USING PEIRCE (AND DELEUZE’S PEIRCE) TO THINK ABOUT #FOODPORN AND OTHER INSTAGRAM SIGNS

Abstract

This essay applies Peirce’s and Deleuze’s semiotics to “food porn” on Instagram, and this sign is an exemplar of the structure of all signs on this platform. Food porn is defined as triadic: (1) the food porn image plus the comments are representative of (2) the profile who posted the image (poster) for (3) another profile (ambient viewer) who thinks this relationship. From Peirce and Deleuze there are two main ways of thinking in signs and I apply them to food porn: from Peirce, comprehension is formal and the ambient viewer draws logical conclusions about the poster of the sign; from Deleuze, comprehension is creative and the ambient viewer can invent brilliant new concepts about the poster. It is not possible to extend my discussion to an evaluation of which mode of thinking is more typical today. This paper explicates Peirce’s and Deleuze’s semiotic systems to explain how we think with Instagram signs. Once we understand what we can do with social media signs, we can be more considered in what we’re doing with it.

keywords:

• platform
• image
• semiotics
• network media
• social media

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I would like to thank the journal’s reviewers for their helpful comments and criticisms.

1 I will follow the practice of citing from The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce by volume number and paragraph number, preceded by “CP,” and Essential Peirce by volume number and page number, preceded by “EP” (e.g., CP 2.227; EP 2.303).

2 It needs to be noted, given today’s “computational turn” of data advocacy (boyd and Crawford), that a data collection strategy has not been employed in this research. The very fact this is noted as an omission is a sign of the times. The objective of this paper is to explain two ways of thinking with social media signs, and this is based on my identification of a structure of “sign-process” on Instagram. The two modes of thinking (Peirce and Deleuze) have a long-standing philosophical precedent (see, e.g., Massumi, “Collective Expression”; Semetsky; Vellodi), and therefore a dataset is not necessary to establish their authenticity and relevance to thinking about representations; moreover, this paper does not set out either to measure their occurrence in social media today or the sovereignty of either – making a dataset unnecessary. In addition, the semiotic structure identified and analysed is precisely that: a structure, meaning that variations of this structure are not considered and creating a dataset to track social media content and classify resources is not necessary.

3 See also Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.

4

Peirce describes the diagram as a map or schema, an “icon of relations” through which a future state is constructed on the basis of an existing state, through the representation, and formalisation, of relations between terms. This (relatively new) future state resembles past states through the diagrammatic construction of laws that relate the two via the mediation of the present. (Vellodi 80)

5 Leaver and Highfield:

Absolute public/private distinctions at the level of code are insufficient to determine user intent [ … ] When Instagram was initially released, it was only available to iPhone users, only accessible on mobile devices and was only navigable via the Instagram app itself. Over time, the app has changed significantly, adding a version for mobile devices using the Android operating system, adding the means to view public Instagram media on the web, adding the ability to embed specific Instagram images in other websites, altering various other parameters of accessibility and notably being purchased by Facebook. In this shifting terrain, even if Instagram images were technically public years ago, the experience of using the app may have felt largely private. Over time, the changes to the platform have meant it is far easier to surface technically public Instagram media on mobiles, the traditional web or via many third-party apps and interfaces. Given this shifting experience of privacy, we have elected to avoid including specific examples of Instagram media in this published form, relying instead on textual description. (35)