Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds): Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space.

Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow, two academics with joint appointments in linguistics and communication studies, have collected excellent case studies integrating analyses of material culture with sociolinguistics. As they state, if not succinctly, they wish to foreground ‘the interplay between language, visual discourse, and the spatial practices and dimensions of culture, especially the textual mediation or discursive construction of place and the use of space as a semiotic resource in its own right’ (p. 1). Every worthwhile anthology deserves a valuable introductory chapter. Unfortunately, it is precisely in this regard that this collection breaks down and the excessively packed sentence above is symptomatic of the editors’ failure. Recommending a reader’s strategy, I suggest commencing with the articles. I do not know when professors in fields other than semiotics decided to use ‘semiotic’ as an adjective and synonym for symbol, rather than master the technicalities of semiotic analysis. As a semiotician, I find Jaworski and Thurlow’s pedestrian and rather unscholarly attempt to tie the articulation between meaning-based actions and socio-spatial processes involving material culture troubling. Semiotics is the ‘study of the life of signs in society’, a concise way of saying the same thing as above and according to the classic definition of de Saussure (even though the term is Peirce’s; de Saussure used ‘semiology’). Any conceived and constructed environment, according to semiotics is, technically, a ‘signifying landscape’. Jaworski and Thurlow’s burden, which they ignore, is to apply semiotics to an object of analysis that they consider ‘semiotic’. In keeping with the breezy way they jaunt through the landscape of contemporary cultural studies, picking and choosing the bright objects that catch their attention, there is little or no semiotics in this volume, nor, any deep level analysis of signifying processes. The case studies presented here succeed only because they add to the usual mix of sociolinguistic analysis a pertinent attention to contemporary sign vehicles that are as important as more traditional manifestations of environmental signification, such as how our current landscape is a composite of images, words, modern media, discourses, communication technologies, and subcultures meshed together in urban space.