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THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 254-257
© 2001 National Communication Association

More Than Interesting

Corey Anton

Marcel Danesi. Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things: An Introduction to Semiotics. New York: Palgrave, 1999. 192 pages. $45.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). 

                Those interested in locating a stimulating and useful introductory text in semiotics need look no further than Marcel Danesi’s Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things: An Introduction to Semiotics.  In this lively and highly readable text, Danesi manages to open up a wide range of topics in semiotics without losing his audience or the text’s overall cohesion.  Danesi’s language accomplishes a tight balance between being user friendly and theoretically sophisticated, and, this is a rare and commendable feat given the work’s historical and social breadth and scope.  Moreover, even finer nuances and technical aspects of semiotics are spelled out so as to be understandable to non-semioticians and beginning students.

                The text itself consists of ten chapters, which range from an overviewing introduction to chapters on language and metaphor, gestures and movement, artifacts, and popular culture more generally.  It covers this range by centering semiotic ideas and analytical techniques around a fictional vignette which has appeal to wide audiences, especially college students: modern day courtship rituals.  Danesi states, “The scene is a fashionable modern day restaurant--an urban courtship ground where wooing rituals are performed on a regular basis.  The fictional actions in the scene allow me to tell the semiotic version of the human drama in concrete terms” (viii).  At many places the text returns to semiotic readings of the vignette, showing how language, gestures, and material conditions generate meaning within courtship communication.  More broadly, it brings to light the way meaning is historically created and sedimented, and the way that the human condition is, basically, a bearing-out of such socio-historical meanings. 

                Thus, a real merit of the work is the way Danesi explicitly approaches meaning.  He cautions against and challenges strictly post-Darwinian naturalisms.  He argues that adequate explanations of human actions cannot be found in biological, evolutionary accounts, not even in explanations that would address semiotic codes as cultural “memes” (195-199).  A vital current throughout, then, is how human meaning is non-reducible to “survival instincts” or to purely biologically functional explanations.  Danesi states, “the nature of Homo Sapiens cannot be understood primarily in biological terms.  The thoughts and actions of human beings are shaped by forces other than the instincts.  The most powerful arguments against reductionist theories of humanity is the fact the humans can change anything they want, even the very systems of everyday life in which they are reared” (198-199).  It is here that I must express a bit of critical reservation. 

                The main difficulty, I would suggest, is not so much Danesi’s text as the ways that semiotic readings introduce or at the least make reified purchases upon codes of normalization.  Again, this is not a critique of the text as it is a question regarding semiotic explanations.  Do they, inevitably, have a subtle normalizing force? 

                Because this is a thorny issue, let me open up the difficulties in this way: Danesi draws on Whorfian arguments regarding categorization and the relations between language and thought to argue that categories are freely created, as his example of “forbs” suggests (73-75).  That is, he explicitly, points out how we are free to invent and make meaningful categories from our experiences.  This is a coherent move; it is part and parcel of his overall arguments against naturalisms.  But, where categories are already sedimented and have been handed down in highly reified manners, they take on less than a freely created feel.  For example, even though, as Danesi points out, women in different cultures, when undressed and encountered by a stranger, cover/conceal different parts of their bodies (135-136), this does not mean that we, upon knowing that, can simply abandon our own cultural practices/meanings.  We still cover the same parts as before.  Such codes are lived-through spontaneously and as such are experienced as natural.  But, the difficulties are much more than this. 

                A more significant problem is that the categories employed within semiotic analyses may not yet have been sedimented, (that is, not yet habituated into the spontaneity of background practices).  Given this, they can take on a more than descriptive or explanatory role.  The meanings of everyday life can easily become caught within the frames by which they are semiotically placed and analyzed (for example, in phallic displays, unconscious drives, and so on).  We could consider, for example, how Danesi analyzes dinner conversations or wearing high heels as scripted codes for courtship performances.  To the initiate or even to the relative outsider, such descriptions as well as their underlying assumptions can frame behavior in an exhaustive, complete, or even conclusive way.  Such readings can overdetermine the multiple layers of meaning-play within interaction.  Indeed, as now informed by those particular frames, they can become the basis for normalizing prescriptions and proscriptions. 

                Finally, if the focus of semiotics is on meanings that are culturally “interesting” rather than biologically functional, I must express a slight, perhaps pedantic, concern over the text’s vignette strategy.  That is, if its goal is to critique and challenge post-Darwinian naturalisms and biologically grounded approaches, why center the work around courtship displays, interactions that, if only loosely, can be traced back to biological functionalisms (mate selection and reproduction).  Perhaps this is a kind of elongated Freudian slip, one which moves ironically against Danesi’s very word choice of “interesting.”  Maybe our concern should not be simply with “interesting things” as we should concern ourselves with how “things” are or are not in our own best human interests.  Said otherwise, could it be that we who study everyday life need to study more than what is interesting? 

                Abraham Heschel, in Who Is Man (1965), writes: “The truth of a theory of [the hu]man is either creative or irrelevant, but never merely descriptive. . . . We become what we think of ourselves” (pp. 8-10).  Our explanations of ourselves, by their nature, become inseparable from ourselves.  Given this, we should learn to appreciate Heidegger’s insight: “Questioning too must be understood accordingly, not as an inquiry-about but as a questioning-for, where the questioner’s situation is included in the question”(1984, p. 186).   When we study our ways of making meaning, those very meanings that comprise our everyday existences, do we want to explain the manner by which all of this is possible, or, should our concern be over the degree to which such meanings serve to humanize us or not?  Is there more at stake regarding human interests than either biological functions or what we happen to find interesting?

Corey Anton teaches at Grand Valley State University

References

Danesi, M.  (1999).  Of cigarettes, high heels, and other interesting things: An introduction to semiotics.  New York: Palgrave at St. Martin’s Press. 

Heidegger, M. (1984).  The metaphysical foundations of logic. (M. Heim, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Heschel, A. (1965).  Who is man? Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.