(2004-05-17) Brown Semiotics Department

Profile of the Brown University Semiotics program that Steven Johnson was in. Ferdinand De Saussure coined the term semiologie while teaching his landmark "Course on General Linguistics" at the University of Geneva from 1906-11... "I was dazzled by this hope," wrote RolandBarthes, author of the ground-breaking book "Mythologies" (1957), "to give my denunciation of the self-proclaimed petit-bourgeois myths the means of developing scientifically; this means was semiology."... And though the works of semioticians were only part of a larger syllabus of recent literary and film theory, the phrase "Brown semiotics" began to take on a larger signification, one that involved expensive black clothes and European cigarettes and a certain kind of hyper-intelligent ideological refusenik." Semiotics . . . was like a Conspiracy Theory to beat all conspiracy theories," IraGlass remembers. "It wasn't just that authority figures of various sorts did things that were questionable . . .. It's that language itself was actually a system designed to keep you in your place, which when, you know, you're 19 or 20 is pretty much exactly what you're ready to hear.".. The "problematic" with semiotics was that by becoming a means of interrogating the ideological assumptions of bourgeois pleasure, semiotics itself became a form of bourgeois pleasure. "It was like an exclusive, self-contained puzzle for super-smart, super-rich kids," recalls novelist Samantha Gillison, an Brown Classics concentrator in the 1980s... Recalling those heady days, Scholes smiles and quotes the philosopher John Wisdom: "Every day, and in every way, we're getting meta and meta.".. Steven Johnson found he had developed a prose style that sounded like he was translating himself "from the French." Meanwhile Glass, was in anguish about how to convert the theoretical "open text" he had postulated in his undergraduate thesis into something that could actually make it on the radio. "I have to say it took years to wash it away," says Glass...