new signifiers or new uses for existing signifiers, for instance when we give names to our children, or invent new terminology, they are no longer observable for words that were devised so long ago that their origins are lost in history and long forgotten. The same applies to non- linguistic signs. The small slit in the back of jackets, for instance, was once functional, serving to make it easier to mount a horse. Today most people are no longer aware of this. Yet it persists in the design of jackets.

In an essay called ‘Against arbitrariness’ Kress (1993: 173) argues the social semiotic point of view that meaning is produced in use: ‘Signs are always motivated by the producer’s “interest”, and by characteristics of the object.’

One of his key examples is an utterance of a 3½-year-old child who said, while climbing a steep hill, ‘This is a heavy hill’. Kress comments:

Aspects of the child’s interest – great expenditure of effort – and aspects of the features of the object to be signified produce a particular signified – perhaps something like ‘This activity takes considerable physical effort’ – and this expresses aspects of the referent that produced, in part, this signified – the diffi- culty of climbing the steep hill.

This applies not only to sign production but also to sign interpretation. When, in the previous chapter, I interpreted examples of typography, I did so in a way which: 1 reflected my interests as a social semiotician – I tried to show that letterforms can be meaningful, and that the principle of ‘experiential metaphor’ can be used in their interpretation; and

2 reflected some selected characteristics of the objects – the letterforms – I was interpreting.

In the case of new semiotic resources and new uses of existing semiotic resources, old rules are cast aside. When very young children make new meanings they do so in a context where they have not yet mastered the rules of the adult world and are experi- menting with the semiotic resources at their disposal as part of the learning process. In many other situations our use of semiotic resources is controlled by rules which will vary in detail and strictness. But rules can never control every detail of what we do. In a sense every instance of sign production and interpretation is new. We never just mechanically apply rules. Every instance is different and requires adaptation to the circumstances at hand. What will we wear for this particular occasion? What are the best words to persuade this particular client or console this particular friend in his or her bereavement?

Double articulation

The second type of rule, the rule of ‘grammar’, stipulates how messages are to be built up from a small number of basic building blocks. In the case of language these building blocks are the speech sounds, the ‘phonemes’, of which there are, roughly, between 30 and 60 in any given language. These building blocks, which in themselves are meaningless, are then combined to make the more complex building blocks also known as words. Although words already have a meaning potential, they are still only building blocks. We do not speak in single words or interpret text on the basis of isolated words. To get actual instances of communication, words must be strung together to make messages.

Each level has its specific, separate rules of combination. Phonological rules stipu- late how words can be constructed from sounds, for example, the rule that, in English, you can have the sequence b-r or b-l, but not b-n or b-m. With these rules you can generate all possible English words, those that (already) exist, for example, brag, and those that do not (yet) exist, for example, blan. Grammatical rules stipulate how messages can be constructed from words, for example, to get a (certain kind of) ques- tion you need to put the (finite part of the) verb before the subject – ‘Did he make it?’ – whereas to get a statement you must put the subject before the verb – ‘He made it.’ As can be seen, these rules involve coupling a formal structure – for example, a certain word order – with a meaning potential – here a kind of speech act, such as ‘making a statement’ or ‘asking a question’. So the language system is seen as layered, as having

two levels of articulation, the level at which words are articulated with sounds, and the level at which messages are articulated with words. Thanks to its doubly articu- lated structure, it can generate a very large number of messages from a very small number of basic building blocks.

Many semioticians have argued that double articulation is unique to language. Other semiotic modes, they say, have only one layer, only a ‘lexicon’ of signs. Books with titles such as Dictionary of Visual Language (Thompson and Davenport, 1982) provide an alphabetically ordered collection of individual design ideas and symbols, which may have been original when they were invented but have since become clichés – although skilful designers can of course breathe new life into them. But double artic- ulation is not unique to language. A toy system like Lego, for instance, also has double articulation. It has basic building blocks, which in themselves are meaningless and do not represent anything, and which are used to construct meaningful objects, for instance buildings and vehicles, by means of the rules of combination that are built into their design – the way blocks fit together. Then, at a second level of articulation, these objects can be used to make ‘scenes’ or play games or tell stories – the pictures in Lego advertisements and catalogues usually show such larger scenes. Again, most people would see the semiotic mode of smell as having only a single layer. We think of smell as a collection of specific individual smells, perhaps evoking moods or memo- ries, interpreted and evaluated in highly subjective ways. But for the specialists who produce smells, for perfumers, scientists, aromatherapists, etc., smell is a system, constructed according to the principle of double articulation. Aromatherapists recog- nize about 50 basic smells that can be combined into a much larger number of complex smells by means of a grammar of ‘head’, ‘body’ and ‘base’, in which a given smell must have particular qualities – for example, a certain amount of volatility – to be able to be used as either head, body or base. The resulting complex smells, in turn, combine to form specific aromas. In other words, what to the consumer of aromatherapies is ‘singly articulated’, a collection of individual, specific signs, is ‘doubly articulated’ to their producers.

So it seems that any semiotic mode can either be used according to the principle of ‘single articulation’ or according to the principle of ‘double articulation’, either understood and used as a loose ‘collection’ of ready-made signs, or understood and used as a tightly structured, rule-governed system, with a ‘phonology’ and a ‘gram- mar’. Not only can smell be thought of, and used, like a language, the opposite is true as well – language can be and is thought of in the way most of us think of smell, as ‘singly articulated’. Today’s corpus linguists, who work with vast computer databases of real language, see language more and more as a vast storehouse of individual words and ‘collocations’, strips of words that have a high statistical likelihood of being used together – the computer can extract and quantify such strips automatically from text. Clearly, whether a semiotic resource is singly or doubly articulated is not an intrinsic quality of that resource but follows from the way it is taken up in specific contexts.

The way in which semiotic resources are structured by their use also varies histori- cally. Nowadays many Lego blocks are no longer meaningless bricks but already-

meaningful items such as doors, windows, rotors for helicopters, garden furniture, trees, etc., and they are marketed in boxes that allow only one item to be built – only the helicopter, or only the suburban home with its trees and garden furniture. The question then arises, why? Although there is clearly no single cause for developments of this kind, I believe that the status of the semiotic mode – and of its users – is an important factor. In the case of Lego, the status of ‘engineering’ has gone down. In the richest countries recruitment figures show that its appeal as a profession has declined, and many engineers are now recruited from newly developing countries. Meanwhile, the appeal of consumerism and of designing your own ‘lifestyle’ (see chapter 7) through careful selection and combination of already-meaningful consumer products has gone up. So when Lego moves from double to single articula- tion, it takes a degree of control away from children, and treats them more as consumers and less as ‘engineers’, makers, producers. For another example, think of the relation between text and image. Formerly language had the highest status in print media. Images were not essential – illustration, embellishment. As a result images were seen as a ‘collection’, and language as a ‘system’. Today the status of the visual is on the rise. Increasingly the visual gets the lead role in important types of print and electronic texts. As it acquires more status it also becomes more strictly controlled, more prescriptively taught, and more codified. The status of (the tradi- tional form of) written language, on the other hand, is declining and as a result it becomes less strictly controlled and codified. Correct spelling and grammar are taught less vigorously, and gradually people begin to doubt their value, while at the same time very visible and influential uses of language such as advertisements delight in taking liberties with spelling and grammar. Again, smell producers have more power of control over smell messages than smell users, so for them smell is a rule- governed system, while for consumers it is a ‘collection’ to be used and experienced.

One final aspect needs to be mentioned. Whether ‘basic building blocks’ are mean- ingless or not, also depends on context. For the traditional linguist, speech sounds are meaningless, for the poet they are not. The composer Murray Schafer used a range of experiential metaphors to bring out the meaning potential of speech sounds, as can be seen from this extract:

B Has bite. Combustive. Aggressive. The lips bang over it

I Highest vowel. Thin, bright, pinched sound, leaving the smallest cavity in the mouth. Hence useful in words describing smallness: piccolo, petit, tiny, wee L Watery, luscious, languid. Needs juice in the mouth to be spoken properly. Feel it drip around the tongue. Feel the saliva in ‘lascivious lecher’.

(Schafer, 1986: 180–1) Until recently such ‘sound symbolism’ was a relatively marginal phenomenon. But today it is moving into the foreground, for instance in important fields of corporate

communication like advertising, just as is also the case with the supposedly meaning- less letterforms discussed in chapter 2, or the meaningless ‘regulation colours’ of buses, trams, trains and planes, which have made way for colour schemes that are