COP Lecture Series: Semiotics

Semiotics can be defined as the 'science' of studying signs and their meanings. This idea was developed by Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure.

Structuralism (came from a French school of thought established mid 20th Century). This looked at the underlying structures of something, however was destroyed by the development of postmodernism.

SIGN
                          SIGN
   
Experience -    signified
                       -------------   |   codes
Utterance   -     signifier

Saussure (1916) ' Course in General Linguistics'.
- Sign = signifier + signified
- The relation between them is arbitrary
- Signs are organised into codes
- STRUCTURALISM

Utterance = evokes meaning/signifies something.
There is no inherent meaning to everything = communication and understanding is therefore just a social construct.
Semiotics destroys the idea that anything has meaning.

IN CONTEXT
e.g. we are socially conditioned to know that the colour red on traffic lights signifies to stop.

According to Barthes (1957) signs signify on two different levels:
1. DENOTATION (literal meaning)
2. CONNOTATION (cultural associations)

In the same way we can unravel meaning in language by understanding the written and the spoken material, we can also unravel meaning in cultural practices, if we take culture as operating like a language.

CODES
A code is a system of signs and symbols. They are found in all forms of cultural practices.
- In order to make sense of cultural artefacts, we need to learn and understand their codes.
- Codes rely on shared knowledge.

PARADIGMS AND SYNTAGMS
Saussure defined two ways in which signs are organised into codes:
1. PARADIGM (a set of signs from which one is to be chosen)
2. SYNTAGM (the message into which the chosen signs are to be combined)
    = all messages involved selection from a paradigm and combination into a syntagm.

e.g. the alphabet is a paradigm - it's meaning is only valid within a shared culture (which can be seen to destabilise universal truths?)

Paradigmatic choices:
e.g. changing shot in TV, typefaces, colour of your front door, etc.
Where there is a choice, there is meaning and the meaning of what is chosen is determined by ---?

Once a unit has been chosen from a paradigm, its combined with other units = this combination is called a SYNTAGM.
e.g. a sentence is a syntagm of words, likewise our clothes are a syntagm of paradigmatic choices of hats, etc.