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CODES, CHRONOTYPES AND EVERYDAY OBJECTS

Betsy Cullum-Swan
Department of Sociology
P.K. Manning
Department of Sociology
School of Criminal Justice
both of
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan USA 48824


INTRODUCTION

Semiotics is the study of how signs convey meaning in everyday
life, but not all signwork is immediate, visible, or even a noticeable
aspect of social life. It would appear that making visible the semiotic
work of everyday objects requires an articulation of ethnography, or
close cultural description, with the tools of semiotics. Ethnographic
work will result in the explication of the underlying codes and
principles that order surface phenomena. It should serve to clarify the
polysemic nature of communication.

Semiotics, the science of signs, since it deals with differences in
context that produce meaning, rather than the reality of "the world out
there," provides a rich vocabulary of terms and techniques for analysis
of the codes and signs that constitute the reality of social relations.
The principles that underlie how signs mean within a system of
relationships, have to be extracted from the features of everyday life.
The semiotic model, relying on the comparison of differences within a
context, can be employed to isolate changes in the functions of signs,
sign vehicles, paradigms and codes and to analyze meanings.

Stability and continuity combined with requisite variety are
fundamental features of communication. Signs are incomplete (Peirce,
1931); fundamentally context-dependent and possess imminently multiple
meanings. Context, or what is brought to the communicational situation,
inumbrates the sign, and is shaped by equivocality and ambiguity in
messages. Constitutive conventions firmly link the expression and
related content to produce a sign. To accomplish stabilized
communication, people depend heavily on institutional contexts and
interpretative processes (Goffman, l959, Culler, l977).

But such stability is not simply as matter of interpersonal
communication and experience. Personal communication and interaction are
increasingly shaped by mass media-produced imagery. Increasingly, mass-
produced images and once-processed impressions replace personal
experience with events, and floating signifiers (those without clear
signifieds), or simulacra (Baudrillard, l988) abound. As simulacra or
images are widely reproduced and reified, especially by the mass media,
they become commodities, and an unquestioned social reality. The media
become the locus of the illusion of reality (Denzin,l986:196). The
"reality" to which such imagery refers is the reality created by imagery
(other images), fraught with rich connotative, ideological and
mythological meanings (Barthes, 1972), and the forms of hyperreality
(signs about signs taken to be objective or universal opinion or truth)
that media produce and reproduce. The point is that other images, rather
than immediate personal experience or local knowledge of events, become
the source of veridicality.

Objects, the topic here, are of course are no less shaped and given
reality than social relations. They are caught in the mesh of
intersubjective reality amplified by the media. The analysis of
communications, especially that about objects, will require more than
the application of semiotics. It requires a fully explicated
imaginative ethnography involving principles derived from semiotics
(Eco, l979). Barthes (1983:27), for example, suggests that once a system
of relations is identified, one should use "the commutative test." This
means that given an identified structure of relations, one alters an
element and examines the social consequences. By examining alterations
in elements of a structure in conjunction or separately, one can
identify a general inventory of "...concomitant variations... and
consequently... determine a certain number of commutative classes in the
ensemble of a given structure" (Barthes, l983:19-20). These variations
in relations within a system may also be patterned chronologically, as
chronotypes (Bahktin, 1937) .

Our analytic procedure requires careful description of a structure,
fashion, the marketing of differences, its units, paradigms and codes.
Fashion refers on the one hand to the physical and material world, and,
on the other, to the symbolic world of the idea of difference and
changes in dress. Semiotics provides a vocabulary : the vestimentary
system (that describing clothes), the code(s) or rules that articulate
instances of dress, paradigms or associational contexts that organize
the meaning of units. Our topic is the garment, "t-shirt." This label
originated post-World War Two, but is currently in common use.

THE T-SHIRT IN THE FASHION SYSTEM

Fashion is a dramatic example of the production of items for
display and the display of these images for mass consumption. Fashion
produces images to market and sell alterations in appearance; fashion
is, as much as anything, the marketing of differences. 2 Fashion is
itself a highly differentiated system. 3 Our interest is not in "high
fashion," but "low fashion," and in explanations for the rapidly
changing character of a banal object, the t-shirt. The t-shirt now plays
a functional role in any ensemble of clothing, as well as in the fashion
system itself.

The shirts worn now as underclothes or as outer garments in warm
weather, sometimes called "t-shirts" (an iconic metaphoric name derived,
presumably, from their shape), "vests," or "underwear," are rather banal
everyday objects. From these humble utilitarian beginnings, the shirt
has risen, at least metaphorically, to assume an important symbolic
role. It has become one of the prime emblems or icons of modern life,
encoded in changing codes and carrying sign functions. It is a sign
vehicle whose functions not only express selves, but the social and
political fields in which it exists.

What follows, unfortunately, is not a proper social history of the
t-shirt. We rely on observations gathered on the streets of several
university towns, in tourist areas and souvenir shops in Chinatown in
San Francisco and the French Quarter of New Orleans. It should be noted
that as a socio-semiotic analysis, unique, individual meanings of a
shirt are not discussed. The fact that a person is attached to a shirt
because it was once his brother's, father's, or boy friend's, a gift
from a loved one, or has rich associations with a past event, place or
time, is important at the individual level. These features can be
associated with shirts encoded in any of the following ways. We have no
data on this (other than our own well-loved t-shirts).

The analysis proceeds as follows. The first task for a semiotic
analysis of t-shirts is to identify the system and the fundamental units
or syntagms (11 are identified) within the vestimentary code of that
system. The second task is to sort out the five associative contexts or
paradigms that organize the meaning of these units. The third task is
discuss the shirt with the seven codes that organize both units and
paradigms. Discussion of the codes and examples thereof constitute the
bulk of the paper. A concluding section speculates on the role of
temporal change in codes and the salience of key elements or units in
three chronotypes or eras.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The eleven unitsx

Eleven syntagms (units) are interchangeable elements necessary for
the production and consumption of a T-shirt. These are also relevant to
the imminent transformation in the shirt's meaning. Some 11
communicative units (that convey organize how the shirt communicates
meaning), it would appear, have been transformed in the last one
hundred years in North America. They appear to be related to the
evolution of the shirt from a home made item worn beneath visible
garments, to a very complex signifying public garment. These units are :
where the shirt is made ; the materials used to make the shirt ; the
values expressed by the shirt, including both expressive and utilitarian
values; where it is intended to be worn (setting-public vs. private
wear; front vs. back stage) ; the cut of the shirt ; the nature of its
adornment; the color(s) of the shirt ; what it represents or symbolizes
publicly; the social roles or statuses it connotes ; its association
with other garments in a fashion system ; and the nature of the
reflexivity of garment. Although this is not an exhaustive list of
potential units, it captures many of the key aesthetic and semantic
aspects of the shirt as a sign vehicle.

The paradigms

The units cluster together in a non-random fashion. They can be
further organized into metaphoric or paradigmatic clusters of meaning.
These make explicit certain themes in the "vertical organization" of
meaning. Five paradigms set out the t-shirt's changing meaning : the
technology used to produce the shirt (material, source, location of the
creation of the shirt); the functions or purposes (social values), both
expressive and utilitarian, of the item; the primary setting(s) for use
(setting, roles and statuses claimed); style (cut, adornment, color,
role in the fashion system) and the nature of the involvement of the
self in the object (the self and representational themes). These
metaphoric clusters also contain a set of metonymic relations. They
offer clues to what patterns of presence or absence of units determine
the overall configuration of the object.

However, certain underlying principles or codes reveal the rules
governing how shirts are perceived and used. The remainder of the paper
outlines the patterning of these syntagms and paradigms by codes.

WHAT IS A T-SHIRT?: SEVEN CODES

A code is a set of principles that organize the patterning of
signs semantically and syntactically. Codes, encoding and decoding, are
essential features of signwork (See Guiraud, 1975: Chs 3-5). At least
seven non-exclusive codes encode the t-shirt as an object. By seeing the
shirt as a function of preformed codes, one shifts attention from the
shirt as an object to its perception and use. let us list the relevant
codes in order : the utilitarian code, the mass-produced manufactured
code, the code of leisure (the t-shirt as a visible outer garment); the
code of complex and fluid expressive signs; the code for problematic
icons; the code of the shirt as a walking visual pun, and the t-shirt as
a copy or double.

Code 1: The shirt as a utilitarian undergarment
The "t-shirt" is a soft, plain, uncolored, sleeveless or short-
sleeved, usually cotton, garment originally worn under another shirt,
blouse, or heavier overgarment. Called now a "t-shirt," "vest," or
"singlet," it was a useful and functional item of apparel unmarked with
insignia, slogans, sayings, or emblems. It served the private and
unseen purposes of protecting the wearer from the harsh, perhaps
prickly, material of heavier outer garments such as sweaters or wool
shirts, absorbing sweat, giving support to breasts, or simply conserving
heat and permitting air to circulate around the body. Made to wear
under heavy outer shirts, they were once called "undershirts." The
degree to which these utilitarian functions were sex-differentiated
remains arguable. 4 When "home made," the shirt, the makers and wearers
of the shirt, shared a value system, exchange values, and imagery
governing the exchange.

Code 2 : The shirt as a manufactured item

Probably in the early part of this century, these undergarments
became widely available, mass-produced manufactured items. They were and
are sold in mail order catalogs and in department stores such as J.C.
Penney, Sears, Roebuck, and Co. and Hudsons' Bay. Although the upper and
upper middle classes continued to employ seamtresses and tailors, the
middle masses shopped and bought underwear by mail or in shops. No
longer were most undergarments individually home spun or made, nor were
they hand tailored and sewn. Large companies, with their own brand
names, "Jockey," "Fruit of the Loom," "Munsingwear," "Sears," or "J. C.
Penney," manufactured and sold them. Competition arose as other
companies began selling underwear. The t-shirt now was distinguished in
part by labels and to a lessor degree, by minute variations in cloth and
style. Brand names and associated stylistic variations became bases
(since the shirt itself was a simple and undistinguishable item of
apparel) for competition, invidious advertising, and marketing. A
commodity, it differentiated people by class and life style. The shirt
became a distinctive unit in a system of monetary exchange, a commodity
produced for sale.

Code 3: The shirt as a visible outer garment

Perhaps in the early 1960's, t-shirts became visible outer
garments. As visible items of dress, they served as status symbols that
differentiated status and taste groups, even within social classes. T-
shirts were previously unacceptable to the middle classes, because they
were viewed as the leisure wear of the tired, "working man at home,"
shown in the media stereotypically as white, soaked with sweat, stained
and torn. The t-shirt as outer wear in the 'fifties had additional and
important stylistic or connotative meanings. As shown in movies and
plays e.g., " A Street Car Named Desire," it symbolized the raw passions
of the unsocialized and proto-rebellious working classes. It signalled
animal vitality. The modest, short-sleeved t-shaped, undershirt became
more popular a