Signification, common knowledge, and womanhood: The significs of Lady Victoria Welby and beyond

DOI 10.1515/sem-2013-0047 Semiotica 2013; 196: 79 – 99

Sophia MelansonSignification, common knowledge, and womanhood: The significs of Lady Victoria Welby and beyond

Abstract: Lady Victoria Welby was born to an era when women were challenging their station as summarily subject to the discretion of the dominant male propri-etors. The furtive soil of women’s liberation had been enriched by the quill and fountain of epic female figures such as Abigail Adams (1744–1818, First Lady of the United States of America between, 1797–1801, promoted property rights for women), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797 – Vindication on the Rights of Women, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935 – The Home: Its Work and Influence). The Victorian period witnessed the burgeoning of a female authority in public consciousness with vigorous support from public figures such as John Stewart Mill (1806–1873 – The Subjection of Women), who openly rejected inequality between sexes, and John Ruskin (1819–1900), who urged women to “abandon trivial feminine pursuits in order to act as a moral force in countering the ills of society” (Ruskin, Of Queen’s Gardens, Sesame and Lillie, 1865). It is, therefore, not astonishing that Lady Victoria Welby’s authority among semioticians emerged from her endeavours interpreting scriptures. Moral gatekeeping was fast becoming a female authority widely re-spected, though most prominently within the confines of the private sphere. Women were socially groomed to manage the family’s moral code, shape chil-dren’s character, and nurture the husband’s moral conduct (Meyrowitz 1985: 200). However, respect for women’s particular authority and power within the private sphere was limited and remained ancillary to the dominance of the mas-culine paradigm. Though common sensibility has changed toward women’s mo-bility within the public sphere, the socio-operative dynamics of power between genders remains asymmetrical, the scale tipped summarily in favour of the mas-culine domain. Given that the social world operates to a significant degree within the ambit of symbolic elocutions, there has never been a better moment in history to apply Lady Victoria Welby’s theory of significs to examine the contemporary subordination of women, and Susan Petrilli’s publication of Welby’s correspon-dence is nothing short of timely.

Keywords: Lady Welby, gender, signification, feminization, interpretation, Victo-rian, semiotics

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(CS4) WDG (155×230mm) DGMetaScience J-2770 SEMI 196 pp. 79–100 SEMI_196_#06-0047 (p. 79)PMU:(WSL) 26/05/2013 18 June 2013 9:38 PM

80 Sophia Melanson

Sophia Melanson: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. E-mail: [email protected]

Take care of the words and you’ll find that the thoughts are not worth speaking of, and sometimes the plainer words the less plain the meaning . . . – Welby (in Petrilli 2009: 100)

He who seeks happiness as ultimate aim defeats itself: to seek for good and truth does not. – Welby (in Petrilli 2009: 149)

Lady Victoria Welby was born to an era when women were challenging their sta-tion as summarily subject to the discretion of dominant male proprietors. The furtive soil of women’s liberation had been enriched by the quill and fountain of epic female figures such as Abigail Adams (1744–1818, First Lady of the United States of America between, 1797–1801, promoted property rights for women), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797 – Vindication on the Rights of Women, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters [Craciun 2002]), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935 – The Home: Its Work and Influence [1970 (1903)]). The Victorian period witnessed the burgeoning of a female authority among public consciousness with vigorous support from public figures such as John Stewart Mill (1806–1873 – The Subjection of Women [1869]), who openly rejected inequality between sexes, and John Ruskin (1819–1900), who urged women to “abandon trivial feminine pursuits in order to act as a moral force in countering the ills of society” (Ruskin, Of Queen’s Gardens, Sesame and Lillie [1900]). It is, therefore, not astonishing that Lady Victoria Welby’s authority among semioticians emerged from her endeavors interpreting scriptures. Moral gatekeeping was fast becoming a female authority widely respected, though most prominently within the confines of the private sphere. Women were socially groomed to manage the family’s moral code, shape children’s character, and nurture the husband’s moral conduct (Meyrowitz 1985: 200). However, respect for women’s particular authority and power within the private sphere was limited and remained ancillary to the dominance of the mas-culine paradigm. Such an orientation undoubtedly resonates in Welby’s observa-tion that:

As to the majority of women, the dominant Man with his imperious intellect has for un-counted ages stamped down their original gift: all their activities beyond the nursery (and, alas, there also, now) are masculinised: language, originally the woman’s as custodian of the camp, creator of its industries and first trainer of the next generation, is now wholly “male”: the whole social order is laid down, prescribed for the woman on masculine line only. (Welby in Deledalle 2000: 98)


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Signification, common knowledge, and womanhood 81

Though common sensibility has changed toward women’s social mobility within the public sphere, the socio-operative dynamics of power between genders re-mains asymmetrical, the scale tipped summarily in favor of the masculine do-main. While women of the Victorian era resisted patriarchal forms of repression that reduced their station to property of men, contemporary women must resist the conceptual containment of their social selves, which has become subjugated by the sexually-objectifying content of popular culture. Exaltation of the indus-trial over the social and the substation of the female logic despite the sexual revo-lution have also contributed to contemporary forms of female subjugation. Tran-sitions from the mechanized thrusts of industrial-based life to an information-based society have lent to the ideational indoctrination of mass consciousness into standardized formulations of knowledge. Such transitions have propelled Fou-cault’s “docile” bodies of industry-based societies (Foucault 1977) into a popu-lous of “docile” minds operating within a milieu of mass produced meaning. In the process, vital experience has become subsumed by symbolic representations that synthesize reality into prescriptive models for social conduct, which inter-rupt the natural interval of social consciousness (Baudrillard 1994).

The “docile” mind imbricated within the substance of social simulation is discernibly related to contemporary forms of gender stratification, in which the subjugation of women is performed within the banal substance of synthetic meaning. Such simulation shuffles an ever ambiguous world view whereby the inane human quality of interpersonal relating is directed by a cacophony of sym-bolic paradigms. Modernity has transformed the contemporary woman, socially mobile yet semantically repressed, by a normalized male gaze ubiquitously simu-lated through popular culture, internalized through signification. A significant degree of emphasis has been assigned to sexuality within Western conceptions of individualism, in that “to know who you are, [you must] know what your sexual-ity is about” (Foucault and Lotringer 1996: 219). Indeed, Victorian sexuality re-mains pertinent to contemporary discussion of contemporary subordination of women as an era from which contemporary sexuality emerged.

The sexual discretion of Lady Welby’s time contrasted with today’s carte blanche approach to sexual liberality lends to an interesting and constructive ex-ercise in terms of understanding differences and similarities in women’s subjuga-tion since the Victorian era. Indeed, the very notion of sexuality as a subject of investigation emerged from the nineteenth century, promoted by progressive thinkers such as Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Carl Jung (1875–1961) who were exploring sexuality as a serious topic worthy of intellectual contemplation for the first time. The influence of emergent discussion on sexuality were not lost to Welby and her female consort, who were discussing the prospect of “carnal felic-ity” and its implications for collective values and social behavior.


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Given that the social world operates to a significant degree within the ambit of symbolic elocutions, there has never been a better moment in history to apply Lady Victoria Welby’s theory of significs to examine the contemporary subordina-tion of women, and Susan Petrilli’s publication of Welby’s correspondence is nothing short of timely. Significs, the philosophy of significance . . . of human ca-pacity and expression, enables the demystification of meaning by dismantling vague representations from the epitaph of existence in order to unearth and better examine inherent “truths.” Such discernment is fundamental to iden-tifying both the beneficial and detrimental meanings of social life, as well as establishing alternative assignment of significance to meaning when existing arrangements hinder the social well-being of particular social groups. As astutely observed by Welby, “the science of Man must remain in some sense abortive un-less we can master the secrets of what we vaguely call ‘meaning’ ” (Welby in Petrilli 2009: 265).

Lady Welby’s philosophy of significs will be referenced through the following examination of the social conditions presently promoting the sexual objectifica-tion of women, and how these conditions encourage self-objectification among women. Self-objectification, women’s personal experience of self according to their physical and sexual attributes, has become a common theme in contempo-rary life. Nearly a decade of research on objectification theory has established that exposure to appearance-related representations of women (most commonly evident in mass media) is a situational antecedent to self-objectification among women (Calogero 2004). One particularly deleterious consequence of this ar-rangement is the cost to women’s mental health and overall sense of well-being. Frederickson and Roberts evaluated the outcomes of self-objectification and identified numerous harmful subsequent implications for women including de-pleted task performance, lower self-efficacy, lower intrinsic motivation, negative body management, depression, and eating disorders (Fredrickson et al. 1998; Noll and Fredrickson 1998; Roberts and Gettman 2004; Tiggemann and Lynch 2001). The projection of women as sexual objects by market culture also cogni-tively undermines women’s station as social beings within a common public sphere. Studies have demonstrated that the cerebral-physiological structures that are typically stimulated during social engagement remain dormant during the sexual-objectification of a women (Grabe et al. 2007; Tiggermann and Kuring 2004; Cikara et al. 2010: 548; Loughman et al. 2010). This implies that the women being objectified are not perceived as social beings, but rather as sexual object to be cajoled and manipulated exclusively for sexual means.

Inherently, women still operate within a world that is predominantly defined by a masculine sensibility that characterizes experience within a dichotomy of virtual dominion and submission, dividing many facets of life into paradigms of


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contrition. Though the mechanisms through which women’s subjugation is ex-pressed have changed, the expression remains and resonates in Welby’s observa-tion that:

The “intermediate region” to which you point must help to counteract the fatal tendency to break experience into two and rest satisfied short of that third factor, the outcome or the totality which they form – which is the only justification for splitting original unity at all. Not merely in sex-duality but in some sense in all, the doubling must mean richer results and greater and greater variation: the true monism is in fact tri-unism. (Welby to Lodge, 1889–1891, in Petrilli 2009: 183)

Such splitting of existence disregards entirely the median vicissitudes of experi-ence between genders, which imbue meaning with breadth and dimension con-ducive to rich experiences among and between human interlocutors. Indeed, the partitioning of social life into asymmetrical dichotomies between genders has remained preeminent since the Victorian era, the interpersonal and conceptual dominion of the masculine over the feminine. Singer notes that this masculine dominion over the feminine is reproduced by an erotic choreography that con-ventionalizes common conduct between genders and normalizes masculine pref-erences and pleasures among both genders. Singer refers to this as “phallocentric hegemony,” or the paucity of cultural representations of female as active social agent in her own right (Singer and Butler 1993: 147–148).

Women’s right to participate equally within the public sphere is presently recognized and supported, and it has become commonly undesirable to speak in any way approvingly of women’s repression. Affirmative ideological shifts within public consciousness toward women and their role in society have occurred, and adjustments to formal and informal mechanisms governing public conduct super-ficially reflect these shifts. While women have greatly benefitted from such social adaptations, precarious social spaces have burgeoned within contemporary con-fluence of sexuality, communication technology and power situated within simu-lated representations of social conduct. Though the suffrage movement defended women as persons with constitutional rights, and the feminist movement de-fended women as equal and competent members of the public sphere, women’s experience of the self remains predisposed to significations produced by an erotic choreography defined by masculine ideologies. Women, thus, continue to con-front fundamental challenges to gender inequality within the semantics of heterosexual relations informed in great part by popular culture’s promotion of women’s objectification couched in the rhetoric of sexual liberality as a conduit to equality. Calogero and Jost (2011) argue that though such observations present a useful conclusion, they “[do] . . . not address the ideological concomitants of


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self-objectification, nor [do they] consider the possibility that it [self-objectification] is a part of broader patterns of system-justifying behavior” (Calogero and Jost 2011). The following pages will attempt to address incidentals of self-objectification among women by examining the signification of sexual-objectification through mass media, which, it will be argued, perpetuate the ideological commodification of women’s sexuality.

Feminist discourse defended a strong case for gender equality in the public sphere and for women’s sexual liberation through equal participation within the erotic milieu as a means of emancipating themselves from the male gaze. Judith Butler, a recognized authority on feminist theory, presented the concept of perfor-mativity based upon the philosophies of Derrida, Foucault, and Hegel, arguing that gender is not constituted by what one is, but what one does (Butler 1990). It was, thus, conceived that women could claim their sexual authority within the erotic milieu by performing gender against the scripts put forth by traditional heterosexual models of feminine demure chastity, subverting the rules and norms generally ascribed to gender by circumventing them (Butler 1990). A contempo-rary example is the exaltation of the act of “stripping” from the confines of the paltry cabaret to the banality of public conduct as an overt expression of gender equality, based upon the principles of neutralized sexual power between gen-ders. Such an approach to common sexuality between genders has been touted as a means of actuating female sexual authority in a way that staunchly deviates from the traditional value of female delicacy. This sensibility has become incor-porated into popular culture, its values and principles adopted by film, televi-sion, radio, musical performances, and popularized fitness programs involving a pole. However, the question of agency and interpretation remains a significant one, in that the performer does not establishes meaning independently of the observer, rather the observer’s interpretation contributes equally to the meaning of the actions performed. Projection of a signifier by a social agent (or even a group of social agents) does not necessarily follow that the observer’s interpreta-tion will match the intended meaning.

Another popular rationale promoted by the women’s movement was directed by an agenda to realign social norms according to the principles gender neutrality – the homogenization of differences between genders. The feminist movement designed to expel traditional patriarchal customs outside the peripheries of the normal, casting the preceding system as restrictive, repressive and sexist (Meyrowitz 1985: 187). The expansive social change demanded by the feminist movement required bold challenges to the paternal maxims defining gender roles. Such realignment of gender norms required a distensible paradigm shift and recalibration of signifiers attached to the preceding system. Inter-gender con-duct that had been previously acceptable was reconstituted as patronizing, rigid


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and oppressive. Any perspective deviating from the values of gender neutrality, equality, and sexual liberality is denounced at once as holdover ideologies from the traditional patriarchal system of gender relations (Meyrowitz 1985: 196). Dur-ing this transition, the concept of sexual liberality had become synonymously attributed to the ideology of equality. Yet, under the pretence of sexual homoge-neity, women pursue their equality by adapting to the rules of masculine logic, adopting the very rationale perceived to be restrictive, repressive and sexist in attempt to level the proverbial playing field. It is not the objective of such obser-vation to negate the significant contribution of the feminist movement to the bolstering of women’s public position, nor to challenge the value of gender equality. Rather, this paper argues that the improvement of women’s experi-ence is contingent upon the elevation of women’s social value above their sexual function within common social consciousness, which challenges the notion of assuming a masculine paradigm to strengthen women’s rights within the public sphere.

Though women’s public position is much improved due in great part to the feminist movement, women remain enmeshed by a social sphere defined by a prevailing masculine logic. Women continue to exercise their sexual agency ac-cording to principles and values prescribed by performativity as a means of exer-cising power through the very mechanisms that symbolically subordinate their position since the inflection of performative sexual behavior within existing dynamics of power between genders remains contingent upon translation and interpretation. Indeed, Nietzsche’s conception of “will to power” (Nietzsche et al. 1967) seems most a appropriate axiology through which to understand how women’s attempt to extricate themselves from the voyeuristic gaze of men through their participation in the erotic has failed, in that it has become “overwhelm[ed by the masculine logic] until the obstacle [female participation in the erotic] is absorbed into the power domain of the aggressor . . .” (Nietzche in Ahern 1995: 15). In Nieztsche’s estimation, the aggressor subsumes that which resists through “will to power,” wherein the motivation is not survival but enhanced power (Ahern 1995: 14–15). Within the public dynamics of sexuality between genders (as projected by popular culture), the feminine becomes subsumed within the domain of the masculine in relation to the signified submission of the female con-dition within the masculine domain of the erotic. Indeed, attempts to subvert conventional sexual norms through the feminist doctrine of performativity is in and of itself a gesture that remains defined by a masculine choreography of the erotic, polarizing dominion and submission with little recursion in between. Erotic signifiers continue to align within a context defined in relation to the dy-namics of conventional masculinity, calibrating socialization according to “a sys-tem of thought . . . [as] a means of relation, of interpretation, of emancipation; it


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may absorb other systems by recognizing their validity, and by perceiving its own inadequacy except from a specified point of view or in a specified sense” (Welby in Petrilli 2009: 626).

Significs (Welby 1903) and Objectification theory (Fredrickson and Roberts 1997) are highly compatible models through which to evaluate the manner in which conventional representations of women presently, in the early twenty-first century, impact women’s lives. Objectification theory posits that an internalized masculine perspective is gradually acculturated into women’s psychic paradigm of self (Bartky 1990; Fredrickson and Roberts 1997). This internalized voyeur per-spective encourages women to perceive their value as sexual object within the masculine domain rather than social agent. According to Welby, the individual psyche of self is experienced in relation to external social manifestations, and though the self and not-self are experienced differently, they remain on the same signifying/interpretive continuum (Welby in Petrilli 2009: 603). Given that the a priori ideology remains, in the twenty-first century, masculine in character and in structure, it follows that conventional expressions signified through common communication mechanisms such as television, popular film, the internet and radio, assume a masculine fervor. Conscious and unconscious sign systems in-form internal experience that is modulated by external manifestations, through which the self emerges, acquiring meaning, value, and significance to the inter-preter (Petrilli 2009: 603).

Significs supplies a dynamic humanist philosophy, an epistemic orientation that is easily adapted to social science inquiry, in that it is, “so far from supersed-ing or displacing or even distracting attention from the disciplines already recog-nized, would rather render them more effectual because more vitally significant: more obviously related to ordinary experience and interests” (Welby in Petrilli 2009: 167). Significs, as a practical extension of semiotics (Welby in Petrilli 2009: 265), enables analysis of the relative connections between signs within various social contexts that situate women’s experience of self in relation to the external manifestation of sexual-objectification. The projection of women’s sexual- objectification through communication mechanisms, as an external antecedent, informs how significance is assigned to beliefs, values, norms, customs, which manifest within preeminent social scripts for social conduct between genders. Objectification theory provides a framework through which to understand the impact of self-objectification upon women and significs provides the method through which to explore how social contexts induce self-objectification among women.

Significance, the relevance of meaning attributed to signs in relation to values, norms, and customs that are inhered by social collectives, is the opera-tional covariant to the triadic equation of signification.


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The term “significance” designates the value conferred upon something, the relevance, the import, bearing and meaning value of signs, the condition of being significant, the propen-sity for valuation. Significance is connected with the pragmatic-ethical or operative- valuative dimension of signifying processes and is enhanced as translative processes de-velop across signs and sign systems. (Petrilli 2009: 272)

Significance is directed, in great part, by prevailing ideologies and their expres-sions, which are created, re-created and reinforced socially between and among social interlocutors through the process of signification. Welby actively par-ticipated in prevailing discourse on the social production of meaning among some of the most influential philosophers of her time, including Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), Michael Bréal (1832–1915), Giovanni Vailati (1863–1909), and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and was highly regarded as a tour de force among pivotal discussions of the time on semiotics, as evidenced within the text of correspondence:

Your ideas of Sense, Meaning, and Significance seem to me to have been obtained through a prodigious sensitiveness of Perception that I cannot rival, while my three, while my three grades of interpretation were worked out by reasoning from the definition of a Sign what sort of thing ought to be noticeable and then searching for its appearance. (Peirce to Welby, 14 March 1909, in Petrilli 2009: 294)

Closely related to Peirce’s model of signification, Welby conceived of significs as a means of understanding the triadic production of knowledge conducted between interlocutors, which shapes social reality through sense, meaning and signifi-cance. Signifiers do not exist as independent variables, rather they are covariants that operate through the social production and significance of meaning, becom-ing combined into composites of self-referential sign systems. The arrangement of covariant signifiers into composite sign systems substantiate the conceptions, values, beliefs and norms that direct cognitive responses:

There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the Sense of word, but only the sense in which it is used – the circumstance, state of mind, reference, universe of discourse belonging to it. The meaning of a word is the intention of the user. The significance is always manifold and intensifies its sense as well as its meaning, by expressing it importance, its appeal to us, its moment for us, its emotional forces, its ideal values, its moral aspects, its universal or at least social range. (Welby in Petrilli 2009: 264)

Self-referential sign systems are in a perpetual state of flux, operating according to the principles of situational, ideational and behavioral conventions that are projected through communication devices that direct everyday social conduct. Signifying systems are not necessarily a set of rules but a “resource” for making


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meaning (Hodge and Kress 1988) within the ambit of conventionalized knowl-edge. Meaning is arguably the most complex component of signification, in that expression is forged through the genesis of signifiers into meaning, which defines both the sense and significance of something. An inherent operation of sig-nificance that bears consideration is alliteration – the repetition of signified se-quences during the production of meaning in such a way that assigns emphasis to some signifiers while redacting others. This sequence designates significance within the conduit of expression, the byproduct of alliteration carrying that which is interpreted, devised through the process of assigning significance. Alliteration creates conventional context (sense) through which the logic of ex-pression is contrived. Through alliteration, signs correlate and fuse into macro-signifiers within paradigms for social conduct. Assemblage of macro-signifiers is conciliatory relative to common consciousness, and not in any respect fixed in space or time. Deviation from convention (from the sequencing of meaning and expression through alliteration) inspires the novel and surprise within conscious-ness. We enjoy this aspect of social reality when we observe a groundbreaking piece of art or technology that changes our world view in some way. This is likely to what Lady Welby was referring when she observed, “it is the writer, that is, the artist who is capable of perceiving truth beyond the limits of convention, who is endowed with the highest degree of perceptive sensibility and expressive capac-ity beyond the limits of the known” (Petrilli 2009: 147).

The human ability to collectively generate experience within the social con-tinuum of meaning influences common interpretation, involving all social in-terlocutors who participate in the production and interpretation of meaning by semantically investing in the sign (Petrilli 2009: 259). Conventions and their inter-pretation are not deterministic, rather their scope is charted through concerted activities within social collectives, whose attitudes, values and norms are rein-forced by behavior between and among social interlocutors. Conventions develop across the entire sign networks in interpretative trajectories without boundaries, associating signs either metaphorically (likeness) or metonymically (affiliation). Meaning is contrived within context that is reified by convention, giving life to norms, attitudes and behavior that direct experience, cognitive response and be-havior. Meaning may be understood as conventional when its significance within a particular context is broadly perceived as common. The affect of conventional-ized signification of meaning (an affect of social priming) does not depend on conscious processing (Bargh and Chartrand 2000). Rather, the conventionaliza-tion of meaning is an affiliated component of “. . . language [which] is radically tainted by association, which, being mostly automatic, we do not realize” (Welby in Petrilli 2010: 273). The more common meaning appears, the more obscure its interpretation becomes between and among social interlocutors, in that “mean-


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ing is not transparent and in the end, becomes secondary to the fact that trans-mission is possible” (Morris 2002: 393).

Conventional interpretation of meaning may be detected through its se-quenced and patterned instance within common knowledge. The interpretation of meaning becomes lost within the assemblage of signs into macro-signifiers, which are normalized through protracted periods of alliteration which arbitrarily designate significance. Alliteration is a critical component to the conventional production of meaning, in that it sets signifiers in motion lending significance to the common experience of reality, directing interpretation that generates experi-ence and prescribing behavior. Alliterated signification also normalizes attributes into conventions, regardless of whether the attribution is cogent or not. The re-cursive nature of meaning may also convolute sense into false attributive reason-ing, lending to the ultimate attribution error (Gall and Irvine 1995: 972–973), or what Welby referred to as the “plain meaning fallacy.” The result is that, “we habitually confound “meaning,” and intended value, with “sense,” and involun-tary value, and last with “significance,” and inferential value” (Welby in Petrilli 2009: 271).

Let us beware in sense, meaning, and significance of allowing the old antithesis “matter and mind” to coerce us. Reality is monistic so far as ultimate division or separation or sun-derance goes, but dualistic from one point of view and tradistic from and in another, plural-istic in and from yet another. The unity thus reached cannot be adequately formulated in our present terminology, which is cramped on every side by the shells of controversy once protective, now mere sources of danger to intellectual and moral life. (Petrilli 2009: 273)

Conventions shape the sexual-objectification of women by rendering it signifi-cant among social interlocutors, in that “before being uttered, . . . [it] has already been pronounced, oriented and accepted or intonated, permeated with values that direct beliefs and behavior . . .” (cf. Petrilli and Ponzio 2005: 55, 157, 268, 542; Ponzio in Petrilli 2009: 360). As delineated above, popularized representations of sexually objectified women persist to inform collective conceptions of hetero-sexuality and each gender’s role within it, which promotes self-objectification among women. The assignment of meaning to self is informed by the composite arrangement of signifiers within external social paradigms, thereby directing how beliefs and values surrounding gender are conducted contextually among social interlocutors. To comprehend self-objectification’s structure of significa-tion among women, it is important to evaluate the social mechanisms that con-ventionalize patterns of thought (common thinking). Communication mediums have standardized this cognitive sequence in a way that was not conceivable be-fore their invention and, therefore, present new challenges for contemporary women in their quest for gender equity and self-empowerment. Marketing, in


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particular, implants signifiers into patterned sequences of meaning, amplifying their significance and providing an illusion of their legitimacy by subsuming other inherent signifiers that point reason to alternate conclusions. Thus, market-ing mechanisms have essentially appropriated women’s sexual expression by commercializing the male gaze so that women’s very experience of independent erotic desire becomes objectified and overwhelmed, once again shifting the balance of power into the masculine sphere. Marketing mechanisms subjugate women’s station within a masculine domain by sequencing the significance of their sexuality into paradigms of artificial logic according to masculine paradigm of the erotic. Bartky suggests that through these very mechanisms, women have learned to “internalized patriarchal standards of bodily acceptability,” which are incorporated into the structure of the self (Bartky 1990: 77). The result is that a significant portion of women develop a male authority in their consciousness – a generalized male witness whose judgment is constant (Bartky 1990: 77). Commu-nication technology has also enabled the male psyche to penetrate the female’s by exposing the private thoughts of the male sphere its expectations toward women (Meyrowitz 1985: 210–211), which may also elicit a form of self-objectification among women. William Ogburn’s conception of “cultural lag,” the propulsion of some parts of culture ahead of the rest through technology, explains how the over-lapping of male and females psychic spheres through communication technolo-gies may have created problematic social experiences for women’s sense of self.

Exposure to sexualized media representations of women is linked to sexually deterministic attitudes, which influence peer norms central to relational conduct between and among genders (Eggermont 2005; Ward et al. 2006; Jeong et al. 2010). Peer norms shape men and women’s comprehension of normative sexual behavior from a young age (Strassburger, Wilson and Jordan 2009) through the same process of signification outlined above. Media depictions of heterosexuality calibrate peer norms for acceptable behavior into relational conventions, which are experienced as “vicarious relationships” through media technologies such as radio, television and the internet (Meyrowitz 1985), forcing viewers to adopt an objectifying gaze (Frederickson and Roberts 1997). Media prime relationship norms through signification by referencing preexisting structures of knowledge and integrating them with automated interpretations of social perception and behavior (Bargh and Chartrand 2000), which may also induce self-objectifying behavior among women. Internalization of a generalized male gaze is socially accomplished through the external assignment of significance through social artifacts that are transported through communication mechanisms that convey common meaning between and among social interlocutors.

Since advancements in information technology, communication mecha-nisms have facilitated communication across time and space, amplifying social


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constructs beyond their natural parameters. Changes in communication technol-ogy affect culture by changing the focus of interest and the character of symbols and the patterns of their arrangement alters their expression (Innis in Carey 1989: 160). In contemporary culture, communication mediums mechanize the assem-bly of macro-signifiers, amplifying and redacting meaning into simulated social paradigms in ways that would not have been possible prior to the development of communication technologies. Such mechanisms affect culture by restructuring common interest and thought patterns by altering the character of symbols, the conduit through which common thought manifests (Innis in Carey 1989:160). The employment of artifacts to communicate and express that which would naturally be transmitted through facial expression or gesture alter the boundaries of social contexts and reshape relationships by magnifying some social ideologies while subordinating others in a structured sequence, though remaining socially signifi-cant (Carey 1989: 12; Meyrowitz 1985: 105).

The situational, ideational and behavioral conventions projected by commu-nication mediums are presented as universal truths, assigning significance and drawing attention to paradigms through which macro-signifier gain expression. As an example, consider the signification of a female body within the pages of a magazine in a Vitruvian pose, a blank expression upon the face, a paucity of makeup, hair pulled back tightly away from the face, attired in a plain bodysuit that covers the entire body upon a white background. The range of meaning would be limited within the signification of woman (beyond her inherent biologi-cal signifiers). A submissive tilt of the hips and the head, a submissive expression in the gaze, and the parting of the lips all modify the representation, impregnat-ing it with conventional meaning. Another dimension further, the coaling of the eyes, glossing of the lips and loosening of the hair into long sensuous tendrils again directs signification and positions meaning within a specific paradigm of meaning. Placing the body against a dark, mysterious background and adorning it with sensual apparel focuses the assemblage of signifiers into a macro-signifier of seduction according to masculine choreography of signifiers, which communi-cates a very specific interpretation among social interlocutors according to previ-ous manifestations of the conventional.

Contemporary culture is replete with referents that sexually objectify women, particularly evident in representations produced through marketing mecha-nisms. Commercial projections of women emphasize their sexual appeal, their physical attributes, the seductive quality of their bodies and their erotic features. Such projections highlight women’s value according to their sexual utility by jux-taposing them alongside other erotic signifiers, which compresses the ensemble into a macro-signifier. Such expression of the female condition redacts the sig-nificance of women as social agent, her value as a contributing member of society


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based on her particular agency. Some representations allude to women’s sexual authority entrenched within the rhetoric of the sexual revolution as a means of subduing female suspicion of any malfeasance. Yet, there remains a substantial paucity of social qualifiers referencing women’s social capacity.

Self-objectification occurs within a praxis of meaning (Lee et al. 2010: 462), whereby women learn to identify with the self according to their sexual attributes rather than their social value by adapting to recursive distinctions and values that manifest among members of social collectives. The assignment of meaning to self manifests as an experience of one’s value through intersecting paradigms of meaning that fuse through the alignment of significance between the self and others. Through social conventions that manifest within society, the self becomes incarnate as an extraneous object for consumption among the general public. Such arrangements supply a conduit through which to project the extrinsic self, estranged from the spontaneous unfolding of significance between and among social interlocutors. Women have been unwittingly seduced into participating in the alignment of self with sexual object, sanctifying the identification with self through a self-deprivating act that redacts the essential experience of the self as social being. In other words, the sense of self as woman is refracted through the conventional spectrum of meaning, which manifests an interpretation of identity based on the common ascription of woman as sexual object promoted by popular culture.

Western capitalist culture emphasizes the value of objects and people in rela-tion to their utility, based strongly upon the dual logic of production and con-sumption. Within the gamut of such logic, other human qualities and values are redacted creating a confluence of paradigms and contexts that intersect and con-found mechanized meaning with human relations. Principles of human dignity and propriety have become subsumed by the logic of profit, inadvertently popu-larizing moral ambiguity and indiscretion. Moral conduct, once directed by the social authority of women, has become commonly unpopular notion lest the value of gender neutrality, presumed an integral antecedent for equality, become usurped. Feminine authority as the caretaker of morality has, therefore, become taboo, a feminist misnomer. Women’s experience sexuality is, thus, a byproduct of an interpersonal paradigm developed between and among people through their collective selection and recursion of values and beliefs through their experi-ences. Therefore, though formal differences in women’s rights exist between con-temporary society and that of the Victorian era, inherent challenges within the signification of heterosexual relations remain prevalent for women.

Women’s plight in the twenty-first century is characterized by the hegemonic trappings of representational semantics that assign significance to women’s bodies, emphasizing their sexual function while redacting their social value.


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Contemporary models for gender relations hold women hostage to the cognitive underbelly of simulated sexuality, promoting the expression of femininity exclu-sively by sexual standards. This is accomplished by flattering women into pre-scribed gender norms, indirectly justifying the status of gender relations through the spectrum of prevailing sexist ideologies (Glick and Fiske 2001; Jackman 1994; Jost and Kay 2005). This imbues a reality wherein, as Petrilli notes, “. . . the inter-pretive function is also connected with value systems and significance” (Petrilli 2009: 256). Thus, prevailing appropriation of feminist logic by commercial cul-ture encourages a common acceptance of existing constructs of gender equality that appear to support women’s interests while symbolically repressing their social qualities within a vortex of significance. In the process, the strengths of the female condition have been redacted and marginalized generating a form of melancholia based on displaced social values that have become symbolically discharged. This process subdues alternative arrangements between and among genders by generalizing women as a uniform signifier. The experience of self within such a limiting interpretation of women becomes particularly problematic when its common significance within society reduces the wellbeing of targeted members. Therefore, exposure of women’s psyche to sexually-objectifying con-ceptions that designate their value according to their utility to men is inherently problematic in its implications.

Conventionalization of women’s objectification persuades social inter-locutors to accept protracted reason as valid based on the arbitrary emphasis and recursion of meaning. The sexual-objectification of women is confounded into plain meaning supported by conventionalized recursive practices based on popu-lar culture’s projection of women’s sexual attributes through communication technology. Paradigms that exaggerate women’s value solely in relation to their sexual attributes gain credibility among social interlocutors through the repeated sequencing of social patterns, contriving meaning in a way that implies cogency within a given context. In this arrangement, sexuality is no longer a social en-counter, but a manifold, discursive experience of a reified self. As W. I. Thomas astutely observed, “If men [and women] define a situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Merton 1995: 571–572). The qualification of self is accom-plished relative to paradigms, which gain validity among social interlocutors as expression takes shape within assemblage of macro-signifiers that are integrated by conventional paradigms.

Today, a proportionate degree of social knowledge is gained through popular culture’s simulated representation of experience through communication mecha-nisms, representing social conduct as authentic expression of the human condi-tion. In other words, the mediation of contexts through modern communication devices designate significance within a given arrangement of symbols, which


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standardizes the experience of the self and others. The authenticity of experience is capitulated and its loss is sensed as the result of repressed spontaneity within the facility of mechanized simulations. The signifying process remains prevalent, yet the dynamics of expression within participatory interactions become depen-dent upon standardized cues for experience. Simulated signifiers define gender by highlighting the value of standardized meaning at the expense of interper-sonal ties that socially bind communities. A critical corollary of the way commu-nication mechanisms frame reality affords far too much distinction to the mecha-nism at the expense of its social dimensions. However, whether projected through communication media or otherwise, the effect is always social. It is always related to the process of producing and interpreting meaning, and then reproducing meaning according to interpretation. The anecdote for women’s liberation from self-objectification within contemporary culture is to remove their representation from the practice of standardizing expression and to make visible the processes of signification that simulate social conduct, thereby unhinging the social from the interference of mass-media devices.

As outlined earlier, the implications of self-objectification for women have produced deleterious consequences for women’s experience of the self and the world, which has created precarious conditions for their overall well-being. Clif-ford Geertz has stated that the first task of social science is to understand the meaningful structure of symbols people use to navigate the social sphere (Geertz 1973). Experience resides in the act of contriving symbols and their meaning into expression that direct reality relative to those who operate within its conventions. We think and speak in patterns, in conventions, and are frequently unaware of their meaning and implications since signification is unconscious and its opera-tions are largely invisible. Though expression is dynamic and transient, the means through which its meaning is signified remains consistent. The capacity to understand the process that collective interpretations are construed compels one to also conceive that alternate arrangements can exist. Since the means by which social meaning is signified is the same, the very capacity to understand the pro-cess that collective interpretations are construed compels one to also conceive that alternate perspectives can exist. There is no linearity to the process and there is no final destination, only alternatives.

Culture is a composite of self-referential social systems that intersect and converge at coordinates where interrelated knowledge manifests through se-quenced patterns of meaning. Liberation from the cognitive interference of self-objectification promoted by popular culture requires a collective shift in common thought patterns and expression from the dominant masculine paradigm that lends significance to our present interpretations of sexual relations between gen-ders. The capacity to explore expression beyond the limits of simulated and stan-


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dardized conventions enables a shift in our collective paradigm, and both gen-ders must be involved in the shift. Contemporary interpretations of women is a far more insidious form of subjugation because it is largely invisible, imbricated by the symbolic continuity of communication mechanisms that define relations be-tween genders. Communication mechanisms standardize women’s expression and have enabled the perseverance of dominant masculine logic to subsume the feminine, rigidly polarizing and standardizing experience. Welby’s protest against the rigidity and dominant polarization of masculine logic remains a rele-vant one, as does her question: “why then is it that the world in general has re-jected [the] guidance [of Mother Sense] and preferred that of [masculine] logic, thin, arid and miserably one-sided and inadequate as that has often been? That is the question that you pragmatists have to answer” (Welby in Deledalle 2000: 98).

Welby proposes that the female paradigm is compatible with the masculine not as the former being subservient to the latter, but as complementary to each other. Empowerment of women’s station, therefore, cannot necessarily be accom-plished by denouncing inherent qualities of the masculine paradigm and shifting entirely to the feminine (that would simply be a polarized rendering of the situa-tion attributed to masculine logic). Rather, a more constructive approach toward gender equality might be established by propping-up the feminine paradigm and its inherent qualities as different, yet equally significant to the well-being of soci-ety in both the private and the public sphere. Through her intellectual exploits, Welby contemplated alternatives to the prevailing gender paradigms that shaped men and women’s world as mutually significant compositions of social discourse and considered the assiduous disregard for female logic as an ardent disservice to society at large. Therefore, her purpose was not to deviate from the qualities of being feminine for the masculine, but to examine the validity of subsuming one for the other which affirmed separation at the expense of social symmetry.

The communication mechanisms through which social conduct is currently coordinated drive conventions into the subconscious, which are internalized with very little significal interpretive intervention. Without the advantage of significal interpretation, common interpretation between social interlocutors loses the co-gency of its structure, and the production of meaning loses its authentic expres-sion as it is enacted within behavior. As Welby herself notes:

It is clear that stress needs to be laid upon the application of the principles and methods involved, not merely, though notably, to language, but to all other types of human function. There is need to insist on the rectification of mental attitudes and increase of interpretive power which must follow on the adoption of the significal method, throughout all stages and forms of mental training and the demands and contingencies of life. (Welby in Petrilli 2009: 4)


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Through her corroboration with some of most pivotal semiotic thinkers of the modern period, Welby anchored the female voice, a “mother-sense,” among the epistemic lineage of inquiry into the sign and its meaning. The introduction of communication technology’s social mechanisms into the banality of everyday life demands a philosophical framework such as significs to examine the novel ways through which reality is presently conceived, as well as false attributive reason-ing that emerges within the “plain meaning fallacies” of its automated knowl-edge. Significs also provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for ethno-graphic inquiry into sexual objectification as an antecedent of self-objectification by facilitating the examination of signification practices and how they inform common experience between and among genders. Trends in mediated represen-tations that resonate among social interlocutors, as well as the modelling of these trends through social behavior and common expression, reveal the extent to which women’s objectification has become a commonly accepted norm between and among social interlocutors. The evaluation of signs and meaning enables robust examination of the false attributive reasoning that projects the sexual ob-jectification of women as common knowledge. Facilitated by the guiding princi-ples of significs, ethnographic methodologies enable the grafting of pertinent data to formulate cogent summations regarding the implications of “plain mean-ing fallacies” (Welby in Petrilli 2009: 271) and false attributive reasoning (Gall and Irvine 1995: 972–973) upon women. Such examination of common experience assists in unveiling signifying processes that produce conventional social prac-tices, how those processes impact social interlocutors and which solutions could be explored to produce alternate outcomes. Therefore, to comprehend the impact of a particular social milieu, one must distend the range of meaning within the fulcrum of expression, situate it within conventional context and identify com-mon interpretation by evaluating its manifestation in relation to how social inter-locutors experience themselves in relation to others.

The multimodal logic of significs is a philosophical impulse that allows for a more concerted evaluation of meaning that shapes common knowledge and be-havior between social interlocutors yet has, not unlike the state of female logic, been largely subverted by the preeminent masculine ideology. While examining women’s sexual-objectification as an antecedent of self-objectification among women, it is imperative to conceptually separate man from the masculine ideol-ogy that promotes sexual objectification practices so as not to convolute the two as mutually inclusive. The social substation of the female logic to the masculine is not the outcome of men’s subordination of women, rather it is the result of so-cial agreements that have conventionalized conduct between genders through signification. Significs enables a concerted evaluation of how the masculine para-digm continues to dominate common knowledge, the normalization of women’s


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sexual objectification and the common practice of self-objectification among women. In summation, this article proposes that the principles of significa-tion are, indeed, the missing link in explaining why representations of sexually- objectified women are an antecedent to self-objectification among women and how communication mechanisms standardize knowledge and produce ultimate attribution errors and “plain meaning fallacies” that normalize the practice of sexually-objectifying women. Significs also animates useful ethnographic meth-odologies that facilitate direct investigations into the nature of signification be-tween and among social interlocutors, as well as the mechanisms that standard-ize knowledge in a way that confounds meaning and value by prescribing significance with little need for social refection upon the cogency of common interpretation. There remains a necessity for further dialogue and movement toward the emancipation of women from the more insidious forms of contem-porary repression in everyday social discourse, and Welby’s conception of signif-ics supplies an exceedingly congruous philosophical framework for the task, for “. . . hope and agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts” (Rorty in Carey 1989: 69).

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BionoteSophia Melanson (b. 1980) is a lecturer at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University ⟨[email protected]⟩. Her research interests include behavioral semiotic, pragmatism, self-objectification, and social media. Her publications in-clude “Mediated desire & the objectification of Eastern European women: A study of the symbolic implications of demand for trafficked bodies within Western Culture” (2012).


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Signification, common knowledge, and womanhood: The significs of Lady Victoria Welby and beyond

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