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.

Tartu…

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?

RAHUL MURDESHWAR

I had the privilege of growing up in a family of voracious readers of literature, popular history, economics. and anthropology. I have always had a love for stories and narrative, and so it was easy to carry this lens for structural analysis into my broader interests in culture. 

SEMIOVOX

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

RAHUL MURDESHWAR

I pursued my interest in culture and social studies through an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Sociology. In retrospect, it makes sense that what fascinated me most at that time were semiological approaches to ritual practices, magical realism, folklore, etc. But my first ‘proper’ encounter with semiotics as an applied tool was after I was brought on to [the Mumbai-based insights and strategy agency] Plum by Sneha Kapoor. Besides our various ethnographic projects working with youth and popular culture,  I became acquainted with methods in applied semiotics like code-finding exercises and RDE models. This led to me committing to a two-year programme in Semiotics at the University of Tartu, Estonia. 

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

RAHUL MURDESHWAR

As mentioned, my role in qual and strategy consultancies in India primed me for specialising in semiotics. But it is also my after-work interests that have kept me tethered to socially relevant fields for inspiration. 

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

RAHUL MURDESHWAR

Bringing theory and practice together is the name of the game, and the researcher here is a ‘translator’ between two worlds. Client education is contingent on translations that avoid (or properly justify the use of) jargon. But this is a difficult task — and there is a wealth of rich dynamic thinking that is lost in translation. Some experimental concepts remain peripheral in toolkits because they lack appropriate applications. The responsibility of an informed researcher is to bring new theories to the table, question and strip down all the fluff, and force clients out of their comfort zone.  

I also think the strength of a semiotician is their network. Semiotics as an applied field of research is powerful exactly because practitioners can specialise in particular markets and categories — while relying on peers for collaboration and sharing of resources and ideas.

SEMIOVOX

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

RAHUL MURDESHWAR

• The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Marek Tamm and Peter Torop, eds. An excellent introduction to the most influential and important concepts from Lotman, written by a collection of some of today’s most distinguished Lotman scholars.
• Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions, Andreas Schönle, ed. A journey bringing Lotman’s relevance beyond the 20th century, to questions of power, politics, aesthetics, and more. This serves as a refreshingly contemporary addendum to Lotman and semiotics of culture, which traditionally relies on Russian literature and poetry for objects of study.
• Gary Genosko’s Critical Semiotics: Theory, from Information to Affect brings together in the present some of the most influential poststructuralist theories by major thinkers of the late 20th century. An inspirational read that invites thinking towards the ethical, social, and political imperatives in a semiotics of praxis.

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?

RAHUL MURDESHWAR

“I decode and encode culture.”

Semiotics is a specialist tool best suited for critical and creative approaches to culture. A semiotic conception of culture takes shape as dynamic network of codes, texts, and subjects, in which values and identities are formed through dialogue. Semiotic analysis reveals any brand, symbol, product, event, etc., to be meaningful only within a locally embedded cultural context — so semiotics is a toolkit for constructing and deconstructing context. Semiotics can provoke a business or stakeholder to pause, reflect, and face hard questions about positioning, communication, and the impact these have in the context of people’s meaningful worlds.

When approaching cultural phenomena, other fields would be satisfied with asking “what” questions, while semiotics answers the “how.” Where it perhaps falls a little short is in answering the “why,” i.e., in posing broader critical questions about ideology, function and social conflict. 

SEMIOVOX

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

RAHUL MURDESHWAR

In my previous work, applying semiotic frameworks in projects on categories from food and beverages to women’s jewelry and traditional festive celebrations have been the most rewarding. I have tried to carry some of the themes I have encountered with me into academia. For example,  a specific application to retro culture had carried my attention — at Plum, we had noticed how codes in the space of retro and nostalgia were changing in different categories — from vintage fashion to retro music to brands in alcobev categories. Nostalgia in retro eventually became the topic for my thesis — through my research, I analyzed the textual processes by which aesthetic codes from history can return and translate across categories, contexts, and generations in order to evoke a yearning to re-live lost feelings of youthful authenticity from bygone eras. 

SEMIOVOX

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

RAHUL MURDESHWAR

What impelled me to journey into academic semiotics was the depth of investigation that you are encouraged to pursue in that space. This kind of depth is rare to find when working on quick-turnaround projects for clients on the industry side. On the other hand, academic semiotics tends to swing too much in the opposite direction — it is very tempting to over-think or over-engineer one’s analysis, and in doing so to lose track of its application and possibilities in the real world. I am of the opinion now that a practiced balance is needed: that is, merging the outcome-orientation of industry with the rigour and creativity of academic thinking.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

RAHUL MURDESHWAR

All models are wrong yet sometimes useful — the tools we use depend on what we want to achieve. For example, if we are designing or studying a ‘public’ space like a park, we can use a Greimasian semiotic square to decode the park in opposition to ‘private’ spaces, and to speculate on new possibilities of meaningful codes. So: Saussurean semiotics. But if we are also interested in including non-humans like birds or animals who contribute to this meaningful micro-world, then we might rely on concepts from biosemiotics — which draws from Peircean semiotics. We should avoid blind partisanship to one theory or another.

SEMIOVOX

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

RAHUL MURDESHWAR

• Collaborate. Not just ‘vertically’ with those who you would like to work with, but ‘horizontally’ with your peers.
• Make yourself a part of every step of the project process, from proposal-writing to implementation.
• Know your worth — never work for free.

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