Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense

Bad Thoughts and Plain Meaning

by Richard Mohr*

Presented at the 19th Annual Law & Society Conference, Melbourne Zoo, 10 - 12 December 2001

In the past twelve months or so I have engaged in several different research projects which have involved some form of interpretation of signs or symbols. In this paper I want to reflect on that experience, and to explore the bases on which one develops and decides among possible interpretations. I feel I should begin by explaining why I have called this paper 'Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense.' When I told a friend recently that I was talking about semiotics at a law and society conference he said that in that case I should have an incomprehensible title. I assured him I did. Now I owe you an explanation (if not an apology). The motto comes from the coat of arms of the British monarchs, where it is found on a scroll beneath a unicorn, several images of lions, and other paraphernalia. That coat of arms has been one of the symbols which my recent research has led me to try to interpret. Towards the end of the paper I will clarify why I think the very incomprehensibility of the coat of arms conveys an interesting message in itself. So, to start with, I am drawing attention to a semiotic obscurity—a mystery, if you like.

I refer in the subtitle to the other point I am making. Since this motto means that evil should come to anyone who has evil thoughts, it has caused me to reflect on just how evil my thoughts might be. We live in a secular age, devoted to plain English and recently emerging from positivist fundamentalism. Say what you mean and mean what you say. When I come to interpret a sign, such as a coat of arms, then should I not address its plain meaning, and resist the temptation to read something else into it? In a debate on interpretation and overinterpretation, Jonathan Culler has suggested:

So this inquiry is motivated by anxiety, with a tinge of guilt. Have I been overinterpreting various images of the Basque country (in one of my projects) or the material symbols of judicial authority in New South Wales courtrooms (in another)? Just how bad have the results been? To try and find answers to these questions, and to help me think about how to proceed in future interpretive exercises, I must analyse the interpretive process.Of course, some form of interpretation is at the heart of law's methodology, and in that context it is not obviously problematical (though of course, it should be!). The work of the lawyer or judge is fundamentally to interpret the law. The law curriculum involves teaching students to become lawyers by interpreting legal texts in 'legal' ways. There are, of course, alternative ways to interpret these texts. For instance we may interpret a judicial decision from a literary or semiotic point of view. This involves reading it 'against the grain', that is, for meanings which are not the ones which a lawyer of judge is normally expected to find in it. We may look at how the judge's language, narrative structure or depiction of the facts point to other meanings or use substituted meanings to reach a particular conclusion.[2] In the context of socio-legal scholarship this suggests some ways in which we may be suspected of overinterpretation. Since as legal academics we spend a lot of our time teaching our students to read law for its 'legal' meaning, then the semiotic or literary interpretation may be seen to be 'going too far' if not simply being 'wrong'. If our colleagues are well skilled in identifying orthodox (or at least legally plausible) interpretations, and rewarding students for such interpretations, then heterodox interpretations may at first be seen as error. If we try to defend heterodox readings by reference to multiple standpoints then we may be open to more serious charges than simple error: relativism may be seen as a threat or a nonsense. If there is not one correct interpretation, does that mean 'anything goes', and that there can be hundreds of interpretations, each equally valid?[3] At the very least it may appear that if we are to adopt alternative interpretations then we are doing some violence to the legal structure and meaning of an argument. I believe that these are serious problems which cannot be resolved by adopting a radical relativist or combative stance. I also believe that there are some helpful analytical tools available, some of which I want to explore here.

I would like to begin by expanding my first example—how we read a judicial decision—to compare this reading with the ways we might read a newspaper. That too is a learned interpretive skill, though one we pick up at an earlier age and less self consciously than legal interpretation. In the 'natural mode' of reading newspapers we want to find out what news is in them, or perhaps we seek other forms of entertainment (cartoons, bizarre opinions, and so on). We have learnt that there are headlines and leading paragraphs which rapidly tell us what the story is about, and we make our choices about what and how much to read by scanning those. As we get used to particular papers we know where to find the local news, world news, letters to the editor, and whacky columnists. These skills are comparable to those of reading a decision for the facts, the ratio and the outcome. But we may also read a newspaper against the grain. We read 'behind' the obvious meanings for alternative ones which are being suggested. What is the editorial style encouraging us to think about a particular event? Why have words like 'asylum seekers' or 'boat people' been chosen instead of 'refugee' or 'mother'? (Or why choose 'mother' as in 'Mother of Three Bashed'?) We may start to see 'opinions' behind or embedded in the 'facts'. The ways newspapers report events—their choice of words, pictures and juxtapositions—carry extra meanings. To read against the grain means unpacking those meanings.[4]

Each of these ways of reading a text, whether a judicial decision or a newspaper, involves interpreting its meaning in the light of particular cultural conventions. We know the meaning of a word by reference to a number of personal (individual) or cultural (shared) associations. The interpretive matrix in which a word or concept is embedded may shift according to the culture. This may be a professional culture like the law or it may be a local, ethnic or national culture. This is why our students need to learn how to read a judgment, and why we have particular difficulty reading a foreign newspaper when we first arrive in a country, even if we know the language quite well. I want to suggest at this stage that culture is central to the problem which confronts us when faced with numerous alternative interpretations: meanings proliferate through cultural associations. I also hope to show that an analysis of culture will contribute to solving the problem of infinite interpretation. By clarifying the cultural context we are working in, it becomes possible to choose among alternative or competing interpretations. The simplest example of this is to say that if we are in a class in some area of substantive law, such as contracts, then the context for our interpretations is defined for us. Moving outside that classroom, other interpretations are still possible. And those interpretations may be classified or preferred according to the specific cultural context we are working in. These interpretive processes are explained fairly simply by semiotics. I will use this semiotic schema as a way of analysing such processes, and I will also look at some of the ways semioticians have used this schema to arrive at alternative interpretations. My purpose in doing this is to find a language that will allow these processes to be analysed. It will also help to explain how culture constitutes the medium through which interpretations proliferate, and to see how culture may also help to develop, choose or criticise those interpretations. The classic semiotic link is that between the signifier (or 'sign') and the signified (or 'object') If I say the word 'cat' to you, you will understand it to signify a particular sort of furry animal. You understand it because you speak English, and depending on the context you may also make other associations. I may use the term at home to refer to a specific animal ('have you fed the cat?'). If I suggest, at the zoo, 'let's go and see the cats', you would understand something else. Or I may refer to certain associations with cats or 'cattiness' if I am referring to a snide and malicious person. These variations point to the third element of the semiotic linkage. The word 'cat' is not a cat and by it I may mean all sorts of things (or nothing, in another language). You understand those things through your ability to interpret what I mean. Pierce called this third element in the semiotic relationship the 'interpretant', ie the knowledge or associations which allow us to interpret a signifier in a particular way, or to decide what object or group of objects it refers to. Eco has explained it thus:

Hence the interpetant introduces the pragmatic, material or social context into the interpretive relationship between the sign and the object. This allows semioticians to do all sorts of clever things in interpreting or re-interpreting signs. Sometimes, I am going to suggest, they are too clever. I want to show, however, that understanding the cultural context may offer a solution to the problems of arbitrary or infinite interpretation, while introducing new puzzles and possibilities.

Roland Barthes used a photograph of an African soldier from the cover of a French magazine as an example of the way signification may shift from one object to another, to invoke the myth of French Empire and egalitarianism.[6] In reference to this photograph, and its interpretation by Barthes, Blonsky used a Miller beer advertisement to illustrate a similar point. To interpret this picture of a black man with his chin in one hand and a beer bottle in the other, Blonsky uses the interpretants of Rodin's Thinker, an Afro-Cuban saying, the phallic symbol, and racist myths of sexuality and laziness.[7]

In both these cases I have found myself wondering why the pictures are interpreted thus and not otherwise. I want to offer alternative readings of both these images, in each case drawing on a song as the interpretant. By pointing to the associations of these songs, I hope to show some evidence of the appropriateness of my interpretation, within the cultural context of the time.

The reference of the beer ad to Otis Redding's song Dock of the Bay is surely obvious to anyone who has heard the song and, further, knows that it was a huge hit in both the black and white communities in the United States, topping the charts in 1967. Anyone seeing the ad in the decade or so after 1967, particularly the sort of people the ad seems directed to, could not fail to recall that haunting song and to associate the ad (and the beer) with 'watching the tide roll away':

To ignore this and to scratch around for allusions in French sculpture and Afro-Cuban expressions seems not only perverse, but culturally naïve. This is both over- and under-interpretation.

What you don't see in Barthes' description is the picture itself. When we do look at it[9] we see that the 'soldier' appears to be a child, yet Barthes does not mention this infantilisation of the Negro. To me this adds an important dimension to Barthes' self confessed and intentionally naïve interpretation. Not only does this picture seek to show the loyalty and alacrity with which the African serves his 'so-called oppressors', but it suggests the superiority, the tutelage of those 'oppressors' (hardly so-called any more). But am I over-interpreting? What do I know of this culture which tells me how to interpret a black child serving a colonial regime? A valuable interpretant for this picture is the Italian Fascist song of a decade or so earlier:

Apart from the obvious colonial sentiments, this little black is also infantilised, by the diminutive 'faccetta' and the familiar 'tu'. The black is to 'hope' for this salvation, 'given' by the invading Italian forces. Using this example in a class last year, I encountered a fascinating instance of the way in which an interpretant may work to reveal new associations within the cultural context. Having explained my points about how this picture might be interpreted, very much as I have now, and mentioning the Italian song, one of my students suddenly exclaimed 'My God, my Nonna used to sing me that song when I was little!' The song acts as an interpretant to reveal more about the Paris-Match cover, but in putting it in this context, the Paris-Match cover and its interpretations became an intepretant of that song for my student. As a third generation Italo-Australian child she had never realised the racist or Fascist content of what had been, to her, a nursery song.[11] As a final year law student contemplating Roland Barthes, the interpretant immediately gave the song 'new' meaning. This also flowed through to a range of associations regarding her grandmother and the culture of Italy at the time she left to migrate to Australia. The social context—as interpretant—guides us in interpreting signs. Likewise signs become part of the social context and may act as an interpretant in the next semiotic interpretation. These examples are classic semiotic scenarios, which may each be reinterpreted by means of an alternative interpretant which in each of these cases happen to be a song, another cultural product just like a beer ad or a magazine cover. I am using these songs to illustrate the plausibility of my intepretations, though it must be recognised that one could find many other cultural products which could also point towards other interpretations. They are a long way from the alternative interpretations of judicial decisions, or of media reporting of crime, which are more familiar in debates around socio-legal studies. So I will now return to those research projects which stimulated my exploration of these issues in the first place. What guidance can this semiotic analysis give us in deciding whether there are particular interpretations which should be preferred, or others which should be discarded, within particular socio-legal enquiries? In these two very different investigations—one of alternative images of the contested Basque Country, the other of symbols of judicial authority in New South Wales courtrooms—it happened that I came upon several coats of arms. These heraldic symbols have quite specific interpretants which are, to a large extent, discoverable. The more I delved into these interpretations, the more I was forced to reconsider the very nature of the interpretants I was discovering. I spent May in the Basque Country preparing a paper for a workshop on legal geography, landscape and identity. There were many competing images of the Basque Country and its political configuration at the time, since there was a regional election during that period. Rather than select party political images from the election campaign, I found fascinating representations of the land in a long-running campaign for the return of Basque prisoners held in jails at the other end of Spain. I compared these with an 'official' representation of the Basque Country which I found in the coat of arms of the Basque Regional government.[12] My research into the meaning of this coat of arms led me to a closer analysis of one of its components, which I did not go into this in the earlier paper. This is, however, worth further consideration in an analysis of the semiotics of coats of arms.The other research which quite independently led me into these heraldic questions was a study of the material and symbolic aspects of court buildings.[13] From that study I selected two New South Wales courtrooms for analysis and comparison, on the basis of some important differences in their layout and symbolism. One of those areas of difference was in the coat of arms above the bench. In a courtroom built ten or so years ago the coat of arms was that of the British Royal family, while a more recent one had that of the New South Wales Government. In both these cases I had to delve into historical and government records to discover what the coats of arms meant. In the case of the Basque coat of arms I discovered that the quarter representing the coat of arms of the province of Gipuzkoa had changed significantly during the twentieth century. The earlier coat of arms of Gipuzkoa existed from the sixteenth century to some time in the twentieth century, and can be seen on bridges in Donostia (San Sebastian). This included two other symbols above the landscape of trees and water, one representing canons seized in battle in 1512 by Gipuzkoans supporting Ferdinand and Isabella (the ‘Reyes Catolicos’) in the unification of Spanish Navarra into Aragon and Castille. The other represented the Gipuzkoans' earlier support for the King of Navarra who is seen 'seated on his throne and with his sword unsheathed and gripped in his right hand in an attitude representing the administration of justice against all classes of wrongdoers.'[14] These two symbols of Castillian allegiance and royal law were eliminated before Gipuzkoa joined the autonomous Basque region of Euskadi. In another outbreak of twentieth century regicide, the coat of arms in the New South Wales courtrooms has also been 'republicanised' by removing references to the monarchy. Instead of lions and a unicorn, judicial authority in New South Wales is henceforth to be represented by a lion and a kangaroo. In place of 'Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense', defendants may contemplate 'Orta Recens Quam Pura Nites'. My research is revealing a veritable reign of terror, wiping out monarchies across the globe, just by tweaking some coats of arms. In semiotic terms, the signs being studied here are the coats of arms, found on public buildings and bridges; my objects are (in this broad-brush interpretation) vanishing monarchies; and my interpretants are sources including a series of articles in a Basque historical journal, and an opinion supplied by the NSW Solicitor General to the Attorney General. Now this is all very interesting and gives me lots of ideas. This is serious historical and semiotic research. But as I came to write the second of the two papers, on NSW courtrooms, I became more and more sceptical of the esoteric interpretants I was using. In the Basque Country I had to access 1915 journals in the Koldo Mitxelena library (Donostia), and was then able to reveal my discovery to a Basque historian who had given a lecture at that very library the week before. He had not known what the coat of arms of Gipuzkoa meant.

My research in New South Wales was assisted by an opinion of the Solicitor General. Referring to the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865 and the Australia Act 1986, he concluded,

I concluded that this paradox of indivisible separation whereby the judiciary is part of the combined power of the three arms of government, yet independent, was no less mysterious than the Holy Trinity. In discussing these findings with a South Australian magistrate, he told me of a fellow magistrate who had been sitting in a remote South Australian town (I think it was Ceduna). Having observed an Aboriginal child who was appearing on a criminal charge with his gaze fixed throughout the proceedings on the ornate (Royal) coat of arms above the bench, the magistrate concluded that this symbol was making a profound impact on the child. It was apparent to that magistrate that there needed to be more of this sort of symbolism if the court was to impress recalcitrant black children with the authority of the common law.Here, it seems to me, is a central aporia of semiotic interpretation. The sign has certain meanings which, following a careful searching out of interpretants, can be discovered and revealed by the conscientious scholar. But what of the interpretants of the Aboriginal child? And what did the South Australian magistrate himself understand of the child's interpretive framework? For that matter what do I understand of the interpretive framework of a defendant appearing before a NSW magistrate sitting beneath a NSW coat of arms? If the people of Gipuzkoa are, by and large, unaware of the symbolism of their coat of arms, let alone the meaning of the earlier symbols which have been removed, how relevant to their interpretive framework are my historical endeavours (or those of Serapio de Mujica before me)?One approach to this problem would be empirical. I could conduct a survey, or perhaps a few open-ended interviews or focus groups, with defendants. This is an approach which is commonly advocated. I imagine it would tell me what I already can assume, i.e. that defendants know little and care less of the heraldic symbols in NSW courts, and would be less revealing than the Solicitor General's esoterica. The interesting semiotic problem here is the disjuncture between the legal opinion and the popular perception. What is particularly curious is that the government and its law officers place so much store in these symbols, while they appear to mean so little (or so little of what they mean to the law officers) to the citizens to whom they are, in some sense, addressed.I could, likewise, if my Basque or Spanish were up to it, conduct similar empirical research to find out what the Gipuzkoan coat of arms meant to the citizens of Gipuzkoa. This, again, would be interesting, but I have a disquiet that again it would miss the point. There are deep historical meanings encoded into the coat of arms of the Basque country and Gipuzkoa. Some of the most interesting are the absences. The cannons seized in 1512 and the King of Navarra are of interest today because they have disappeared. We know that they were removed during the twentieth century and that they signified the monarchy, which tells us something. We could find out more, such as when they disappeared, and what justifications or arguments were used at the time. And again that may tell us of the political and cultural milieu of those decision makers just as we know how the New South Wales politicians and law officers interpreted their act of replacing one coat of arms with another.I held out the hope, earlier in this discussion, that I would discover some guidelines for interpretation in the social or cultural notion of an interpretant. As I reach the end of the discussion, that hope may be fading. I am sceptical that a coat of arms 'really' means what any of these analyses say it means. And of course this is one limit of interpretation: there is no 'real' or authentic meaning of a sign. But at the other extreme, interpretation is limited by the interpretants, those social matrices of meaning which participants understand. In the case of public symbols like coats of arms, the participants are multiple and so too are their interpretations. It is important to recognise this multiplicity, without assuming that multiplicity equals infinity. We are in the realm of meaning here and there are particular signs which are coded and decoded within particular social realms.

So the simple solution to the problem of preferred or more plausible interpretations is to say that they are multiple, and that we may understand them in their social context by understanding more of the ways in which different participants understand these signs. As I have indicated, those questions could be answered drawing on empirical or on historical methods, using interviews or documents. However, we are also operating at the level of meaning when we interpret these signs ourselves. As a social being with my own interpretive framework, I can understand the sign and its varying interpretants as a meaningful set of relationships. If I develop alternative interpretations then I must justify them in terms of the interpretants of various participants, without losing sight of the relationships between them. Ultimately it is the inter-relationships between meaning frameworks that serve to constitute social and institutional objects, be they courts, judges or nations. Institutions themselves exist at the level of representation and meaning.[16]

The social or institutional relationship between the Basque people and their government or the people of New South Wales and their judges is not only understood through the semiotics of these symbols of authority and history, it is constituted by them. Now this leaves us with a puzzle, or returns us to the aporia which I introduced above. Symbols of authority have vastly different meanings to those who uphold them, or purvey their interpretations, than to those other participants who, in the case of the NSW courts, only 'appear before them'. Indeed to those others, the very lack of an interpretive framework (or lack of access to the framework of those in power) constitutes a significant aspect of the relationship. I have said above that the separation of powers which the Solicitor General sees embodied in the coat of arms is no less mysterious than the Holy Trinity. Mysteries have their own power, setting apart those who are initiated into them from those who are not. Those mysteries may derive from sophistic theologies (political or otherwise) or from the archeological layers of historical knowledge. Their ancient origins set them apart from the quotidian struggles for power and resources whose determination they authorise. If their meaning is, for many, lost in those origins, then this too is an important aspect of what they mean. Interpretation of meaning is central to law and to social and institutional life. Symbols do not simply reflect a neutral reality, but at the same time they constitute power relations and the conditions for authoritative decision making. To understand the meaning of these symbols we must understand their interpretants, bearing in mind that in a complex society different proponents and audiences may bring different interpretive baggage to bear. In appreciating the diversity of interpretants, we do not seek simply to decide on the 'correct' or most 'authentic' way of interpreting a symbol. We may understand more of the symbolic and social world by recognising the interplay between competing interpretations, and the analysing the disjunctures between those of the powerful and of the powerless.Like the symbolic, material and non-verbal trappings of courts and government symbols, law texts arise in a realm of social and contested meanings, which is to say that they can be subject to alternative readings. The symbols of authority arise in the realm of power and politics and they can properly be interpreted using the interpretive framework of the rulers and their ideologues. Yet being aware that alternative frameworks exist helps us to reach new insights into meaning. The emperor's new clothes had at least two meanings. Semiotics and alternative interpretive frameworks help us to explore these.

* Richard Mohr is Co-Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre and Head of Postgrqaduate Studies, Law Faculty, University of Wollongong

[1] Eco, Umberto, Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-Rose. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. p 111. Of course, this passage, like my interpretation of it, is ironical. Culler is parodying a possible version of 'overinterpretation' in debate with Umberto Eco.
[2] See for example Noonan, John T. The Responsible Judge: Readings in Judicial Ethics. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993. Threadgold, Terry. "Re-Writing Law as Post-Modern Fiction: The Poetics of Child Abuse." In The Happy Couple: Law and Literature, edited by J. N. Turner and P. Williams, 322-341. Sydney: Federation Press, 1994. Weisberg, R. Poethics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
[3] See Eco, Umberto. The Limits of Interpretation. Edited by Thomas A. Seboek, Advances in Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
[4] These methods have been used most effectively in analysis of political and legal responses and 'moral panics' Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1978. Hogg, Russell, and David Brown. Rethinking Law and Order. Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press Australia, 1998.. Even the High Court tried its hand at such an analysis in deciding that Mr Chakravarti had been defamed as much by the juxtaposition of the text and pictures on the page as by the literal content of the words. (Chakravarti v Advertiser Newspapers [1998] HCA 37, 20 May 1998 http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/disp.pl/au/cases/cth/high%5fct/1998/37.html.)
[5] Eco, Umberto. "Peirce's Notion of Interpretant." MLN 91 (1976): 1457-1472 at 1471.
[6] 'I am at the barber's and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro in French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.' Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by A. Lavers. NY: Hill and Wang, 1972.
[7] Blonsky, Marshall, ed. On Signs: A Semiotics Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.
[8] '(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay', Warner Bros Music (p) 1987.
[9] Paris-Match, June 1955, reproduced in Deacon, David, Michael Pickering, Peter Golding, and Graham Murdock. Researching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis. London: Arnold, 1999.
[10] This song was instantly recalled by my Italian partner, on seeing the Paris-Match cover. She also recalls the parody, directed at the Fascists, 'A calci in culo prenderemo a tutti e tre …' ('We'll give you all a kick up the arse').
[11] Nursery songs and other 'innocent' forms have a long history of political intervention. See for example Dorfman, Ariel. The Empire's Old Clothes. What the Lone Ranger, Babar and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds. London: Pluto Press, 1983.
[12] Presented as 'Territory, Landscape and Law in Three Images of the Basque Country' at the workshop The Geography of Law: Landscape and Identity, IISL, Oñati, 23-25 May 2001. View the Images
[13] Presented as 'Material Conditions of Law in Courtroom Re-presentations' at the joint meeting of the Law & Society Association and the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law, Budapest, 4 - 7 July 2001. This project was supported by the Legal Scholarship Fund of the Law & Justice Foundation of NSW. View text.
[14] Guerra, quoted Mujica, Serapio de. "El Blasón de Guipúzcoa." Euskalerriaren Alde 5, no. 115, 116, 117 (1915): 595-601, 631-634, 652-658.
[15] New South Wales Solicitor General (Keith Mason). 1995. Displaying the New South Wales Coat of Arms, SG 95/47.
[16] Searle, John R. The Construction of Social Reality. London: Penguin, 1996. pp 60-70.