Code-X (Intro)

By: Joshua Glenn
April 25, 2014

Reality, according to the post-structuralists whom members of my generation were encouraged to take seriously in the Eighties, is a shapeless mass of experience (call it: nature) upon which is superimposed — pre-consciously, and therefore ultra-persuasively — a complex, language-like matrix of… not meaning, exactly, because there is no such thing, but meaningfulness (call it: culture). These theorists (Derrida, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, the later Foucault and later Barthes) suggested that a meditative attention to this matrix’s gaps and glitches might reveal glimpses of natura naturans, reality in its never-ending state of flux and mutation. Far out!

The aim of the forthcoming Code-X series of HiLobrow posts is more modest, less mystical and liberatory than the post-structuralists’ mission. Via detailed observational analysis, this series aims to surface not nature, but culture. Each post in this series will identify one code: a single node in the vast meaningfulness-matrix structuring our perception of the everyday world.

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The Code-X series will be a minor contribution, a footnote, to the codex begun and abandoned by the post-structuralists’ predecessors. Once upon a time, structuralist linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and social critics including Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Greimas, Lacan, Althusser, the early Foucault (of Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge), and the early Barthes (of Elements of Semiology, Mythologies, and The Fashion System) sought to analyze not merely what everyday objects, actions, and gestures within a given social order mean… but how they mean. How does the a priori network of classifications, categories, and concepts (a.k.a. the all-encompassing sign-field) through which each of us intuitively reads and interprets everyday life function? What are the implicit assumptions (or “mythologies”) we’ve absorbed without consciously evaluating them?

Since the late 1990s, I’ve worked as a semiotic culture and brand analyst. My agency, Semiovox, audits the codes of product categories and cultural territories from the outside-in, i.e., we attempt [via what phenomenologists call a “bracketing” exercise; ancient Greek philosophers called this exercise ἐποχή (epoché)] to operate as alien anthropologists who regard the apparently permanent, natural, and inevitable norms and forms of everyday life in 21st-century America as impermanent, unnatural, and evitable. At the same time, we’re acting as insiders — drawing on years of attention to cultural trends, shifts, and minutiae within our own cultures. The sociologist Robert Friedrichs, with whom I studied as an undergrad, claimed that a social scientist should be a “minotaur”: productively divided, striving to be simultaneously objective and subjective. [“An attitude at once critical [objective] and apologetic [subjective] toward the same situation is no intrinsic contradiction in terms (however often it may in fact turn out to be an empirical one) but a sign of a certain level of intellectual sophistication.” — Clifford Geertz.] Operating as a minotaur semiotician, on behalf of the many brands, agencies, and institutions who’ve hired me, I’ve haphazardly worked towards what Barthes optimistically called a “total ideological description” of the implicit norms and forms communicated via pop culture, advertising, and packaging. Ideology, that is, not in the Marxist sense of an explicit idea fed by the bourgeoisie to the masses, but in the Althusserian sense of an implicit, unquestionable “primary ‘obviousness.’”

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I’ve shared a few insights into how meaningfulness operates in four of my books, The Idler’s Glossary, The Wage Slave’s Glossary, Taking Things Seriously, and Significant Objects, as well as in my introduction to HiLoBooks’ edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt. Also, I’ve anticipated this Code-X series in essays I wrote in the ’90s for my zine/journal Hermenaut, in previous posts for HiLobrow and the website Semionaut (which I started with the Welsh semiotician Malcolm Evans), and elsewhere. Here are a few examples: e.g., The Double Exposure Series, Star Wars Semiotics, Icon Game, Meet the Semionauts, Show Me the Molecule, Science Fantasy, Inscribed Upon the Body, The Abductive Method, Enter the Samurai, and Semionauts at Work.

Alas! The Code-X series is doomed to failure. Many of the codes analyzed in the Code-X series will strike readers as banal, quotidian, obvious. Why? Because that’s exactly how semiotic [meaningfulness-producing] codes function in our daily lives; they operate at the that’s-just-how-things-are level of primary “obviousness.” Also, an all-encompassing cultural codex is (as the post-structuralists were correct to point out) an impossibility — because culture is always changing. What’s more, no isolated code means anything except inasmuch as it differs from all related codes within a category — so therefore extracting one code at a time from various cultural territories (e.g., British-ness, Happiness, Tough Mom) and product categories (e.g., Automotive, Male Grooming, Chocolate Milk) won’t do much to enlighten readers. In my work, before I classify codes and map them onto an explicatory grid [e.g., a “semiotic square”], I first must surface and dimensionalize them — and that’s what this series aims to do. Despite all the arguments against this series I’ve just listed, then, let’s give it a whirl.

ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES

Code-X (Intro)

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