Introduction to Semiotics 2010 - BDC

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Introduction to

Semiotics

Shahbaz Ali

BDC

2010



Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria - the city is known for the Borsalino company, the maker of the famous hats. After completing his maturità classica at the Liceo Plane, Eco enrolled at theUniversity of Turin, receiving his doctoral degree in 1954. Luigi Pareyson (1918-91), who was

Eco's teacher at Turin, influenced deeply Eco's ideas on interpretation and aesthetics. Eco alsowrote a review on Pareyson's Estetica for Lettere italiane in 1955. Eco's classmate was the

hermeneutic ontologist and aesthetician Gianni Vattimo, who succeeded Pareyson as Professor of Aesthetics at Turin.

Eco's doctoral thesis dealt with the early philosopher and religious thinker St. Thomas Aquinas.Eco, who had been a militant Catholic intellectual in the early 1950s, confessed later in aninterview that he stopped believing in God after his studies. "You could say he miraculously curedme of my faith." (Time, June 13, 2005)

From 1954 to 1959 Eco worked in Milan as a cultural editor for RAI, Italian Radio-Television, also

lecturing at theU

niversity of Turin (1956-64). In 1958-59 Eco served in the army. He was auniversity teacher in Milan (1964-65) and Florence (1965-69). From 1969 to 1971 he was ateacher at Milan Polytechnic. At the early age of 39 Eco was appointed professor of semiotics atBologna University in the north of Italy. He has also taught at Harvard and Yale.

He collected more than 30 ³Honoris Causa´ Degrees from the most prestigious universitiesaround the world.

Umberto Eco



What is Semiotics?

This is not «

Signs and their use

An example

Overview



Semiotics (from Greek semeion = sign)studies the entire range of sign systems

and the various processes of

communication (µsemioses¶) related to

these systems.

What is Semiotics?



Semiotics is a discipline that is concerned

with the production and interpretation of

meaning.

Meaning is made by the deployment of

acts and objects that function as ³signs´ in

relation to other signs. In general meaning

is not believed to reside within anyparticular object or text . Rather,

meaning arises during the communication

process itself.

What is Semiotics? /2



General

One of the broadest definitions is Umberto Eco¶s

one: ³semiotics is concerned with everything that can

be taken as a sign´. Semiotics involves the study notonly of what we refer to as 'signs' in everyday

speech, but also of anything, which 'stands for'

something else.

Social

It examines semiotics practices, specific to a culture

and community, for the making of various kinds of

texts and meanings in contexts of culturally

meaningful activity

What is Semiotics? /3



This is a famous painting by Rene Magritte called

³The Treachery of Images.´ Magritte's caption

says, (in French) ³This is not a pipe´.



Actually, it's not a famous painting by Magritte; it's a digital

image of the painting.

Or, to be even more precise, a digital image of a photograph of

the painting



All of which illustrates Magritte's point, which is simply that an

image or sign of a thing is not the thing itself. One could make

the same point with any number of images.

For instance«



This is not Einstein...



Magritte's point is a simple one, so simple that we usually don't thinkabout it. But precisely because we don't think about it, because we

forget that the signs and symbols all around us are just that, signs and

symbols, and not things themselves, we can come to take for granted,

take as "natural," aspects of life that are anything but. And this may

have important social implications. Consider...



This is not happiness...



This is not manhood...



This is not

womanhood...



This is not patriotism...



This is not love...



Sign is often defined as "a pattern of data which, when

perceived, brings to mind something other than itself," the

notion of the sign is central to the semiotic approach to the

study of communication. The term can refer to the relationship among the elements

of the semiotic model, or it can be used to indicate the first

of the three elements, i.e., the physical thing perceived.

All the individuals are meaning-makers. Distinctively, we

make meanings through our creation and interpretation of

³signs´. Signs take the form of different objects, but such

things have no meaning and they become signs only when

we invest them with meaning.

Sign /1



Saussure proposed a theory of signification (a ³dyadic´ or

two-part model of the sign). He defined a sign as being

composed of:

The ³signified´ - the idea being represented

The ³signifier ́ - the word (or the image, like a picture)

doing the representing.

Thus, the sign is the whole that results from theassociation of the signifier with the signified. The

relationship between the signifier and the signified is

referred to as ³signification´.

Sign /2



An µimage¶ of tree is the signified.

The word ³tree´ is the signifier.

Sign /3



The Semiotic Model provides a coordinated way of talking

about how the thoughts in our minds can be expressed in

terms of the world outside of our minds. The model contains

three basic entities:

The sign: something which is perceived, but which stands for

something else,

The concept: the thoughts or images that are brought to

mind by the perception of the sign,

The object: the "something else" in the world to which thesign refers.

The model is most often represented as the semiotic

triangle .

Sign /4



Concept Object

Sign

Perception Convention



This version of the semiotic model is adapted from the work of the American

philosopher Charles S. Pierce. Pierce is generally acknowledged as an

important pioneer in the study of signs.

Notice that:

The sign and the concept are connected by the person's

perception,

The concept and the object are connected by the person's

experience,

The sign and the object are connected by the conventions, or the

culture, of the social group within which the person lives.

These connections are important to understand the process of

meaning-making that is present in the everyday creation and use

of signs by human beings.



When we say something is ³arbitrary´, we mean

that there's no good reason for it (choice

randomness). If you make an ³arbitrary choice´

between two things, then you choose for no goodreason; you probably don't care which one you

choose.

By saying that signs are arbitrary, Saussure meant

that there is no good reason why we use thesequence of sounds 'sister' to mean a female

sibling. We could just as well use different sound

patterns of this word in different languages.

Sign / Arbitrariness



In semiotics, denotation and connotation are terms describing the

relationship between the signifier and its signified, and an analytic

distinction is made between two types of signified:

a denotative signified and a connotative signified.

Meaning includes both denotation and connotation:

Denotation is the first and basic codification of cultural unit.

The basic level of coordination of meaning in order to

understand each other. The codification universally shared

and accepted in a cultural community .

Connotation is a second level of meaning, mainly based on

associations, similarities and implications

Denotation &

Connotation



Denotation²Stop (even

without words, werecognize the meaning

from the shape and

color)

Denotative levelConnotative level

Connotation -Incident or Police

Brutality



Applications of

Semiotics Advertising

Marketing

Literary Criticism

Art Criticism

Mass Media Studies

Philosophy of Language

Anthropology

And several others domain«



An example

In the Reebok advertisement from

Cosmopolitan, the woman looks like she is

"hidden" under the robes and cloths, with

just her eyes being exposed. The eyes are

not scared or submissive, but confident and

strong. She is "Classic" because she is partof a long tradition, but it is her shoes that set

her apart.

'Feeling good' might refer to the gratifying

emotional state that corresponds to being

one's own and not being subservient any

longer . Her shoes may be a form of subtle

rebellion, an independence all her own.

Perhaps she is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of

envy for others.

Documents

Introduction to Semiotics 2010 - BDC