The Weaponization of Semiotics

I’m still a carnivore. A slice from a nearly rare chateaubriand or filet mignon with a generous pour-over of Béarnaise sauce, served with a fine vintage Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon is my favorite meal. Finished with a chocolate mousse and raspberry sauce dessert and I’m happy as a pig in slop, as they say in the bluegrass foothills of Appalachia where I was born and reared.

As MELEE-R6 (Mass Extinction Level Events on Earth – Round 6) continues advancing unabated, actually accelerating and intensifying by the hour, my inclination to go vegan will probably go in the opposite direction. If morbid obesity weren’t so damned uncomfortable, I’d live there just for the gourmand indulgence of it all.[2]

But I want to focus on an entirely different kind of ‘Bernays sauce’ here. Together with the 99% of the 7.8 billion of us on the planet, we are all are being relentlessly cognitively waterboarded 24x7 every day with a very different and categorically more toxic spice of life than that savory red meat homophonic pour-over.

Signs and Cognition

Recall that ‘semiotics’ is the study, theory, or science of signs and this blog is framed by the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) who pioneered and founded the field in its modern and contemporary forms.[3] In his earlier writings, at least, Peirce sought to identify cognition with sign-processing (semiosis) and contemporary biosemiotics certainly has firm grounding in this premise. In my doctoral dissertation last year (March 2019), on the basis of this semiotic conception of cognition, I argue from Peircean semiotics that we humans possess not just sentient ‘right-brain’ and sapient ‘left-brain’ cognition, but a third ‘transcient’ brain state and mental modality based in the corpus callosum.[4]

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist mention the corpus callosum’s role in cognition as a sort of ‘traffic cop’ or ‘overseer’ of sensory signals and ideational signs. I take that concept a few steps further to envision it as a distinct category of semiosic mentality that precedes our perceptual awareness and supersedes our conceptual consciousness. As such, its semiosic dynamics literally compose and conduct the symphony of our cognitive being and presence in reality – subliminally, transcendentally, and simultaneously. I chose the term ‘transcient’ to refer to this semiosic category together with sentient and sapient categories of human cognition.[5]

Here’s the thing, and you need to let this truth and reality fully sink into your heart and mind before you read further: if transcient semiosis can be controlled by outside interference, then cognitive awareness and consciousness can be engineered before they are manifested in the human brain and mind.   

Bernays Sauce

Propaganda is a cognitive toxin. It has been around in primitive forms for millennia, at least as far back as empires began training their armies to enjoy slaughtering their fellow human beings living out their presence. But it became scientifically weaponized in the early 20th century when Sigmund Freud’s double nephew Edward Bernays (1891-1995) pioneered its refinement during the Woodrow Wilson presidency as the means to sell the Great War to the country’s unwitting citizenry.

During and after WWII, Bernays took propaganda to the next insidious level, re-packaging and re-branding it as ‘public relations.’ Semiotic engineering thus became scientifically weaponized and we the people have been us the sheeple ever since. ‘Bernays Sauce’ has become a semiosic poison keeping us zealously and rapaciously death-marching in our tightly controlled consumer formation from the stockyard pens we are deluded into knowing as the comforts of our ‘home sweet home’ straight into the shearing shed and slaughterhouse of fascist capitalism. From its nefarious beginnings, Bernays sauce was conceived, contrived, and concocted to serve exactly the vile maxim and vicious cycle of that evil tyranny, and it is USAmerican to its core.[6]

The toxicity of Bernays sauce cannot be overstated and the extent of its perfusion and infusion in 21st century human being and presence on Earth cannot be overemphasized. As a corrosive agent for dissolving human cognition, compared to all its pre-Bernays predecessors, its toxicity is rather like that of fluoroantimonic acid – 20 quintillion times stronger than sulfuric acid! The real efficacy of it lies in its imperceptibility – it forms our sensory and conceptual cognition for us before they become awareness and consciousness in our own presence of mind, preceding our own self-awareness and self-consciousness. Metaphorically speaking, in terms of human cognitive powers, this is rather like traveling faster than the speed of light – as if the darkness of deception and delusion can be established and entrenched in our minds faster than the light of truth and reality can get there to dispel it.

Are we powerless against semiotic engineering? Not entirely. But our self-defense against it calls for a complete and fundamental shift in our perceptual awareness and in our conceptual consciousness. Both of these modes of being present in truth and reality must be diligently maintained simultaneously: we must know what the signs are telling us even as we perceive them through our senses, even before we pause to give them even a first thought. At the same time, we must cultivate insight into how those signs are being transformed into thoughts and ideas in our analytic, linguistic, logical, sapient mind where all our thinking is derivative of those sentient impressions that we acquire simply by being present in the world.    

It’s the challenge of the ages – the perennial conundrum of being the apex predator cognitive species on the planet. To prevail against semiotic engineering, we must regain understanding and control of our own semiosis even as it’s happening within us, in the resonant harmonies of our sentience and sapience as composed, orchestrated, and conducted by our transcience.

Put more simply, I’ll have my truth and reality uncooked and raw, if you please, and hold the Bernays sauce or I’ll never return to this establishment. No, never mind the wine list, thank you – I brought my own vintage.

NOTES

[1] This FINAL MEAL image by MR. FISH (Dwayne Booth) is used here by permission. It also happens to appear with a recent article which resonates quite strongly with the same theme as this blog post, Chris Hedges, “The Disaster of Utopian Engineering,” Truthdig (Jan 28, 2020).

[2] See related blog post about the Bernays Sauce of semiosic engineering at work in “MELEE-R6.” Its deployment in the PR-Propaganda wars of Circus2020, especially with respect to McCarthyism and Red-baiting, is exposed in “The Circus2020 McCarthyism Bandwagon (Feb 19, 2020), ”Stakeholder Capitalism v Truthteller Realism (Feb 4, 2020),“ and “Making Ends Meet (June 2, 2019).”   

[3] Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is also considered, especially in Europe, to have pioneered and founded the field of ‘semiology.’ As far as we know neither semiotician knew of the other’s work in the field, despite their being alive at the same time working on the same ideas. Since everything Saussure had to say about signs is encompassed within Peirce’s vastly more far-reaching, incisive, and profound theory of signs, however, I prefer Peirce’s account by default. For a brilliant and still seminal biography of Peirce that also offers an excellent introduction to his theory of signs, see Joseph Brent, C. S. Peirce: A Life. Another excellent and shorter read for an insightful introduction to Peirce is Dan Everett, “The American Aristotle.” For a more thorough study of Peirce’s semiotics, see Thomas A. Sebeok, Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics or Charles S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce (J. Buchler, ed.). An excellent introductory overview of semiotics emphasizing its visual elements is provided in David Crow, Visible Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics in the Visual Arts, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Fairchild Books, 2015). 

[4] My dissertation, “The End Signs! Are We Getting the Message?” is available online from researchgate.net. I only recommend it to left-brain masochists who savor reading academic tomes overstuffed with abstruse concepts and arcane language. A follow-up rewrite is in progress as my attempt to retell the same story to a wider audience in a friendlier vernacular (target publication date June 21, 2020).

[5] Cf. Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight and Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary. Taylor also has a TED talk telling her story, and there’s an animated video of McGilchrist’s story as well.

[6] A recent documentary vividly exposes the truth and reality of the history of ‘Bernays sauce’ and its evolution to become the semiotic engineering that permeates human cognition in the 21st century – see Propaganda: The Manufacture of Consent (Icarus Films, January 24, 2020), featuring Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges. Other films on the same cognitive toxicity of our times include The Great Hack (2019), PsyWar (2010), and Zeitgeist (2011). A classic work on this topic is the “propaganda model” by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988). A short animation illustrates the mechanisms at work in the Herman and Chomsky propaganda model, “Noam Chomsky – the 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine” (2017). Another clip, “Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann – Woodrow Wilson’s Brains of Propaganda,” also features Chomsky explaining the role of Walter Lippmann in shaping the techniques and the advance of ‘public relations.’ Chomsky’s 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent, draws its title from Lippmann’s 1922 book, Public Opinion. Also see these Wikipedia articles, “Edward Bernays,” “George Creel,” “Committee on Public Information,” and “Walter Lippmann.” Cf. Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power (2017); Chomsky, Who Rules the World? (2017); Wolin and Hedges, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2017); Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour (2018); Hedges, The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress (2013); and Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Illusion (2010).