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Semiotics: A Brief Overview
It is…possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of life…We shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeîon,"sign"). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them.- Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Semiotics emerged from the teachings of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, in the early twentieth century. Originally formulated under the term semiology, Saussure's theory of language as a system of signs influenced many later currents of thought, including the anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, and the social mythology of Roland Barthes. [11]Each of these writers shared an interest in understanding how products of human culture, from languages to funeral rituals to games, could produce meaning. In a general sense, semiotics is the study of how meanings are made. The question of what signs represent, or denote, is of central concern to the field. If a high society dinner party was framed as a semiotic system, for example, we would be interested in understanding the meaning of the different elements that make up the dinner party. We could look at the way the table-settings denote a space for eating. We could look at how the presence of fine china or silverware represents the idea of social class, or the representation of status in the arrangement of chairs around the table.We might look at how the event represents concepts such as "elegance,"power,"high-society," or "fine dining," or reference the idea of eating as an activity of survival, sensual pleasure, anxiety, or community. We might even consider what the act of attending the event represents or what it means to those who were not invited. Each of these perspectives contributes to our understanding of the dinner party as a system of meaning, one comprised of signs that refer to things familiar to us from the world "out there." But what do we mean when we say "sign"? Semiotically speaking, people use signs to designate objects or ideas. Because a sign represents something other than itself, we take the representation as the meaning of the sign. The smell of smoke (sign) represents the concept of "fire," for example, or the tallest piece in Chess denotes the "King." In the game Rock-Paper-Scissors, an outstretched hand means "paper," a fist means "rock," and two fingers spread in a V-shape means "scissors." Our capacity to understand that signs represent is at the heart of semiotic study. Similarly, understanding that signs mean "something to somebody" is at the core of any design practice. A graphic designer, for example, uses typographic signs (letterforms) representing words to design a book; a fashion designer uses silk as a sign representing "beauty" or "femininity" in a new spring line; a game designer uses the classes of Fighter, Wizard, Thief, and Cleric in a fantasy role-playing game to denote four kinds of player-characters within a game.Thus, signs are the most basic unit of semiotic study and can be understood as markers of meaning. As David Chandler notes, We do not live among and relate to physical objects and events. We live among and relate to systems of signs with meaning. We don't sit on a complex structure of wood, we sit on a stool. The fact that we refer to it as a STOOL means that it is to be sat on; it is not a coffee table. In our interactions with others we don't use random gestures, we gesture our courtesy, our pleasure, our incomprehension, our disgust. The objects in our environment, the gestures and words we use, derive their meanings from the sign systems to which they belong. [12]
[11]Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller,"Laws of the Letter." In Design, Writing, Research: Writing on Graphic Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), p. 55.[12]Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners. <www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/semioticl.>
