What is Semiotics?, Definition of Semiotics, History of Semiotics, Importance of Semiotics, Application of Semiotics, Branches of Semiotics
I. Prologue
Semiotic, also called semiotic studies or (in the Saussurean tradition) semiology, is the study of signs and signs processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:
Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example, Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine areas belonging also to the natural sciences – such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics or zoosemiosis.
Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols. More precisely, syntactics deals with the "rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences." Charles Morris adds that semantics deals with the relation of signs to their designata and the objects which they may or do denote; and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs.
II. Terminology
The term, which was spelled semeiotics, derives from the Greek σημειωτικός, (sēmeiōtikos), “observant of signs” (from σημεῖον – sēmeion, “a sign, a mark”) and it was first used in English by Henry Stubbes in a very precise sense to denote the branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs, John Locke used the terms semeiotike and semeiotics in Book 4, Chapter 21 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Here he explains how science can be divided into three parts:
All that can fall within the compass of human understanding, being either, first, the nature of things, as they are in themselves, their relations, and their manner of operation: or, secondly, that which man himself ought to do, as a rational and voluntary agent, for the attainment of any end, especially happiness: or, thirdly, the ways and means whereby the knowledge of both the one and the other of these is attained and communicated; I think science may be divided properly into these three sorts. - Locke, 1823/1963, p. 174
Locke then elaborates on the nature of this third category, naming it Σημειωτικη (Semeiotike) and explaining it as "the doctrine of signs" in the following terms:
Nor is there any thing to be relied upon in Physick, but an exact knowledge of medicinal physiology (founded on observation, not principles), semiotics, method of curing, and tried (not excogitated, not commanding) medicines. - Locke, 1823/1963, 4.21.4, p. 175
In the nineteenth century, Charles Sanders Peirce defined what he termed "semiotic" (which he sometimes spelled as "semeiotic") as the "quasi-necessary, or formal doctrine of signs", which abstracts "what must be the characters of all signs used by an intelligence capable of learning by experience", and which is philosophical logic pursued in terms of signs and sign processes. Charles Morris followed Peirce in using the term "semiotic" and in extending the discipline beyond human communication to animal learning and use of signals.
Ferdinand de Saussure, however, founded his semiotics, which he called semiology, in the social sciences:
It is possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeîon, 'sign'). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge. - Cited in Chandler's "Semiotics For Beginners", Introduction.
III. Formulations
Semioticians classify signs or sign systems in relation tto the way they are transmitted (see modality). This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of the codes that may be movements they make to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothes they wear. To coin a word to refer to a thing (see lexical words), the community must agree on a simple meaning (a denotative meaning) within their language. But that word wan transmits that meaning only within the language’s grammatical structures and codes (see syntax and semantics). Codes also represent the values of the culture, and are able to add new shades of connotation to every aspect of life.
To explain the relationship between semiotics and communication studies, communication is defined as the process of transferring data from a source to a receiver. Hence, communication theorists construct models based on codes, media, and context to explain to the biology, psychology, and mechanics involved. Both disciplines also recognize that the technical process cannot be separated from the fact that the receiver must decode the data, i.e. be able to distinguish the data as salient and make meaning out of it. This implies that there is a necessary overlap between semiotics and communication. Indeed, many of the concepts are shared, although in each field the emphasis is different. In messages and meanings: an introduction to semiotics, Marcel Danesi (1994) suggested that semioticians’s priorities were to study signification first and communication second. A more extreme view is offered by Jean-Jaques Nattiez (1987;trans. 1990: 16), who, as a musicologist, considered the theoretical study of communication irrelevant to his application of semiotics.
Semiotics differs from linguistics in that it generalizes the definition of a sign to the encompass signs in any medium or sensory modality. Thus it broadens the range of the sign systems and sign relations, and extends the definition of language in what amounts to its widest analogical or metaphorical sense. Peirce’s definition of the term “semiotic” as the study of necessary features of signs also has the effect of distinguishing the discipline from linguistics as the study of the contingent features that the world’s languages happen to have acquired in the course of human evolution.
Perhaps more difficult is the distinction between semiotics and the philosophy of language. In sense, the difference lies between separate traditions rather than subjects does not match the separation between analytic and continental philosophy. On a closer look, there may be found some differences regarding subjects. Philosophy of language pays more attention to natural languages or to languages in general, while semiotics is deeply concerned about non-linguistic signification. Philosophy of language also bears a stronger connection to linguistics, while semiotics is closer to some of the humanities (including literary theory) and to cultural anthropology.
Semiosis or semeiosis is the process that forms meaning from any organism’s apprehension of the world through signs. Scholar who have talked about semiosis in their sub-theories of semiotics include C.S. Peirce, John Deely, and Umberto Eco.
IV. History
The importance of signs and signification has been recognized throughout much of the history of philosophy, and in psychology as well. Plato and Aristotle both explored the relationship between signs and the world, and Augustineconsidered the nature of the sign within a conventional system. These theories have had a lasting effect in Western philosophy, especially through Scholastic philosophy. More recently, Umberto Eco, in his Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, has argued that semiotic theories are implicit in the work of most, perhaps all, major thinkers. Early theorists in this area include Charles W. Morris. Max Black attributes the work of Bertrand Russell as being seminal.
A. History of semiotics according to glossary of literary term
At the end of nineteenth century Charles Sanders Pierce, the American philosopher, described a study that he called “semiotic,” and in his Course in General Linguistics (1915) the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure independently proposed a science that he called “semiology.” Since then semiotics and semiology have become alternative names of the systematic study of signs, as these function in all areas of human experience. The consideration of signs (conveyors of meaning) is not limited to explicit systems of communication such as language, the Morse code, and traffic signs and signals; a great diversity of other human activities and productions-our bodily postures and gestures, the social rituals we perform, the kinds of clothes we wear, the meals we serve, the buildings we inhabit, the objects we deal with-convey common meanings to members who participate in a particular cultutre, and so can be analyzed as signs which function in diverse kinds of signifying systems. Although the study of language (the use of specifically verbal signs) is technically regarded as only one branch of the general science of semiotics, linguistics, the highly developed science of language, in fact has for the most part supplied the basic concepts and methods that a semiotician applies to the study of other social sign-system.
C.S. Peirce distinguished three classes of signs, defined in terms of the kind of relation between a signifying item and that which it signifies:
1) An icon of relation functions as a sign by means of inherent similarities, or shared features whit what it signifies; examples are the similarity of a portrait to the person it depicts, or the similarity of a map to the geographical area it stands for.
2) An index is a sign which bears a natural relation of cause or of effect to what it signifies; thus, smoke is a sign indicating fire, and a pointing weathervane indicates the direction of the wind.
3) In the symbol (or in a less ambiguous term, the “sign proper”), the relation between the signifying item and what it signifies is not a natural one, but entirely a matter of social convention. The gesture of shaking hands, for example, in some cultures is a conventional sign of greeting of parting, and a red traffic light conventionally signifies “Stop!” The major and most complex examples of this third type of purely conventional sign, however, are the words that constitute a language.
Saussure introduced many of the terms and concepts exploited by current semioticians; see Saussure under linguistics in modern criticism. Most important are the following:
1) A sign consists of two inseparable components or aspects, the signifier (in language, a set of speech sounds, or of marks on a page) and the signified (the concept, or idea, which is the meaning of the sign).
2) A verbal sign, in Saussure’s term, is “arbitrary.” That is, with the minor exception of onomatopoeia (words which we perceive as similar to the sounds they signify), there is no inherent, or natural, connection between a verbal signifier and what it signifies.
3) The identity of all elements of a language, including its words, their component speech sounds, and the concepts the words signify, are not determined by “positive qualities,” or objective features in these elements themselves, but by differences, or a network of relationships, consisting of distinction and oppositions from other speech sounds, other words, and other signified that obtain only within a particular linguistic system.
4) The aim of linguistics, or of any other semiotic enterprise, is to regard the parole (a single verbal utterance, or a particular use of a sign or set of signs) as only a manifestation of the langue (that is, the general system of implicit differentiations and rules of combination which underlie and make possible a particular use of signs),
The focus of semiotic interest, accordingly, is not in interpreting a particular instance of signification but in establishing the general signifying system that each particular instance manifests.
Modern semiotics, like structuralism, has developed in France under the aegis of Saussure, so that many semioticians are also structuralists. They deal with any set of social phenomena or productions as “texts”; that is, as constituted by self-sufficient, self-ordering, hierarchical structures of differentially determined signs, codes, and rules of combination and transformation which make the texts “meaningful” to members of a particular society who are component in that signifying system. (See structuralist criticism.) Claude Lévi Strauss, in the 1960s and later, inaugurated the application of semiotics to cultural anthropology, and also established the foundations of French structuralism in general, by using Saussure’s linguistics as a model for analyzing, in primitive societies, a great variety of phenomena and practices, which he treated as quasi-languages that manifest the structures of an underlying signifying system. These include kinship systems, totemic systems, ways of preparing food, myths, and prelogical modes of interpreting the world.
Jacques Lacan has applied semiotics to Freudian psychoanalysis-interpreting the unconscious, for example, as (like language) a structure of signs (see Lacan under psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism). Michel Foucault developed a mode of semiotic analysis to deal with the changing medical interpretations of symptoms of disease, the diverse ways of identifying, classifying, and treating insanity, and the altering conceptions of human sexuality (see under poststructuralism). Ronald Barthes, explicitly applying Saussurean principles and methods, has written semiotic analyses of the constituens and codes of the differential sign-systems in advertisements which describe and promote women’s fashions, as well as analyses of many “bourgeois myths” about the world which, he claims, are exemplified in such social sign-system as professional wrestling matches, children’s toys, cookery, and striptease. (See his Mythologies, trans, 1972.) Barthes was also in his earlier writings a major exponent of structuralist criticism, which deals with a literary text as ”a second-order semiotic system”; that is, it views a literary text as employing the first-order semiotic system of language to form a secondary semiotic structure, in accordance with specifically literary system of conventions and codes.
V. Some Important Semioticians
a) Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), a noted logician who founded philosophical pragmatism, defined semiosis as an irreducibly triadic process wherein something, as an object, logically determines or influences something as a sign to determine or influence something as an interpretation or interpretant, itself a sign, thus leading to further interpretants. Semiosis is logically structured to perpetuate itself. The object can be quality, fact, rule, or even fictional (Hamlet), and can be (1) immediate to the sign, the object as represented in the sign, or (2) dynamic, the object as it really is, on which the immediate object is founded. The interpretant can be (1) immediate to the sign, all that the sign immediately expresses, such as a word's usual meaning; or (2) dynamic, such as a state of agitation; or (3) final or normal, the ultimate ramifications of the sign about its object, to which inquiry taken far enough would be destined and with which any actual interpretant can at most coincide. His semiotic covered not only artificial, linguistic, and symbolic signs, but also semblances such as kindred sensible qualities, and indices such as reactions. He came circa 1903[16] to classify any sign by three interdependent trichotomies, intersecting to form ten (rather than 27) classes of sign.[17] Signs also enter into various kinds of meaningful combinations; Peirce covered both semantic and syntactical issues in his speculative grammar. He regarded formal semiotic as logic per seand part of philosophy; as also encompassing study of arguments (hypothetical, deductive, and inductive) and inquiry's methods including pragmatism; and as allied to but distinct from logic's pure mathematics. For a summary of Peirce's contributions to semiotics, see Liszka (1996) or Atkin (2006).
b) Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the "father" of modern linguistics, proposed a dualistic notion of signs, relating the signifier as the form of the word or phrase uttered, to the signified as the mental concept. It is important to note that, according to Saussure, the sign is completely arbitrary, i.e. there was no necessary connection between the sign and its meaning. This sets him apart from previous philosophers such as Plato or the Scholastics, who thought that there must be some connection between a signifier and the object it signifies. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure himself credits the American linguist William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) with insisting on the arbitrary nature of the sign. Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign has also influenced later philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard. Ferdinand de Saussure coined the term semiologie while teaching his landmark "Course on General Linguistics" at the University of Geneva from 1906–11. Saussure posited that no word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a "signifier," i.e. the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the "signified," or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued "sign." Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts.
c) Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) studied the sign processes in animals. He borrowed the German word for 'environment', Umwelt, to describe the individual's subjective world, and he invented the concept of functional circle (Funktionskreis) as a general model of sign processes. In his Theory of Meaning (Bedeutungslehre, 1940), he described the semiotic approach tobiology, thus establishing the field that is now called biosemiotics.
d) Valentin Voloshinov (1895–1936) was a Soviet/Russian linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology. Written in the late 1920s in the USSR, Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (tr.: Marksizm i Filosofiya Yazyka) developed a counter-Saussurean linguistics, which situated language use in social process rather than in an entirely decontexualized Saussurean langue.
e) Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) developed a formalist approach to Saussure's structuralist theories. His best known work is Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, which was expanded in Résumé of the Theory of Language, a formal development of glossematics, his scientific calculus of language.
f) Charles W. Morris (1901–1979). In his 1938 Foundations of the Theory of Signs, he defined semiotics as grouping the triad syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Syntax studies the interrelation of the signs, without regard to meaning. Semantics studies the relation between the signs and the objects to which they apply. Pragmatics studies the relation between the sign system and its human (or animal) user. Unlike his mentor George Herbert Mead, Morris was a behaviorist and sympathetic to the Vienna Circle positivism of his colleague Rudolf Carnap. Morris was accused by John Dewey[18] of misreading Peirce.
g) Thure von Uexküll (1908–2004), the "father" of modern psychosomatic medicine, developed a diagnostic method based on semiotic and biosemiotic analyses.
h) Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was a French literary theorist and semiotician. He would often critique pieces of cultural material to expose how bourgeois society used them to impose its values upon others. For instance, the portrayal of wine drinking in French society as a robust and healthy habit would be a bourgeois ideal perception contradicted by certain realities (i.e. that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiotics useful in conducting these critiques. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were second-order signs, or connotations. A picture of a full, dark bottle is a sign, a signifier relating to a signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage – wine. However, the bourgeois take this signified and apply their own emphasis to it, making ‘wine’ a new signifier, this time relating to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing wine. Motivations for such manipulations vary from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo. These insights brought Barthes very much in line with similar Marxist theory.
i) Juri Lotman (1922–1993) was the founding member of the Tartu-Estonia (or Tartu-Moscow) Semiotic School. He developed a semiotic approach to the study of culture and established a communication model for the study of text semiotics. He also introduced the concept of the semiosphere. Among his Moscow colleagues were Vladimir Toporov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, and Boris Uspensky.
j) Umberto Eco (1932–present) made a wider audience aware of semiotics by various publications, most notably A Theory of Semiotics and his novel, The Name of the Rose, which includes applied semiotic operations. His most important contributions to the field bear on interpretation, encyclopedia, and model reader. He has also criticized in several works (A theory of semiotics, La struttura assente, Le signe, La production de signes) the "iconism" or "iconic signs" (taken from Peirce's most famous triadic relation, based on indexes, icons, and symbols), to which he purposes four modes of sign production: recognition, ostension, replica, and invention.
k) Eliseo Verón (1935–present) developed his "Social Discourse Theory" inspired in the Peircian conception of "Semiosis".
l) The Mu Group (Groupe µ) (founded 1967) developed a structural version of rhetorics, and the visual semiotics.
m) Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001), a student of Charles W. Morris, was a prolific and wide-ranging American semiotician. Though he insisted that animals are not capable of language, he expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling and communication systems, thus raising some of the issues addressed by philosophy of mind and coining the term zoosemiotics. Sebeok insisted that all communication was made possible by the relationship between an organism and the environment it lives in. He also posed the equation between semiosis (the activity of interpreting signs) and life – the view that has further developed by Copenhagen-Tartu biosemiotic school.
n) Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992) developed a structural version of semiotics named generative semiotics, trying to shift the focus of discipline from signs to systems of signification. His theories develop the ideas of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
VI. Current Applications
Applications of semiotics include:
· It represents a methodology for the analysis of texts regardless of modality. For these purposes, "text" is any message preserved in a form whose existence is independent of both sender and receiver;
· It can improve ergonomic design in situations where it is important to ensure that human beings can interact more effectively with their environments, whether it be on a large scale, as in architecture, or on a small scale, such as the configuration of instrumentation for human use.
In some countries, its role is limited to literary criticism and an appreciation of audio and visual media, but this narrow focus can inhibit a more general study of the social and political forces shaping how different media are used and their dynamic status within modern culture. Issues of technological determinism in the choice of media and the design of communication strategies assume new importance in this age of mass media. The use of semiotic methods to reveal different levels of meaning and, sometimes, hidden motivations has led some like Yale's Harold Bloom to demonise elements of the subject as Marxist, nihilist, etc. (e.g. critical discourse analysis in Postmodernism anddeconstruction in Post-structuralism).
Publication of research is both in dedicated journals such as Sign Systems Studies, established by Juri Lotman and published by Tartu University Press; Semiotica, founded by Thomas A. Sebeok and published by Mouton de Gruyter;Zeitschrift für Semiotik; European Journal of Semiotics; Versus (founded and directed by Umberto Eco), et al.; The American Journal of Semiotics; and as articles accepted in periodicals of other disciplines, especially journals oriented toward philosophy and cultural criticism. The major semiotic book series "Semiotics, Communication, Cognition", published by De Gruyter Mouton (series editors Paul Cobley and Kalevi Kull) replaces the former "Approaches to Semiotics" (over 120 volumes) and "Approaches to Applied Semiotics" (series editor Thomas A. Sebeok). Since 1980 the Semiotic Society of America has produced an annual conference series: Semiotics: The Proceedings of the Semiotic Society of America.
VII. Branches
Semiotics has sprouted a number of subfields, including but not limited to the following:
- Biosemiotics is the study of semiotic processes at all levels of biology, or a semiotic study of living systems.
- Semiotic anthropology
- Cognitive semiotics is the study of meaning-making by employing and integrating methods and theories developed in the cognitive sciences. This involves conceptual and textual analysis as well as experimental investigations. Cognitive semiotics was initially developed at the Center for Semiotics at Aarhus University (Denmark), with an important connection with the Center of Functionally Integrated Neuroscience (CFIN) at Aarhus Hospital. Amongst the prominent cognitive semioticians arePer Aage Brandt, Svend Østergaard, Peer Bundgård, Frederik Stjernfelt, Mikkel Wallentin, Kristian Tylén, Riccardo Fusaroli and Jordan Zlatev.
- Computational semiotics attempts to engineer the process of semiosis, say in the study of and designs for Human-Computer interaction or to mimic aspects of human cognition through artificial intelligence and knowledge representation.
- Cultural and literary semiotics examines the literary world, the visual media, the mass media, and advertising in the work of writers such as Roland Barthes, Marcel Danesi, and Juri Lotman.
- Design Semiotics or Product Semiotics is the study of the use of signs in the design of physical products. Introduced by Rune Monö while teaching Industrial Design at the Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden.
- Film Semiotics is the study of the various codes and signs of film and how they are understood. See the works of Christian Metz.
- Law and Semiotics. One of the more accomplished publications in this field is the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law.
- Music semiology "There are strong arguments that music inhabits a semiological realm which, on both ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels, has developmental priority over verbal language." (Middleton 1990, p. 172) See Nattiez (1976, 1987, 1989), Stefani (1973, 1986), Baroni (1983), and Semiotica (66: 1–3 (1987)).
- Gregorian chant semiology is a current avenue of palaeographical research in Gregorian chant which is revising the Solesmes school of interpretation.
- Organisational semiotics is the study of semiotic processes in organizations. It has strong ties to Computational semiotics and Human-Computer Interaction.
- Social semiotics expands the interpretable semiotic landscape to include all cultural codes, such as in slang, fashion, and advertising. See the work of Roland Barthes, Michael Halliday, Bob Hodge, and Christian Metz.
- Structuralism and post-structuralism in the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, etc.
- Theatre Semiotics extends or adapts semiotics onstage. Key theoricians include Keir Elam.
- Urban semiotics.
- Visual semiotics – a subdomain of semiotics that analyses visual signs. See also visual rhetoric.
- Semiotics of Photography.
VIII. Pictorial Semiotics
Pictorial Semiotics is intimately connected to art history and theory. It has gone beyond them both in at least one fundamental way, however. While art history has limited its visual analysis to a small number of pictures which qualify as "works of art," pictorial semiotics has focused on the properties of pictures more generally. This break from traditional art history and theory—as well as from other major streams of semiotic analysis—leaves open a wide variety of possibilities for pictorial semiotics. Some influences have been drawn from phenomenological analysis, cognitive psychology, and structuralist and cognitivist linguistics, and visual anthropology/sociology.
IX. Semiotics of Food
Food has been one traditional topic of choice in relating semiotic theory because it is extremely accessible and easily relatable to the average individual’s life.
Semiotics is the study of sign processes when conducted individually or in groups and how these sign processes give insight as to how meaning is enabled and also understood.
Food is said to be semiotic because it transforms meaning with preparation. Food that is eaten by a wild animal raw from a carcass is obviously different in meaning when compared to a food that is prepared by humans in a kitchen to represent a cultural dish.
Food can also be said to be symbolic of certain social codes. “If food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across boundaries”.
Food is a semiotic regardless of how it is prepared. Whether food is prepared with precision in a fine dining restaurant, picked from a dumpster, plucked, devoured, or even consumed by a wild animal, meaning can always be extracted from the way a certain food has been prepared and the context in which it is served.
X. Semiotics or Symbolic according to Julia Kristeva
A crucial part of Kristeva’s thought depends upon the distinction between two distinct linguistic forces – “two modalities […] within the same signifying process that constitutes language” – the semiotics and the symbolic (Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 23-4; emphasis in Kristeva (and among her commentators) as the more radical, unknowable, artistically productive modality, in fact neither language nor subjectivity can ever be “purely” semiotic or symbolic. While the fascinating “nonverbal signifying systems” Kristeva examines (such as primary narcissism or abjection, or even music) are “constructed exclusively on the basis of the semiotic,” she insists that “this exclusivity is realive.” Because “the subject is both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he produces can be either ‘exclusively’ semiotic or ‘exclusively’ symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both” (24; emphasis Kristeva’s).
The semiotic and the symbolic function, “synchronically within the signifying process of the subject himself.” In a narrowly archaeological sense, nevertheless, we could say that the semiotic comes first. Psychoanalytically, it is associated with the “primary processes,” the drives, the unconscious logic of condensation and displacement, as well as the workings of the body, rhythms, and sound (25). The symbolic, by contrast, is the “social” domain of signification: science, logic, the law “established through the objective constraints of biological (including sexual) differences and concrete, historical family structures” (29). Closely related to both jouissanceand the chora, it cannot be represented in terms of the symbolic.
Arguably, feminist theory’s primary interest in Kristeva stemmed from the gendered parental dynamics she has associated with the semiotic or symbolic relationship. The semiotic, a kind of language before language, is closely related to the mother. Opposed to the maternal semiotic, the symbolic finds its origin in the father, or more accurately, the phallus; the symbolic introduces a rift in the subject that separates subject from mother, thus making possible the formation of the ego. Lacan, identifying the unconscious with just this process of the separation and ego-formation, revolutionizes the unconscious by calling it symbolic. The ego, narcissism, and language are all symbolic operations. It is in conflict with the symbolic that phenomena such as repression, abjection, and fear often arise. While critics are often divided about Kristeva’s supposed privileging of one domain or the other (some accuse her of essentializing or overly valorizing a stereotypically “feminine” semiotic; others accuse her of working too heavily in the thrall of the symbolic), Kristeva has insisted upon their dynamic interpendence throughout her career; each realizes itself through the other, much in the way that the ego achieves self-awareness through narcissism in kristeva’s analysis of love in Tales of Love. Kristeva shrewdly analyzes the semiotic in the early pages of Polylogue (pp. 14-50), as well as in Revolution in Poetic Language (pp. 19-90).
XI. Semiotics and Globalization
Present research found that, as airline industry brandings grow and become more international, their logos become more symbolic and less iconic. The iconicity and symbolism of a sign depends on the cultural convention and are on that ground in relation with each other. If the cultural convention has greater influence on the sign, the sign get more symbolic value.
XII. Main institusion
A world organisation of semioticians – the International Association for Semiotic Studies, with its journal Semiotica – was established in 1969. The larger research centers together with extensive teaching program include the Semiotics Departments of Tartu University, Aarhus University, and Bologna University.
Conclusion
In the plural, semiotics refers to the ‘science of signs’ – systematic codes of representation. Julia Kristeva, however has coined the term ‘the Semiotic’ to refer a mode in language. Language, he says consists of the Symbolic (derived fron Lacan), the linguistic real of transparency, paraphrasability, conformity, and power. The semiotics is the pre-linguistic residue of language, made up of sounds, rhythms, and the babbling incoherence of the child, the language of poetry and the language of psychosis. It is not precisely meaningless, but it cannot be subsumed in the Symbolic. The Semiotic pulses against Symbolic language, making it mean both more and less than it intends.
References
Julian Wolfreys, Ruth Robbins, and Kenneth Womack, Key Concepts in Literary Theory; 2002, Edinburgh University Press, Ltd, Edinburgh.
Megan Becker-Leckrone, Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory; 2005, Palgrave Macmillan, Ltd, New York.
M.H. Abrams, Glossary of Literary Term; 1999, Earl McPeek, USA.
