Semiotics anyone?

[Liar]

You are quite right of course - but if we didnt communicate there would be no semoitoics

Or narrative. or onomapoetics, or intertextuality, or semantics, or thematics, or graphemes, or tropes, or topoi, or disposition, or invectives...

 

[slyc_willie]

well, to be more serious, I would say that we all communicated with reasonable facility before the theory of semiotics was ever outlined.
Semiotics is an attempt to diagram the mechanics of communication- but the field of semiotics itself is NOT communication.

It's a fascinating subject, no doubt.

Whether or not communication can be facillitated without semiotics is a point that can be argued until the day after Armageddon.

A few thousand, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or so years ago (the jury is still out as to when, exactly, humans began thinking in abstract ways, thus involving symbols and signs), a hominid pointed to a dead animal and tucked his fingers in his lips, while looking to one of his tribal members. The other understood that the first meant 'should we eat it?'

Ergo, semiotics.

Where I work, there are three other employees with my first name. Yet, I can always tell when someone is calling MY name. There's always a different inflection, a different tone in their voice when they call me. A different combination of respect, friendliness, and admiration.

We all do this, whether we know it or not. Mothers can tell when a baby is crying because it needs to be fed, or it needs it's diaper changed, or because it has gas. To the rest of us, it is just crying. Maybe semiotics is instinctual, a necessary part of communication.

Which begs the question: what would communication be without semiotics? If we, as human beings, did not think in abstract ways, did not look at a cigar and see it as a phallic symbol or Harry Potter's wand (let's not go there, fellow pervs), communication would be as dry, direct, and ultimately uninteresting as the tiled floor of my kitchen. Without semiotics, we would all be speaking like Dr. Spock on a British jury. Direct, unemotional, with no interpretation involved. The spoken word would be EVERYTHING. No 'reading between the lines.'

So maybe semiotics is not the be all and end all of communication. But I sure as hell would not want to live in a world without it.

Hell, without semiotics, and the concepts behind it of being able to interpret the heard and spoken word, the term 'semiotics' would never have been coined.

I just had an idea. Want a crash course in communication without semiotics? Next time you're in a chat, or next time you post, do so without punctuation of any kind. No italics, no bold, no funny fonts. No emoticons or funny characters. No background on your YIM. No capitalization, no breaking up posts for dramatic effect.

See how much you enjoy it.

But, in the mean time . . .

 

[Goldie Munro]

Or narrative. or onomapoetics, or intertextuality, or semantics, or thematics, or graphemes, or tropes, or topoi, or disposition, or invectives...

Those are all part of semiotics are they not?

 

[Goldie Munro]

It's a fascinating subject, no doubt.

Whether or not communication can be facillitated without semiotics is a point that can be argued until the day after Armageddon.

A few thousand, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or so years ago (the jury is still out as to when, exactly, humans began thinking in abstract ways, thus involving symbols and signs), a hominid pointed to a dead animal and tucked his fingers in his lips, while looking to one of his tribal members. The other understood that the first meant 'should we eat it?'

Ergo, semiotics.

Where I work, there are three other employees with my first name. Yet, I can always tell when someone is calling MY name. There's always a different inflection, a different tone in their voice when they call me. A different combination of respect, friendliness, and admiration.

We all do this, whether we know it or not. Mothers can tell when a baby is crying because it needs to be fed, or it needs it's diaper changed, or because it has gas. To the rest of us, it is just crying. Maybe semiotics is instinctual, a necessary part of communication.

Which begs the question: what would communication be without semiotics? If we, as human beings, did not think in abstract ways, did not look at a cigar and see it as a phallic symbol or Harry Potter's wand (let's not go there, fellow pervs), communication would be as dry, direct, and ultimately uninteresting as the tiled floor of my kitchen. Without semiotics, we would all be speaking like Dr. Spock on a British jury. Direct, unemotional, with no interpretation involved. The spoken word would be EVERYTHING. No 'reading between the lines.'

So maybe semiotics is not the be all and end all of communication. But I sure as hell would not want to live in a world without it.

Hell, without semiotics, and the concepts behind it of being able to interpret the heard and spoken word, the term 'semiotics' would never have been coined.

I just had an idea. Want a crash course in communication without semiotics? Next time you're in a chat, or next time you post, do so without punctuation of any kind. No italics, no bold, no funny fonts. No emoticons or funny characters. No background on your YIM. No capitalization, no breaking up posts for dramatic effect.

See how much you enjoy it.

But, in the mean time . . .

LOL Im with you!

 

[rgraham666]

A little expansion.

Thought a lot about this last night. In my sleepless ramblings I came up with a butterfly metaphor.

A fine work of prose or poetry is like a butterfly. People look at it and know it's beautiful.

A semiotician comes along, sticks said butterfly in a killing jar. Then they take it out and pin the corpse to a card. They measure it, weigh it, even take spectroscopical analyses of the light reflected from its wings. A nice little 'Last of species, pity.' note will be included if necessary. One has to be careful.

They catalog all this information and declare, 'Yes indeed. This, according to our analysis, was a beautiful creature.' Or not.

Doesn't matter. In the process they've destroyed the butterfly. And corpses aren't nearly as pretty as the living thing.

I blame our toxic love affair with rationality. 'Rational' is the only thing you can be these days. Unfortunately, rationality can't understand beauty.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

There's a whole cult of bozo's who do this with the Bible. It never occured to them that if it were to be meaningful, they should be doing it in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, not English

 

[Vermilion]

See, that's exactly what frustrates me- it is NOT "all metaphor - analogy - symbol - and the like." And so often, I watch people diving into perfectly simple literal sentences. squeezing out a metaphor where there isn't one. It gets so stoopit. It totally gets in the way of the very communication it's supposed to be observing.

Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, you know?

Have you read 'Ways of Seeing' by John Berger. It was one of the recommended text for my Uni course on Semiotics.
x
V

 

[Stella_Omega]

Have you read 'Ways of Seeing' by John Berger. It was one of the recommended text for my Uni course on Semiotics.
x
V

no, but I will look into it, thanks
Are you reccing it then?

 

[Liar]

Those are all part of semiotics are they not?

Good heavens no. They are part of communication. Semiotics is a part of communication too. So they're like siblings in the communication family, or something like that.

Which is what I've been trying to say all along. Semiotics is indeed an interresting subject. Symbolism, representation and metaphor is well worth to study and discuss. But it's not = communication. It's not the higher level container that all the other elements are part of. It's one of the elements.


Oh by the way, Stella. Semiotics, in it's most basic form, also includes things like the representation of a letter for a sound or an abstract sound for an object. (Why is it called "chair" and not "gnurf"?) So in a way, there's semiotics everywhere. But you're right that symbolism and methaphor is very often over-analysed into texts or images by the scholars, where none was intended by the sender (author, artist) and none is really needed for the audience.

 

[Grushenka]

Have you read 'Ways of Seeing' by John Berger. It was one of the recommended text for my Uni course on Semiotics.

Excellent text. Marxist-oriented, but extremely helpful on many levels. I've given and recommended this book to many. Gr.

 

[Grushenka]

— Semiotics is important because it can help us not to take 'reality' for granted as something having a purely objective existence which is independent of human interpretation.
— Studying semiotics can assist us to become more aware of reality as a construction and of the roles played by ourselves and others in constructing it.
— Meaning is not 'transmitted' to us - we actively create it
— We learn from semiotics that we live in a world of signs and we have no way of understanding anything except through signs and the codes into which they are organized.
— Deconstructing and contesting the realities of signs can reveal whose realities are privileged and whose are suppressed.
— The study of signs is the study of the construction and maintenance of reality. To decline such a study is to leave to others the control of the world of meanings which we inhabit.

The quotes are from the last paragraph of the article Stella provided in the first post. I thought seeing these statements highlighted might be more helpful for those unfamiliar with Semiotics (I capitalize it the way I would Physics, Mathematics, etc.) It might also be obvious that Semiotics was welcomed and retooled (sometimes bent) for many politically oriented intellectual theories.

I understand, and empathize with Rob’s latest post very well; it’s a general attitude toward many ‘higher’ academic subjects, and oft with good reason. I find deep semiotical study tedious, and mostly irrelevant professionally, to my interests, but I appreciate the widening of thought it can urge (even unto Structuralism and Deconstructionism). Looking at the subject in a context outside its own study is daunting and unappealing to many, but it’s not going to go away.

I like to think of linguistic (and other) theories as useful, from time to time, when necessary for a deeper understanding (of what—is up to the reader), but Semiotics and all it has wrought, is only a tool, not a religion. I liken it, and other like subjects, to the sciences. The Universe existed billions of years before anyone came up with the laws of physics, and though we don’t all want to be professional scientists, isn’t it wonderful to know there’s a language (Mathematics) that can help tell us about the place in which we exist.

As for the comments about inane and stupid remarks, pooh ! Literature has done well throughout the centuries, and will continue to do so, without semiotic-minded or -informed authors.

Here are a few more helpful points for those interested in the subject, or a general understanding of its outreach. These are from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Also called Semiology, the study of signs and sign-using behaviour. It was defined by one of its founders, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, as the study of “the life of signs within society.” Although the word was used in this sense in the 17th century by the English philosopher John Locke, the idea of semiotics as an interdisciplinary mode for examining phenomena in different fields emerged only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the independent work of Saussure and of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

Peirce's seminal work in the field was anchored in pragmatism and logic. He defined a sign as “something which stands to somebody for something,” and one of his major contributions to semiotics was the categorization of signs into three main types: (1) an icon, which resembles its referent (such as a road sign for falling rocks); (2) an index, which is associated with its referent (as smoke is a sign of fire); and (3) a symbol, which is related to its referent only by convention (as with words or traffic signals). Peirce also demonstrated that a sign can never have a definite meaning, for the meaning must be continuously qualified.

Saussure treated language as a sign-system, and his work in linguistics has supplied the concepts and methods that semioticians apply to sign-systems other than language. One such basic semiotic concept is Saussure's distinction between the two inseparable components of a sign: the signifier, which in language is a set of speech sounds or marks on a page, and the signified, which is the concept or idea behind the sign. Saussure also distinguished parole, or actual individual utterances, from langue, the underlying system of conventions that makes such utterances understandable; it is this underlying langue that most interests semioticians.

This interest in the structure behind the use of particular signs links semiotics with the methods of structuralism (q.v.), which seeks to analyze these relations. Saussure's theories are thus also considered fundamental to structuralism (especially structural linguistics) and to poststructuralism. Modern semioticians have applied Peirce and Saussure's principles to a variety of fields, including aesthetics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, communications, and semantics. Among the most influential of these thinkers are the French scholars Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva.

 

[gauchecritic]

Good heavens no. They are part of communication. Semiotics is a part of communication too. So they're like siblings in the communication family, or something like that.

From what little I've read so far Liar, I think the semioticists would disagree with you there. Semiotics, it seems to me, is about communication rather than a part of it. They speak of the semiotics of movies, photography and road signs as well as words and language and their function and meaning.

To take (I think) your analogy from before; A car isn't about transport it is transport.

(I think I fucked up the analogy there since I used the word 'about' in the previous definition too, but you get the drift)

 

[Stella_Omega]

From what little I've read so far Liar, I think the semioticists would disagree with you there. Semiotics, it seems to me, is about communication rather than a part of it. They speak of the semiotics of movies, photography and road signs as well as words and language and their function and meaning.

To take (I think) your analogy from before; A car isn't about transport it is transport.

(I think I fucked up the analogy there since I used the word 'about' in the previous definition too, but you get the drift)

LOL! We are going to get into a major quagmire here, don't you think?

Here's the way I'd put it;

semiotics is the study of modes of communication. But it isn't exactly an element of communication.

That's like calling Astronomy a part of the stars, see?

 

[Grushenka]

LOL! We are going to get into a major quagmire here, don't you think?
Here's the way I'd put it;
semiotics is the study of modes of communication. But it isn't exactly an element of communication.
That's like calling Astronomy a part of the stars, see?

You are a clear thinker, Stella.

I too felt the squishiness of a quagmire throughout this thread, that's why I posted the long thingy above. Maybe this will help too:

"Most generally, Semiotics is the scientific study of signs and sign functions. It includes the most characteristic operation of all living organisms--communication or the interchange of messages. If we might say, simply put, that communication consists in some sense in the moving of information from one place to another and one time to another and that effective communication requires the material presence of an object or entity which refers back to something other than itself, then an object or entity of this sort is a sign. The process of referring back, called a sign process, may take many forms. To a medical doctor, for instance, a given spot on an x-ray may signal or communicate the possibility of a tumor in a patient's lung; for a meteorologist, a rise in barometric pressure may provide a clue that communicates some aspect of the next day's weather; for an anthropologist, the verbal and nonverbal complex of reciprocal gift-giving reveals and communicates essential elements of the social organization of a people; to a political scientist, the perception and observation of some aspect of public comportment may signal or communicate a change in ideology; in a forensic and judicial setting, a fingerprint may lead to a communication that allows for the identification and conviction of a criminal; to a person face-to-face with a snarling dog, the snarling behavior may telegraph and communicate the strong possibility of the dog's intention to attack. . . Thus, we are led to say that semiotics is an interdisciplinary study which entails, comprehends, and informs itself of all conceivable message exchanges--all communications, whether verbal or not, whether the interactants are humans or speechless creatures, or even whether the exchange is with or among such instruments as computers, or among living entities as diverse as plants or planets."

I like that the author distinquishes clearly various forms of communication, that one can understand how an x-ray can communicate, or a snarling dog.

Quoted from here.

 

[Liar]

From what little I've read so far Liar, I think the semioticists would disagree with you there. Semiotics, it seems to me, is about communication rather than a part of it.

Yah well. First of all, I'm not a semitioci... semiocti.. semi-finali... that thing. I've just studied semiotics, among other aspects of communication. From what I can tell, and from the literature and definitions I read about it (there seems to be several, even aming the s-people) semiotics is the study of symbols and representation in communication.

I feel like a broken record here (A semiotic statement? some kinda metaphor anyway.), but I'll have to stress this point it seems. It's the study of one aspect of communication. One. Of several. To say it's THE study of communication will make linguistics, narratology, contextuality, rhetorics and whatnot else (still digging into the whole field) ask if it's chopped liver.

To take the astronomy allegory... it's the study of stars specifically, not astronomy as a whole, no planets, comets, quasars and dark matter.



Good quote there, Gru. Have to update my thread before I reply more often.

 

[Grushenka]

Yah well. First of all, I'm not a semitioci... semiocti.. semi-finali... that thing.
- - -
I feel like a broken record here (A semiotic statement? some kinda metaphor anyway.)
- - -
Good quote there, Gru. Have to update my thread before I reply more often.

Thanks. And you're pretty funny for a semiotickle type . Gru.

 

[Liar]

Speaking of semiotics... Gonna be using Barthes' visual semiotics analysis on a bunch of ice cream ads next week for a uni class I'm taking. So I gotta read up on the theory again.

I think those books are at the bottom of a box in a storage on the other side of town. Ah the curse of compact living.

 

[CharleyH]

Speaking of semiotics... Gonna be using Barthes' visual semiotics analysis on a bunch of ice cream ads next week for a uni class I'm taking. So I gotta read up on the theory again.

I think those books are at the bottom of a box in a storage on the other side of town. Ah the curse of compact living.

Aside: I recall Barthes writing on many things (wine - wrestling), but never ice-cream - interesting, L. Much Luck and I hope you share your findings with at least me.

As for Stell? See? Nothing of intelligence gets to belong on a front page for more than a day.

Semiotics, especially. LOL

 

[CharleyH]

Not a subject for me. Deals too much with symbols and not enough with communication.

And as with all modern forms of expertise it's cloaked in an impenetrable dialect meant as an initiation ritual for its members and to protect its power from outsiders.

So pthhhhhhbt!

If I did not say it before Rob, in this you are wrong. Semiotics IS communication.

 

[Liar]

Aside: I recall Barthes writing on many things (wine - wrestling), but never ice-cream - interesting, L. Much Luck and I hope you share your findings with at least me.

We're leaning towards focusing on discourse analysis now, but we'll no doubt borrow a leaf off Barthes or maybe Halliday for it.

If I did not say it before Rob, in this you are wrong. Semiotics IS communication.

Heh. Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree there then.

Or maybe we should look deeper into your semiotic population of the word "is".

 

[CharleyH]

A little expansion.

Thought a lot about this last night. In my sleepless ramblings I came up with a butterfly metaphor.

A fine work of prose or poetry is like a butterfly. People look at it and know it's beautiful.

A semiotician comes along, sticks said butterfly in a killing jar. Then they take it out and pin the corpse to a card. They measure it, weigh it, even take spectroscopical analyses of the light reflected from its wings. A nice little 'Last of species, pity.' note will be included if necessary. One has to be careful.

They catalog all this information and declare, 'Yes indeed. This, according to our analysis, was a beautiful creature.' Or not.

Doesn't matter. In the process they've destroyed the butterfly. And corpses aren't nearly as pretty as the living thing.

I blame our toxic love affair with rationality. 'Rational' is the only thing you can be these days. Unfortunately, rationality can't understand beauty.

And more expansion from me - You miss the point of semiotics, friend and are looking too narrowly into linguistics and not toward cultural semiotics. Try Christian Metz or Charles Pierce (especially) for starters.

 

[TheeGoatPig]

semiotics

I hate that word. Just thought I'd let everyone know.

 

[CharleyH]

I hate that word. Just thought I'd let everyone know.

I hate the word nigger - it still means a lot of things. Just thought I'd let you know.

 

[Kev H]

I hate the word nigger - it still means a lot of things. Just thought I'd let you know.

*snickers*

I have nothing to add at this time other than a true appreciation for some of these posts (and not just the one I quoted!). Fundamental/structural studies are always noble endeavors. To hate that is like wishing everyone were simple and uninquisitive (or just constantly, distractingly horny). Time and a place, man...

 

[CharleyH]

*snickers*

I have nothing to add at this time other than a true appreciation for some of these posts (and not just the one I quoted!). Fundamental/structural studies are always noble endeavors. To hate that is like wishing everyone were simple and uninquisitive (or just constantly, distractingly horny). Time and a place, man...

Indeed, Kev. Well said.