Semiotics, Stoicism and...Sports? Say it Ain't So...

Semiotics is the study of signs. To some, this may seem a bit silly. Why would anyone want to study signs? Are we talking about stop signs? Speed-limit signs? Or are we talking about billboards and advertising? In a way, the answer to these questions is yes. Semiotics is, in fact, concerned with these types of signs, but also a multitude more signs that exist in culture and in the universe. While I am unable to go at into a proper introduction to semiotic theory, I will give a brief introduction by way of introducing the real topic which is modern day Stoicism in professional Sports.

I see this...

To begin, the study of signs is the study of things that "signify." By this I mean that a sign is something that points to a reality that is beyond itself (Augustine, De Dialectica). The classic example of this is smoke and fire. When a person sees smoke, the logical assertion is that there is a fire. In this example smoke is the sign, and fire is the "signed" - or, to use the 19th century French father of semiotics' (Ferdinand de Saussure) terminology, the smoke is the signifier, the fire is that which is signified.

So I think this.

Another classic example is that of a weathervane. When a farmer looks to the top of his/her barn and see the weather vane pointing north, the conclusion that farmer reaches is that the wind is blowing north. Thus the weathervane signifies a signified truth - the wind's direction.

Once we understand what signifiers and signifieds are it is easy to see them everywhere. Rain signifies clouds; a sonic boom signifies a passing jet; a siren signifies an emergency vehicle. Things become more interesting, though, when we realize that our words themselves are signifiers. There is, for example, no inherent meaning to the English word "dog." It is simply the signification of the animal that I have in my backyard that goes running about when I throw a bone. If we took the same animal, a dog, but said the Spanish word "perro" instead, it would be nonsensical to those who didn't know Spanish. In fact, I could take the Spanish word "perro" and, because I knew not that it meant "dog," use it to refer to, say, a table. And so, we must conclude, language is fundamentally semiotic in nature.

So happy to be a semiotician...

Once we grasp these fundamental semiotic truths is becomes readily apparent that the whole world is full of semiotic connections. The fun stuff, in my opinion, is looking at how semiotics gets used (and abused!) in pop culture. I can think of three television shows that I watch avidly whose foundational premise is built on semiotic theory. The first my good friend Gregory House. House employs semiotic theory to his patients by looking the signs of their symptoms. By observing signs, House postulates what causes them (like the smoke/fire example) then sets out to be rid of the cause.

 

She IS happy to be a semiotician

Another is the charming, but sometimes obtuse, Dr. Temperance Brennan. You may know her better as Bones. Bones is a forensic anthropologist. She examines skeletal remains to determine gender, ethnicity, lifestyle, and cause of death. Utilizes her skills in the same way House does, looking for signs that point to known signifieds - e.g. de-calcification of bone structure may indicate a certain type of diet.


  
There are others, but I am sure that these are enough to get your brain going. Now on to the juicy stuff.

As I was preparing for my semiotics class, I noticed a remarkable convergence of Stoic semiotic philosophy in modern professional sports. This cannot, I think, have been intentional, but the result is still the same. Bear with me as I explain a little bit.

The Stoics were a philosophical school that lived in Classical Greece. They philosophized as a group alongside Plato and Aristotle all the way down until classical philosophy was subsumed under Christianity in the 5th and 6th centuries C.E. The Stoics' foundational belief was that there was nothing beyond the physical senses. They were non-dualistic in that they rejected Plato's understanding of a bifurcated universe where "real" things only existed as ideals somewhere in "heaven." The practical implications of this were that Stoics didn't believe in anything that didn't have solid grounding in the physical world. This is why they were often taught to be without emotion, since emotion had no grounding in reality.

You can imagine, then, that when confronted with the notion of a sign - something that is not grounded in reality - they were not impressed. There very convincing (and complicated!) answer is basically as follows: if, say, we take the smoke/fire example used above and say the smoke signifies a fire is had. The problem with this is that a signifier (the smoke) precedes our knowledge of the signified (the fire). That is, in theory we have no knowledge of the fire until we see the smoke (hence signified and signifier). But this cannot be so since you must already have knowledge of a signified to have a signifier - in other words, I must have knowledge of fire before I can recognize that smoke = fire. But if I have simultaneous knowledge of smoke and fire then there cannot be a signifier since the very definition requires that it a signifier precede knowledge of the signified.

And so, the Stoics claimed that there was no secret behind reality, that everything simply, "is what it is." And this little bit of Stoic philosophy has crept into modern professional sports.

I am an avid fan of professional basketball. I watch a lot of games and play a good deal of fantasy basketball so I know a lot of players and their statistics and abilities. Basketball is different than football in that individual performance can be graded very easily. If a person's stats fluctuate outside accepted parameters then a player is often questioned by the media as to "why" such fluctuations occurred.
~Shawn Marion on the occasion of the Dallas Mavericks loss to the San Antonion Spurs (1/14/11)
"when you’re losing. Everybody is looking at this and that. Everyone has red flags to throw up. It is what it is and we just got to find a way to stick together as a team and pull this out." 

~Jerry Stackhouse on the Buck playing without their star Center
"It is what it is, but hopefully he can come back healthy, but I think he is the key and the centerpiece to everything the Bucks do.”

~Suns coach Alvin Gentry on getting walloped by the Raptors
"their pressure bothered us and they continued to do it throughout the whole game even when they were up 50, 40 or whatever it was. It is what it is. The great thing about it is that Friday we get to lineup and play again."

Now since I first heard this some 4-5 years ago I have been extremely frustrated with it. It seemed like a cop-out to me, a sound bite for the media to deflect having to answer a difficult question. "It is what it is, huh? Well what the hell is IT?" I would ask aloud. After my work for my semiotics class, though, I realized that, in some way, the NBA players were mimicing a Stoic response to the media hounds. Rather than see their performance as a sign of some underlying issue, they chose to combat the relentless semiotizing of the media with a Stoic-esque denial of sign theory! As a fan, I am still frustrated, but as a semiotician, I say "Bravo" and "Well done!"