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 as an outergarment, while the "track jersey" style of
sleeveless jersey with thin straps and a ribbed bodice was not worn as
outer wear. It lost popularity although it reappeared later as a "tank
top" style.
Changes in the composition of cloth and production technology also
contributed to changes in the t-shirt's sign functions. Polyester and
other artificial fibers, along with the introduction of "drip dry"
cycles on clothes dryers, expanded the range of colors, styles and
textures of shirts, and increased their durability. In time, emblematic
and multi-colored t-shirts made of new synthetic materials, and blends
of these materials with cotton, also appeared. 5
The mass production of undergarments to be worn as outergarments
proceeded apace. Plain cotton shirts were now manufactured in primary
colors, some with pockets which indicated they were to be worn in public
and meant to hold something the wearer needed, such as a pen, a ticket,
a map, or a package of cigarettes. The middle classes could now be seen
wearing simple colored t-shirts for social occasions: barbecues,
golfing, sailing or other week-end leisure activities.
Fashion began to affect t-shirt design. The shirts took on
connotative signification that resonated in the social world of fashion.
They became widely-available mass produced signs of identity, sign
vehicles carrying a variety of signifiers whose referents were
themselves and their wearer. They referred to other signifiers and
various signifieds within the fashion code. They spoke the language of
fashion.
Code 4: The shirt as a representational sign vehicle
Shirts became an assemblage of signs. They conveyed messages while
residing in an "open text" or contained many messages that the reader or
observer could interpret (Eco, l986). A range of types of shirts, all
communicating a variety of messages about the wearer, his or her
experiences, attitude, or social status, appear in the post-1960s era.
A connection remained between experience, role and status, and
symbolization.
The code orders meaning by seeing the t-shirt as a mirror of social
relationships. The t-shirt conveys representations that signal or
communicate membership in a group, work place or collectivity. Consider
how T-shirts now carry emblems, words or pictures (or all three)
announcing various social identities or locations: a place (Virginia
Beach, N.C., Oregon); a business (Mac's Bar, Gilley's-Pasadena, Texas);
an institution (Harvard, MSU, Haslett High School); another form of
group or collectivity (UAW Local 650; B-O-C engine assembly); a team
(usually, in turn, sponsored by business e.g. Gino's Tavern, East
Lansing Plumbing Supply); a rock concert,tour or play ("Les Miserables";
"Cats" ; "A Chorus Line" -also at times the name of a forthcoming album-
"Joe Jackson's Night and Day tour"), a value commodity (Jaguar,
Panasonic Speakers), or an axial ceremonial experience ("The Temple
Family reunion, Hood River, 1979; or "I survived my son [or daughter's]
wedding") or just an experience ("Veni Vedi, Visa, I came, I saw, I
shopped"). Some cry out slogans ("Take a walk," "Save the whales" or
"Free Nelson Mandela"). Others combine a personal name announcement and
a team as in the football jerseys that display a name across the upper
portion of the back and the team name and number on the front and back.
In spite of their ambiguity as a basis for a status or identity
claim, the representations on these shirts are in Eco's (1979:135ff.)
terms "undercoded." They stand in a synecdochical (a part-the t-shirt-
stands for the whole- the self of the person) relationship to some
important ostensive experience, social relationship, role, or status
claimed explicitly or implicitly by the wearer. The message of the shirt
is not only about the club, place, play or business, but about the
wearer's status claim: "There is more to my self than what you see ;
here's a sample." The viewer is meant to assume that the wearer of an
"Oregon" t-shirt with a waterfall on the front has been to Oregon in
fact and that this experience, in turn, is significant in some way that
the wearer wishes to announce (and or to be asked about, as in the front
license plates that ominously announce, "Let me tell you about my
grandkids"). This turn toward validation from the other of a self or
identity signals a transition into an extension of this code: a fully
ironic reflexivity.
The messages or representations found on these shirts, in turn,
yield yet another complex and non-exclusive sign function. With
increased travel and affluence, and mail order catalogs selling souvenir
items, one is no longer required to have been somewhere to make a claim
to the experience. Once a shirt is seen, e.g., "Oxford University
eights, Spring, 1991," many interpretative possibilities arise. One
might have been merely briefly visiting a place (long enough to buy the
shirt, to be sure); could have acquired it by mail, or been given it as
a gift. It may have no connection whatever to the experience. Although
the assumption remains for "souvenir" t-shirts that the wearer has been
there, done it, worked there, or had a role in it, one could wear
nevertheless a "Sorbonne" or "Cambridge" t-shirt without having been
enrolled or visited either. T-shirts are disconnected from direct
experience and no longer unambiguously communicate membership status.
Since validation of such ambiguous signs rests with the other, the
degree of doubt and lurking equivocality of the t-shirt based-message
are relevant to decoding the communication. The status claims of the
wearer remain problematic. As Weber (1960) and C. Wright Mills (1960)
noted, any claim to status, if it is to be successful, must be
legitimated and deferred to by an audience. It is impossible, on the
basis of the t-shirt alone, to interpret with finality the wearer's
claim(s). Any message of a t-shirt is equivocal and an audience may
distrust the message(s). Could wearing this shirt be the manipulation of
a status symbol? What is being claimed from whom by the wearer of such
a t-shirt? In other words, the signs and sign vehicles convey ambiguous
representational integrity and coherence. The diversity of the codes
means that "readings" became more equivocal, and more likely to convey
aesthetic or poetic meanings.
Code 5: The shirt as a problematic icon
Undershirts, as they are commodified and exchanged in part for
their image-creating value, no longer directly index experience, action,
membership, institutional or social identity. They display signifiers
with ambiguous signifieds. They may index experiences or statuses the
wearer has not had or does not possess, fantasies, or imagined status
honor. Various forms of truth are reproduced and honored. Signifiers
float and play on fictive relationships and social identities. T-shirts
now speak to manufactured, copied, or fabricated identities, jokes about
these identities, or reflections of the purely personal.
Here, one might consider how the t-shirt has become the
quintessential modern icon. It states something about the wearer and
something about the other. T-shirts are sold as commercial jokes e.g.
"My parents went to New Orleans, but all I got was this lousy shirt"
(worn by a child). Shirts also display stylistic puns, interpersonal
provocation and forms of self-mortification, "Old Fart" and a matching
shirt reading "Old Fart's wife" ; or "Baby under construction." Shirts
contain paired reflexive identities "Why?" (for the putative child) and
"Because I say so" (for the adult). Claims are made not to membership,
but claims play on the absence of membership : "stolen from" or
"property of" Alcatraz, or MSU Athletic Department.
One sees floating ephithets such as statements emblazoned on the
front of shirts referring to a putative self or identity, usually
vulgar, crude, attention-seeking or all three, e.g., "Kissing
Instructor," "I don't have a drinking problem : I drink too much, I fall
down, no problem," or "Not leavin' til were heavin'." Some are more
vague: "Shit happens." Some variations are combinations of the above
"Retired. My job is having fun." On an ancient harridan shopping in a
local produce market : "I am Not Old. I am a Recycled Teenager."
Ambiguous status claims, displayed on a shirt, are made to
membership in non-existent groups e.g., "Michigan State Polo Club,"
"Drunken State University," "Naked Coed Lacrosse (or basketball-"skins
vs. skins") team," "Bedrock Varsity" (with pictures of characters from
"The Flintstones" cartoons on the front).
These modes of communication via a t-shirt in public express claims
about what a person is not. This is surely a double negative : a dubious
claim to membership in non-existent organizations. T-shirts may function
to state longing and desire for status by association or a desire for
the absent or unattained. These cloth icons retain some oblique relation
to personal referents or are directly but contentiously self-
referential. They may index political meanings, reference political
ideologies, or have direct referential functions, but the relationships
between the field of broader political activities and the person's
claims is tenuous at best.
T-shirts are useful mini-billboards advertising products as well as
displaying selves and identities. At some point, t-shirts to be worn as
living advertising were sold or given away by companies such as beer
manufacturers. This trend has increased in the last ten years. T-shirts
(and hats worn as an integral part of the head) with emblems of the
labels of beer on the front, back, or both are sold to be worn as
leisure wear: "Budweiser, the King of Beers; Corona-light-cervesa."
Companies also now make clothes, t-shirts and other types of leisure
wear bearing the names of the manufacturer, "Coca Cola," "Nike" or
"Wilson," and sell them in Department stores as mass produced ready-to-
wear items of clothing. They are not defined by wearers as
advertisements for the product, but as indicative of the status and
income of the wearer, loyalty toward or trust in the trademark. They
also announce an identity of sorts: I am a person (are you?) who drinks
this sort of beer, or soft drink, or wears this brand of sunglasses.
Since wearing the clothing made by certain manufacturers connotes a
life style, showing the proper label connotes taste, albeit
simultaneously advertising the product. An example of this is the
Benetton, Ralph Lauren, or Calvin Klein labels, worn or positioned on
the garment by the manufacturers to insure that they are read. Thus, a
small alligator, a little polo pony and rider, (and their variants by
large department store chains that copy them), are also significant. Not
only do they symbolize the status that consuming expensive "designer"
clothes conveys, but also status within the designer label world. An up-
market label differentiates a T-shirt from those with the symbols of
"down market" brands, such as the fox on a J. C. Penney sport shirt.
To further complicate the question of reality and copies, copies of
the jerseys of professional sports teams with names, insignia, and
numbers were mass produced and became widely available. Sporting goods
shops sold team jerseys to anyone, and the gray "sweatshirt," worn
originally under football pads, or for team sports practice, was worn
publicly by those not belonging on teams. Internal differentiation
within the system of objects or commodities became increasingly
important not only to the manufacturer, but also to the consumer and
status-seeker.
Code six: The shirt as a walking pun
T-shirts, once solely undergarments, are now mass postmodern
commodities, insofar as they are intended to display their status as a
desirable consumable. Figurative language creates dramatis personae; it
connects self and substance. Seeing something in terms of something else
can be accomplished semiotically, and once seen as something, the object
can refer to itself in these very terms.
T-shirts are reflexive and even self-referential. The reflexivity
of shirts (the reference to themselves as sign vehicles as well as
carriers of other communicating signs) is another kind or level of sign
function. It is captured best by the "poetic code" since the message or
text refers to itself and to feelings (Jakobson, 1970). Self-reflexive
shirts playfully redefine their own slogans, make puns, or covertly or
overtly dissemble. They communicate about other signs.
They may contain representational or iconic puns, like the sign on
a t-shirt reading "this is a t-shirt," "your name here" "Home sweet
home" (showing the earth from a distant star) or the t-shirt for
physicians that has a white coat, stethoscope, and tongue depressor
painted on its front. Happy babies can now wear a "Happy Baby" t-shirt.
Some t-shirts show rather complex puns such as the shirt with four
illustrations of signing (four hands making letters in signing)labelled
"Say it with signing" (a pun on "say it with flowers or "Say it with
music"?), or the t-shirt with a picture of two cows melting in a field,
entitled "Salvador Diary" (a visual and verbal pun on Salvador Dali's
most famous picture, "The Disintegration of the Persistence of
Memory").
Emptiness, abstraction and non-referentiality are compounded to
produce examples like the MIT t-shirt that reproduces Maxwell's equation
(one basis for computing) or a shirt that says in Greek, "Sigma Phi 0 (0
means "nothing" and stands for "omega," the last letter in the Greek
alphabet). A t-shirt showing a cat walking along a fire escape was
captioned "Cat Walk." One shirt's message, written in french, read
(rough translation) "Here is the man who all the others love." Variants
on the commercial message t-shirt, presumably playing on the theme of
selling oneself, are seen such as the shirt reading "This bud's for you"
on the front, a picture of the Budweiser beer label on the back and with
"Michigan" printed in bold letters where "Budweiser" is meant to be. A
parallell example is the shirt saying "Just do it" (a reference to Nike
athletic shoes) and a play on it with the slogan. "Just do me." Both of
these example are self-referential and intertextual (see below). Other
visual puns are more serious such as the example of iconic memesis
(visual onomatopoeia is the term used by Steve Dubin, forthcoming)
showing the outlines of Africa set out in black, green and red using the
words "Abolish Apartheid in South Africa." In Toronto, two punnish
shirts were being offered for sale, one reading "nice dog" on the front
and showing a snarling wolf on the back and another showing a pirhana
fish on the back and the label "vicious fish" on the front. Some t-
shirts pun on deixis such as the t-shirt in a window in Ann Arbor saying
"You are Here. Ann Arbor, Michigan," or "This side up."
Code seven : Copies and real copies
T-shirts are now massively reproduced and distributed. Copies are
abundant, but some copies are seen as more real than others (Eco, 1986,
1990). Baudrillard (1988:145) writes, "A possible definition of the
real, is that for which it is possible to provide an equivalent
representation". Copies can be distinguished (from others, if not from
an original as in fine art) through various means. 8 One is through
ostensive or putative definitions. For example, National Basketball
Association teams license companies to make, merchandise, and distribute
"official copies" of their jerseys, hats, shorts, and jackets. The items
carry a label : "Official NBA approved souvenir." These items are mass
commodities that take meaning within a system of other undergarments.
They are "real" when compared to the non-sanctioned official NBA
souvenirs. They are also false in the sense that they are not the same
coats, jerseys or uniforms produced by the same companies to be worn by
the players. In an additional irony of form, basketball teams permit
"baseball caps" to be produced and sold with the team name and logo on
them. Basketball players do not wear baseball caps when they play
professional games, although they may wear them when they play, unlike
baseball players who may wear them when they play and when they play.
T-shirts by the late 'eighties attained a new, additional, iconic
sign function. They now referred to and reproduced images found in other
formats as well as on other t-shirts. They became self-referential
reproductions of reproductions, or representations of representations
(Ouspenskii, 1979). One can buy a shirt with the picture of a famous
person on the front, a rock star, politician, composer or hero of some
kind to someone, or with a picture of oneself generated by photography
and computer graphics. The viewer sees simultaneously a double
representation : the embodied person and a reproduced image of the
person. Of course, one can custom-design a shirt to display and signal
anything about anything and have it made up at a custom t-shirt shop.
Shirts signal intertextuality (the display of a mode of
communicating in the context of another), and double-referentiality.
Museums, such as the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, sell t-shirts with
Dali pictures on the front, a representation of a representation as
surely as the t-shirts showing Bart Simpson, the television/cartoon
character, screaming "Cool your jets, man!" Shirts are sold with
reproductions of the photography of accomplished/ well-known
photographers in the center of the shirt, captioned with the title at
the bottom and the photographer's name at the top.
Consider two t-shirts celebrating heroic victories. The University
of Michigan won the championship of collegiate basketball in March, 1989
and shortly thereafter, a t-shirt was displayed in the window of an Ann
Arbor shop that reproduced the front page from the Ann Arbor News
showing the day's headlines, story about the game, and a nearly full
page picture of the Michigan Star, Glen Rice, celebrating after the
victory. The same sort of t-shirt was produced by a company sanctioned
by the Detroit Pistons after they won their second NBA championship in a
row in June of 1990. One t-shirt used the theme "Hammer time," a pun on
a song by a rap group, "M.C. Hammer" (the title of the group in turn
being a pun), and showed crossed hammers on the back of the shirt along
with the another pun, the caption "back to back." (When the Pistons were
defeated in the 1991 play-offs by the Chicago Bulls, the "Threepeat"
shirts were marked down from 18 to 9 dollars by the morning after the
defeat).
These shirts reproduce on their front or back newspaper photos
originally printed following an event. Although the wearer could have
attended the event (t-shirts were sold at the games and after the
tournament ended), the shirt locates the person as one wearing a
reproduction of a picture of an event. This intertextual display is a
reproduction of a picture on a t-shirt reproduced in the thousands for
sale. Perhaps it says: "celebrate with me," or "Do you celebrate with
me?" and displays an image to be validated.
CHANGES IN CODE AND CHRONOTYPE
Perhaps another way to examine changes in the meanings of the t-
shirt, or semiosis, is to place the shirt in three representational eras
or chronotypes, early industrial, late industrial and post-modern, using
the units listed above (Cf. Baudrillard, l988).
In the pre-industrial era, the shirt is home made for a particular
person from local materials (perhaps even grown nearby and woven in the
home), and is worn under or with an outer garment and only worn openly
in private or in the home or while at hard work. It has utility function
while expressing labour and the work ethic. It is white or uncolored,
unadorned, functional, worn for protection and/or insulation, and
represents the person directly : it displays him or her as they display
it. The signwork is direct and simple.
In the second era, the mass-produced era, beginning perhaps shortly
after World War Two, the shirt is manufactured, woven and assembled in
this country from materials grown in the USA or abroad in standardized
sizes for any buyer. It is worn both publicly and privately. It can be
worn alone as an outer garment and as such expresses mostly leisure
pursuits. It is now colored and adorned, and can express various degrees
of informality, depending on color, cut, and emblems. The cut is various
and functional, but can be a representation of a sporting jersey. It is
now worn in part to display a role, status, or an experience. The shirt,
a sign vehicle, is one part of an ensemble chosen to create and sustain
an ambiguous display. These shirts are multi-colored, multi-textured,
adorned (usually), and signal many contexts. Their relationship to the
self and experience becomes more tenuous and problematic, and this
ambiguity is often amplified by the particular signs featured on the
shirt.
In the current era, the postmodern, the shirt is made for anyone,
and can be manufactured anywhere using a variety of materials of many
textures and cuts. It functions variously and is context-dependent. It
expresses mass informality: it is not an occasioned item of dress, but
crosses social classes, gender identities, and social situations. It is
worn as an item in the uniform of the mass consumer, but can be worn in
virtually any setting. It carries iconic puns and displays hyperreality:
t-shirts mimic other t-shirts. The postmodern shirt is something of an
open text, a functional carrier of signs and signs about signs that
variously signify social relations, the self or identity of a wearer and
other t-shirts. The shirt floats with other simulacra in the sense that
few social constraints govern its content or occasion. The shirts and
their signs grasp at fragments of meaning and experience, pun on them,
or signify what is not true for the wearer. It signals an image or
tentative picture that may be validated by others, but lacks intrinsic
meaning absent that validation.
COMMENT
The three eras summarized suggest changes of the meaning of the t-
shirt: as a sign vehicle. It has been modified physically and
technologically. Changes in the sign functions of the t-shirt, seen
within the chronotypes, indicate shifts in modern sensibilities and
technology. These include: how the shirt was cut, sewn, and assembled,
and modified as a result of public standards and aesthetics and the
application of the iconic code of fashion. As the technological paradigm
alters the material capacity of the society to mass-produce shirts,
social changes in function, in style, and in setting relevance of the
wearing of the shirt occur. The self becomes increasing lodged in public
displays of claimed statuses, imagined positions, missing or desired
feelings, and the ever-present absent consumable, other selves. In this
sense, Barthes' comutative test would suggest that the paradigm of self-
reflexivity contains the salient units illustrating these changes in the
object. As these change, they signal changes in the other paradigms and
their relationships to the system as well. The very idea of "fashion"
arises when the shirt begins to manifest differences rather than
similarities. The codes into which the t-shirt and its signs, material
and visual, have been encoded have changed, as we have noted.
Changes in the coding of the clothing reveal or indicate still
other social changes. The first code distinguishes the t-shirt within
the code of clothing. It had a idiosyncratic or personal kind of self-
referential reality for the wearer at that time since the undergarment
was a part of the person's clothes, made by the person or someone in the
family for him or her. Self and clothes were physically, socially and
psychologically close. In the last three codes, connections between self
and display are complex, mediated and problematic; the instanciations of
the code are very open to multiple interpretations. The signs convey
messages that are arbitrary, ironic, commodified, and perhaps even
intertextual. The modern t-shirt is close to the person only physically.
Shifts in the salience of units within the paradigms suggest that
the postmodern perspective illuminates changes in sign functions. That
is, style and self-reflexivity indicate the nature of the code and the
salience of given signifying functions of the shirt.
Signs are fundamental to representation. Changes in the sign
functions of the t-shirt represent a change from the shirt as an
empirically available physical reality to an interpretant. Questions of
representation and misrepresentation arise naturally. 10 T-shirts now
question the credibility of the viewer by presenting evocative,
floating, adrift and elusive, signifiers that are free from easy
assumptions, conventions or social verification procedures. The drift of
the shirt as sign vehicle involves changes from misrepresentation (where
there may be some sense of contrast between reality and unreality) to
dissimulation and dissembling, simulation and new forms of hyperreality.
In the latter case, only the reproducible remains.
Changes in the vestimentary code suggest that a t-shirt is
converted from a useful private undergarment to a publicly displayed
physical sign vehicle carrying representations and representations of
representations. Shirts increasingly communicate about the fashion
system, its connotations, and about themselves. Shirts now mark claims
and display fantasies about status honor and wishes for recongition. The
features of T-shirts no longer merely mark differences within the code
of clothing; they mark distinctions in the imagined- the fantastic
world, and fashion's simulacra. These shirts publicly transmit messages
about one's self, status, life style, and attitude(s) to life, as well
as what wishes to be known as. They display what one is not, and may
call out for validation of one's unfulfilled desires.
Footnotes
1. 10.6.91. Delivered at a conference, "The Socio-semiotics of objects:
the role of artifacts in social symbolic processes," convened at the
University of Toronto, June 22-24, 1990. We thank Norman Denzin for his
detailed commentary given at the Symposium. Forthcoming in S. Riggens
(ed). The Socialness of Things. Berlin: Mouton/DeGruyter.
2. Three broad kinds of analysis of the changes found in low fashion
might be considered. These are an analysis of the system of signs and
codes represented by the clothes within the system of dress (the
vestimentary code), and the language used to discuss these two elements
(Barthes, 1983: Ch.1-2); the technological aspects of clothing
manufacture (of interest here only as they play an increasing role in
the sign-carrying capacity of the garment), and the aesthetic language
of fashion. This latter language is undeveloped in the case of the t-
shirt. The focus here is on the first - it undertakes an analysis of the
system of signs and codes and the related meaning entailed by that code.
3. At least three sorts of fashion exist. World-wide trends and marked
changes characterize the esoteric yet familiar world of "high fashion,"
which involves designing original clothes for distribution to a select
number of clients and outlets. It is associated with professional
designers, especially Parisian designers. "Mass fashion," on the other
hand, is a system for creating, distributing and selling copies of
designer clothes. A third system of fashion considered here is "vulgar"
fashion, the fashion created by mass-produced copies of mass fashion,
often a few years later.
4. Exploring the gender-based differences in underwear would require
detailed analysis of the infrastrucure of meaning of these items and
would go well beyond the topic of this paper. However, the addition of
other structural supports under cotton jerseys such as brassieres,
corsets, slips and the like appeared later. Simple undergarments such as
the camisole worn by women were functionally very similar for everyday
day wear to the "t-shirt" worn by both men and women.
5. In the late 'sixties, in a countertheme or movement to arts and
crafts and to self-sufficiency, the t-shirt was personalized. It became
again a craft item. Artisans of a kind, using Tie-dying or Batik
techniques, produced unique, individually made and stylized t-shirts.
These manifested colorful, even "psychedelic," patterns. Soon Batik
shirts were mass produced, sold at Rock Concerts, and then commercially
distributed and sold widely as items of "nostalgia".
6. The film, "Dick Tracy" released in the summer of 1990, was promoted
by giving away t-shirts to those who attended the openings of the film,
much like runners in a 10k race are given a t-shirt if they compete.
This marketing technique, like selling t-shirts at a rock concert with
the dates of the concert listed on it, closely couples an experience and
the representation.
7. "Designer" is a rather dubious term for mass produced clothing that
is not unique nor limited number of products made for a fixed number of
clients. The connotations are rich, but the denotations of the word are
derived from the work of dress designers who created clothing, either
one of a kind or one of a handful, for sale to an elite clientele. Now
it means simply that an expensive, mass produced shirt, trousers, or
sweater can be identified easily by a designer's name on it. Perhaps
this is a special kind of sign function in which commodity, sign and
ideology, are sufficiently integral to suppress or overcome the
(assumed) resistance to being an unpaid advertisement.
8. While in the past, a definition of "art" was a unique object with an
origin with an artist or creator, now the capacity to reproduce
something is endless, and the point of origin, shifting and dubious.
New mechanisms are required to sort out various versions of reality
(Eco, 1986 Ch:1), and to socially discriminate copies.
9. False eponomy is also possible. A few years ago, the NFL sanctioned
jerseys with the names of famous players on the back, so that one could
make an obvious false claim (being Roger Staubaugh, for example, a
famous football quarterback at the time) with an officially sanctioned
copy of his jersey. Such shirts do not state or claim an experience, a
pattern of social relations or roles while conveying a modicum of
prestige by association within the system of fashion. It should be noted
finally, that young people who have been given the actual team jerseys
or hats worn by famous professional players are, on the surface at
least, no more likely to be granted status that the proud owner of an
officially sanctioned items.
10. Norman Denzin, in a comment on this paper in the Symposium in which
it was delivered, pointed out an important limitation of this analysis.
It does not address the meanings of metacoding of t-shirts within an
ideological system such a "race conflict" or "racial oppression." His
comment drew on the ideologically organized iconography of the t-shirts
shown in Spike Lee's movie, "Do The Right Thing."
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