Semiotics
Paul Cobley, Middlesex University
[email protected]
(Word count: 5544)
Abstract
This entry outlines some of the ways semiotics is defined and considers some of the
narratives into which semiotics has been fitted, even within communication theory. It
discusses the domain of semiotics, the constitution of the sign, the ideas of ‘code’ and
‘text’ and the relation of semiotics to the ‘textual’ turn that still wields influence in
media studies. It shows how semiotics has been inflected sometimes in a misleading
fashion while also attempting to demonstrate that the semiotic project can be grasped
by a focus on the task of illustrating the complex and fluctuating relations which
expose the gap between ‘illusion’ and ‘reality’.
Keywords: sign, symbol, relation, signification, semiotics, context, Umwelt, signans,
signatum, media, code, text, Saussure, Barthes, Peirce, Poinsot, Sebeok, Deely
Semiotics is defined in numerous ways and is also subject to various narratives, even
within the confines of communication theory. Definitions of semiotics cast it as,
among other things,
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the theory of the sign
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the theory of semiosis
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a ‘sign science’ that encompasses all modes of signification
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a concern with codes and decoding
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a branch of, or supplement to, linguistics
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synonymous with ‘semiology’
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the study of human signification
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the study of comparative Umwelten, comprising the signification of all living
things
Narratives of semiotics depict it as
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founded by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
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founded by Saussure and the American polymath, Charles Sanders Peirce
(1839-1914)
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established by Saussure, Peirce and the Hungarian-American polymath,
Thomas A. Sebeok (1920-2001)
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inaugurated as an enduring pre-Socratic practice by Hippocrates of Cos (460377 BCE) and Galen of Pergamon (129-c.200), developed by St. Augustine
(354-430) and John Locke (1632-1704)
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the means to perceive the gap between illusion and reality
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akin to and fashionable during the period of structuralism and poststructuralism
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largely dead because textual analysis has been superseded by the study of
audience’s meanings
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very much alive because analysis of ‘codes’ and invariants will always be
needed and semiotics does take account of the audience in any case
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an important strand of communication theory
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synonymous with communication theory
As such, semiotics has undergone periods in its history when it has enjoyed centrality
and marginality, and this is no less true of its fate in communication theory.
The domain of semiotics
Increasingly, semiotics has become recognized as the study of all signs, not just the
linguistic ones that dominate the ‘semiology’ projected by Saussure and, later,
Barthes. Historically, semiotics precedes semiology. The term itself is derived from a
Greek root, seme, and was taken up by Charles Sanders Peirce, who sought to classify
all types of signs in the universe. In this way, semiotics constitutes the major tradition
of sign study ultimately derived from the ancient semioticians (see Sebeok 2001). In
the Anglophone world the name ‘semiotics’ was current even while semiology was
dominant, largely because the anthropocentric endeavours of semiologists were
brought together with those of semioticians for the formation of the International
Association for Semiotic Studies in 1969. If semiology created the impression that the
whole of sign study was human discourse and the human sign, semiotics proper
demonstrated something very different. The very localised study of the linguistic sign,
a sign type used by humans alone, is only one component of the study of the sign in
general. The human phenomenon of language is just one minuscule aspect of a
broader semiosis, the action of signs throughout the universe no matter how they
might be embodied.
Semiotics, in a pre-Socratic fashion, has sought to unify science and philosophy by
way of a concern with how the entire cosmos operates – the earth, its inhabitants and
the elements - rather than just the interactions that constitute the polis. Both Peirce
and Sebeok, out of step with the intellectual fashions of their times, shared this
outlook. For the later Peirce, especially, the entirety of logic, philosophy and science
were only approachable through an expansive sign theory, as Poinsot had
demonstrated in 1632 (see Poinsot 2013 and below). Peirce envisaged a sign theory
that would be comprehensive rather than localised, comprising “mathematics, ethics,
metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy,
astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and
women, wine, metrology” (Peirce, 1966, p. 408). He wrote to Lady Welby, late in life,
revealing that he had recognized ten basic types of signs and 59,049 different classes
of signs in all (Peirce, 1966, p. 407). Arguably, communication theory’s focus
contrasts with the comprehensiveness of semiotics. Despite its diversity, the study of
communication, as it has been constituted as a field, has tended to be restricted to
human communication. Studies of (non-human) animal and plant communication
have been located outside this field. Yet, communication theory’s development
alongside information theory in the second part of the twentieth century, with
Shannon and Weaver (1949) as the touchstone, has entailed that communication
theory has maintained links with the study of non-human signs by way of its interest
in technologies of mediation. Thus, Sebeok, like Bateson a formative influence in
both semiotics and cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s, could justifiably assert that
semiotics and communication theory were synonymous.
The constitution of the sign
Whether signs covered the entirety of the universe or just humans’ activity, the history
of sign theorizing from the ancient medics onwards was largely dominated by a
binary distinction of signans (the vehicle which acted as sign) and signatum (that
which was signified). The high point of this binarism is to be found in Saussure’s
Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics 1916; translated into
English in 1959 and 1983). The original book of Saussure’s Cours, based on the
notes of his students, projects ‘semiology’, “a science which studies the role of signs
as part of social life” (1983, p. 15). This entails a study of signs which, rather than
just tracking the ways in which they have been used to refer to objects from one
epoch to the next, institutes a ‘synchronic’ interrogation of the very conditions upon
which signs operate. From the beginning, despite the call for a general sign science,
Saussure focused on the linguistic sign. This feature of communication he sees as a
“two-sided psychological entity” and not as a “link between a thing and a name, but
between a concept and a sound pattern” (1983, p. 66). Referring to the sound pattern
as the signifiant and the concept as the signifié, Saussure insisted that there was a
signifié bound to each signifiant but that the reasons for their binding was not natural
or pre-ordained. This is, for him, the most fundamental characteristic of the sign: that
the relation in it is arbitrary.
Saussure’s concomitant emphasis on the language system (langue) underlying sign
use derives precisely from the principle of arbitrariness. What binds this system is the
sum of differences that occur between linguistic signs, none of which can rely on a
natural process of ‘meaning’ but, rather, consist of the ‘values’ generated by each
other’s arbitrary relation between sound pattern and concept. As such, instances of
linguistic communication – parole – in all their richness and variegation, are not to be
analysed simply in terms of a semantic link that it might be assumed their individual
signs enjoy with the objects to which they refer but, rather, within the frame of a
relationship of difference to all the other linguistic signs in langue. Saussurean
semiology is not principally concerned with how signs indicate or communicate about
specific objects; instead, its focus is how regimes of communication, somewhat
removed from specific objects, are sustained and perpetuated.
Whereas Saussure continued the tradition of the two-sided sign, Peirce broke with this
line of thought and insisted on a triadic sign. The theoretical importance of this break
should not be underestimated, yet it was by no means without precedent. Its roots can
be discovered in Peirce’s profound knowledge of not just classical logic but also of
the Latin scholastic tradition. As with the technicalities of what was taken from
Saussure’s Cours, it is important to consider the mechanics of sign-hood inherited
from this tradition. The Latins took as part of their task the exegesis of the perspective
on signs emanating from the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. The most important of
these exegetes was John (sometimes ‘Jean’ or ‘Joao’) Poinsot: his ‘Tractatus de
Signis’ (2013 [1632]), nearly sixty years before Locke coined the term ‘semiotics’,
offers a realist foregrounding of the sign as the object of study to illuminate two
key states: mind-dependent being and mind-independent being. The Kantian idealist
notion of the “ding an sich”, so important for modern thought, posits an entity that is
unknowable (i.e. totally mind-independent being). Before Kant, though, Poinsot’s
Thomism offered the means to overcome the impasse of the knowable and the
unknowable by demonstrating how cultural reality in the human species is where the
differences between mind-independent and mind-dependent being become knowable
and distinguishable.
Deely, the scholar who rescued Poinsot from mere footnote status, demonstrates how
Poinsot defined an object as always an object of experience (an entity involving minddependence), definitionally distinct from a thing (a mind-independent entity). The
latter may be made an object by the thing being experienced; but, even then, through
the sensations it provokes, the feelings about them and its consequence, that thing is
never available ‘in full’ – it is only available through a sign (1994, pp. 11-22; cf.
2009). The sign is simultaneously of the order of mind-independent and minddependent being, no matter what futile attempts to bracket off one or the other form of
being might be made in an attempt to render the sign as either solely object or thing.
As Peirce noted “trying to peel off signs & get down to the real thing is like trying to
peel an onion and get down to the onion itself” (in Brent, 1993, p. 300 n. 84).
The Latin thought that informs contemporary semiotics was well-apprised of the
faults of representation, as evident in the concept of mind-dependent being (ens
rationis); but more importantly, it recognized, unlike semiology and much modern
thought, that representation is not the whole of the sign. For Poinsot and, later, for
Peirce, the sign needs to be understood as the entire relation of elements that
constitute it, rather than just the representational ‘relation’ between some ground and
some terminus. The real relation that constitutes the sign consists of ground, terminus
and ‘relation’ as a triad. The ‘relation of representation’ must be distinct from that of
‘signification by a sign in general’, must be merely a part of sign action, simply
because an object or terminus can represent another and also represent itself, whereas
it would be a contradiction for a sign to be a sign of itself. A sign is only a sign of
something if that something is other than the sign. Furthermore, Poinsot emphasized
that the relation in a sign is not so much suprasubjective as contextual: in one set of
circumstances the relation in a sign could be of the order of mind-independent being
(known as ens reale by the Latins), in another set it could be of mind-dependent being
(ens rationis).
The Latin heritage of sign study was relatively vaguely known by Peirce scholars,
including Jakobson, the ex-Russian Formalist, and Charles Morris, both of whom
were teachers and friends of Sebeok. The latter encouraged Deely’s recovery of the
scholastics from the late 1960s till the twenty-first century, but it was Sebeok himself
who was to demonstrate at length the broad importance for science of semiotics’
figuring of relations in the triadic sign across different domains and for different
species. Peirce posited a trichotomy consisting of a Sign or ‘Representamen’, an
Object and an ‘Interpretant’. The advance inherent in the triadic sign is that the
Interpretant does two jobs. Firstly, it sets up the sign relation: it is the establishment of
a sign configuration involving Representamen and Object. When a finger
(Representamen) points at something (Object), this is only a sign configuration if
somebody else makes the link between the pointing digit and the something that is
‘pointed to’. This making of the link is the Interpretant. If the finger pointed but was
placed behind its owner’s back, concealed from anyone else in that space, then there
is no sign configuration however much the finger points. Put another way, no
Interpretant is produced. The second feature of the Intrepretant consists in the way
that any person looking at what the finger points to is bound to produce another sign
(e.g. the finger points at the painting on the wall and the onlooker says: “Titian”). So
the Interpretant is another Representamen, “an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more
developed sign” (CP 2.228). The fact that the Interpretant becomes in itself a sign or
Representamen amounts to a sequence of an “interpretant becoming in turn a sign,
and so on ad infinitum” (CP 2.303). Eco (1976) concluded from this that the sign is
constituted by a chain; equally, it could be said that the sign thus exists in a network
of Interpretants (CP 1.339) whose bearing is determined by prevailing circumstances.
The sign is not so much suprasubjective, like a coded entity; rather, it is constituted in
a fashion that renders it wholly susceptible to contextual factors.
Set against the background of Peirce and the late Latin heritage, Sebeok’s semiotics
was sympathetic to research into the natural world without being naïve about the
relation of the sign and world. Emphatically, Sebeok inaugurated zoosemiotics in
1963, six years before he founded the IASS with Emile Benveniste. From the late
1970s onwards, he was responsible for a further reorientation of the sign in his
foundation of biosemiotics. Following his discovery of the 2nd German edition of the
Theoretical Biology of Jakob von Uexküll in 1976, Sebeok began to develop
semiotics (and biosemiotics) in Uexküll’s direction (see Sebeok 2001). The notion of
Umwelt, from von Uexküll, suggests that all species live in an ‘objective world’ that
is constructed out of their own signs, the latter being the result of their own signmaking and receiving capacities. Peirce had already stated that “A sign, or
representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some
respect or capacity” (CP 2.228). Moreover, the world of the ‘thing’ is only
apprehended by the sign – that is, any organism’s Umwelt is constituted by its own
sign-making capacity, its own semiosis facilitated by the sensory apparatus it
possesses whether it is a human or a mere tick. Yet, signs in an Umwelt have
considerable richness. A dog’s hearing, for example, has advantages specific to that
species; a fly’s antennae and visual organs, to take another example, invariably enable
it to swiftly avoid even the most deadly of rolled up newspapers. In sum, an Umwelt
offers an indispensable guide to reality which, while not comprehensive, is sufficient
to maintain the continued existence of specific species. There is thus a strong case for
asserting that the study of the vicissitudes of signs in different Umwelten, including
that of the human, and how such study sheds light on the human Umwelt lie at the
root of what contemporary semiotics is. From Sebeok’s rediscovery of Jakob von
Uexküll onwards, semiotics had a remit which involved a semiotics of plants
(‘phytosemiotics’), of fungi (‘mycosemiotics’) and of the 3.5 billion year old global
prokaryotic communication network within and between different bacterial cells
(‘microsemiotics, cytosemiotics’). Additionally, the higher organisms do not simply
traffic signs; they also harbour them, with a mass of signs enacting message transfer
nonverbally within the body (‘endosemiosis’ – the neural code, the genetic code, the
metabolic code, etc.).
Code in semiotics
The topic of biological codes also invokes the issue of ‘code’ in general as an integral
part of semiotics’ bequest to communication theory. However, closer scrutiny reveals
that this narrative is more complicated than might be anticipated. The term as it is
used in semiotics grows out of Saussure’s Cours and subsequent semiology. The
Cours, as promulgated and debated by Karcevskij, Jakobson, Bühler and Vološinov,
was extended by Louis Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen School of linguistics, for
whom the Saussurean dictum that “langue is a form and not a substance” was to be
taken to its logical conclusion and technically developed into a more systematic
semiology. At the root of this development was the understanding that, in spoken
discourse, langue (the language system underlying speech acts) was synonymous with
the code, while parole (the speech act) instantiated the code in a message. The
mapping of code/message onto langue/parole was chiefly carried out in the postSecond World War era of communication theory by Roman Jakobson. In both
couplets, an abstract, but tacit, system facilitated but also restricted discrete
embodiments of communication for sign users.
Yet, a tension inhered in semiotics’ invocation of ‘code’. Sebeok, for example, even
when developing zoosemiotics, proceeded with a concept of code drawn directly from
an information theory-inflected post-Saussurean linguistics. He figured code as a set
of ‘transformation rules’ known a priori by the addresser and addressee, made up of
“the atomic particles”, the “universal building blocks of language . . . ‘distinctive
features’” (1972, p. 86). Distinctive features were Jakobson’s base units of language,
sounds in speech more fundamental than Saussure’s phonemes and irreducible
beyond their binary status. As Sebeok continued his work on non-human
communication, he moved away from ‘fixed’ codes towards a flexible version of
coding. In his later writings Sebeok referred to a proliferation of ‘cultural’ and
‘natural’ codes - from those in specific film genres to those in the social world of cats,
ultimately treating the term ‘code’ merely as a synonym for ‘interpretant’ (see, for
example, 2001, pp. 80 and 191 n. 13) as part of a pluralistic conception of codes
which was coupled with an as yet unspecified determining role of the genetic master
code. In his final book, Sebeok (2001) repeatedly made reference to the five major
codes: the immune code, the genetic code, the metabolic code, the neural code and the
verbal code.
Earlier, semiotics had attempted to be more strict about codes. Eco elaborated on the
matter in the influential volume translated into English in 1976 as A Theory of
Semiotics. He considered four different phenomena:
a) a set of signals ruled by combinatory laws
b) a set of states conveyed by almost any kind of signal provided they reach the
destination in a form which becomes intelligible;
c) a set of behavioural responses at the destination (these can be independent of
how a) and b) are composed);
d) a rule coupling some items from the a) system with some from b) and c) (a
syntactic arrangement refers to a semantic configuration).
For Eco, only the rule in d) can really be called a code. However, he points out that
combinatory principles that feature in a), b) and c) are often taken for codes. This is
consistently the case when such phrases as ‘the legal code’, ‘code of practice’,
‘behavioural code’ are in such wide circulation. Yet, what Eco’s semiotics makes
clear for the study of communication is that ‘code’ should strictly be taken as a
‘holistic’ phenomenon in which a rule binds not just the sign-vehicle to the object to
which it refers but also binds it to any response that might arise irrespective of the
reference to the object becoming explicit. At most, a), b) and c) are to be taken as ‘scodes’ – systems or ‘structures’ that subsist independently of any communicative
purpose. They can be studied by information theory but they only command attention
from communication theory when they exist within a communicative rule or code, d)
(Eco, 1976, pp. 38-46).
Increasingly, semiotics has been compelled to be concerned with these so-called ‘scodes’. Partly, this is the result of the growing realization of the complexity of
contextualization of signs in culture – sometimes partaking of mind-dependence,
sometimes partaking of mind-independence. It is also a result of the upsurge in
investigations of semiosis in nature broadly. In particular, the concept of code duality
(Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, 2007, pp. 27) attendant on the insight that some codes –
digital ones - endure in the service of evolution while others – analogue - are transient
and/or mutable. Thus, there are codes for ‘action’ and codes for ‘life’. Action in a
lifespan is dominated by analogue signs, changeable and interpretable to different
degrees, with digital, genetic signalling not so susceptible. The common
understanding of code in the Saussurean/Jakobsonian sense persists in communication
theory – and in semiotics. In the latter, however, there has been growing recognition
of code duality.
The text
Alongside the rapid development of semiotics in the second part of the twentieth
century, code was already a component of information theory or communication
theory after Shannon and Weaver. In the preceding millennia it had evolved through
magic and divination to spawn the field of cryptography. So, the most enduring
original contribution of semiotics to communication theory is probably the former’s
formulation of textuality – in short, the concept of the ‘text’. The semiotic notion of
text stands between two polarities. On the one hand, there is the conception of
‘message’ in information theory which is concerned with the process of transmission
and for which any meaning that accrues is of no real consequence. On the other hand,
there is the belief in the ‘work’ or the opus which suffused the humanities and framed
messages in terms of authorial intent, richness of allusion and, often, the possibility of
full transmission or pure communication. Roland Barthes’ 1971 essay, ‘From work to
text’ (translated into English in 1977) is a pointed exemplar of this polarity. The idea
of the text can be found, also, in Propp’s study of folktales, then later in the work of
the structural anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss both of which adumbrated the possibility of
a disinterested analysis of literary and other works guided by a classificatory impulse
amidst bewildering heterogeneity. Text, “a discursive unit higher than or interior to
the sentence, yet still structurally different from it” (Barthes, 1981, p. 34), could be
summed up simply as ‘a string of signs’, neutralizing the overcoded, value-centric
concept of the literary work as well as, perhaps, the idea of a full, intentional
‘communication’. Juri Lotman stressed that, as an entity, the text is, in its nature, for
someone and can become for someone by inviting, in its very fabric, specific modes of
reading. This, of course, is not to say that a text is necessarily successful because it is
always accurately targeted and coded according to a consensus: “Non-understanding,
incomplete understanding, or misunderstanding are not side-products of the exchange
of communication but its very essence” (Lotman, 1974, p. 302). Some flavour of the
consanguinity of the idea of the text and communication theory is offered in
Marrone’s (2014, p. 24) observation that the former is “a theoretical option that
emphasizes the methodological procedures, whose aim is to bring to the surface the
multiple – rhetoric, stylistic, linguistic, etc. – forms whence the stream of meaning
originates”. Certainly, the ‘birth of the reader’ from the ‘text’ provided a further
semiotic model for communication and, especially, the study of the media.
The ‘textual turn’ and ‘media semiotics’
Because of the centrality of textuality to semiotics, a current of thought which gained
considerable traction in the humanities and the social sciences in the latter part of the
twentieth century became erroneously associated with semiotics. This was the
‘linguistic turn’, coined by Richard Rorty and coalescing various perspectives
including ones that later became prominent in Anglophone media studies. The idea
that knowledge is ‘constructed in discourse’ with humans’ apprehension of the world
amounting to a mere figment induced by figures in language, arose out of the
‘linguistic turn’ and (post-)structuralism. Yet it has often been associated with
semiotics, particularly where ‘representation’ is concerned. Introduced in its
recognizable form by, among others, Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1973, [1957]),
representation has occupied a privileged role in thinking about signification. Hall
(1997, p. 21) claims that “the meaning is not in the object, person or thing, nor is it in
the word… The meaning is constructed by the system of representation.”
Representation in this strict view, is a matter of ‘text in principle’ rather than the ‘text
in practice.’ Hall (1973), developing Eco, figured representation in terms of the text’s
giving birth to the reader. Drawing also on sociology, he suggested that apprehension
of representations in a text could be ‘dominant’, ‘negotiated’ or ‘oppositional’ – that
is, a reading position that accepts the instilled codes that dominate the media text, one
that accepts some of the codes but rejects or is unsure of others, or one that
strenuously rejects them. Effectively, this replays Lotman’s (1974) formulations on
levels of ‘understanding’, mentioned above. Nevertheless, Hall’s idea was to
influence a generation of researchers into media texts (Morley, Ang, Radway, Lull,
Hermes and others), also sparking a somewhat protracted debate about the active or
passive status of readers or media audiences was conceived. In the 1980s and 1990s,
‘media semiotics’ repeatedly staged this debate as a route to solving the orthodoxy
embedded in its approaches to representation, using the term ‘semiotics’ in general as
a whipping boy for text-based approaches.
Much of the debate of the role of the reader in ‘media semiotics’ derives from the
dated ideas in Barthes’ Mythologies (1973), particularly the concept of myth:
representation that are not a reflection of reality itself (nature) but a reflection of
history (culture). Myths, Barthes argued, are responsible for making ‘culture’ pass as
‘nature’ or for turning "the social, the cultural, the ideological, the historical into the
'natural'" (1973: 165) For example, in discussing the myth of the Romans in films,
Barthes states that “in Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, all the characters are wearing
fringes. Some have them curly, some straggly, some tufted, some oily, all of them well
combed, and the bald are not admitted, although there are plenty in Roman history”
(Barthes, 1973, p. 26) In short, Barthes underlines the discrepancy between myth
(Romans with a fringe) and reality (Romans who must have suffered hair loss and
thus no fringe). In ‘Myth today’, the final theory-based essay of Mythologies, Barthes
turns this amusing but simple observation into a complex linguistic argument,
invoking different levels of form, substance, plane of expression and plane of content
in the act of representation. At a stroke, Barthes turned semiotics’ ability to expose the
gap between illusion and reality into a party trick, co-opted by media studies, to
reveal the ‘truth’ behind ‘representation’:
The (…) sign, the fringe of Roman-ness (…) reveals a degraded spectacle,
which is equally afraid of simple reality and of total artifice. For although it is a
good thing if a spectacle is created to make the world more explicit, it is both
reprehensible and deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified (Barthes,
1973, p. 27).
Naturalised in media studies, this take on semiotics reduces signification to
representation. It singularly fails to address the question of why
audiences/readers/human beings willingly and persistently allow themselves to ‘get
fooled’ in watching movies that present false Romans or characters or settings that are
equally fictitious.
Yet, the representational and dominant/negotiated/oppostional co-option of semiotics
for addressing the text/reader relationship was rapidly coming into question with the
advent of post-internet media in the early twenty-first century, especially Web 2.0.
These latter putatively entail more demonstrable activity (interactivity, for example)
which suggest that the text/audience relationship can once more be measured in terms
of use (click-throughs, favourites folders, history, for example) and, arguably, involve
a greater concealment of affective or emotional dispositions in communication. Along
with semiotics proper, post-internet media called into question older takes on
representation. ‘Representation’ assumes that human semiosis is mind-dependent (ens
rationis), constantly preventing humans from gaining anything other than a
tantalising glimpse of the mind-independent (ens reale) universe. Yet, as Deely is at
pains to stress in the wake of Poinsot, the sign fluctuates between both forms of
dependency according to context. One might add that implicit in the contextuality of
the sign is the sharing of some parts of signhood across the world of humans, other
animals and plants, the variegation of semiosis being so extensive that
‘representation’ does not really come close to capturing it. Ultimately, Deely (2009, p.
116) concludes that “the social construction of reality, no doubt, occurs in the political
order” and that “Reality as we experience it is neither purely objective [in the sense of
things experienced as objects in an Umwelt] nor purely subjective nor purely
intersubjective, but rather a constantly shifting mixture and proportion of all three not
at all easy (perhaps not even fully possible) to keep complete track of”. As a
statement about semiosis aligned with the biosemiotic idea of Umwelt, this
demonstrates how semiotics does not really envisage power in the masking of reality
with illusion. Rather, it proceeds from humans’ suspension in a universe of changing
relations, sometimes ‘illusory’, sometimes ‘real’; sometimes reliable enough to
preserve members of a species, sometimes not. Such fluctuation and change entails
that humans are not forever barred from reality, as the theory of representation insists;
nor are they able to easily access the road to reality as adopting the theory of
representation seems to imply. Semiotics, instead, reveals that humans are charged
with the task of enacting a semiotic awareness appropriate to the vagaries of relation.
Semiotics is slippery. It has not been successfully institutionalized in the same way as
some of its sub-areas have in the global academy – for example, linguistics. It has its
own history, but this is not an institutional history. It has numerous academic journals
and national and international associations, as well as book series; but it has relatively
few professors appointed with the title ‘Semiotics’. It has numerous schools, many of
them transient, that define semiotics in various ways subject to diverse narratives.
Despite this slipperiness, semiotics can be grasped with reference to the most catholic
co-ordinates: a theory of semiosis, encompassing all modes of signification among all
living things, an enduring pre-Socratic practice featuring key texts such as the work
of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce and Thomas A. Sebeok, the
latter of whom made great strides to formalise this disciplinary field’s attempt to
explore the gap between illusion and reality. Its development in modern academic life
has been concurrent, and often convergent with, communication theory.
SEE ALSO: Anthropology; Bakhtin, Mikhail; Barthes, Roland; Bateson, Gregory;
Cultural studies; Cybernetics; Derrida, Jacques; Discourse theory; Dissemination;
Information theory; Jakobson, Roman; Lévi-Strauss, Claude; Linguistics; Meaning;
Myth; Narrative; Peirce, Charles S.; Post-structuralism; Pragmatics; Semantics;
Signs, symbols; Medium Structuralism; Text; Traditions of communication theory
References and further reading
Barthes, R. (1973). Mythologies. trans. A. Lavers, London: Paladin.
Barthes, R. (1977). From ‘Work’ to ‘Text, In Image – Music – Text. (ed. and trans.) S.
Heath, (pp. 155-64), London: Fontana.
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Biography
Paul Cobley, Professor in Language and Media at Middlesex University, is the author
of a number of books, including Narrative 2nd edn (2014). He co-edits Social
Semiotics, and is associate editor of Cybernetics and Human Knowing.
He is co-series editor (with Kalevi Kull) of Semiotics, Communication and Cognition
and (with Peter J. Schulz) of the multi-volume Handbooks of Communication
Sciences. He was elected President of the International Association for Semiotic
Studies in 2014, was made 9th Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of
America in the same year and is secretary of the International Society for Biosemiotic
Studies.