Yesterday, when I was out driving, I was passed by a big white tractor-trailer. The only decoration on the truck was on its rear doors: a name and a picture of a penguin. I thought, "oh, this truck must be one of a fleet of refrigerated trucks."
Was this a semiotic moment? Would semiotics concern itself with how I came to this conclusion -- the study of the way I, in one glance, made the metonymic association penguin + cold + truck (- brand name) = one of a fleet of refrigerated trucks? Would semiotics concern itself with the guy who chose the picture of the penguin, with my brain seeing the picture making the association, or with the cultural associations that the truck owner and I share (the associations of penguins and cold)? Or is semiotics all of the above?
What if I had missed the point and thought that the truck was full of penguins? Would semiotics examine how and why I missed the point of the picture?
Peony,
With your penultimate sentence I might think that you are the alter-ego of Umberto Eco!
Yes, you are practicing semiotics, looking at how a sign is read by an ideal reader, with the ideal reader inferred from the text itself (all the while recognizing that you, the empirical reader, is filtering the sign through your own intentions). Sometimes the text misses the level of the empirical reader and utterly baffles. Semiotics examines that as well.
Go ahead and play around with it: look at the Penguin's use in Western imagery (Penguin books, penguin pops, etc.), the history of the penguin, the history of refrigerated trucking. Then, after you have sorted through all the data and levels of buried meanings and so on, then you can really ask, "why penguins? Wouldn't it had been more interesting to read Proust this way?"
But, you see, often you have to do a little of what you just did to really know if it is worth pursuing. In his objection to Eco's comments in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Rorty (or was it Culler) pointed out that Eco's comical scenario was actually a case of under-interpretation, that he would have saved himself the whole mess had he done a little more up front.
So why is it necessary to plunge into that "history of the penguin in Western culture" stuff? Would it be so the semiotician would look at things like the reason why, when I looked at the penguin, my first thought was penguin = cold as opposed to penguin = Southern Hemisphere, penguin = paperback book, penguin = Scott expedition or penguin = tuxedo?
I guess I bring a Missouri attitude to this study. If you are going to show me some medieval legend about the penguin in a semiotic discussion, you had better show me how it is relevant to the topic at hand.
Peony,
In this case your observation is right on the money. You have discerned a red herring, and that is the first thing one needs to do: limit the search for significance. Otherwise we would really not be able to finish breakfast.
Part of the great joy of studying semiotics is navigating the straits between the famous statement "il n'y-a pas une vrais sence d'une texte" and an overly-literal interpretation.
The penguin is a pretty straight forward sign here (perhaps the penguin/tuxedo connection may help establish a sense of professionalism in a company that interacts with the food industry, where the servers are often in tuxedos, which would have to be seen as a secondary overlay. The primary signified is cold, but then you could woner why an exotic bird was used, rather than a Polar Bear, which can be found much closer - the trick is to always ask, does it really matter and how much does it matter. We are not looking to throw out common sense here).
Any use previous use of the signifier is relevant to some extent, so long as the use remains somewhat in the cultural memory, because in semiotics we are looking at a cumulative signifier/signified relationship, not just a "magic key" that will allow us to get the work. Semiotics is not gnosticism, where the initiated find the "real" meaning of a sign, rather it tends towards a view that there are multiple interpretations of a sign that may be supported by evidence.
Part of the joy of literature is that we can discern and use these various interpretations, and see further analysis as providing us an even richer tapestry of meaning.
The truck's color also conforms to a pattern: refrigerated trucks tend to be white or metallic in color, perhaps for a functional reason.
A polar bear is not an unequivocal sign, since readers may fail to distinguish it from a common bear. Some ads have depicted a bear wearing a scarf around the neck to reinforce the idea of "cold".
For high-tech readers, the penguin is associated with Linux.
Or you could quit beating yourself up and study something that makes more sense to you. I'll let you in on a little secret I learned at Yale: you can't learn everything. I went from being overwhelmed, to unconvinced, to absolutely having the drop on the people who talked as if they had read everything, and discussed everything, and written about everything. You know what? Almost the whole gang of them - undergraduates, grad students, instructors, and tenured professors - turned out to have actually read about a tenth to a quarter of what they let on, and to understand, in fact, very little beyond their specialty. If you're interested in semiotics, go for it; if you're not, but are uneasy about not understanding it, forget it. It's quite respectable not to know anything about it at all.