Abstract
Bob Hodge, Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Sydney, is one of the few contemporary champions of semiotics in the Anglophone world. His transdisciplinary legacy permeates his latest monograph, Social Semiotics for a Complex World: a theoretical and methodological exploration into the intersection of semiotics and linguistics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, mathematics and more. This engaging, amusing, yet challenging tome continues Hodge’s research paradigm of transforming linguistic and other modes of semiotic analysis into a socially reflective practice. Based upon Michael Halliday’s (1978) social semiotic framework which Hodge and Kress (1988) amongst others then developed, the additional lens of complexity science makes Social Semiotics for a Complex World Hodge’s tour de force of multi-disciplinarity.
At the outset, Hodge identifies his agenda as the intersection of social semiotics’ three-body problem: language, society and meaning. Hodge posits the analysis of language and meaning as the key to understanding society, as well as vice versa. Arguing that the search for reality is intrinsic to social semiotics, Hodge positions meaning as a socially inflected version of reality, carried by language as a socially shared resource that underpins every social action (p. 10). However, meaning is not only the province of language for Hodge – meaning is multimodal, and such texts are an omnipresent aspect of modern-day life. Even print media and spoken language are fundamentally multimodal for Hodge.
Split into three parts over nine chapters, Hodge’s monograph presents a vast and varied repertoire of global, multimodal texts for semiotic analysis. From climate change deniers (p. 68) to the cultural implications of gendered grammar (p. 110), such analysis happens at what Hodge terms the multi-scalar: the examination of phenomenon at their various levels in space and time. This includes the individual’s modes of perception and the cultural discourse in which the multimodal text exists.
Hodge’s first part, ‘Principles and Practices’ starts with an examination of key concepts in semiotics and a history lesson of the field for the non-semiotician reader. In the second chapter, Hodge expands on the social semiotic method, such as ‘making strange’ the multimodality of occurrences for analysis. For instance, his example of a 2010 televised press conference between US President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron examines the placement of the podiums, clothing, gestures, linguistic expressions and resulting actions from the outsider observations of an alien species called the Pleiadeans.
In parts two and three, Hodge’s remaining six thematic chapters (plus one concluding chapter) spiral outwards from small-scale linguistic analysis to culture-wide ideologies of post-colonialism. Part two elucidates how linguistics can transform into semiotic analysis through an exploration of the meaning and complexity imbued in words, grammar, reading and then meaning itself. In chapter four, Hodge revisits his linguistic traditions to address Chomsky’s universal grammar and Halliday’s functional linguistics as ‘relative universals’ (p. 101) in culturally constructing meaning through linguistic practices.
Part three expands on chapter five’s examination into meaning through semiotic processes by looking at larger-scale examples of meaning-making in society itself. For instance, chapter six addresses the multimodality of the digital world and how social semiotics accounts for the interaction of new media with its three-body problem. The final analytical chapter tackles the powerhouse of semiotic processes – globalization and its enabling power structures. Here Hodge expresses his mathematical side by positing fractals as offering linguistics higher scales of social meaning-making beyond the text (p. 197), whilst complexity theory relaxes assumptions of stability and order in social systems. His concluding chapter is then a reflexive summary of social semiotics in the digital globalized revolution of contemporary life.
Social semiotics as a field is always a going to be a tough sell, nestled within an already obscure discipline suffering from an image problem. And yet, Hodge goes a long way to overcome this, positioning social semiotics as a contemporary method for the networked 21st century. Social Semiotics for a Complex World is not only for semioticians interested in semiotic social inquiry. Instead, Hodge opens his monograph by introducing semiotics for the untrained reader. Then, his breadth of contextualized, timely, global examples demonstrate the need for true interdisciplinary and multimodal examination of social and linguistic activity to recognize their reciprocal relationship. Unfortunately, Hodge’s expansive example repertoire, shorn with quick-fire rapidity, comes with the cost of brevity; such multi-scalar analysis by nature requires longer, more detailed examinations. Perhaps this is because Hodge, in arguing that he is transforming linguistic models for better semiotic research, also frequently admits that social semiotics amounts to guess work. However, it should be argued that Hodge is selling his heuristic methods short. Instead, Social Semiotics for a Complex World establishes social semiotics as a highly rigorous, complex yet contemporary method that is recommend to all who are in interested in social meaning-making practices – linguists, cultural and social theorists alike.