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Objects
- Indiana University Press
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Objects The semiotics of objects studies the communicative potential of cultural artifacts and natural objects. The possibility of a semiotics of the natural world (Greimas 1970: 49-92), the transformation of real-world objects into signs, and the so-called language of objects raise the question of the semiotic threshold from the nonsemiotic to the sphere of semiosis. A paradigm of object semiosis is the "language of commodities." Except for culinary semiosis (cf. Herzfeld 1986), most object messages are instances ofvisual communication. Within this section, more specific semiotic aspects of visual objects are also discussed in the chapters on aesthetics and architecture. A special subfield of the semiotics of natural objects is the study of mantic signs (see Magic 2.3.4). 1. Semiotics of Objects: State of the Art In his Language without Words (1888), Kleinpaul discusses among other things a language of facts, of stamps, of flowers, and even "of fans and gloves." These examples refer to a folkloristic field of objects whose semiotic potential is popularly circumscribed by the metaphor of language. In the beginnings of nonverbal communication research, Ruesch &. 440 • OBJECTS Kees proposed to study the message of objects in everyday life as object languages (1956: 87107 ). Later, however, the field of nonverbal communication was restricted mostly to messages of the human body. The state of the art in the semiotics of objects is reviewed by Krampen (1979b: 6-20). Objects as signs are a topic of special concern to three fields of semiotic research, aesthetics, culture, and, in the borderland between semiotics and political economy, the semiotics of commodities. 1.1 Aesthetic Objects Semiotic aesthetics raises the question of how objects of everyday life become aesthetic signs. This question is studied in the semiotics of art, architecture, and industrial deSign. A first outline of a semiotic aesthetics of object messages was given by Maltese (1970). As Mukafovsky pointed out, not only artifacts but also natural objects, such as rocks or pieces of wood, may be viewed as aesthetic signs (1966: 230-31). The semiotiC transformation of artifacts of everyday life into pieces of art, radically demonstrated with Marcel Duchamp's objets trouves and Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, has led to a reconsideration of the fundamental conditions of aesthetic semiosis (cf. Noth 1972; 1987b, Danto 1981). The climax of this dynamic process seems to be the transformation of trash objects into aesthetic signs, as analyzed by Thompson (1979). 1.2 Objects of Cultural Praxis Apioneer work in the semiotics of cultural objects is Barthes's study of the Fashion System (1967b; cf. 3.2). Following this approach, Imbert (1978) gives a thorough analysis of the furniture system in the world of Balzac's novels. Both studies are concerned with texts (fashion journals or novels) about cultural objects and do not study these objects directly. Among the few attempts at a semiotics of everyday objects not based on texts about such objects are studies by Boudon (1969) and Moles (1972a; cf. 3.1). A major interest of these studies is the possibility of a systematic taxonomy of artifacts . Apromising perspective for the semiotics of objects is the research in The World of Goods and The Meaning of Things carried out in cultural anthropology (Douglas &: Isherwood 1979 and Csikszentmihalyi &: Rochberg-Halton 1981). The focus of these empirical studies is on the cultural and psychological significance of objects in domestic life (cf. 4.2.3). 2. Objects as Signs The features of object signs may be characterized in comparison with language signs and in opposition to their referents. 2.1 The "Language of Objects" The impracticability of an attempt to develop a universal language on the basis of a sign repertoire of objects was demonstrated in ]. Swift's satire of the Academy of Lagado (Gulliver's Travels V. 3). The mere metaphorical nature of expressions such as "the language of flowers" is apparent from a comparison of natural languages with "object languages." The design features of phonetic languages from which "object languages" differ most typically are specialization , rapid fading, arbitrariness, and duality of patterning (the lack of distinctive features and of an object syntax). Cf. Language 3.1. Specialization refers to the fact that language is exclusively or at least primarily communicative in its function. Speech production requires little energetic effort, and man is free to perform other activities while speaking. Object languages are not specialized in this sense. If there are systems of objects such as a "language of flowers" (Billig &: List, eds. 1974), a "language of the automobile...