Self-referential postmodernity

Self-referential postmodernity

WINFRIED NÖTH

Abstract Contrary to the early media semioticians’ claim that semiotics is a metalanguage of the media and the media are a metalanguage of reality, the present paper gives evidence of how the media represent a world that is itself highly mediated. It is argued that media representations involve self-referential loops in which communication turns out to be communication about communication, reports are reports about reports, and mediations are mediations of mediations. Self-reference in the media is interpreted as a symptom of postmodernity with its tendency towards historical self-reflection in scenarios in which even catastrophic current events are being interpreted as mere media events or even déjà-vu scenarios in a culture in which everything seems to have been said and shown before. Keywords: self-reference; postmodernity; metalanguage; medium; media; semiotics. 1. Self-reference in postmodernity Self-reference is a much-discussed characteristic of postmodernity (Lawson 1985; Nöth 2001; Petersen 2003). In an era in which everything seems to have been said, the “grand narratives” have lost their credibility, and representations can no longer represent (Lyotard 1979: 27). To escape from the postmodern Crisis of Representation (Nöth and Ljungberg 2003) and the impasse of narrative incredibility, literature, the visual and the audiovisual arts, and media have become increasingly self-referential (Nöth and Bishara 2007), self-reflexive, autotelic. Instead of representing something heard about, seen, lived, or otherwise experienced in social life, culture and nature, journalists, commercial artists, designers, and film directors report increasingly what has been seen, heard, or reported before in the media. The mediators have turned to representing Semiotica 183–1/4 (2011), 199–217 DOI 10.1515/semi.2011.010

0037–1998/11/0183–0199 © Walter de Gruyter

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200  W. Nöth representations. Instead of narrating, they narrate how and why they narrate; instead of filming, they film that they film the filming. The news are more and more about what has been reported in the news, television shows are increasingly concerned with television shows, and even advertising is no longer about products and services but about advertising. The messages of the media are about messages of the media, whose origin has become difficult to trace (Nöth, Bishara, and Neitzel 2008). In literature, fiction has become metafiction, novels have become metanovels, and texts are being discovered as intertexts whose reference is not to life but to other texts. Last, but not least, art is now about art, and even architecture is about architecture. The digitalization of pictures and films, which has liberated the media from the bonds of factual reference to a world that they used to depict, has contributed to the increase of self-reference. No longer originating in a world that leaves its documentary traces on the negatives of a film, the pictures of the new media have become the result of digital imaging and art work, whose origin is in the software of the semiotic machines by means of which they are produced (cf. Nöth 2002). Literature, music, and the traditional visual arts have had self-reference inscribed in their canonical definitions since the classics of philosophical aesthetics. L’art-pour-l’art, autonomy, and autoreflexivity have been key concepts in this tradition (cf. Nöth 2000: 426–427, 434). The new trend since postmodernity has been that artists have begun to reflect programmatically about art in their art works. Literature has become metaliterature, novels metanovels, art has become art about art (Lipman and Marshall 1978; Wolf 2009), and even architecture has become architecture about architecture (Wittig 1979). A conspicuous symptom of the increasing concern with self-reference in the visual arts is the current interest in representing and exhibiting the artist’s own bodily self in works of visual art (cf. Santaella 2004; Nöth and Hertling 2005; Nöth 2006). Media studies have discussed the argument that self-reference is at the root of every medium. Each individual medium has a historical precursor to which it refers back in media history. The more the media interact today and turn intermedial, the more they refer to the media in self-referential loops. These were some of the reasons why McLuhan (1964) declared that the medium is the message. The famous tenet expresses among other things the view that each message in the media refers both to its own medium and to other media, and thus characterizes messages as partially self-referential. McLuhan develops this argument on the basis of his very broad concept of medium as an extension of man, according to which even light is a medium: The electric light is pure information; it is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium. The content of

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Self-referential postmodernity  201 writing is speech just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, “What is the content of speech?,” it is necessary to say, “It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal.” (McLuhan 1964: 8)

Notice that in this description of how the messages in the media circulate in a process of infinite semiosis that even includes thought as a content of a medium, the medium described as the most self-referential of all is light. A medium without a message that nevertheless conveys “pure information” can only be a medium that refers to nothing but to itself. All other media evince self-reference to the degree that they refer to other media, which implies a divided reference. To the degree that the media refers to the media, they are selfreferential, to the degree that they refer to other media, they are (allo)referential. Fashion has always been self-referential, but its cycles of self-reference have accelerated in postmodernity. It was Barthes who described fashion as a “tautological system” that defines itself reflexively only through itself, a system of signs “deprived of content but not of sense, a kind of machine to operate sense without ever fixing it” with the only goal of making the “insignificant significant” (1967: 287), or, as Goebel put it, a system that keeps conveying the same message forever: fashion is hence “a language that consists of nothing but synonyms” (1986: 476). One of the most striking symptoms of the current concern with self-reference in culture and in the media is probably the recent phenomenon of culture jamming (Klein 2000: ch. 12), the critical transformation of media messages by activists who display their protest against the age of consumerism, globalization, and social surveillance in public places and urban spaces in subversive forms such as adbusting, graffiti, flash mobs, hacktivism, cybersquatting, or sousveillance (cf. Wikipedia contributors 2007), not without creating the selfreferential paradox that they depend on the media themselves in their subversive attacks against the media. In the interpretation of the phenomenon of ever increasing self-reference in postmodern culture, we find the “apocalyptic” critics opposing the “integrated” ones. The former, among them Baudrillard (1976, 1981, 1991), deplore the loss of referents in a more and more self-referential world in which reality has degenerated to constructed, simulated or virtual reality. The latter interpret self-reference as a symptom of increasing critical consciousness in a world that has lost its confidence in ultimate truths (Lawson 1985). However, while the integrated ones may lack critical distance in face of the aporias of postmodern self-reference, the apocalyptic ones run the risk of finding themselves involved in paradoxes as long as they are unable to explain the nature of those referents whose loss they deplore (Nöth 2001; Nöth and Ljungberg 2003). During the first decade of the twenty-first century, semioticians and media researchers can celebrate the semicentennial of the semiotics of the media.

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202  W. Nöth Fifty years ago, between 1954 and 1956, in the French literary journal Les lettres nouvelles, Roland Barthes wrote his seminal essays on the ideologies of the mass media, which were republished in 1957 under the title of Mythologies. Only gradually did the mythologist of the mass media Barthes develop the semiotic framework for the study of the myths he discovered in women’s magazines such as Elle, daily newspapers such as Figaro, or in Paris Match, the legendary news magazine of his time. The model that he finally adopted but later abandoned was Saussure’s model of the sign and Louis Hjelmslev’s theo­‑ ry of denotation, connotation, language, and metalanguage. The myths of the mass media of the 1950s, according to Barthes’s early writings, were a metalanguage with ideological connotations whose purpose it was to veil the real messages contained in their underlying denotative meanings. It was the semiotician’s task to unveil these myths and to reveal with the theoretical instruments of semiology that the mass media have the structure of a semiological system. It is not necessary to go into further details concerning Barthes’s rather wellknown early approach to the semiotics of the media nor is it possible to give here a historical survey of the panorama that emerges from half of a century of semiotic research in the media (see Nöth 1997, 2000). Instead, my aim is to take this first model of semiotics as a metalanguage of the media as a point of departure before showing that, and in how far, this early model is in contrast with very different models and issues predominating in more recent discussions concerning the semiotics of the media. However, before approaching the current issues of media semiotics, let me specify more in detail the underlying assumptions that were characteristic of the semiotics of the media fifty years ago. 2. Semiotics, the media, and “reality”: Double transitivity? According to the early pioneers in media semiotics, the world of signs and the world of the media are in the following relation of double transitivity, which can be epitomized by the formula signs about signs about signs: 1. semiotics provides a model of the sign processes in the media, 2. the media provide models of the sign processes in a “reality” that exists independently of the media, and 3. the verbal and nonverbal sign systems used by humans in the “reality” of everyday life are verbal and nonverbal models of the reality of the objects and events they refer to. These forms of modeling at different levels can also be described in terms of representation, and the relationship between the levels in terms of the classical semiotic hierarchy of language, metalanguage, and meta-metalanguage.

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Self-referential postmodernity  203 1. At the first level, language serves to represent life as it exists before and independently of the media, everyday life from birth to death and from morning to night. It is a world of signs that includes verbal, nonverbal, acoustic, and visual languages to represent or to model the world before the signs, a world of objects, events, and living beings. 2. At the second level, there are the media that represent life before the media, everyday life or extraordinary events, possible or even impossible worlds beyond the paper on which they are printed or the screens on which they appear. In this sense, the media are a metalanguage of the languages in the reality they represent. 3. Third, semiotics, the study of signs and sign processes, provides models and tools for the study of the media and seems as such predestined to represent or model the world of the media on a theoretical level, which is again a world of signs. In this sense, semiotics is a metalanguage of the media and at the same time a meta-metalanguage of the sign processes represented in the media. Thus, the media seem to represent a world before the media, to represent sign processes in a reality existing independently of the media. The double transitivity of representation means: semioticians model the sign processes in the media, the media in turn model the life before the media, and the life before the media models the world in which we live. The idea of semiotics as a metalanguage of the mass media has perhaps been most explicitly formulated by the Tartu-Moscow School of semiotics in the framework of their cultural semiotics. Their key notion in this context is the notion of the modeling system. According to Lotman, a modeling system is a structure of elements and rules of combination that is “in a state of fixed analogy to the entire sphere of an object of knowledge, insight or regulation. Therefore a modeling system can be regarded as a language. Systems that have natural language as their basis and that acquire supplementary superstructures, thus creating languages of a second level, can appropriately be called secondary modeling systems” (quoted in Lucid 1977: 7; from Lotman’s “Theses on the problem “art in the series of modeling systems”). According to this framework, language is the primary modeling system, the media are secondary modeling systems, and the semiotics of the media is a tertiary modeling system.

3. Self-referential loops Is semiotics the metalanguage of the media, and are the media the metalanguage of the life before the media? Semiotics provides indeed models or theoretical tools for the study of signs in the media, and the media present models

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204  W. Nöth of the life before the media, the so-called “reality.” Nevertheless, the image of double transitivity that seems to project semiotics to the top of a hierarchy of a world of signs about signs about signs gives only a very incomplete account of the intricate relationships between the study of signs and the study of the media. Half a century after Roland Barthes’s early semiotic studies in the mythological and ideological metasigns of the media, the semiotics of the media has arrived at the conclusion that the relation between media semiotics, the media, and the world represented by the media can no longer be accounted for by the relationship of transitivity. Instead, it has become more and more evident that and how signs do not only depict, represent, or misrepresent reality, but rather create this reality and are creations of this reality themselves. In addition to transitivity, semioticians are faced with reflexivity, in addition to reference with self-reference. A panorama of the semiotics of the media fifty years after its beginnings must account for such self-referential loops in the semiotic study of the media. Beginning with the self-referential nature of the sign considered as a medium, it will cover self-reference in communication, in the news media, and in the comics. 4. Mediations of mediations The first self-referential loop is at the very root of the semiotics of the media; it is the loop of the media whose signs are mediators. At least in the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, “medium” is a synonym of “sign.” “All my notions are too narrow. Instead of ‘Sign’ ought I not to say ‘Medium’?” Peirce exclaimed in 1906 in search for a radically new terminology of his semiotics (MS 339: 526). Peirce’s definition of the sign as a medium reminds us that the study of the sign just like the study of the media is the study of the process of mediation between the world in which we live and the minds in which it is reflected, or perhaps only constructed: signs are the mediators between the so-called reality, which is itself already a reality mediated in previous processes of semiosis, and the way we interpret this reality through the very mediation of these signs. The sign, according to Peirce, mediates between the object, the “real” or only “imaginary” or even merely “virtual” world in which we live and the effects of semiosis that the sign evokes in the minds and actions of those to whom it is addressed. Consider, for example, the message of a TV report about an earthquake in Iran: the earthquake is evidently the object of the message; the message is the sign, and the curiosity, the shock or perhaps the charity evoked in the TV audience by this report is the interpretant. The sign mediates between the event and the people affected by it on the one hand and the minds of the audience on the

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Self-referential postmodernity  205 other. At first sight, the description of this process seems to reduce the complexity of media semiosis to a linear sequence from the object via the sign to the interpretant, but at a closer look, this linearity at first sight will soon evolve into multiple circularities. The object of the sign, it is true, precedes the sign and its interpretant in time, but, as Peirce taught, there are two circularities involved in the relationship between the sign and its object. The first is that “the object of representation can be nothing but a representation of which the first representation is the interpretant” (CP 3.339), and this insight is particularly evident in the media: what the media report are reports about reports about reports. The second circularity at the root of media semiosis is that a sign in representing an object “cannot furnish acquaintance with or recognition of that object.” Instead, the sign “presupposes an acquaintance in order to convey some further information concerning it” (CP 2.231). In this sense, the media can never inform about something utterly new, the audience must always have some prior background about the circumstances of the event that the report is about. A sign can impossibly “convey information and yet have absolutely no relation nor reference to anything with which the person to whom it conveys the information has . . . acquaintance” (CP 2.231). To be informed, the TV audience must hence have prior knowledge about what an earthquake is, where Iran is located, what the sufferings of the people affected by the earthquake mean, etc. The sign that presupposes some acquaintance with its object is a mediator that mediates between the prior knowledge that we have and the new information that the sign conveys. In this respect the messages transmitted by the media always involve a certain circularity. The most rudimentary and first circularity is hence that the message about the earthquake transmitted by the mass medium of television worldwide is thus, like any sign, a medium itself. Hence, the mass media are media of media. The medium is not only a message, as McLuhan (1964) taught; the medium is, self-reflexively, also a mediated medium. 5. Communication about communication The second way in which the media are self-referential is equally fundamental; it concerns the process of communication. Every act of communication, not only communication in the media, has something self-referential at its root since communication is not only the transmission of a message but also communication about communication. Together with the message, every communicator conveys a self-referential metamessage that indicates so to speak, “I am communicating.” The semiotician Luis Prieto (1966) has defined this kind of metamessage as the index of notification (cf. Santaella and Nöth 2004: 112). This index is particularly relevant in nonverbal communication. The receivers

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206  W. Nöth have to know whether the sender is transmitting a message or doing something else, and the sender emits signals to make clear: “I am communicating.” In the media, an explicit notification of the message seems to be redundant. What we see on the TV screen, for example, is always a message and cannot be confounded with an unmediated reality. Nevertheless, the mass media use explicit signals of notification from their station logos to more specific program notifications, such as “These were the news.” Furthermore, several levels of communication must be distinguished, and at each level, communication about communication, in particular communication about the communicating self, occurs in a different form. In the movies, for example, the actors communicate and emit signals of communicating at two levels at least, story and discourse. At the level of the story, the actors notify that they are communicating as heroes or villains addressing themselves to other characters of their fictional world. Communicative self-reference at this level can perhaps best be illustrated with Tarzan’s famous address to Jane: “Me Tarzan. You Jane.” Tarzan communicates or notifies that he is the communicator and that Jane is the addressee in the fictional world of their jungle. At the level of discourse, the actors notify simultaneously with their selfreferential signals of being heroes or villains that they are film stars of the Hollywood world addressing themselves to mass audiences. At this level, they no longer communicate a heroic or a criminal identity, but the identity of a film star who wants to impress or amuse the spectators in order to achieve fame in the world of the movies. At both levels, the communicators communicate that they communicate under different names, the character name, which changes from film to film, and the name of the actor, which remains the same. Consider the following example of this duplicity of self-reference in the movies reported in the “People” column of USA Today (Figure 1). We see two press photos from the Hollywood premiere of The Legend of Zorro of Oct. 15, 2005, one of “Legend star Antonio Banderas and real-life wife Melanie Griffith,” the other “Mrs. Zorro and Zorro Jr.: Catherine Zeta-Jones and Adrian Alonso” about whom we learn elsewhere in the report that he is eleven years of age and acts as Zorro’s son, Joaquin. At the level of the story, whose knowledge the reporter William Keck simply presupposes, Mr. and Mrs. Zorro are identified as communicators in the world of Zorro’s adventures. The two are not Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones but Mr. and Mrs. Zorro (a strange address that actually betrays the interference of the reporters as communicators about both worlds). At the moment of the Hollywood premiere, however, the two communicate a different mode of self-reference. They do not communicate with each other but address themselves to the audience. Antonio (alias Mr. Zorro) communicates his identity as a famous Hollywood star and so does Catherine Zeta-Jones

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Figure 1.  Duplicity of self-reference during the Hollywood premiere of The Legend of Zorro ( USA Today, Oct. 18, 2005: 2D).

Self-referential postmodernity  207

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208  W. Nöth (alias Mrs. Zorro). Notice how the scenes shown in the press photos emphasize the difference between the fictional and the Hollywood communicators. Antonio Banderas emphasizes that he is no longer Mr. Zorro, and Mrs. Zorro is identified as not being his wife. Legend star “Mr. Zorro,” alias Antonio Banderas, is now the husband of his “real-life” wife, Melanie Griffith, and the reporters are happy to note that the Hollywood couple communicates their roles as communicators very distinctly from the fictional selves, emphasizing that “there were no signs of strife between Banderas and his real-life wife, Melanie Griffith, who walked the red carpet hand-in-hand.” “Mrs. Zorro” in the photo to the right communicates a different Hollywood identity and reports that her real-life husband, Michael Douglas, is “in Hawaii filming a movie,” and that she has “to leave the premiere immediately after her red-carpet duties to fly to New York,” etc. In a film of the “candid camera” genre, by contrast, in which people are shown who do not know that they are being observed and filmed, only the cameraman communicates. The people in the film who do not know that they are being filmed do not communicate and emit no indices of notification, but when people know they are being filmed, they behave differently and begin to communicate to a film audience, whether they want to or not. This is why reality shows are no shows of reality. All the agents in the so-called reality show have become actors who communicate twice that they communicate, once to their fellow actors in the show, once to the audience that applauds or not. More recently, emphasis on self-referential notification has become a special device of news reporters and producers of documentaries who do not merely want to show an event, but show that they are showing an event by including the camera and the reporters in their films as much as possible (cf. Andacht 2007). The purpose of this kind of self-reference of the reporters to themselves is to make the audience aware of the processes of production as a limitation on the film’s neutral stance, its ability to document objectively. In doing so the film draws attention to the process of selecting and reconstructing events to convey meaning. Self-reflexivity becomes then a reaction against or a way of countering the traditional mode of the documentary, which emphasizes verisimilitude (Allen 1977: 37). 6. Reports about reports The third self-referential loop in the media has to do with the remoteness of the signs from their object of reference. An event such as the earthquake in Iran is rarely the unmediated object of the signs in the mass media, as the local weather report may perhaps be. Instead, the grand stories transmitted by the mass media are usually reports about reports; their mediations are mediations about mediations. Media messages are reported media messages, bought from news

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Self-referential postmodernity  209 agencies; very rarely are they first-hand testimonials of eyewitnesses. The morning newspapers do not bring eye witness reports but reports about what eye witnesses are reported to have seen; they report what the news agencies report, and these reports are once more referred to in commentaries of the opinion columns (cf. Marcus 1997). In sum, the signs of the mass media are mediated signs. They are signs about signs about signs. Insofar as they refer to signs from the media, they are self-referential signs. If, however, signs in general as well as the signs in the media do not operate on the basis of, or with reference to, an unmediated reality, but have, instead, always a semiotically mediated reality as their level of reference, the semiotics of the media can no longer be content with trying to demystify the myths or trying to de-ideologize the alleged ideologies of the media. Myths and ideologies, it is true, are semioticizations of sign systems, and the media are vehicles of the propagation of such secondary sign systems. However, these semiotic­ izations do not operate on the basis of a “natural” or “nonsemiotic” world of reality which receives its secondary meanings only by its representation in the media. Since the world represented in the media is already mediated and semioticized before the media arrive, the semiotics of the media has to investigate the mediations and semioticizations in the media, not as a semiotic epiphany, but as only one of the many stages in the unlimited process of semiotic mediation which Peirce called semiosis. It is interesting that such a perspective of media studies, which necessarily abandons the search for two levels of meaning in messages, i.e., primary, natural or true meanings with the overlay of secondary, ideological ones, has been paralleled by semiotic insights that Roland Barthes has developed independently of Peirce. Barthes was one of those semioticians who, in the 1960s, believed in a semiotics of the media as a method of revealing the secondary connotations superimposed on the primary denotations of the messages in the mass media; but he later abandoned this view and came to the conclusion that a primary level of denotation (representing “nature” and “reality”) can never be the point of departure of a semiotic analysis of a message (Barthes 1970: 9). Such an analysis always begins with the discov­ery of a plurality of connotations, and only after the investigation of a long chain of such connotations can we hope to arrive at an interpretation that might deserve to be called its denotation. According to Barthes, then, the denotative meaning of a message does not represent a primary, but rather an ultimate level of meaning, which arises as the result of the interpretative process after many layers of connotation have first been determined. In this idea of a possible finality of the process of interpretation, there is a parallelism with a central element of Peircean semiotics; namely, the notion of the final interpretant, the meaning “which would finally be decided to be the true interpretation if consideration of the matter were carried so far that an ultimate opinion were reached” (CP 8.184).

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210  W. Nöth 7. The Gulf War did not take place? There are circularities in the semiotics of the media that derive from the model describing them. One of such circularities derives from the sign model of structuralist semiotics in the Saussurean tradition, which conceives of the sign as something that is only constituted by other signs and, hence, can never really represent anything but signs, albeit by difference. The world beyond the signs, according to Saussure, is a mere nebula; signs can only be signs in opposition to other signs, and representation is not the representation of the world, but the representation of a difference between signs. Furthermore, structuralists postulate an unbridgeable gulf between the signifier and the signified in the sense that the signifier gives no access to the signifieds unless via other signifiers. All of this amounts to a fundamental and radical self-referentiality of signs: there is no escape from the world of signs. This structuralist view of the essentially self-referential sign is the semiotic foundation of Baudrillard’s radical theory of self-reference in the media: signs, in his perspective, only survive in the form of “simulacra,” simulating a reality where even the original turns out to be a mere copy. Baudrillard’s critical vision is the one of a society dominated by “empty signs” and “codes without referents” in which even everyday life and contemporary history have degenerated into mere simulacra. Instead of reality, there is only virtual reality or hyperreality, and the self-referentiality of signs in the media is such that Baudrillard has even come to doubt the reality of the Gulf War. The Gulf War did not take place was the conclusion at which he arrived in his provocative essay of 1991. In his attempts at finding the semiotic roots of the emptiness of the signs that have become mere simulacra, Baudrillard, celebrating a Requiem for the Media, has made out the loss of the referent as the cause of the decay of the signs in social and cultural life. However, his thesis of the loss of the referent is precisely the Achilles heel of Baudrillard’s semiotic theory. On the one hand, the referent now lost is never specified; on the other hand, the Saussurean sign model on which its structuralist premises are founded has never admitted the consideration of a referent in the first place. 8. The self-referential déjà-vu scenarios of September 11 A quite different account of the catastrophic and hyperreal scenarios in the media of our days has been given by Slavoj Žižek. In one of his “Essays on September 11 and related dates,” Žižek writes: “The question we should have asked ourselves as we started the TV screens on September 11 is simply: Where have we already seen the same thing over and again?” (2002: 17).

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Self-referential postmodernity  211 In our context, only the aspect of self-reference addressed by Žižek is of relevance. What Žižek reminds us of is that the TV pictures of the collapsing World Trade Center on September 11 did not only arouse shock, horror, and despair but it also created some feeling of déjà-vu. In a way, the film reports of September 11 in the news media only seemed to repeat the scenarios that the genre of disaster movies had displayed for decades. The TV pictures seemed to lack absolute novelty because the viewers had been all too familiar with similar pictures of catastrophes, wars, destruction, and invasions by enemies and aliens, some of them even in New York City. As Tim Dirks’s list of the “Greatest disaster film scenes” demonstrates (2007), the world’s highest glass tower building had been aflame before (although in a fictional version in which the towers were located in San Francisco), namely in the movie The Towering Inferno of 1974, and there are dozens of catastrophe film scenarios resembling the September 11 events with plane crashes, terrorists of many kinds, out of control fires, nuclear annihilations, and even end of the world scenarios. On September 11, the media had been ahead of the event; reality seemed to lag behind. In short, the déjà-vu effect on the screen accounts for a particular form of self-reference in the media, which consists in the repetition of the same scenario, whether fictional of nonfictional.

9. The media in the media The modes of self-reference in the media are manifold and cannot be dealt with exhaustively here, but to conclude the list of examples, let us consider a case of self-reference that might be called “the media in the media.” It has to do with intertextuality, which is a form of self-reference in a broader sense (cf. Nöth 2005). Since the following example is from the comics, the mode of selfreference, is more specifically an example of self-referential “comics in the comics.” The pictures that we are seeing (Figure 2 and 3) are from a recent prize winning comic book novel entitled Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (2000). Jimmy Corrigan, the protagonist, is a loser, a meek little office clerk in his mid-thirties, a lonely man without a girlfriend but lots of phone calls from his mother. In the panels shown here, Jimmy is looking out of his office window. Suddenly, the comic reader, together with Jimmy, discovers the tiny figure of a man standing on the cornice of the skyscraper across the street. In the following panel, a close-up shows more clearly that it is the figure of Superman in his classical caped costume in blue, red, and yellow. Superman waves to Jimmy, and Jimmy waves back. As if guided by a film camera moving still closer to the object of attention, the next panel shows superman crouching as if to take off

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212  W. Nöth for one of his spectacular flights from the top of the building. Without an intermediate panel depicting the ensuing flight through the air, the next panel shows superman lifeless on the pavement right in front of the building from which he set out for his leap. There he remains to be seen on several subsequent panels, during which it eventually begins to rain. We continue seeing him there from

Figure 2

Figure 3

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Self-referential postmodernity  213

Figure 4 Figures 2, 3 and 4.  Intertextual self-reference in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (2000).

the perspective of Jimmy’s office window, while the office clerk has to attend another of his mother’s phone calls in which she asks once more the embarrassing question: “Jimmy . . . d-do you still love me?” while he, doing nothing but watching the comic-book hero Superman through the window of his office, replies: “Mom, I’m busy. I’m at work.” In several strange ways, the scene of the world of comics entering the world of the comics creates self-referential paradoxes. Superman, the character whose real existence is actually restricted to the world of paper, as we know, enters Jimmy Corrigan’s “real life,” and his reality is so real that he even dies an ordinary death. However, with his death, the Jimmy Corrigan’s comic book story unmasks the superman myth, according to which the hero in red, blue, and yellow has an invulnerable “Kryptonian” body that would have resisted any fall from any height. Since we see Superman dead on the pavement, either the myth of his invulnerability is a fake or the man who flung himself from the building is a fake Superman.

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214  W. Nöth However that may be, semioticians of the media are faced with a paradox that testifies to the intrusion of semiotics within the media, their object of study. The comic book is no longer about the comedies and tragedies of everyday life, but about making and reading comic strips. The theoretical separation of the levels in the hierarchy of language, metalanguage, and meta-metalanguage is disturbed by conflation, nesting, or mirror projections of the higher into the lower levels. The image of the map and the territory, which has so often been evoked as a metaphor of the relationship between language and metalanguage as well as for the relationship between the media and the reality they depict is insufficient. Like a perfect map, which would include the map of the territory that it is depicting, languages include their own metalanguages, or, as Paul Thibault puts it, “systems of interpretation such as natural languages incorporate into their own internal design the very principles of organization whereby the relationship between object and system of interpretation is constituted. . . . This means that the systems of interpretation that we use to model the infinitely richer and more complex phenomena of the world are self-referential to their users” (1998: 410). The little scene from Jimmy Corrigan is only the tip of the iceberg of a myriad of self-referential allusions to the world of the comics in this particular cartoon. It begins with the name: Jimmy Corrigan is the diminutive of James Corrigan, the name of a cartoon detective murdered by gangsters in the DC More Fun Comic issue #52 of February 1940. Furthermore, the book begins with an ironical section of reprints of articles on how to read it, and it is replete with advertisements for itself as if the readers needed propaganda for a book they had already bought. 10.  The end of the grand narratives? Self-reference has been interpreted as a symptom of postmodern culture. Literature and the arts, novels, and films have been reflecting more and more the modes and conditions of writing and filming. Novels become metanovels, films metafilms, and even advertising has seen its transformation into meta­ advertising. In postmodern architecture, we are faced with a style that renounces to functionality in favor of quotations from past styles of architecture, and reference to function has become replaced by reference to architecture itself. Self-reference in the media is part of this larger symptom of postmodernity. Is it a symptom of a general crisis of representation, of the fin-de-siècle tedium of a culture in which the loss of a reality before representation must be deplored, a culture that has lost its ability to represent since representation consists only of empty catchphrases and, as Lyotard has declared, “the grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses,

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Self-referential postmodernity  215 regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation” (1979: 27)? The answer to these questions is “no,” but let me specify this “no” in four concluding statements.

11.  Four conclusions First, the image of the media as a map of the territory of contemporary life is incomplete since the media cannot pretend to represent an unmediated reality. Instead, their territory is always a semiotically mediated reality. Hence the semiotics of the media, early in its history, discovered that it could not be contented with demystifying the myths of the media or trying to deideologize their ideologies. Myths and ideologies, it is true, are semiotic systems, and the media are vehicles for the propagation of such systems. However, these myths are not constructions erected on top of a “natural” or “nonsemiotic” world of reality receiving its secondary meanings only by its representation in the media. Since the world represented in the media is already mediated and semioticized before the media arrive, the semiotics of the media has to investigate the mediations and semioticizations in the media, not as a semiotic epiphany, but as only one of the many stages in the unlimited process of semiotic mediation that Peirce called semiosis. Second, self-reference in the media is not a symptom of a culture that begins to repeat itself, it is not a symptom of a crisis of representation; nor is it the symptom of the impossibility of representation of the realities of our times. On the contrary, self-reference in the media is a symptom of the transformation of the concept of reality. After all, the life that the media represent is not a life without the media; it includes the media, which have become part of reality and can no longer be separated from them. Self-reference is hence the logical necessity of the semiotic mission of the media that is to represent. Third, self-reference is a source of creativity. In particular, it leads to paradoxes, and paradoxes are one of the main sources of humor, irony, riddles, but also of lies and fantasy. Paradox accounted for the particular charm of our Jimmy Corrigan comic book. The very title of this cartoon is pure irony, for how can this poor and dull loser be “the smartest kid on earth”? Either the title of the cartoon is a lie, or, if it is true, the world at the turn of the third millennium has no smarter kids, but in that case, how could this charming comic book by its author Chris Ware have seen the light of the world in the year 2000? As we see, the self-referential paradox created by the author of this comic book reflects on the author himself, but the solution to the paradoxical riddle does not leave us in the despair of the logicians in their millennial search for the solution to the ancient Greek paradox of Epimenides, the Cretan who

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216  W. Nöth said that all Cretans are liars; it is easy to find the solution in the realm of irony and fantasy. Fourth, self-reference is a symptom of cultural maturity. This final thesis has a more general foundation in the semiotics of culture and in Juri Lotman’s semiotics of culture and of the “semiosphere” (cf. Nöth 2006). According to Lotman, semiospheres evince the tendency of creating their own metasemiospheres in a self-referential loop: “Whether we have in mind language, politics or culture, the mechanism is the same: one part of the semiosphere . . . in the process of self-description creates its own grammar” (1990: 128). An appropriate image of this relationship between a semiosphere and its metasemiosphere is that of the mirror mirroring itself. The semiosphere contains a mirror that depicts its own metasemiosphere, but the metasemiosphere is also a mirror of the semiosphere of which it is an image. This fundamental semiotic principle is at the root of the semiotics of the media. The media have become selfreferential. No longer contented with mirroring the world, they have begun to include within themselves a mirror to reflect their own mirroring of the realities of a world in which their presence constitutes a reality of its own. References Allen, Jeanne. 1977. Self-reflexivity in documentary. Ciné-Tracts 1(2). 37–43. Andacht, Fernando. 2007. On the use of self-disclosure as a mode of audiovisual reflexivity. In W. Nöth & N. Bishara (eds.), Self-reference in the media, 165–182. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil. Barthes, Roland. 1967. Système de la mode. Paris: Seuil. Barthes, Roland. 1970. S/Z. Paris: Seuil. Baudrillard, Jean. 1976. L’échange symbolique et la mort. Paris: Gallimard. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée. Baudrillard, Jean. 1991. La guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu. Paris: Galilée. Dirks, Tim. 2007. Greatest disaster film scenes. http://www.filmsite.org/filmdisasters.html (accessed 4 October 2010). Goebel, Gerhard. 1986. Notizen zur Semiotik der Mode. In Silvia Bovenschen (ed.), Die Listen der Moden, 458–479. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Klein, Naomi. 2000. No logo. Toronto: Knopf Canada. Lawson, Hilary. 1985. Reflexivity: The post-modern predicament. London: Hutchinson. Lipman, Jean & Richard Marshall (eds.). 1978. Art about art. New York: Dutton. Lotman, Yuri M. 1990. Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture, Ann Shukman (trans.). London: I. B. Tauris. Lucid, Daniel P. (ed.). 1977. Soviet semiotics: An anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. La condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding media. New York: McGraw-Hill. Marcus, Solomon. 1997. Media and self-reference: The forgotten initial state. In W. Nöth (ed.), Semiotics of the media: State of the art, projects, and perspectives, 15–45. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Self-referential postmodernity  217 Nöth, Winfried. 2000. Handbuch der semiotik, 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler. Nöth, Winfried. 2001. Autorreferencialidad en la crisis de la modernidad. Cuadernos 17. 365–369. Nöth, Winfried. 2002. Semiotic machines. Cybernetics and Human Knowing 9(1). 5–22. Nöth, Winfried. 2005. La auto-referencia en los medios. In Pablo Espinosa Vera (ed.), Semiótica en los mass media, 67–87. Monterrey: Universidad Autónoma de León. Nöth, Winfried. 2006. Yuri Lotman on metaphors and culture as self-referential semiospheres. Semiotica 161(1/4). 249–263. Nöth, Winfried (ed.). 1997. Semiotics of the media: State of the art, projects, and perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Nöth, Winfried & Nina Bishara (eds.). 2007. Self-reference in the media. Berlin/New York: ­Mouton de Gruyter. Nöth, Winfried & Anke Hertling (eds.). 2005. Körper — Verkörperung — Entkörperung. Kassel: University Press. Nöth, Winfried & Christina Ljungberg (eds.). 2003. The crisis of representation: Semiotic foundations and manifestations in culture and the media. Special Issue, Semiotica 143(1/4). Nöth, Winfried, Nina Bishara & Britta Neitzel. 2008. Medile Selbstreferenz. Köln: Halem. Peirce, Charles S. 1931–1966. The collected papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss & A. W. Burks (eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Reference to Peirce’s papers will be designated CP followed by volume and paragraph number.] Peirce, Charles S. n.d. The manuscript collection of Charles S. Peirce, Peirce Edition Project. Indianapolis, IN. [Reference to Peirce’s unpublished manuscripts will be designated MS followed by a manuscript number.] Petersen, Christer. 2003. Der postmoderne Text. Kiel: Ludwig. Prieto, Luis. 1966. Messages et signaux. Paris: Presses Universitaires. Santaella, Lucia. 2004. Corpo e comunicação. São Paulo: Paulus. Santaella, Lucia & Winfried Nöth. 2004. Comunicação e semiótica. São Paulo: Hacker. Thibault, Paul J. 1998. Metalanguage. In Paul Bouissac (ed.), Encyclopedia of semiotics, 408–411. New York: Oxford University Press. Ware, F. Chris. 2000. Jimmy Corrigan: The smartest kid on earth. New York: Pantheon. Wikipedia contributors (2007). Culture jamming. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en. ­wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_ jamming (accessed 4 October, 2010). Wittig, Susan. 1979. Architecture about architecture: Self-reference as a type of architectural signification. In Seymour Chatman, Umberto Eco & Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (eds.), A semiotic landscape, 970–978. The Hague: Mouton. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the desert. London: Verso. Winfried Nöth (b.1944) is a professor at the University of Kassel and visiting professor at the Catholic University of São Paulo . His research interests include general semiotics, semiotics of the media, and semiotic linguistics. His publications include Handbook of semiotics (1990); Semiotics of nature (with K. Kull, 2001); Imagen: Comunicación, semiótica y médios (with L. Santaella, 2003); and Semiotic bodies, aesthetic embodiments, and cyberbodies (2006).

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