The whole and the part: commercial semiotics in China

In his now canonical study of philosophy in ancient China, Disputers of the Tao, A.C. Graham lays out some of the profound dissimilarities between the intellectual heritage of ‘Western’ and Chinese society. A recurring theme in his analysis is that in the Hellenic inheritance of modern Europe, there is a tendency to see the whole as a product only of the parts, while in Chinese intellectual traditions, there is a tendency to see parts as taking their significance only in the context of the whole.

There are various exciting ideas that can be pulled out of this highly abstract theorizing of part-whole relations (formally called ‘mereology’). An immediate reaction is that it might give us an explanatory framework for the cultural reductionism that has characterised various facets of social explanation in the West. This reductionism amounts to the idea that ‘culture’ is simply the collection of all the individual psychologies of the members of society. In order to model and understand what world people live in, we start by understanding all the parts (individuals) of that world. ‘Culture’ (the whole) is just the addition of all the psychologies (the parts). We all know how pervasive this idea has been in marketing.

That is an inheritance that commercial semiotics has constantly struggled with; the presumption of ‘cultural analysis’ is precisely that to understand all the individual psychologies is not to understand the cultural life of those individuals together[1].

Chinese theoretical traditions (to the extent that they have reached the present) have never been committed to a simple reduction of the cultural to the psychological. This may explain the extent to which the great ‘overturning’ of modern culture associated with 20^th century philosophy, cultural theory, and history has proved particularly amenable to Chinese thought.

More practically, it opens up the possibility that something like the perspective of commercial semiotics might find a more natural home in contemporary China than in Europe or America. Understanding the conceptual frameworks that consumers live through, the traditions and artworks that they establish their identity in relation to and the articulation of the ‘individual’ through a vocabulary shared with others – all these are hallmarks of the semiotic approach in branding and marketing. In their commitment to the irreducibility of the whole to the parts, and their insistence that the parts take significance from the whole, we might say that commercial semiotics is already Chinese.

Chris Francis,  Alfie Spencer and Flamingo Shanghai will be thinking through the practice of cultural theory in East Asian branding in 2010.

[1] The semiotic method, consequently, takes its place in that tradition within modernity that might be said to invert the Platonic tradition of part-whole relations; a tradition that counts Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche as its forebears.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 7:02 pm. It is filed under Advertising, China, Culture, Research, Text and tagged with featured, semiotics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.