What makes a semiotician tick? SEMIOVOX’s Josh Glenn has invited his fellow practitioners in the field of commercial semiotics, from around the world, to answer a few revealing questions.

São Paulo…

SEMIOVOX

When you were a child/teen, how did your future fascination with symbols, cultural patterns, interpreting “texts,” and getting beneath the surface of daily life manifest itself?

GIANLLUCA SIMI

In hindsight, it must have been whenever gender would come up in association with different games, tasks, or behaviours. As a child, I was as naïvely comfortable playing pretend police as I was playing with dolls, but everyone around me seemed adamant on there being certain things only boys would do and others only girls would — which would rarely, if ever, overlap. By the same token, I remember all family barbecues being strictly split into two halves: the men would gather around the grill, drink beer, and talk — with as few words as possible — about football, politics, or farming whilst the women, on the other hand, would gather in the kitchen and go into as much detail as possible about shampoos, the neighbour’s daughter, or how they had discovered a new recipe for potato salad. Many years later, I found myself at one of these barbecues, listening to my cousin say how she couldn’t make her then-three-year-old son understand lipsticks were for women. “Every time I put some on, he wants some too”, she said. His father sat at the same table but didn’t say anything; he would just give her the side-eye. “Well”, I intervened, “maybe he doesn’t understand it because it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just colourful — and that’s what he sees”. Suffice to say I wasn’t invited to as many gatherings back then.

SEMIOVOX

Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.

GIANLLUCA SIMI

My undergraduate degree was in Media & Communications and we had two compulsory modules on Semiotics with Professor Adair Peruzzolo, one of the biggest names in the field in Brazil. Everyone was incredibly afraid of these modules because most students failed them at least once, so I remember taking lectures very seriously. Unfortunately, the strictness of it only led to fear, not much learning — and I would only become genuinely interested in Semiotics through conversations with my friend, Professor Juliana Petermann, herself a former pupil of Professor Peruzzolo who now teaches those modules. I then ended up using Semiotics in my undergraduate dissertation on foreign correspondents’ memoirs as well as, later in Britain, in my master’s dissertation on cosmopolitanism, and finally in my PhD thesis on everyday life in the borderlands. Given my first encounter with it then, my first impression of Semiotics was based on the fear of potentially failing one of the modules. It was love “at second sight,” so to speak, as, from the moment I actually understood it, Semiotics became a brand-new, well-adjusted pair of specs that allowed me to see everything in so many more dimensions than before. It was like being able to peel layer after layer from objects, words, gestures… everything suddenly became so much more powerful and vivid — dangerously polyvalent even, as I had to learn, over the years, not to split hairs on a bald head. (Yes, of course things are much more complex most of the time, but sometimes what you see is what you get. A semiotician needs to be able to deal with that, too.)

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

GIANLLUCA SIMI

Totally by chance! As I finished my PhD, I planned to get a less-flaky teaching position and keep building my career towards tenure. About a month after I submitted my thesis, a friend who worked in a Semiotics consultancy invited me to freelance on a project. The rest is history: I never got that first teaching job and now I can say I’m oh-so happy I didn’t. Working with Semiotics in the industry is not only more stable than in academia but it’s also more fulfilling. In academia, you’re “a nobody” until essentially you become someone (with a full-time, permanent teaching-and-research position); most of the time, you feel like a child, whom nobody takes seriously. In the industry, on the other hand, clients and colleagues alike are usually more interested in what you’ve got to say; they pay attention to you and take your expertise and ideas more seriously.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

GIANLLUCA SIMI

A good semiotician must, by definition, be curious — that’s non-negotiable. (Most semioticians know and would say that.) From my own experience, I’d add that a great semiotician is not merely curious but widely so. Too often many of us — especially in the so-called Global North — are painfully uninterested in the rest of the world. How many times did I have to hear a British person mean “global” when they listed an example from the UK, one from the US, and one from Australia — all sprinkled with an obscure quote from a dead French philosopher! We simply cannot grasp the extent and the vicissitudes of signs, meaning, culture — that is, what makes us human beyond the flesh — when we’re not curious about all of the world, all cultures, all manners of communicating. Being a semiotician that’s only interested in certain parts of the world is like being an anthropologist who thinks there are more and less developed or civilised societies. Sure, everyone’s experience and worldview are limited, but not being actively curious about “all else” is just debilitatingly narrow-minded. And this demands a level of self-awareness that seems difficult to find amongst semioticians.

SEMIOVOX

What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?

GIANLLUCA SIMI

• By reading Lucia Santaella and Winfried Nöth’s Introdução à Semiótica, one can understand all the basics of Semiotics. This is the best introduction to the field I know and it’s criminally unknown in international circles.
• The next step is then to read Cours de Linguistique Générale, in which Ferdinand de Saussure laid the groundwork for key concepts like the signifier, the signified, and the arbitrary nature of the sign, making this text a must-read for anyone interested in advancing in Semiotics.
• Finally, in Trattato di Semiotica Generale, Umberto Eco places communication at the heart of Semiotics, arguing that understanding how signs are produced and interpreted is crucial for understanding “meaning” itself. I treat Eco’s book as a holy book; it’s my favourite one!

SEMIOVOX

When someone asks you to describe what you do, what is your “elevator pitch”? How do you persuade a skeptical client to take a chance on using this tool?

GIANLLUCA SIMI

I usually start with what will be the tagline of my own company one day: “We do research” — and build up from there. Sometimes, if I know a bit more about the person with whom I’m speaking, I’ll try to find an example that makes sense for them. For example, in talking to my cousin, who’s a dentist, we went over the colours dentists’ offices usually sport: are they green or red? Use green to evoke asepsis and calm. In this context, red is scary, painful; it’s the colour of blood — and there’s nobody who would want to be reminded of that on a visit to the dentist. Now, as for clients, I must admit I feel a bit reticent about having to “convince” them. Explaining why symbols, meaning, and culture are important for literally any business feels like having to explain why numbers are important for mathematics. (But of course I acknowledge that’s part of a bigger picture: anything that’s not traditionally associated with the “hard sciences” is discarded as whimsically subjective. And I don’t fully disagree that we, semioticians and all social scientists and humanities experts alike, are not somewhat to blame for that as well.) Anyway, when talking to clients, I find it important — and it’s a work in progress — to put my ego as an experienced, trained researcher aside and try to meet them halfway — like I did when talking to my dentist cousin. That a client might not recognise the value and validity of what I do does not imply they’re intrinsically dismissing it. So I make sure to, as much as I can understand of the client’s domain, bring examples that make sense to them. If it makes sense to them, it makes sense for us to work together.

SEMIOVOX

What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?

GIANLLUCA SIMI

Whatever sort of project it may be, what I most enjoy is the absolute rush of realising, of learning something new — the epiphany of an insight. Understanding a new connection between a sign and a meaning — and especially how that connection came to be and how it’s used by different people in different contexts. So, I could say the most rewarding part of working with Semiotics is the joy of successfully establishing relations of cultural causation, if that makes sense. What a joy! It’s a “divine drug” — and I fear, once we’re on it, we’ll spend the rest of our lives looking for that rush everywhere. As far as I can tell, the upsides are still far more numerous — though it can be very challenging to deal with the feeling of never knowing enough.

SEMIOVOX

What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?

GIANLLUCA SIMI

As someone who’s been deep in both academia and the industry, my frustrations are on a spectrum. In academia, scholars never seem to move forward, dedicating innumerable meetings, conferences, publications to the tiniest of details, which — ironically — make little to no sense in the end. Of course, if we were to say that to a scholar, we’d have to sit there and listen to plenty of insinuations we don’t really know what we’re talking about. At the other extreme, the industry seems to have a serious problem with a healthy degree of gatekeeping: if someone were to suddenly decide to start calling themselves “a semiotics enthusiast” on LinkedIn, there’s nothing that could stop them; there’s no test, process, checkpoint where they might need to prove their knowledge or expertise. So, in other words, whilst academia is paralysing, the industry is way too lax. Both extremes are frustrating and, most importantly, they are dangerous to our field — and, at a purely utilitarian level, dangerous to our craft. I would love to see those two worlds come together: academia cares about rigour and the industry cares about applications, so we’d be so much more relevant and impactful if we managed to work together. I have been trying to find ways to do that myself, but, alone, I either get stuck at the industry’s obsession with velocity and easy-to-digest ideas or, on the other hand, at academia’s disdain for anyone who “left” instead of sticking around.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

GIANLLUCA SIMI

Saussure all day, any day. Virtually everything we need to start is in Saussure’s work. For me, Peirce’s greatest contribution is the concept of “semiosis.” Of course I’m not suggesting everything else he worked on should be ignored, but his work was too confusing, relied heavily on others’ accounts and interpretations (though admittedly the same could be said of Saussure here), and was just volatile. He created way too many categories and subcategories, he contradicted himself between pieces of work. Essentially, Peirce was too invested into the taxonomic exercise of Semiotics. Many of his followers today — mostly in academia — would defend his work against any sort of real criticism precisely because Peirce’s work enables the paralysing obsession with taxonomy and conceptual nitpicking that much of academia is based on.

SEMIOVOX

What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?

GIANLLUCA SIMI

Keep an open mind and make yourself curious about literally everything. Semiosis is our friend — so indulge falling into those weird 2am “YouTube rabbit holes.” That’s the only solid piece of advice I can give; everything else seems sort of haphazard or, at least, immune to strict planning.

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