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.

New York City…

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?

CHARISE MITA

I am Japanese by “inheritage,” born in the USA, and culturally a mixed-plate Hawaiian by semiosphere (more on mixed plates later). At age four my mother’s older sister decided that I should join in her quest for deeper understanding and connection to the art and experience of the Japanese tea ceremony. Every Saturday afternoon until I was 13, I donned a kimono with appropriate accessories and my aunt would drive me to class. The Japanese Urasenke tea ceremony occurs in its very own semiosphere — a freestanding teahouse surrounded by special gardens, or in special rooms within a building designed with the material and flow of a teahouse. Such spaces quietly vibrate with meaning baked into every material, symbol, ritual, phrase or pause, and especially movements — from how you enter the room (gracefully sliding on your knees); bow; sit on your feet; get up to stand; and walk by sliding your feet in special “tabi “ (now called “ninja socks” on Amazon); and how you place, fold or release your “fukusa” (purifying cloth) — as well as meanings attached to your interactions with every container and implement. You also must learn the guest rituals. If it sounds a lot like paying attention with a heightened demand to notice things typically unseen and unfelt in life… it was.

SEMIOVOX

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

CHARISE MITA

As a PhD student my focus was on world knowledge acquisition and organization in children. The reason for the emphasis on world knowledge is because the research tradition in developmental psychology was focused on scientific and school-based knowledge, especially hierarchical category organization — e.g., when/how do children figure out that cars and trucks are both vehicles and under the even larger category of transportation, etc. Instead, I was curious about how the rest of what they knew was organized; children are definitely not unorganized knowledge sponges, as some theories would have you believe. At Northwestern University I was part of the Interdepartmental Program in Language & Cognition which included PhD students from Linguistics, Anthropology, Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Communication Sciences & Disorders, all interested in the relationship between language and cognition. It was there that I took a fabulous seminar called, “What does it mean to know something?” and first encountered Semiotics.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

CHARISE MITA

Because that Northwestern class was taught by a Psycholinguist (who’d become my thesis advisor), and because our textbook was John Lyons’ Semantics: Volume 1, for years I viewed Semiotics as a sub-specialty of Semantics. It wasn’t until I’d spent two decades working in advertising and brand strategy that I’d encounter [English commercial semiotician] Louise Jolly, whose presentation of a semiotic analysis for our client made me realize, “Wow! You can do this for a living!”

I started to explore what was happening in the commercial semiotics world, discovered the Semiotic Thinking Group on LinkedIn, and ultimately collaborated with Louise on a paper for Semiofest 2016 in Tallinn, Estonia. It was this experience that encouraged me to transition into commercial semiotics.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

CHARISE MITA

The Hawaiian “mixed plate” — which typically includes everything from beef stew and macaroni salad to lo mein, takuan, and haupia — that represents multiple cultures and origin stories, is a useful metaphor, here. A semiotician ought to be a “mixed plate” of knowledge and interests. We need not just depth of knowledge, but breadth — via never-ending curiosity. Like a mixed plate, it all works together somehow.

Another useful metaphor is the TV or movie detective cracking a cold case, or hunting a serial killer. We need a rigorous method in order to gather our data, and to organize it (whether literally or figuratively) on a big board. We need enough time to do this work properly, and to explore meanings and backstories. And we need creativity in order to make connections that aren’t obvious. Like the detective who can foresee where the killer will strike next, semioticians can recommend future actions and innovations.

SEMIOVOX

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

CHARISE MITA

In addition to the seminal texts I’ve already seen mentioned in this series, I’d recommend these:

• Juri Lotman’s Culture and Explosion (ed. Marina Grisakova, trans. Wilma Clark), which analyzes how change happens in culture, and offers an intelligent counterweight to American business strategists’ ideas around triggering “mutations” and “boiling point S-curves.”
• Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality. A series of Eco’s essays that, among other things, can help people get to the why’s of people’s continued love for Hollywood world building, the rise of cosplay, and huge movie/TV franchises like Harry Potter, The Game of Thrones, and Dune.
• George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By is an oldie — from 1980 — but goodie exploring how metaphor is a tool that enables people to use what they know about their direct physical and social experiences to understand more abstract things. It’s thought-provoking for those of us whose job it is to think about meaning and how meaning is created and transmitted.

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?

CHARISE MITA

“Companies hire me to explore the hidden meanings and stories that are all around us that we — myself included—- take for granted.” I try to have relevant example, so it if it’s a Pharma client it might be the meaning of spaces like laboratories (do you think they are a bit scary, or not? why?); I’ll try to get them to think about meanings and stories that people and even Hollywood creates about laboratories. Or it could be categories, brands, or products with expansive histories or cool backstories, or things that are hiding in plain sight that can tell us about where/why things have been and where they are going.

SEMIOVOX

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

CHARISE MITA

I enjoy the discussion and camaraderie of collaborative projects — especially global ones. When I’m leading such a project — for example, I recently led a project that involved semioticians in China, Brazil, Mexico, the UK, France, India, including myself in the US — I tell everyone, “you do you.” Use whatever methodology you think is best — visual brand worlds, culture maps, long descriptions of codes, category RDE, semiotic squares, it doesn’t matter to me. Are you a fan of Peirce, Jakobson, Lotman, Malcolm Evans? All good! What matters to me is getting the best work from all concerned within the time limit.

I also enjoy category explorations that involve consumer research — I like collaborating with market researchers (qual and quant). I’ve done projects ranging from premium chocolate to alcohol to men’s fashion, wine, and the state of the US healthcare system.

SEMIOVOX

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

CHARISE MITA

Having left behind the world of Account Planning and Strategy in advertising, I find commercial semiotics much less chaotic and confusing! That said, clients in the US have very little patience for theoretical explanations — the “how” of semiotic analysis. I knew this coming in, because when I was an advertising strategist I’d often work closely with an anthropologist to streamline and simplify his reports. He wanted to demonstrate the methodological rigor of his work, which I understand… but the clients didn’t care. If a marketing client can’t easily explain a semiotician’s work to their boss, then they won’t use semiotics again.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

CHARISE MITA

I’m a fan of a semiotician — Juri Lotman — who doesn’t figure in most discussions of major semiotic schools of thought. Lotman’s “semiosphere” concept is a very compelling model, and useful way out of the structural debates in Semiotics. As mentioned earlier, I like to keep my explanations to clients very simple, and Lotman’s model is very helpful in that regard.

On a side note, when I was in graduate school, my thesis advisor introduced me to the work of Lev Vygotsky, a Russian-Soviet psychologist who studied cognitive development in children at the same time as Piaget but whose writings did not reach the West until 30+ years after his death. Piaget’s approach is what I call an “Empirical Parts” approach: to record observational data and focus your theory/model intently on one thing — the child — and imagine/interpret the child’s behaviors as objects, deconstruct them further into more parts, and then analyze, analyze, analyze. In contrast, Vygotsky analyzed not just the child, but included the larger social system around the child — the world of “Knowing Others” — especially those who closely support the child as s/he develops. It’s a socio-cultural approach to cognitive development. Vygotsky’s framework of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) could be useful for semioticians to think about how new meanings/activities/frenzies are created today and who/what/how operates in the Social ZPD. Vygotsky’s approach has a very “Lotmanian” sensibility.

SEMIOVOX

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

CHARISE MITA

• Go as deep as you can on your project topics — for your own edification beyond the project requirement.
• Explore topics of interest that have lots of history, materials, and art – especially those around the world with centuries’ worth of these things. (In the US, that would involve studying Indigenous Peoples.)
• Gain life experiences via train/bicycle/walking… pursue slow travel on the ground where people live, as opposed to relying on speedy technologies that offer wide but shallow and soul-less content.

Over time, the deeper experiences you gain via these sorts of explorations will start to add up — giving you both depth and breadth of knowledge, which will allow you to generate fresh insights.

MAKING SENSE series: MARTHA ARANGO (Sweden) | MACIEJ BIEDZIŃSKI (Poland) | BECKS COLLINS (England) | WHITNEY DUNLAP-FOWLER (USA) | IVÁN ISLAS (Mexico) | WILLIAM LIU (China) | SÓNIA MARQUES (Portugal) | CHIRAG MEDIRATTA (India / Canada) | SERDAR PAKTIN (Turkey / England) | MARIA PAPANTHYMOU (Greece / Russia) | XIMENA TOBI (Argentina) | & many more.

Also see these series: COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | MAKING SENSE | COLOR CODEX