Reading the Signs

Nothing is neutral

There's a fancy word for this, and I'll use it once and then put it down: semiotics. The study of signs. Sounds like a seminar. In practice it's the difference between a man who walks down a street and a man who reads one.

A sign is simply anything that stands for something to somebody. A shape, a mark, a gesture. The mistake the amateur makes is thinking the meaning lives in the object itself. It doesn't. The meaning lives in the relationship between the thing, the world it sits in, and the head doing the looking. Change the head or the world, and the same object says something else entirely.

Three kinds of telling

It helps to know what sort of sign you're looking at, because each one lies to you differently.

• Some signs simply resemble the thing — a photo, a map, a logo over a door. Easy to read, easy to fake.
• Some are physically tied to a cause: smoke means fire, fresh footprints in dust mean someone passed recently and the dust hasn't settled. These are harder to counterfeit, because they're produced by the world rather than chosen.
• Some are pure convention — a flag, a word, a hand signal that means nothing until two people agree it means something.
• And then the ones I cared about most: the concealed signs. The mark left where only the right reader will look. A chalk line. A particular curtain half-drawn. Deniable to everyone but the intended eye.

The same dove, three meanings

Here is the whole discipline in a single image. A picture of a dove.

On a funeral card it means peace, a soul moving on. In a surveillance folder it might mean nothing of the sort — it might be the literal shape of a small machine in the sky. Painted on a wall in a place where men are shooting at each other, it could be sincere, or it could be the bitterest kind of joke. Same bird. Three worlds. Three meanings, and only a fool reads it the same way in all three.

Strip a sign out of its context and you haven't simplified it. You've thrown the message away and kept the wrapper.

Reading without being seen to read

The method, once you stop being precious about it, is plain.

You observe more than the obvious — not just the man, but his shoes, his hands, what he carries and how worn it is. You sort what you're seeing: is this a resemblance, a trace, a convention, or something meant to be missed? You set it in its place: who made this mark, for whom, why here, why now? Then you arrive at a probable meaning — probable, never certain, because the moment you decide you've cracked it, you've stopped looking.

In REDACTED I once spent a week reading a single café by its regulars' habits before I understood that the old man with the crossword was the one who mattered, and the two obvious watchers were furniture. The crossword was the sign. I'd nearly walked past it because it was too quiet to be suspicious.

The discipline

Stay probabilistic. Hold two or three readings at once and let the street decide between them. The man who's certain he's understood the signs is the easiest man in the world to feed a false one.

The street is always talking. The only question is whether you've gone deaf to it or learned, quietly, to listen.

Names changed, the café relocated, the crossword real. The lesson holds.

— M.