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Postmodern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life by M. Gottdiener. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. 262 pp. $49.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-631-19215-8.
NORBERT WILEY University of Illinois, Urbana
This original and refreshing treatment of semiotics stresses not the usual meanings, symbols, and interpretants, but social contexts, material and economic forces, and political impacts-a sort of semiotics of social stratification.
A major strength is in the everyday, "built environment" nature of Gottdiener's case studies. These cover a variety of material commodities and settings including shopping malls, large buildings and their architecture, theme parks, clothing, household goods, and real estate developments. None of the existing approaches to semiotics has done well with the material, particularly the fabricated material world, so Gottdiener is breaking relatively new and useful ground.
He calls his theory "socio-semiotics," and he contrasts it with symbolic interaction, Derridean deconstruction, postmodernism (especially Baudrillard), and mainstream Marxism. He differs from the first three in assigning more semiotic power to the material realm, and from Marxism in assigning less. There are suggestions of Max Weber in the way he incorporates the strengths of both materialism and idealism.
Some signs or semiotic entities are primarily immaterial, meaningful, or mental. Others are primarily material and physical. These latter are not merely physical in the way that written or spoken words are the physical signifiers or designators of meanings. In those cases the physical carrier is external to and outside the meanings. In the case of Gottdiener's material signs, however, the physical is more intrinsic to the meanings, and therefore has a stronger semiotic role. Take, for example, the physical (acoustic or...