Culture codes and semiotics

1 Culture and codes

In this analysis, I suggest that cultures can be thought of as collections of codes that shape our behavior. Codes that we are aware of we call “rules” or “laws,” while codes that we do not recognize, but which affect our thinking and behavior in many areas, I call culture codes. I explain the various characteristics of these codes below. We know that genetic codes play a major role in shaping our physical bodies and in many illnesses we are plagued with. In the same light, culture codes are of interest to semioticians because they play a major role in framing our thoughts and behavior, even though we generally are not aware of the existence of these codes. I made a caricature of myself as a “code breaker” and “code finder” and “code analyst” in which I took on the persona of “Decoder Man” (see Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Decoder Man.

Determining what signs mean is more complicated than you might imagine. Their meaning is connected, sometimes in complicated ways, to the codes that explain them. As Daniel Chandler (2002) writes in Semiotics: The basics:

Since the meaning of a sign depends on the code within which it is situated, codes provide a framework within which signs make sense. Indeed, we cannot grand something the status of a sign if it does not function within a code […] The conventions of codes represent a social dimension in semiotics: a code is a set of practices familiar to users of the medium operating with a broad cultural framework […] When studying cultural practices, semioticians treat as signs any objects or actions which have meaning to the members of a cultural group, seeking to identify the rules or conventions of the codes which underlie the production of meaning within that culture. (Chandler 2002: 147)

Chandler adds that there are any number of different kinds of codes. Under social codes, he lists verbal language, bodily codes, commodity codes (fashions, clothing, cars), behavioral codes, protocols, rituals, role-playing, and games. He discusses other kinds of codes, such as textual and interpretive codes, but they are not important for my purposes. With these insights into the relationship between signs and codes in mind, let us consider some interesting aspects of codes – all of which begin with the letter “c.”

2 Characteristics of codes

Codes are in fashion for the moment (code à la mode). You see mention of codes in most of the avant-garde writings of semioticians, ethnomethodologists, linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and various other kinds of social scientists and humanities scholars. The notion is that many aspects of our lives have a hidden or internal “logic” and structure and are shaped in some ways we do not generally recognize. Generally speaking, they are in our unconscious. So something can be in our minds, but we are not conscious that this is so.

But what is a code? In spy literature, much use is made of scrambled messages which can only be unlocked by knowing a certain code – that is, by knowing what stands for what. Consider the following letters that don’t seem to mean anything:

D V M U V S F D P E F T

The code for unlocking the meaning of these letters is minus 1. When we apply this code to these letters, we get:

D V M U V S F D P E F T

minus 1

C U L T U R E C O D E S

So things that might seem trivial or meaningless often appear that way to us because we do not know the codes that unlock their meaning.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a code as a “set of letters or figures or word groups with arbitrary meanings for brevity or secrecy.” If you look at transcripts of messages sent by texters, you find many abbreviations and strange constructions that are now conventionally used. Another definition of code is a “systematic collection of statutes, body of laws so arranged as to avoid inconsistency and overlapping.” If we combine the two meanings and apply them to culture, we have a pretty good way of understanding culture codes. Codes are, in essence, instructions sent to us by our cultures, which, in some cases, are disguised so we do not understand their significance. But I would like to say a bit more about them. The code for the material that follows is “begin with a C.”

3 Codes are coherent

Implicit in the very definition of a code is the notion of coherence, the notion that for a code to be a code the things it codifies have to be related in some systematic way. We are very close here to the so-called “coherence theory of truth,” except that the relations are arbitrary for a given sphere and nothing is necessarily related to anything else, except within the sphere covered by the code. Relations are necessary only because the code defines them that way. The coherence theory of truth of the Absolute Idealists stated that there were degrees of truth, and some truths were more true than others in that they explained more about reality than weak truths did. If everything is related to everything else, then knowing anything enables you, ultimately, to know everything. You can work it out for yourself – if that is, you know how everything is related to everything else. In Conan Doyle’s (1887) “A Study in Scarlet” there is a relevant passage:

Its somewhat ambitious title was “The Book of Life,” and it attempted to show how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of all that came in his way. It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the deductions appeared to me to be far-fetched and exaggerated. “From a drop of water,” said the writer, “a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.” (Doyle 1887: Pt I, Ch. II; my Italics)

From a drop of water, we can infer the existence of our rivers and oceans and all kinds of other things.

4 Cultures can be seen as collections of codes

Every culture, I suggest, can be thought of as a collection of codes of conduct, and these codes are transmitted from one generation to another. I am using culture here anthropologically – not as some people do when they are dealing with aesthetic considerations. Everyone has a culture then, though not everyone necessarily appreciates elite culture – ballet, chamber music, poetry, avant-garde literature, and other art forms that require sophisticated and educated aesthetic sensibilities. I will consider the terms culture, codes, and culture codes to be the same for our purposes. Cultures provide us with “ways of behaving” in various situations and ways of looking at the world, society and humankind, and these ways all lock together to form a coherent system for each culture (or subculture). We know from the work of Basil Bernstein that children pick up, almost by osmosis it seems, attitudes toward time and themselves and the world using the codes hidden in the language of their parents and peers.

This leads to the next consideration – codes are covert.

5 Codes are covert

People are generally not aware of the extent to which their actions (and thoughts) and behaviors are “governed” or “shaped” by their culture. All of this is unconscious and unrecognized by them. We are, as Clotaire Rapaille puts it in his book The culture code, “imprinted” when we are children with certain codes. A culture is a code and is, therefore, to a great degree, “secret” – at least to the people involved who have been “enculturated.” When people become aware of cultural codes, they can modify them and arrange them to suit their purposes. In such cases, culture as a code loses its power to shape behavior the way it did before the code was discovered.

Pierre Bourdieu (1971) uses the notion “cultural unconscious” and explains its relation to individuals as follows:

It may seem surprising to ascribe to the cultural unconscious the attitudes, aptitudes, knowledge, themes and problems, in short, the whole system of categories of perception and thought acquired by the systematic apprenticeship which the school organizes or makes it possible to organize. This is because the creator maintains with his acquired culture, as with his early culture, a relationship that might be defined according to Nicolai Hartmann as both “carrying” and “being carried” and he is not aware that the culture he possesses possesses him. (Bourdieu 1971: 182)

The relationship between individuals and cultures is a complex one, for we both shape our cultures and are shaped by them. The important point for us to consider, however, is that individuals are frequently “unaware” of the extent to which our culture “possesses us.” To paraphrase Emile Durkheim, we are in society and society is in us.

6 Codes are concrete

For a culture to maintain itself (and I will say something about the problem of change later), it must relate to concrete and specific matters. What do you do when a baby cries? Every culture has an answer for this which is related to the specific situation in which the crying occurs. In one cultural tradition, you give the baby a teaspoon of olive oil (when I lived in Italy, the woman who owned our apartment explained to me that bodies are machines and need oil to run well); in another, you feed the baby; in another (if it is not four hours since he was last fed), you let babies cry, until they pass out from exhaustion, having been traumatized and experienced starvation at a very early age. The imprint of this starvation lives with them the rest of their lives.

For a code to work, it must be specific, and the power of culture codes is directly related to their capacity to help or guide people in different situations and to give detailed and rigorous rules for any given situation. If a code is not concrete, people will start improvising; and when they do, the culture, as a coherent system, is in danger of falling apart. This, in turn, suggests the next attribute of cultural codes – they must be clear.

7 Codes must be clear

Not only must codes deal with specific matters in specific ways; people must be, to the extent it is possible, clear about what they are to do. This need for clarity is connected with the matter of concreteness. People must know how they are to deal with particular situations they face at various times. A cookbook would be a good example of the need for concreteness and clarity. It is most specific about the contents of a given recipe and about how the contents are to be combined and cooked. It also generates a kind of code in that certain dishes are combined with others, and these combinations, though arbitrary and culturally specific (or sub-culturally specific) are seen as correct, and natural. They are in the real of that which goes without question. For example, in the United States, people generally serve potatoes with steak, not noodles.

The English eat great quantities of fish and Brussels sprouts, but when in England one does not see restaurants featuring “Fish and Sprouts” or “Fish and Carrots” or even “Fish and Baked Potatoes.” A national cuisine is a code also (Barthes sees it as a “signifying system” with rules of association, exclusion, etc.). People absorb (literally as well as figuratively) this code and seldom question it. Some people, as the result of travel or marriage to people from different cultures, move beyond their cultural food codes, but most do not. Anthropologists report that food preferences are created in our earliest years and tend to shape what we eat for the rest of our lives. Thus, this unacknowledged code system that we know of as culture must be invisible to us and yet, at the same time, give clear and unambiguous answers about how to deal with specific problems. This tension within a culture is further complicated by the matter of change and continuity in cultures.

8 Codes must have continuity

It is only logical that cultures must have continuity and lasting power, otherwise the very idea of culture and cultural codes is compromised. On the other hand, cultures are subjected to pressures (brought on by social changes, historical accidents, etc.) so they must be able to change also – but they cannot change too fast lest they lose their identity or coherence. When we use the word “tradition,” we are really talking about the continuity of a culture, its capacity to shape people’s expectations, and ideas about what is correct and valuable.

Cultures face the dilemma, then, of mediating between the internal need for continuity and maintenance and the external pressure to change and accommodate to new situations, which may be a condition for survival. Sometimes this matter is solved through the creation of subcultures, which siphon off discontented elements into little entities at variance in certain respects to the main culture but which do not, necessarily, aim at overthrowing it. Other times, however, counter-cultures arise which are antagonistic to the central culture and which engage it in a fight for survival – a fight which sometimes is successful, but which frequently leads to relatively minor modifications in the main culture that enable it to weather the storm.

Codes must have continuity, but they must also face the need for being changed and probably can be best characterized as usually being in a state of dynamic equilibrium.

9 Codes are comprehensive

Culture strives toward totality; it must cover as much of a given person’s world of experience (or a society’s) as it can. It is this comprehensiveness which helps account for its invisibility. Because cultural codes are everywhere we take no notice of them; it is a case of fish not being aware of water. It is their total environment and so becomes invisible. They cannot get away from it and take it into account. In the realm of politics, this invisibility is described as hegemonic ideological domination by Gramsci and Marxists.

This comprehensiveness is implicit in the definition of a code. A code which did not tell how to understand every figure or word group in a coded message would not be very useful, though a good cryptologist could no doubt deduce or derive the whole code from knowing part of it. Cultural codes are a different matter, however. Within their sphere (nations, regions, classes, etc.), codes must be comprehensive to function without being noticed.

Let us return to our example of food systems or codes. Not only do we pick up from the code ideas about what foods are good to eat and what foods go with other foods, but we also gain notions about the order in which foods should be served, how a “complete” meal should be started and ended. In the United States, for example, we don’t serve boiled potatoes with steak, and we broil or grill steaks rather than boil them or bake them. We serve soup or salads before main courses such as steak and potatoes, not after; and we generally have something sweet for “dessert,” not something sour, and not soup. In China, meals often end with soup. We generally have codified in cookbooks and foodie magazines a comprehensive plan for cooking foods and planning meals each day which nobody thinks twice about. My use of cookbooks suggests another aspect of codes – they are communicated.

10 Codes are communicated

All of the points I have been making about codes are implicit in the definition of codes, and so is the notion of communication as being central to codes. Much of this communication is to our unconscious. That is, we are not aware that we have learned a code. In the case of laws, we are aware of them, and, in fact, we are taught that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” But much learning is done automatically or by osmosis, so to speak. We read menus and restaurants and learn what foods go with what other foods.

A great deal of research in mass communications work is involved in searching for clues – what George Gerbner calls “cultural indicators” – to codes and to reconstituting the codes from bits and pieces that become unmasked and are revealed as existing and as affecting people. Content analysis, for example, is a very explicit attempt to find codes by searching for hidden patterns that exist in the material being studied. In a famous study of biographies in mass magazines, Leo Lowenthal discovered that magazines in the thirties and forties had biographies of heroes of production; in later years the biographies were about celebrities and movie stars, heroes of consumption.

All kinds of communication (language, gesture, music, painting, and whatever kind you can think of) have a relation to the culture in which they are found; they mediate between the codes and the individual, and that code is something that can be searched for and hopefully discovered – at least in part. These communications involve such matters as assumptions people have, their values, their logic, their superstitions, their myths and legends, their “high culture,” and their “popular culture.” It may very well be that different disciplines, like the blind men and the elephant, spend their time with discipline-specific aspects of a code or codes, and the movement for interdisciplinary studies represents an attempt, not fully realized or understood, to crack as much of the code as is possible.

Umberto Eco, an Italian semiotician, has suggested that there is a problem with the mass media in that the codes of the creators of texts are different from the codes of the receivers of these texts, which leads to audiences not decoding the texts correctly – that is, the way the creators of the texts thought they would be understood. This suggests that large numbers of people are misinterpreting the texts they receive from the mass media because of differences in socioeconomic status, education, and culture. As he writes: “Codes and subcodes are applied to the message in the light of a general framework of cultural references, which constitute the receiver’s patrimony of knowledge, his ideological, ethical, religious standpoints, his psychological attitudes, his tastes, his value systems, etc.” (Eco 1976: 115).

Thus, aberrant decoding becomes the norm thanks to the mass media. We are left with the notion that audiences interpret all texts in different ways and usually different from the way the creators of these texts thought they would be interpreted.

I have not said anything about two other important matters – how cultures are created and how they might be classified, and I do not intend to do much with either problem. It seems likely that cultures are the result of chance and circumstance; historical accidents (wars, migrations, and disasters) lead to the dominance of certain values which then become institutionalized and affect other institutions, which then reinforce the original values. This at least is what the great German sociologist Max Weber postulated. Marxists, on the other hand, derive culture from a given system of economic relations in a country. The mode of production “determines” (in ways that are not always quite clear) the culture, which is an epiphenomenon. The problem with Marxist analyses of culture is that countries with similar modes of production and levels of economic development do not necessarily have similar cultures and value systems. They frequently have conflicting ones.

It is more important, I think, to pay attention to how cultures and culture codes affect people rather than speculate about the origins of cultures. We can see how particular cultures influence individuals and decide whether modifications are desirable. Classifying cultures is another difficult problem we face in dealing with codes. Cultures are not identifiable with societies or nations; in some cases, culture is broader than nations and in others much smaller. Also, there may be all kinds of mixtures of cultures and subcultures within a given geographical area. For example, there may be an American code, which refers to certain general things people in America have in common. This would be at a very high level of abstraction. There may also be, within that general frame of reference, regional codes such as western American culture – a regional code – that people in certain states have in common. Also, there may be a North Californian code, which, in turn, is broken up by class divisions – upper class, middle class, working-class, and so forth. And, also, within the Northern Californian code, there may exist numerous subcultures and counter-cultures. All of this makes generalizing about American culture or any culture or country difficult (except in very broad terms).

11 Comedy codes in Japan

During a visit to Kyoto some years ago, I gave a lecture on humor at a university in Osaka. I had been told that the Japanese like the comic strip Peanuts, so I had half a dozen Peanuts cartoons in my PowerPoint presentation. But when I showed the students the cartoons, they just stared at them with a sense of bewilderment. None of them cracked a smile. The professor who invited me to give the lecture and a colleague, who were translating what I said, worked hard trying to explain to the students why the cartoons were funny, but with little success. I knew that dealing with American humor in Japan would be difficult because the codes for humor in countries often differ considerably. For example, I was told that the Japanese do not find jokes about mothers-in-law funny since they are honored in Japan.

The students also didn’t recognize allusions in the cartoons, either. The only humor that would have worked, I believe, is physical humor, where language is not important. So the first part of my lecture was difficult, and I don’t think the students found any of the humorous examples I provided them amusing.

For the second part of my lecture, I had a workshop in analyzing humor. I provided the students with a list of ten of the basic techniques of humor, descriptions of each technique, and some jokes. In my research on humor, I isolated 45 techniques found in humor, such as insults, stereotyping, the revelation of ignorance.

I put the students into groups of three and had them work, as a team, on figuring out which techniques would be found in each of the jokes I gave them.

They found this exercise interesting and enjoyed trying to determine which techniques could be applied to the humorous texts I gave them. There was a lot of energy in the room. I chose jokes that were simple to analyze, and they had no problems with some of them, but with a couple of jokes that were a bit more complicated, they could not conclude as to what techniques were operating in the joke. We can look upon my list of the 45 techniques as the “codes” of comedy found in humorous texts of all kinds – from jokes to Shakespeare’s plays. I discuss these techniques in my An anatomy of humor and several other books. Table 1 lists the 45 techniques. I also list the techniques numerically in Table 2 so the jokes can be described and be given a code.

Without stretching credulity too much, I think we can look upon these techniques as codes of comedy that inform, in various combinations, all humorous texts. When I gave workshops on humor and had people use my techniques to analyze jokes, I used to ask them to give the code for the joke: to choose a subject and list the techniques, in order of importance, found in the joke. Consider the following joke:

The United Nations asks a group of scholars to write a book on elephants. The following books are contributed: The French write “The Love Life of the Elephant.” The English write “The Elephant and English Social Classes.” The Germans write “A Short Introduction to the Elephant in Five Volumes.” The Americans write “How to Raise Bigger and Better Elephants.” The Italians write “Elephants and the Renaissance.” The Israelis write “Elephants And The Jewish Question.”

The comedic code for this joke would be:

Elephants: 43, 44.

That is, the joke uses stereotypes as the dominant technique. One might also consider 44, Theme and Variation to be operating in this joke. I chose a very simple joke here, but in some jokes, one might find three or four different techniques at work.

12 Conclusion

I have always found Claude Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of how academic games are played by scholars instructive and amusing. He writes (1955: 54):

It was then that I began to learn how any problem, whether grave or trivial, can be resolved. The method never varies. First, you establish the traditional “two views” of the question. You then put forward a commonsense justification of the one, only to refute it by the other. Finally you send them both packing by use of a third interpretation in which both the others are shown to be equally unsatisfactory. Certain verbal manoeuvres enable you, that is, to line up the traditional “antitheses” as complementary aspects of a single reality: form and substance, content and container, appearance and reality, essence and existence, continuity and discontinuity, and so on. Before long the exercise becomes the merest verbalizing, reflection gives place to a kind of superior punning, and the “accomplished philosopher” maybe be recognized by the ingenuity with which he makes ever bolder play with assonance, ambiguity, and the use of those words which sound alike and yet bear quite different meanings.

This little exercise, shaped by my sense of humor and my adherence or compulsive fixation on the letter “c,” offers some speculations about codes that might help us understand the semiotic significance of codes and the roles they play in our societies, cultures, and our everyday lives.