The Limits of Post-Modern Semiotics, or Why the Apple Matters · 4:08pm May 2nd, 2018
Great post about Modernism by Bad Horse, here. Good to see you dropping in like that.
So, read his blog post. Then read Mr Numbers blog post. Then, go and get a degree in semiotics.
All ready? Good, let's begin.
Bad Horse wanted to point out a facet of the value-deficient stance that is commonly found in the Modern art movement. It is a valid argument, and his position is well-supported.
What I want to discuss is the importance (to us, as fic writers) of what happened next. Modernism, as a movement, was replaced by Post-Modernism. This may seem like a trivial distinction, but it is actually quite vital to our work. Let me explain.
Modernism was a rejection of classical structures; born from the Enlightenment, this philosophy of contrarian and deliberate innovation found a willing and receptive audience in the fast-growing cities. In the country, traditions were developed over countless generations and these folkways governed much of society. The cities, on the other hand, were changing constantly. Many of these imported folkways were found to be either redundant, contradictory, or entirely baseless in the hustle and bustle of Paris or New York.
Enter Modernism: a wholesale rejection of outmoded and inefficient cultural legacies. The goal, if such a diverse and rudderless movement could be said to have a goal, was to replace the old folkways and cultural truths with an untainted objective and scientific truth that all could recognize. I admire the audacity of the notion.
This brings us to Postmodernism; a socio-political movement so hostile to the idea of innate meaning that the very term "postmodern" is offensive. (Preferred phrasing: affiliated with a concept that can be labelled as "postmodern") It may come as a surprise to you, but I do not care for postmodernism. As little as I care for it, it is important to understand this: there is a foundational point to postmodernist thought that we must accept. There is no objective reality.
This was a rude shock to the Modernist movement: the constant search for the objective truth led philosophers to realize that there was no means to prove the objective existence of anything. There was no universal truth, because every human experience is founded upon the subjective interpretation of stimuli.
It has gotten so bad that the postmodernist philosophers are calling science and mathematics into question. (Fine, question away.) Their position is that science can only "prove" our cultural conditioning, and not any fundamental understanding of the universe. This is, on the face of it, a dangerous line of reasoning. Whereas it has been proven that the field of mathematics was a human invention, it does not invalidate the methodologies granted by that math.
(Aside: there are actually an infinite number of mathematics, and we have settled on one set of initial postulates as a cultural artifact. That this is so is not really up for debate. That said, mathematics is still a pure and logical structure that, for all intents and purposes, can be treated with an objective purity. There is nothing wrong with the notion of mathematics as a human invention.)
This matters, because there are two schools of thought regarding this postmodernist dynamite. The first is that we must question our cultural foundations. I am OK with this, and we will discuss why this is important below. But first, we must discuss the absurdity of the second school of thought: that all language is subjective, and so we can never understand one another. And all you have to do is read a postmodernist critique of anything: it is an almost universally unreadable method. Ha ha. But, whatever. I understand that semiotics relies on subjective cultural foundations, that a pistol is not *just* a pistol, but it still has an existence that is well-understood by the community at large. You can dispute that cultural underpinnings of that pistol-symbol all you want, but if I shoot you, you will bleed.
But let's talk about the former school, which has lessons with actual consequences in our writing.
What is important, I feel, is that we use semiotics to convey meaning in our work. But: these symbols do not have universal significance. They can't. If I place a cup of hot cocoa on a table in my story, I am looking to imbue the scene with a sense of warmth and comfort (hygge, in the nordic tradition). But, if your worst childhood memory is when your father lost his temper and threw a full cup of cocoa at you and you got second-degree burns on your neck and shoulder? That cup of cocoa is imbued with a completely different meaning.
My story just lost a reader, because of a cup of cocoa. Now, I can't control for that as an author. But there are methods that we must be aware of, if we wish to grab and retain a base of readers. If you have a style, and a group of readers that enjoy that style, then you already have a foundation for those communal semiotics. A pistol is, by agreement, a pistol.
But, even in the subcommunities of FIMFiction, we can still run afoul of poorly-understood or undeclared symbolism. To start, many of our strongest symbols are given to us by My Little Pony. They are defined, acculturated, and then handed to us. We have to use the semiotics that Hasbro gives us, and if we try to subvert them we run the risk of alienating the reader. Even the act of giving an OC pony a cutie mark requires the consent of the reader. That consent is granted or denied based on unspoken rules of opprobrium: if you do it right, no one blinks an eye; if you do it wrong, no one will read your work.
We must appreciate, as authors, that we come to the craft with a lot of personalized symbols. We write with the idea that others will see and understand these symbols. And, for the most part, there is some level of understanding. What we must strive for, I think, is the casting of these symbols within the text, so as to better define their place in the story.
I should give you an example. Here's one: The Gift of Lethe
So, Bad Horse again. Small story, and a good (if controversial) one. What I want to highlight here is this: the symbol of "picture" is strongly typed here. We all may come to this story with a differing (and highly personal) semiotic understanding of the keepsake, the memento, the cameo, the locket. But in this story, the power of the final scene is contextualized by our understanding that Celestia has her own personal concept of this symbol. And it is this realization, that Celestia herself has imbued the gift with her own personal baggage, that strikes the hardest.
This is semiotics done right. This symbol has been acculturated by the story, so that we are all on equal footing. This is why we have headcanon, and why headcanon can become canonical in its own right. Fog is a problem for pegasi. That was not Hasbro; that was the community. When we do our work well, we create the symbols by which understanding is achieved. That's powerful stuff.
So, consider this exercise: your OC opens a door, and in the room beyond is a pony holding an apple. The rest of the room is up to you, but think about this. How does the *room* change when you swap any of the Mane 6 in as the holder of that apple? How does the tone of your story change? What does the apple mean?
I'm glad you thought my story was a good example rather than a bad one!
In case anybody's reading this and worrying that they need a degree in semiotics to write pony stories: I never thought anything like "I need to clarify Celestia's semiotic understanding of the keepsake" while writing it. I just knew what the key parts of the story were, including what knowledge in the minds of the characters was important to motivating their actions and generating their responses. I think that most people who haven't been trained in semiotics, logic, or artificial intelligence do this automatically.
But I have about 20 years training in artificial intelligence, a lot of it specifically in how the way agents represent knowledge affects their actions and responses. So I can't really judge by my own case.
One of my professors used to say that artificial intelligence is philosophy done right, and I agree with that. Studying AI will help or at least probably not harm your instincts about how knowledge works.
I think that studying philosophy, on the other hand, will. IMHO the problems with modern and post-modern art of all kinds--painting, music, literature, etc.--are that people are thinking too hard about metaphysics when they don't even know any physics. I don't study that stuff because I hope it will help me write better stories. I did at first, but now I study it because I think it's destroying art and literature, and I want to make people aware of how it's doing that. There's a strong continuity of ideology from romanticism to modernism to post-modernism, but at least the romantics were still working by ear, so to speak--writing music that sounded good to them, or poems that moved them, instead of generating them from abstract principles, or even (in the case of music) from equations or sociological arguments.
This heavy emphasis on theory might be helpful if the people doing it had any hope of getting the theory right, but all of these theorists had classical or humanist educations which left out nearly everything relevant to art theory, like linguistics, psychology, neurology, evolutionary theory, economics, statistics, information theory, differential equations and function optimization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. They often filled in the gaps with pseudoscience or obsolete science that they chose because it didn't require any math--Saussurian linguistics, Hegelian logic, Freudian psychology, Marxist economics, Platonist ontology, and Aristotelian knowledge representation and physics, for instance. This stuff isn't all worthless, but it's all wrong enough to do more harm than good.
So my opinion is that writers shouldn't study philosophy, semiotics, or recent "theory" (a term which means the mess of post-modernist philosophy that tries to combine anthropology, linguistics, aesthetic theory, philosophy, economics, politics, ethics, and, well, everything, into a single simple set of beliefs). It's just so wrong that it will lead them to think about bogus mysteries and paradoxes, and when they make art with those things on their mind, it won't be very good.
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Agreed. Indeed, I find that the single biggest hurdle for me is that my education gets in the way, and I over-work my stories. I accept that, and I am working on just not giving much of a flip anymore.
I think the “pocket guide to semiotics” is all anyone should bother understanding, because a writer must sound natural first. It is, however, important to look at your use of symbolism as you edit down to the final publishable story. Thats all. Pay attention to how your story builds and transforms these symbols as the story progresses. Like the rug in The Big Lebowski, symbols can really tie the room together.