READING 1

• Codes


  A system of signs that allow people to make and send out meaningful messages in specific situations
• Codes


  • Mediate relationships between people and are therefore shapers of how we think of others and ourselves
• Gender Code


  How individuals act, move gesture, dress, and the like to present an appropriate gender persona
• Text


  A 'weaving together' of the signs taken from a specific code
• Semiotics


  How to Identify Sign
• Identifying a sign

  1. Identify what constitutes a sign and determine its meaning

  2. A sign must have a distinctive physical structure (Signifier, representanen)

  3. A sign must refer to something (signified, referent)

  4. Evokes particular thoughts, ideas, feelings, and likes differentially in people (signification, meaning)
• Saussure


  • Coined the terms signifier, signified, and signification
  • The meaning of a sign was fixed socially by convention
  • Believed that the choice of a particular sign to stand for something was largely motivated by an arbitrary process
  • The process of making a sign is not motivated by any attempt to replicate or imitate the entity it refers to, except for onomatopoeic words
• Peirce


  Signs are attempts to imitate reality but are no longer perceived of as such because time and use have made people forget how they came about
• Fetishes


  • Signs that evoke devotion to themselves rather than what they stand for
  • Objects or body parts through which sexual fantasies are played out
• We are all fetishists to an extent, the line between normal and abnormal is blurry
• Goffman


  Everyday life is like the theater, life is a stage
• Ritual


  • A set of actions accompanied by words intended to bring about certain events
  • Predecessor of theater
  • Basis of tribe's culture
• McLuhan


  • In complex societies where there's too much culture there is a tendency for individuals to gear towards TRIBALISM
  • Modern society is a super tribe
• Hippocrates


  • The first definition of semiotics meant the study of the symptoms produced by the body
  • Symptom: semeion (sign/ mark in greek) of changes in normal bodily functions and processes
  • Semeiotike- way of diagnosis of illness, or disease, by looking at the semeion. Was extended by Philosophers to include human-made signs
• Plato


  Intrigued by the fact that a single word had the capacity to refer not to specific objects, but objects that resemble each other
• Aristotle


  • Words start out as practical strategies for naming singular things not properties
  • Only after we discover that things have similar properties that we start classifying them into categories
  • We create abstract words that allow us to bring together things that have similar properties
• St. Augustine


  Argued that there are three types of signs: Natural Signs, Conventional Signs, and Sacred Signs
• Scholasticism


  The translation of the ancient philosophers and interest in what they say rekindled
• Scholastics


  Conventional signs captured practical truths and thus allowed people to understand reality directly
• Nominalist


  Truth was itself a matter of subjective opinion and signs captured at best only illusions and highly variable human versions of it
• Bacon


  Developed one of the 1st comprehensive typologies of signs, claiming that, without a firm grasp of the role of signs in human understanding discussing what truth is or not would end up being a trivial matter
• Locke


  • Revived interest in study of signs through his ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
  • First to put forward the idea of an autonomous mode of philosophical inquiry called semiotics
  • Semiotics: Doctrine of the signs
• Saussure


  Used the term semiology to suggest that such a doctrine or science was needed
• Modern practices, theories, and techniques are based on the writings of Peirce and Saussure
• Wittgenstein


  Signs were pictures of reality presenting it as if it were a series of images
• Morris


  Divided semiotic method into the study of relationship between signs and meanings, sign assemblages, and relationship between signs and users
• Jakobson


  Sign exchanges are hardly ever neutral but involve subjectivity ad goal attainment of some kind
• Barthes


  Illustrated the power of using semiotics for decoding hidden meanings in pop culture spectacles
• Greimas


  Narratology: Studies how humans in different cultures invent similar kind of narratives with virtually the same plot, characters, and motifs
• Sebeok


  • Was influential in expanding the semiotic paradigm to include the comparative study of an animal signaling systems (zoosemiotics)
  • Biosemiotics: the study of semiosis in all living things
  • Semiosis: innate ability to produce and comprehend signs in a specific way
• Eco


  Put semiotics on the map through his novel "The name of the Rose"
• Semiotics


  The discipline studying everything that can be used to tell a lie
• Signs do not tell the whole truth
• Semiotic method


  Structuralist because of its recurring patterns of meaning captured and expressed by recurring structures in sign systems
• Derrida


  • Rejected structuralist premise
  • Proposed post-structuralism; no universal structures of meaning in human sign systems
  • All signs systems are self-referential (signs refer to other signs)
• Semioticians continue to endorse structuralist principles
• Semiotics


  A Rhetorical Science, it uses a set of basic principles to examine human nature
• Principles of semiotic analysis

  • All meaning bearing behaviors have ancient roots
  • Signs systems influence people's notions of what is normal in human behavior
  • The particular system of signs in which one has been reared influences worldview
  • Doesn't exclude the role of nature in the makeup of humanity. Nature and culture are partners
• Barthes


  Explained that elements (food, horoscope, religion) imbued with ideology providing society with the myths that once came from fables and epics
• Signs


  Don't just reflect meaning, they add it, change it