Semiotics is a species of Structuralism that seeks to articulate a science of the sign. Its status as a science is precarious, however, especially given Umberto Eco's definition of a sign as anything that can be used to lie. A science... [more]

Semiotics is a species of Structuralism that seeks to articulate a science of the sign. Its status as a science is precarious, however, especially given Umberto Eco's definition of a sign as anything that can be used to lie. A science of lies, then, constructed of nothing but lies: such is the kind of monster Saussure unwittingly created when he severed the sign from its material referent. Nowadays, after the influence of Roland Barthes, Semiotics is employed as a tool for the dissection of popular culture, especially the image-rich world of advertising. Contemporary Semiotics maintains the definition of the sign that Saussure originally conceived (a relation between a signifier and a signified). But it emphasizes, as Levi Strauss did, the conventional and cultural nature of every system of signs. Following Lacan, most Semioticians see metaphors and metonymies, displacements and condensations, as the basic building blocks of sign systems; they exploit these two tropes to analyze how cultural conventions function, perform, and persuade. An image of a scantily dressed woman smoking, for example, is a signifier, a concentration of a culture's conception of sexual lure (this conception being the signified of the image). Signifier and signified are soldered together into an advertisement for cigarettes. And the advertisement harbors within it a code, a cultural logic. The code, of course, is made up of lies: signs that perpetuate particular aesthetic values and mores. It's the task of Semiotics to break this code, to analyze the cultural logic at work within it, to show how this logic acts to persuade. Semiotics is the science of arbitrary yet insidiously powerful systems of culturally specific signs. This science doesn't study truths, but lies -- that is, cultural conventions, common sense notions with no other ground than the people that feed them by acting them out. Thus the system is not static: it is alive, always evolving and developing, suffering resistances and subversions, revisions and perversions. And Semiotics itself participates in these perversions, manipulating the system of signs from within. [show less]