“The connotators do not fill the whole of the lexia, reading them does not exhaust it. In other words (and this would be a valid proposition for semiology in general), not all the elements of the lexia can be transformed into connotators; there always remaining in the discourse a certain denotation without which, precisely, the discourse would not be possible.”
-Roland Barthes “Rhetoric of the Image” from Image-Music-Text
A new business suit: pressed, clean, and stylish. Truly a signifier of those who are members of western professional work. Those who are respected to make the giant cogs in the system turn. It was under this assumption that a strange little curiosity occurred to me on my morning walk to work.
It was in the early hours of the morning, no later than 7:30AM, when the first mass of workers make their way into their offices. My particular path, running along side of the elevated tracks, is only busy when a load of passengers makes their way off the platform and onto the street. With no trains in sight, the empty sidewalks made for a wonderfully empty stage for this scene to play out.
Enter our actor, a man in a new business suit, briefcase in hand, on his way to what surely would be a day of importance. He was walking briskly to the shelter of the train platform's stairway, seeming to be in a hurry to feed some inner desire. Must be in dire need of a smoke, I thought.
As he approached, a pigeon swooped in next to him, close enough that it certainly would have made me jump. But this man was unperturbed, indeed, he remained calm as another, two more, ten more, then seemingly hundreds more pigeons descended upon his created shelter under the stairway. Framed by the slanted angle of rusting steel support beams, this canvas was painted with angry brush strokes of black and white feathers. So thick was the paint that I completely lost sight of the man for a number of seconds.
Is this some horrific realization of a Hitchcockian nightmare, I wondered?
After what seemed like much too long for a man in a business suit to be surrounded by an army of pigeons, the birds began to settle into place, anxiously shifting from one foot to the other. I saw the man open his briefcase. He pulled out a small plastic container, the kind of thing you would buy peanuts or almonds in. He opened the container and began shaking out pieces of bread, slowly turning until he had made a complete circle.
The pigeons went wild. Jumping on, over, next to, and underneath one another. This was their breakfast, and it was clearly expected. This man was recognized and expected by the pigeons, as if he had been there numerous times before, part of his normal morning routine: 1. Put on a suit 2. Walk to the train station 3. Exit down town 4. Feed the pigeons 5. Enter the office. Simple as that, the kind of thing where if someone asked him if anything interesting happened on his way in, he would casually reply, “Oh you know, the usual.”
The usual. This scene added to the list of meanings for business suit.
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