Semiotics

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SEMIOTICS.

DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS
OTHER DISCIPLINES
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Semiotics studies the various ways meanings are expressed by and embodied in systems of signs and symbols. In its European as opposed to its American form it originally was known as "semiology." It grew out of the conception of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), formulated in his Cours de linguistique générale (1916; Course in General Linguistics, 1959), of a "semiology" as a general science of the life or circulation of signs in society. Using the "sign character of language" both as model and as standard for other sign systems, European semiotics extended its interests far beyond language to such domains as art, literature, myth, and religion, and even to advertising and fashion systems.

DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS

The linguistic sign, according to Saussure, is two-faced: it is the inseparable union of a "signifier" and a "signified." Language for Saussure was a system with a distinctive structure and was intrinsically social. It must be distinguished from speech, its realization in concrete instances. Any act of speech, like a move in a chess game, selects from a set of preexisting units and combines them in rule-governed or rule-creating ways. This distinction between the axis of selection and the axis of combination (the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic) is matched by another, perhaps more subtle and far-reaching distinction: that between form and substance. Language, Saussure claimed, is a system without positive terms. The linguistic sign gets its meaning from its relations to other signs, not from its positive characteristics or its relations to the world. Using the clue of the difference between a "significant" sound and a mere "material" sound, Saussure thought of language as a socially sanctioned system of correlations between sign units. This idea of the sign, as defined by its relations to other signs, will be carried over to the whole cultural domain.

This set of distinctions led to a theoretical revolution in linguistics and in cultural theory that went under the name of structuralism. Structuralism attempted to discover the significant units in cultural systems quite generally and to set out the patterns of relation between them. Literary texts, for example, were shown by the Prague School to be complex acts of speech made possible by, and defined by, preexisting language-like systems without which they could not be created or understood. Texts stood in relation not just to previous texts but to all contemporaneous texts, too. Here are to be found the roots of the later notion of "intertextuality."

Early semiotics was faced with the serious problem of what seemed to be an irreconcilable opposition between semiotic systems and individual creativity, as manifested in the arts, both visual and literary. This theme was explored by such writers as the Russians Valentin Voloshinov (1895–1936) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). They showed that texts, as utterances, transcend the individual-society dichotomy by being situated, but not predetermined, historically shaped and distinctively pitched rhetorical forms or "voices." Novel texts were seen as emergent forms of "verbal interaction," as shifting performances of meaning. But they are not mere repetitions of past meanings that were already present in the system.

The focus on a creative social-historical logic of discourse was balanced by the exploration of a semiotic logic of the deep, unchanging structures of myth by Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908). Following Saussure's lead, Lévi-Strauss attempted to reduce the multiple forms of myth to variations on a few ultimate units and their systems of oppositions—raw/cooked, nature/culture, clean/unclean, endogamous/exogamous, and so forth.

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) further extended the language-based semiotic model to describe modern cultural myths and also the "rhetoric" of the image. Barthes was fascinated by the linguistic analogy and by not just the power of language but also the language of power embodied in the great mythic themes we live by and that enter into and define our individual and social identities. It was Barthes, along with Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), who affirmed that even the psyche, that is, the self, is "structured like a language," as a coded system of oppositions, a realization of structures of signifiers, which one had no immediate access to or control over. The "self" became essentially a decentered "place" in the play of signs, a theme developed on the philosophical plane by Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).

OTHER DISCIPLINES

Semiotics, then, as a discipline has more than mere theoretical concerns to deal with. Semiotic analysis becomes a form of self-reflection, even of political opposition, since it makes visible the hidden systems of meaning that define the space of one's life. Whether these systems are "prison-houses" or "happy homes" cannot be settled by semiotics itself.

Semiotic concerns and orientations also entered into the work of psychology. Of special interest is the work of the German Karl Bühler (1879–1963), and of the Russian Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934). Foregrounding and generalizing the distinction between significant sounds and sounds as merely physical phenomena, Bühler explored how the apprehension of something as a sign depended on one's powers to abstract distinctive features in the sign complex as well as in things and objects in the world. This power of abstraction, clearly present in the perception of language, led Bühler to develop a semiotic model of human perceptual powers quite generally. Perception itself, he showed, was a multiform process of sign-reading. The perceptual field is filled with a plethora of symptoms, signals, and symbolic structures that must be "picked out" as significant from their non-significant surroundings. Vygotsky also explored the semiotic dimensions of the perceptual sphere, drawing extensive and fruitful parallels between signs and tools as essential, indeed, indispensable, supports for the development of consciousness. Vygotsky showed that semiotics has an unavoidable genetic dimension alongside its structural and historical dimensions, laying in this way the groundwork for a semiotically informed cultural psychology.

The ineluctable embodiment of perception in signs and sign systems had important consequences especially for a semiotically informed aesthetics. Consequently, the visual arts, with special focus on painting, sculpture, and architecture, have been subjected to semiotic analysis. What makes up sets of visual signifiers, however, is a serious problem for a specifically semiotic approach to visual art. The approach taken by European semiotics availed itself of the great phonological analogy: significance, or meaning, arises through difference, and the differences can be coded or uncoded. What, then, are the constitutive differences and oppositions in either the marked or carved surface (painting and sculpture) or a building? What makes some significant and others non-significant? These systems of differences and oppositions point to one another in intricate and not always obvious ways. They encompass both the formal and content poles of any meaning-bearing artifact, whether thematically exploited or working "behind the backs" of seemingly autonomous creators.

The production of meaning, semiotics holds, is always embedded in, and exploits, sets of conventions. And, strangely enough, novel artistic meanings can also emerge out of the system, although just how remains a perplexing problem. Art in all its forms, seen from the semiotic point of view, bears witness to the fact that there is no "pure" perception or innocent eye. A large semiotic literature has been devoted to these themes. Of primary importance is the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), who was perhaps the most important philosopher to first recognize the revolutionary role of Saussure's semiotic insights for philosophy and for aesthetics.

Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), the great Russian linguist, applied semiotic insights to literary and phonological theory, foregrounding especially the poetic function of language, which was marked by the "palpability" of signs. The notion of palpability is clearly not restricted to language signs but to artistic signs of all sorts. Émile Benveniste (1902–1976), a distinguished French linguist, also reflected on the extension of the linguistic analogy to other systems of signs, concluding that while language was the "interpreting system" par excellence, one may not deny that the realm of signs permeates the whole cultural world. This is precisely the enduring central thesis and theme of European semiotics.