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SOME NOTES ON SEMIOTICS, STRUCTURALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM

Semiotics (also known as semiology) is the "science of signs," a study of the ways in which culture communicates through its products. This form of study originated in the early twentieth century in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, and of Charles S. Peirce, an American philosopher.

Any cultural product is capable of generating meaning and therefore can be considered to be a sign. The most obvious case is of language, where given words are assigned certain meanings and arranged in particular ways to produce meaningful statements, but this property is true of a wide range of products as well. For example, a company logo represents that company; an ad showing a bottle of soda can mean "You should drink this soda." As a sign system, film both conveys signification itself and organizes a wide range of other signs and sign-systems. Literature is also a "secondary" sign-system that uses the primary sign-system of language in creating literary forms as systems.

Semiologists divide signs into two basic parts: a signifier--the object, image or word that produces meaning, and a signified--the underlying meaning of the signifier. (For example, the signifer cat signifies a smallish furry, four-footed creature that meows.) A third component, the referent, is also sometimes used by semiologists. The referent is the object in the real world to which the signifier refers. Obviously, the referent is a more important component of visual signs than of other kinds. Thus, a signifier may have one or more signifieds while also having a referent. (For example, the tv ads featuring Morris the Cat have a referent in the actual cat used to portray Morris, but Morris is also signifies the concepts of "all cats," "laziness," and "finicky eaters," among others.)

The meaning (signification) of a sign is arbitrary; that is, it is not "natural" but culturally and historically determined. Signifieds operate through codes that give meaning to the interrelationships of groups of signs.

Peirce classified signs into three groups: 1) Icons--These derive their meaning from their resemblance to the thing they represent. Realistic painting, photography, film, but also caricatures, maps and blueprints may be icons. 2) Indexes--An index derives its meaning from its association with the thing it represents. A picture of the Eiffel Tower could signify "Paris." A picture of the White House could signify "Washington, D.C." or "the power of the Presidency." 3) Symbols--In Peirce's usage, a symbol derives its meaning completely arbitrarily, by convention and agreement. A circle with a slash through it means "No . . . " depending on what is represented within the circle.

Any signifier may fall into more than one of these categories. For example, the Statue of Liberty has an iconic resemblance to a woman holding her hand up (the actual referent would be the artist Bartholdi's model, his wife). On the other hand, the Statue of Liberty also has indexical status as signifying "America" or "New York City." Finally, the statue is best known as a symbol of the abstract concept of freedom--it is a statue of "Liberty."

Signs operate through systems, codes, that provide a context for their reading and interpretation. This is especially true when several signs are arrayed together within a particular context--a picture, a narrative, or some other structure. The most obvious code is that of language, where the conventions of syntax and phonetics within a particular language-system (English, Swahili, COBOL, or others) provide the context for the interpretation of the signs. For visual images, the codes are not so concrete but can include codes of dress, gesture, expression, color, shape, lighting, etc. Both visual images and words can also function along with other codes, such as codes of narrative and of certain cultural norms. Literary codes may encompass not only the primary linguistic code but codes of literary representation (particular literary forms) and social codes that are enacted through the words of the text. In literature especially, these codes often express themselves through sets of the opposition of binary values (heat/cold; black/white; male/female; stability/instability; and so on).

These signs and codes can be examined in relation to one another at any one point in time. This is called synchronic analysis. We could, for example, look at the use of the image of Woman as a signifier in any number of literary texts.

A sign can also be traced in its development over time. This is called diachronic analysis. We might, for instance, trace the way one particular image of Woman has developed over time.

Signs exist in relation to each other in two ways: horizontally, in how the signs relate to each other (as in syntax in language) or vertically, in how one sign may be substituted for another. The horizontal arrangement is called the syntagm. The vertical set of relationships is called the paradigm. Different codes are more or less flexible in the amount of variety they allow in syntagmatic or paradigmatic relationships. For example, English as a language has only limited syntagmatic flexibility (you can't say "Cat the on the sat mat" instead of "The cat sat on the mat"). While these linguistic codes are limited by their very nature, literary codes are far less limited and usually have their limits set only by cultural conventions and practices.

The study and use of semiotics has been vital to two broad critical approaches that developed over the last four decades or so, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism.

Broadly put, Structuralism was a critical approach to cultural products ranging from kinship patterns in tribal societies to literature to television ads. "High" structuralism, which dominated criticism in France in the 1960s until around 1968 (and which came to prominence in America somewhat later), was primarily concerned with how the object of study was organized--how it produced meaning--not so much in the meanings themselves.

Post-Structuralism, which emerged in part because of the political upheavals of the late 1960s in France and elsewhere, is more concerned with the meanings that are produced through signification and signifying systems. It is less interested in understanding the patterns of organization of signifying systems (such as a poem) than in studying the way certain meanings are encoded in these systems and their effect on the reader.

Post-Structuralism is based in large part on structuralist reinterpretations of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud by the writers Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, respectively. Althusser reinterprets Marx's writings on capitalist ideology to note that ideology--as part of the overall superstructure of society that preserves and supports the economic base of society--is embedded in the lived set of daily relationships we all have with our culture and its products. Lacan reinterprets Freud to note that the individual "self" is actually a construct, a result of the operations of language through culture. Thus, poststructural critics are often concerned with discovering the social and psychic gaps and contradictions in signifying forms that reflect the contradictions of society and the subjective sense of self. Later post-structuralism, especially "deconstruction," finds those gaps and contradictions to be a basic function of language itself, something that inherently limits the possibility of meaning but that frees new possibilities for expression.

Although critics have strongly debated the meaning of different terms and concepts of semiotics and its application to literature, and although the point of emphasis in these studies has shifted dramatically, there is virtually no field of human thought, and especially literary criticism, that has gone untouched by "the linguistic turn."