Stained glass art by Shirley McNaughton, called “Communication.” It’s composed of 10 Bliss symbols.
What is a sign? According to the French philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, signs are: “something, which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.” At least, that’s the one of the definitions Professor Erkki Huhtamo of the Design/Media Arts program offered us in lecture last week. We broke it down further by dividing up signs into two categories: the “signifier,” or the visible/interpretable form the sign takes, and the “signified,” or the idea the sign expresses. Essentially, signs are defined by humans. Nothing is a sign unless it can be interpreted through a shared culture or ontology.
This past summer, I found myself listening to a wonderful episode of the RadioLab podcast, entitled “Bliss.” One of the subsections of this episode focused on the story of one man named Charles Bliss, who created a system of signs entitled “Bliss Symbolics.” Like many of his time, Mr. Bliss was disillusioned with the dystopian chaos of the post-WWII world, and in turn believed he could heal the miscommunication and destruction he saw around him through a universal system of iconic signs, which all humans would be able to use in order to understand and communicate with one another, regardless of language.
Unfortunately for Bliss, his system of symbols never took root in the global manner that he had envisioned. However, in 1971 a nurse named Shirley McNaughton began using Bliss Symbolics to help children with cerebral palsy develop language skills. Eventually, these children were able to speak basic English by developing written skills using Bliss Symoblics to communicate with their instructors. Over time, Bliss’ signs began to develop to meet the specific needs of children, which eventually traveled around the world. In each place, the symbols would inevitably become tweaked to fit the rules and linguistic ontologies specific to that culture. Bliss Symoblics in Israel were written from right to left, because Hebrew is written from right to left. Bliss’ hope of a universal and unchanging semiotic language was a complete failure.
In many regards, the problem of “mismatched ontologies” presented by Wallack and Srinivasan link directly to the discussion of how the creation and reading of Bliss’ signs played into human culture, education and communication. The localization and specification of Bliss’ signs to small groups of children around the world reminded me of the problems states face in developing broad ontologies that attempt to force large groups of diverse people together in a binary census. The signs that were appropriated from Bliss’ semiotics proved successful in teaching children to speak because they were modified to fit local customs and cultures. In their article, Wallack and Srinivasan point to this exact issue and explain how “any object, attribute, category or relation included within a local ontology could be included in a meta-ontology…there is no reason [Governments] could not also incorporate folkloric relations that guide community perceptions.” Inevitably, local communities know best what it is that is required to successfully educate their children. If governments give their citizens the ability to define themselves on a local level like many different groups did using Charles Bliss’ symbols, I think information loss and infrastructural dysfunction could be significantly diminished in the future across the globe.
Check out the podcast here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/257194-man-became-bliss/