(Taken from Chandler’s Book) SEMIOTICS › files › 2013 › 11 › SIGNS...•Signifiers and signifieds are part of the sign system signified are socially constructed •Peirce

SIGNS AND THINGS (Taken from Chandler’s Book)

SEMIOTICS

Semiotics > textual analysis

a philosophical stance in relation to the nature of signs, representation and reality

- reality always involves representation

- signs are involved in the construction of

reality

semiotics a form of philosophy.

• Semioticians the feature of signs is that they are treated by their users as ‘standing for’ or representing other things (p 60).

• Naïve realist

words simply mirror objects in an external world (p 60) ‘words are only names for things’,

Isomorphism one to one correspondent between word and referent

Nomenclature item by item naming things

Naming Things

• As Saussure noted, if words were simply a nomenclature for a pre-existing set of things in the world, translation from one language to another would be easy. Is it the fact?

• In fact languages differ in how they categorize the world – the signified in one language do not neatly correspond to those in another.

• Within a language, many words may refer to ‘the same thing’ but reflect different evaluations of it.

Referentiality

• Saussure’s model of the sign involves no direct reference to reality outside the sign.

• In linguistics, ‘it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object’ perception

• Signifiers and signifieds are part of the sign system signified are socially constructed

• Peirce reality can only be known via signs referents

• Modality = Reality

• Peirce modality refers to the truth value of a sign

• Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress: ‘modality refers to the status, authority and reliability of a message, to its ontological status, or to its value as truth or fact’ (p 65)

• Interpreters make modality judgements about sense of a text, drawing on their knowledge of the world and of the medium

Modality

• ‘Modality markers’ : refer to the plausibility, reliability, credibility, truth, accuracy or facticity of texts within a given genre as representations of some recognizable reality.

• Among Peirce’s three modes of sign, symbol

has the lowest modality compared to other two. Why?

• Modality judgments involve comparisons of

textual representations with models drawn from the everyday world and with models based on the genre

The Word is Not the Thing • Construction of reality a representation is

more than merely a reproduction of that which it represents what about photo?

• The most realistic representation may also symbolically or metaphorically ‘stand for’ something else entirely.

• Alfred Korzybski, the founder of a movement known as ‘general semantics’, declared that ‘the map is not the territory’ and that ‘the word is not the thing’ go to page 70

• ‘A map’ is of a higher (more general) logical type than ‘the territory’, and linguistic representation in particular lends itself to this process of abstraction page 72

• Semiotics and Freud page 73

• Algirdas Greimas:

‘signification is . . . nothing but . . . Transposition from one level of language to another, from one language to a different language, and meaning is nothing but the possibility of such transcoding’.

• A signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified.

• Such signifiers mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean Shakespeare

• In such a state of radical disconnection between signifier and signified, a sign only means that it means.

Empty / Floating Signifiers

• Peirce signs always refer to other signs, and there is no final sign referring only to itself.

• Saussure the meaning of signs derives from how they differ from each other

• Jean Baudrillard

interprets many representations as a means

of concealing the absence of reality;

“simulacra” (or copies without originals).

• These would be the successive phases of the image: 1. It is the reflection of a basic reality. 2. It masks and perverts a basic reality. 3. It masks the absence of a basic reality. 4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its

own pure simulacrum.

• When speech and writing were created, signs were invented to point to material or social reality, but the bond between signifier and signified became eroded. (p 80-81) so sign first? Or language first?

Sign According to Baudrillard

• Counterfeit (imitation) – when there was still a direct link between signifiers and their signifieds;

• Production (illusion) – when there was an indirect link between signifier and signified; and

• Simulation (fake) – when signifiers came to stand in relation only to other signifiers and not in relation to any fixed external reality.

Baudrillard’s Simulacra

– Representations cannot be identical copies of what they represent.

– Representations can never be neutral and transparent but are instead constitutive of reality.

– Semiotics gaining the truth

Conclusion