Captain Decode : Reshaping the Future : Prof. Jack Solomon Has a Way of Finding the Hidden Cultural Message in Everything From Cereal Boxes to Shopping Malls--It’s Called Semiotics

Has it ever occurred to you that:

- The Cabbage Patch doll craze that swept the country a few years ago was not just a case of consumer fever for an expensive toy but actually represented the guilt of two-career parents who didn’t spend enough time with their children?

- Today’s elaborate shopping malls with their soaring levels of luxury shops, fountains and gardens are not a sign of national prosperity, but an indication of the shaky consumer economy of the 1980s which are actually designed to lull nervous shoppers into a fantasy world where spending money is OK?

- A “ring-around-the-collar” TV commercial is not just a plug for a laundry detergent but the contemporary equivalent of an ancient religious rite, in which the offending husband and wife are jeered for committing a social error and are ostracized until they seek Product Salvation in the marketplace?

Though all this may seem a strange way to look at things, welcome to Jack Solomon’s world.

Solomon is an intellectual detective who goes through life seeking clues to explain what is really happening. Even the most innocent object, he says, conveys important new social information when you look beneath its surface.

“Everywhere we look, we are bombarded with hidden codes,” Solomon says. “The trouble is that most people don’t realize it.” Solomon is busily engaged in decoding the culture becausehe is a student of semiotics, the social science that studies signs and symbols and the interests that lie behind them.

Semiotics, which was introduced in the late 19th Century, has become a tool for scholars to analyze human cultures, literatures, linguistics, legal systems and even animal communications. The Semiotic Society of America has about 2,500 members and its official journal publishes such obscure semiotic titles as “Beowulf’s Swords and Signs” and “Metaphor Recognition and Neural Process.”

In short, semiotics is not exactly a household word, but Solomon, an assistant professor in UCLA’s English department (he incorporates semiotics in his Critical Theory courses), wants to bring the concept from its academic shelter into everyday awareness.

“I find it very frustrating,” he says. “Here we are, interpreting culture, and the culture doesn’t even know it.”

To bridge the gap, the 34-year-old Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brandeis University with a Ph.D. in English from Harvard has written “The Signs of Our Times.” However one describes it--as a consumer book, or a how-to book or a consciousness-raiser--it is aimed at making semioticians of us all.

This awareness is important, Solomon insists with passion, because America has become a semiotic society, moving from the era of print communications to a culture awash in visual symbols. Waves of images, launched by growing armies of advertisers, politicians, consultants, designers, publicists, manufacturers and marketers, leave the passive American consumer afloat in a cultural limbo and victim to every manipulating message that comes along, he maintains.

And, he adds, the consumer is also powerless because, while schools teach us how to read and interpret the written word, no one is taught how to analyze or even question the images that influence every waking moment.

In the face of this media/marketing onslaught, Solomon advises continual vigilence.

In the book’s opening chapter, he counsels his readers to ‘Think of this book as a guide to the signs of contemporary American culture, one that will show you the powerful influence of signs in your life and how to spot, interpret and ultimately control them.” He offers some guidelines that the semiotic student might apply to any subject to strip away its surface meaning, and he suggests that there is a single commanding reason why any one would want to think like a semiotician. The reason is short and simple:

“So you won’t get hoodwinked.”

And we are being hoodwinked much of the time, he insists. “For example, when you are made to feel inadequate because you don’t have a lot of money, you have been duped by a culture that measures everything in monetary terms.

“When you are told that a ‘woman’s place is in the home,’ your culture is trying to conceal a patriarchal interest behind the veil of ‘nature’ or ‘common sense.’ ”

In his book, he hop-skips energetically over the contemporary landscape, fixing a semiotic gaze on the hidden messages lurking in such fields as advertising, architecture, television, food, dress and gender.

In the process he analyzes everything from the meaning of a supermarket’s countless varieties of cereals, cookies, crackers and soft drinks (“America is putting an inordinate proportion of its creative energy today into the development of consumer products”) to the runaway prime-time success of NBC’s “The Cosby Show” (“a representation of our desires for a world that is practically the inverse of the one in which we actually live”). And he encourages readers to challenge long-held beliefs as ancient as the biblical Genesis creation story and as contemporary as the American dream of a single-family home.

“Once you do learn to read the signs that surround you,” he says, “you can free yourself from their often hypnotic grasp.”

Currently he is explaining semiotics and plugging his book on a dizzying round of radio and television talk shows as well as in phone interviews “everywhere from Bridgeport, Conn., to Tucson, Ariz.”

He usually takes a teddy bear along on his rounds as a conversation starter, because one of the cultural signs that fascinates him is the growing purchase by young adults of expensive, sophisticated stuffed animals (with names like Lauren Bearcall or Douglas Bearbanks).

“We are buying these like crazy,” says Solomon, who then explains why. “For one reason, toys answer the nurturing instinct of young professional couples who do not have time to raise a family. I think I’m an example. My wife, Sonia Maasik, teaches composition at UCLA, and we live in Van Nuys with our three cats.”

Second Reason

But he sees a second reason for the return to teddy bears. “They are soothing--both literally, to hold physically, and because we live in a very stressful world and these bears are icons of a pre-nuclear, pre-Freudian age, a time of Edwardian tranquillity.”

That was the point he was discussing recently on KABC’s Tom Snyder show when a listener called in with this question:

“Wouldn’t it be better if people, instead of acting like kids with their dolls, tried to make the world a less stressful place to live, got involved in politics, tried to clean up the environment?”

Solomon’s answer was a semiotic “Yes.”

“Rather than being lulled by toys,” he said, “it would be better to look at what they are really telling us, and then try to change the world that makes us run to our toys.”

THE SEMIOTICS OF A LOGO

Recognizing this logo and associating it with the Apple Computer Co. are sophisticated acts of semiotic analysis. A foreigner might not place this symbol, but Americans usually can.

The rainbow-striped apple associates a complicated machine with the natural world. It greatly appealed to the Woodstock generation that felt uncomfortable about joining the Establishment in the mid 1970s.

The bite reflects the computer creators’ self-irony at their fall into the corporate world.

Colored a soothing, non-threatening adobe gray, the computers were calculated to appeal to their initial market: consumers who were wary of technological wizardry but who needed it to get ahead.

Based on The Signs of Our Time, by Jack Solomon