On Sign Lies

1 Background to the Interview

Some months ago, I received information that Shinawatra University was recruiting PhD students in Semiotics and Cultural Studies. It was particularly exciting to know that Prof. Hongwei Jia would be the head supervisor, for I had heard of him and read some of his articles prior to this. He is well known for his contributions to translation semiotics, sociolinguistics, overseas sinology, history of modern Chinese linguistics, history of modern semantics, Chinese history of translation, and more. He obtained his PhD in linguistics from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 2011 and conducted his postdoctoral research at Minzu University of China (2012–2014). Currently, he is an associate professor of linguistics and translation semiotics at the Department of College English, Capital Normal University (Beijing, China) and permanent professor at Center for Semiotics and Cultural Studies in Shinawatra University (Bangkok, Thailand), as well as executive director of Xu Yuanchong Institute of Translation and Comparative Culture at Datong University (since 2016). He is also a guest researcher at a number of major Chinese institutions. He also serves in an editorial capacity on a variety of journals on language and culture, and he has published almost 80 journal papers and five books, with another two books forthcoming.

I called Prof. Hongwei Jia to talk about my research proposal: to analyze The secret history of the Mongols from a semiotic perspective. During my first conversation with Prof. Hongwei Jia by phone, he was so kind as to give me great encouragement and recommended that I read the book written by Umberto Eco, A theory of semiotics, especially the part on sign lies, for a famous history book such as the one I proposed to analyze must be full of instances of sign lies. This was the first time that I encountered the concept of sign lies.

Reading the book and some other relevant journals gave me a general understanding of semiotics and sign lies. Semiotics, also called semiology, is the study of signs and sign-using behavior, namely the study of meaning, all activities of sign signification (sign process), and all kinds of sign relations. However, sometimes the sender may express some meanings that are contrary to reality or may exaggerate them intentionally in order to achieve particular effects. This brings us to the field of sign lies, which is in the nature of sign.

Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands in for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all. I think that the definition of a ‘theory of the lie’ should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics. (Eco 1976: 7)

Indeed, we live in the world perfused with signs, and it is in and by signs that we communicate with each other. In particular, we encounter and are enveloped by sign lies. Even some animals have the capacity for using signs to lie (which are also sign lies, albeit merely simple ones). For instance, a chameleon can change its skin color in order to hide itself in the forest when facing danger. Some insects may pretend to be dead when they recognize and confront signs of danger. People, intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously, use sign lies for special purposes during their lives. People tend to use sign lies in order to either conceal their emotions or please their managers or leaders. In fact, people show a great interest in fiction or sci-fi movies (such as Avengers), which partly or completely consist of lies of various forms. Thus, sign lies have permanent impacts on people’s minds and behaviors.

However, Eco’s concept of sign lies is not easy to grasp. Professor Hongwei Jia has agreed to an interview on sign lies to provide a better understanding of the concept and introduce us to new findings.

2 Interview

Suojun Zhang: Thank you for your accepting my interview. You are among the leading scholars in China studying semiotics. Could you explain to us what brought you to semiotics and sign lies?

Prof. Hongwei Jia: To answer this question, I need to talk about several things from a historical perspective.

First and foremost, China is a unique country with rich semiotic resources created and cross-developed by 55 ethnic nationalities, not including the Han people, for more than two thousand years. Two thousand years ago, intertextualities existed as a rhetorical device in different forms. Almost at the same time, sign lies emerged, as different authors probably changed the original works to varying degrees in order to achieve particular purposes: in Literary expositor (尔雅), Dictionary of dialects (方言), and the Tang poems, among the others. Almost at the same time, sign lies appeared in Record of the grand historian (史记) to beautify the performance of the kings and emperors in power, and several hundred years later there came sign lies in the form of the pseudo-translations of Buddhist Sutras in helping the Empress Wu Zetian (武则天) to gain the throne. Since the second century B.C. the tradition of Buddhist sutra translation brought about the practice of and regulations over systematic linguistic transfer and semiotic transformation, transposition, transfiguration, transmutation, and transvaluation, in which the monk translators as the interpreters of the Buddhist sign texts involved the semiotic facts of the current terms Object and Interpretant, and the Chinese native monk translators acted as the interpreters of the great Monks from India and Central Asia. All the semiotic resources mentioned above interested and inspired me when I started to conduct translation studies around 1998.

Second, one of my university professors, Prof. Fu Lian, offered us a course in semiotics at Heilongjiang University before his book The signs around you: An introduction to semiotics (1997) was published. From his course, I learned the basic facts concerning signs and also principles of semiotics or semiology as a subject. What’s more, what surprised me was that I was interested in and even fascinated by the signs around me. In fact, in the course, we were encouraged to touch on sign lies, but unfortunately, we were ignorant and unaware of the semiotic phenomena around us.

Third, my actual thesis supervisor, Prof. Xiyin Li, was one of the first researchers on semiotics and its application in translation studies in China since the 1980s. He advised me to read something about semiotics while I was reading the literature on translation studies, pointing out that translation as a process is sign process, and that a translation as a product is a result of this process. Meanwhile, I happened to obtain a book by Xiaohua Jiang based on his doctoral dissertation at Peking University – A semiotic approach to literary translation: With emphasis on motivations underlying literary language (2003). This book applies semiotics to translation studies, although it is not in fact an interdisciplinary study. In any case, I was informed and inspired by its literature review, and attempted to adopt semiotics in my master’s thesis – but poorly written – as my start on this Odyssey into the semiotic world.

Finally, I must mention that I dropped semiotics and turned to translation studies. In 2007, I decided to conduct my research on the translation history of general linguistics classics in China before 1949. The next year I came to draft my doctoral dissertation on this topic and finished it in 2010. After finishing my oral defense in 2011, I successfully came to do my postdoctoral research on language security at Minzu University of China in 2012. In 2014, I moved to Capital Normal University and collected literature on translation security, which was inspired by my postdoctoral experience at Minzu University of China. Then another founder of Translation Semiotics in China and the current president of China’s Association of Language and Semiotics, Prof. Mingyu Wang, invited me to pick up semiotics and thought about how to combine semiotics and translation as an interdisciplinary subject.

Considering the combination of translation studies and (social) semiotics in the Chinese academic context, I decided to focus on the semiotic aspects with reference to translating and translation as its research object, and in the Conference paper “On the possibilities of translation semiotics” (2014), I proposed translation semiotics as a new subject different from what is covered under the same term by the colleagues outside China. What is different lies in the fact that we are building a subfield of semiotics, with translation in its broadest sense as sign transformations, transfiguration, transmutation, transposition, and transvaluation in general, including tangible and intangible signs, their transformations in all forms (cf. Jia 2016, 2017, 2018), and three types of semiospheric transformation, namely intrasemiospheric transformation, interspheric transformation, and suprasemiospheric transformation (Jia 2016). We are trying to construct a new semiotic theory concerning sign interpretation and transformation in general ontologically, epistemologically, teleologically and methodologically.

So, translation semiotics by nature is not translation studies per se or simply the application of semiotics into translation studies. As for sign lies, I encountered this concept in The signs around you: An introduction to semiotics (1997: 99–102), but had been unaware of it then. However, in 2017, I happened to read about sign lies in both Susan Petrilli’s “Translation as the doctrine of inter-genre and trans-genre communication: A semioethic perspective” (2005) and Ritva Hartama-Heinonen’s “Semiotico-translation-theoretical reverberations revisited” (2012), and traced sign lies to Umberto Eco’s A theory of semiotics (1976). After a general reading of the half-page explanation in Eco (1976: 6–7), I found he didn’t elaborate it as a sign activity on the micro level, but dealt with it as the function of signs as well as the object of general semiotics on the macro level. In 2018, when I finished the Chinese version of Dinda L. Gorlée’s On translating signs: Exploring text and semiotranslation (2012), in its Translator’s Introduction, I developed Eco’s sign lies into the analysis of finger-guessing, a Chinese traditional drinking game.

Suojun Zhang: The concept of sign lies was proposed by Eco over 40 years ago. What are sign lies according to your understanding?

Prof. Hongwei Jia: Obviously Eco defined the semiotics and proposed the term “sign lies” in terms of the function or influence of a sign as everything that can be taken as significantly substituting for something else not necessarily existent or actually being somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands in for it. According to Peirce’s maxim of pragmatism or pragmaticism, which states, “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (Peirce 1878: 293), sign lies strive for the effects or conceivably practical bearings when a sign signifies a non-existance or an existent actually being somewhere.

Surely, if a sign cannot tell a lie, it cannot tell a truth, and it cannot even “tell” in its real significant sense. Through the history of both the West and the Orient, there is no lack of typical events concerning sign lies. The Trojan Horse was recorded in the works about the Trojan War in ancient Greece; the Glorious Revolution was recorded in the history of Great Britain; Hamlet pretended to be mad to Ophelia in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet; the plot of borrowing arrows with straw-soldiers on boats, and that of openly repairing the gallery roads while sneaking through the passage of Chencang is described in Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义) written by Luo Guanzhong in the period around the year 1323; the stratagem of bluffing the enemy by opening the gates of a weakly defended city was plotted in The art of war, a military treatise written by Sun Tzu in the 6th century B.C.; the beauty trick is frequently used in Chinese folk culture and business events; white lies are the means “we live by” or “Chinese husbands live by” in day-to-day life; overstatement and/ or understatement have become commonly seen rhetorical devices in literary works; the theory of psychological compensation was prevalent in Western psychology around the 1960s; all these examples are more or less concerned with sign lies in the real or possible world.

Comparably speaking, signs are taken to tell lies more than telling the truth in daily life, but we are scarcely aware of this “fact.” In the physical world we live in, there are commonly seen tokens everywhere at every moment, such as man-made beauties to gain favors, the rental of luxurious cars to show wealth, house agents dressing in costly suits, forged money to gain profit, faked doctoral dissertation or money cheated from banks or stock markets. In the final analysis, the motives of sign lies are to boost prestige, to flaunt wealth, to make exorbitant profits, to cover up defects, to bolster vanity, to please somebody, among others.

Suojun Zhang: The nature of signs is to signify. As Eco said, “Every time there is a lie there is signification. Every time there is signification there is the possibility of using it in order to lie” (Eco 1976: 59). However, I wonder what the nature of sign lies is according to your understanding of Eco’s doctrine.

Prof. Hongwei Jia: Scientifically, that a sign lies or may lie is a paradox, as a sign can only signify. But we need to make clear that a sign itself cannot lie, and what makes a sign signify is its subject, so what makes a sign lie is its subject. Specifically, it is the motives or intentions of a subject that make a sign signify “something else not necessarily existent or actually being somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands in for it” (Eco 1976: 7). As is known, the purpose of a sign is to signify while the motives of its subject are to make a sign signify what the subject wants to express by means of a sign. Thus, what sign lies mean indeed is that the user of the signs lies to reach his or her motives. Philosophically and logically, sign lies are semiotic events or propositions. In this context, whether a sign signifies something existent or not, whether a sign signifies something actually being somewhere at the moment the sign stands in for it or not, lies in what a sign signifies or the relation between the object or interpretant and reality. In any case, what is illuminated above is what I understand for the time being, and may be true or false to some extent. In other words, with the advance of human knowledge, my view on the nature of sign lies may vary more or less.

Suojun Zhang: What you illuminated concerning the nature of sign lies has never been touched on before. But I still wonder what properties of sign lies are semiotic in general.

Prof. Hongwei Jia: As for the properties of a sign lie as a sign activity or event, they first of all occur in a physical form. If there are any sign lies, they must present in the physical forms of signs. Only if presented in a physical form do sign lies exist in the mental forms of sign activities, such as designing, planning, or plotting on how to present them. Thus, sign lies also have mental properties. As C. S. Peirce constantly expounded, ”a sign is not a sign unless it translates itself into another sign in which it is more fully developed” (CP: 5. 594). The transformation of sign lies from mental forms into physical forms is actually also a translation in the broadest sense. Furthermore, when an addressee decodes a sign lie, another translation based on the interpretation of the original text occurs.

Suojun Zhang: Even in Eco’s works, he did not give us a classification of sign lies in detail. Could you give us some explanations?

Prof. Hongwei Jia: To me, everything around us is a sign if it stands for something which can stand for something else. Furthermore, a sign presents something, or something stands for something else. If it is an in overstated or understated state, or presents the aspects or properties of the given thing or event not true in reference to its reality, it is a sign lie. In regard to sign use in our daily life, sign lies could be either good or evil. The former are so-called white lies, for instance when a doctor hides a patient’s real health condition from the patient, or when a husband reports only the good events at work to his wife while keeping the bad from her. However, the latter is usually to make bad or evil deeds appear good, among the various forms being pyramid selling prevalent in some parts of the world. As for the classifications of sign lies, Lian (1997: 102–103) divides them into profit and function types. For the former, sign lies serve as an end. In the communication process, although the sender knows the message is not true, he or she sends out the message to the addressee, who does not know the message is false. This type of sign lie can, for instance, bring about illegal profit to the message sender and loss to the addressee, and the targeted profit is also the goal of the sender. For the latter, sign lies function as the means. In a communication situation, the message sender, though he or she knows the message is not true, still sends it to the addressee who also knows the message is false, but would like to receive and accept it, as under this given circumstance, a false message is usually better than a good one. In addition, we also can divide sign lies according to the field in which they are used. For instance, we can have media lies, political lies (as is mentioned in Hartama-Heinonen 2005: 229), economic lies, etc. Another two things are to be said about the classifications of sign lies. One thing is that, more often than not, we use sign lies on purpose, such as when a Chinese schoolboy keeps his school performance from his parents. We call these intentional (sign) lies. By contrast, if one tries to hide something from others, but he or she happens to reveal it by a careless slip of the tongue or in other careless ways and vice versa, we call these unintentional (sign) lies. Another thing is that sign lies can be known as the premise, such as when a super star pretends to be single. We call these overt (sign) lies. Otherwise, sign lies are not known to anyone, serving as a reality on that occasion. We call these covert (sign) lies.

Suojun Zhang: According to Eco (1976), there are natural boundaries and political boundaries in the study of the theory of semiotics. What are the boundaries to other disciplines for sign lies in your perspective?

Prof. Hongwei Jia: Actually, there are no absolute natural boundaries for sign lies as sign activities or other sign activities. And the division between natural and political boundaries is not an absolute one in any sense, because any kind of natural boundaries for any subject are postulated in the context of the natural languages of given peoples or nationalities, or we say of historical-natural languages from a significal perspective proposed by Lady Welby. In this sense, so-called natural boundaries are natural in the context of a culture. Take the case of sign lies for instance. According to Juri Lotman’s language modeling system, we can divide its boundaries into primary and secondary modeling systems. In reference to the doctrine of utterance proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin, we can have sign lies in the field of literature, politics, mass media, new media, sci-fi movies, etc. In regard to Juri Lotman’s semiosphere, we can have sign lies in the field of anthroposemiosphere, biosemeiosphere, zoosemiosphere, ecosemiospere, etc. Thus, how the boundaries of sign lies are delineated is not set, but depends on the practical need in any given research.

Suojun Zhang: In Eco’s book, he shows the example of the Watergate Model several times, which is used to explain some abstract theories in it, such as the theory of information. What are the applications of the theory of sign lies?

Prof. Hongwei Jia: I think I need to say that sign lies are only a commonly seen sign activity or event, but not a theory in any sense. A systematic and scientific (semiotic) study of sign lies as a sign activity, sign process, sign act, etc. is a study in the field of general semiotics. Usually, a theory is not a theory unless it has its own ontology, epistemology, teleology, and methodology, but a so-call theory of sign lies is not equipped with these four qualifications. In other words, sign lies do not qualify as a theory in that sense. As for research on sign lies in a given text, we need to collect all the tokens of sign lies in the text, describe and classify them, and analyze them in a systematic way, namely why the author wanted to put them this way, what functions the sign lies have in this historical, cultural, religious, and ideological context, what intentions the author wanted to express by means of these sign lies, etc.

Suojun Zhang: What will be the greatest problem or difficulty for sign lies as well as semiotics in the coming years?

Prof. Hongwei Jia: This question is a bit like prophecy, but unfortunately, I am by no means a prophet. In any case, I’ll just talk about what I think we need to do in the coming years. The pressing task before us is to develop semiotics (especially translation semiotics) as an autonomous subject in terms of ontology, epistemology, teleology, and methodology while applying its theories, principles, and methodology in other fields. Up to now, we have extended semiotic research into the fields of art, design, media, literature, translation, among others, but folk cultures, suprasemiospheric transformation, religious sign resource, natural sign resources, geological signs, archaeological signs, mineral signs, etc. are rarely touched. As for sign lies, since Eco (1976), few semioticians have explored this on the macro, meso, and micro levels. We feel it necessary to explore the resources of sign lies in literary works from different countries, in witchcraft and fortune telling, in martial arts, in history books, in new media or new media news, in academic works, etc.

Suojun Zhang: You have given us so much important information and so many provocative ideas on sign lies today. Thank you for your insightful contributions.