This week get a quick introduction to Semiotics by learning the difference between an Icon, Index, and Symbol.
This blob is eating dinner. This blob is sleepy. This blob loves you. But how do we know that? This is a job for semiotics, the field of study that explores how humans and other organisms derive meaning from the world around them.
In semiotics, a sign is anything that represents or indicates something else, called the object. A sign isn’t necessarily pictorial, for example, the feel of a fruit may indicate its ripeness, and the sound of buzzing may mean there is a bee around. Charles Sanders Peirce defined three categories of sign (icon, index, and symbol) based on how the sign is related to the object. An icon directly resembles the object; it shares tangible qualities with the object. For example, a painting of a pipe is an icon representing a pipe, a map of London is an icon representing London, and the sound of coconuts may be an icon representing the sound of horses’ hooves in a film. An index has an implied association with the object; the sign and object are connected in a logical way. For example, a growling stomach indicates hunger, sunglasses and a white cane indicate blindness, and the smell of smoke indicates a nearby fire. A symbol is not inherently connected to the object, instead the connection is a matter of convention within a particular society. Because their meanings must be explicitly taught, symbols are easily misunderstood. Examples of symbols include the dotted lines on a road, symbolizing that drivers may pass one another and the Star of David symbolizing Judaism. Most words are also symbols, as they have no natural connection with the objects they represent.
Professionals in any field that involves interaction and communication can benefit from understanding semiotics. For example, user interface designers are charged with making websites, programs, and applications easy to navigate, and they often utilize icons, indices, and symbols to achieve that goal. In order to create an effective interface, designers may run side-by-side tests, called A/B testing, to determine which signs are best associated with the intended object. The public’s interpretation of signs changes very quickly in the realm of technology, as evidenced by the highly-debated use of the hamburger button to represent a menu. Through widespread use of the button and careful design choices surrounding it, the hamburger button is now correctly interpreted by most users and has quickly become an industry standard. Similarly, signs may become less attached to their meaning over time, such as the image of a floppy disk representing the save function. Formerly an index, as users associated a physical floppy disk with storing information, this button has become a symbol as new users learn its function without ever having experience with a floppy disk.
Animators and illustrators also need semiotics to understand how their work will be interpreted by audiences. While some depictions of emotions are based on natural and universal facial expressions, others are symbolic, and only make sense to certain audiences. This became clear when emoji, originally developed for a Japanese phone messaging service, were introduced to the west. This new audience used their own experiences with western comics and cartoons to interpret emoji, often in ways the original designers had not intended. For example, in western animation, an angry character may blow steam from their nose or ears, so western audiences interpret this emoji as angry, while the original intention was to depict a person exhaling in triumph after accomplishing a goal. Understanding how different cultures view certain symbols is of utmost importance in today’s world of global media.
These examples may imply that semiotics focuses only on human interactions with the man-made world, but in fact, biologists use semiotics to study how all life forms interact with and interpret their environment. The ability to express and interpret signs, however rudimentary, is one of the fundamental qualities that distinguishes living organisms from non-living objects. Furthermore, the ability to interpret abstract, symbolic signs seems to be unique to human beings, and may help to distinguish humans from non-human animals.
Whether you’re a fish looking for food or a student looking for the library, interpreting signs is an essential part of everyday life. Knowing more about how we make meaning from the world around us will help us to be better communicators and creators.
What is Structuralism? In this episode, we are going to break down the Structuralist theory pioneered by Claude Lévi Strauss and explored by the likes of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jean Piaget. We will be looking at the meaning of Structuralism and what the main criticisms of it were from Jean Piaget and from the Poststructuralism angle of Jacques Derrida.
The simple answer to what is Structuralism would look at the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. His work especially the idea of langue and parole as we explore in this video was a pivotal inspiration for the structural anthropology of Claude Levi Strauss and for structural sociology as seen in the work of Barthes and Foucault and in structuralism psychology as seen in the works of Jacques Lacan. There are influential ways of looking at structuralism in literature as we shall see with the works of Joseph Campbell who while not a structuralist was influenced by Claude Lévi Strauss and whose work is the epitome of Structuralism.
Content from this lecture has been adapted from Dr. Louis Markos’ lectures on Structuralism (Houston Baptist University).
Saussure introduced Structuralism in Linguistics, marking a revolutionary break in the study of language, which had till then been historical and philological. In his Course in General Linguistics (1916), Saussure saw language as a system of signs constructed by convention. Understanding meaning to be relational, being produced by the interaction between various signifiers and signifieds, he held that meaning cannot be understood in isolation. Saussure illustrated this relationality of language, with the terms paradigmatic axis (of selection) and the syntagmatic axis (of combination), and with the example of 8.25 Geneva to Paris express. Further he challenged the view of reality as independent and existing outside language and reduced tang cage to a mere “naming system”. He questioned the conventional “correspondence theory of meaning” and argued that meaning is arbitrary, and that language does not merely reflect the world, but constitutes it.
As Jacques Derrida pointed out, Saussure’s theory is based on binary oppositions or dyads, i.e., defining a unit in terms of what it is not, which give rise to oppositional pairs in which one is always superior to the other. The most fundamental binary opposition is related to the concept of sign, the basic unit of signification.
In Saussure, the previously undivided sign gets divided into the signifier (the sound image) and the signified (the concept). Saussure stressed that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is conventional and arbitrary, and that both terms are psychological in nature. There is no one-to-one relation between the signifier and the signified. For instance the sound image “tree” may refer to different kinds of trees or it may even be a metaphor for forest. Therefore, it is inferred that meaning is arbitrary and unstable.
The second binary opposition is-that of the langue and parole, where langue refers to language as a structural system based on certain rules, while parole refers to an individual expression of language.
The terms langue and parole are parallel to the terms competence and performance formulated by Chomsky.
The binary opposition of synchronic and diachronic refers to the study of the structure and functions of language at a particular point of time, and over a period of time respectively.
Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic axes refer to the axes of selection and combination respectively, where syntagmatic denotes the relationship of units/words in a linear pattern, while ‘paradigmatic, axis constitutes of the interchangeable units in a language.
The most significant of the binary oppositions that has been criticized by Derrida is that of speech and writing. Saussure privileged speech over writing owing to the subjectivity, authority and presence of the speaker. Derrida called this phonocentrism, a manifestation of the logocentrism, which literally means the centrality of the logos. “Logos” etymologically and historically means the “Word of God” and by extension, rationality, wisdom, law – all synonymous with power.
Derrida describes logocentrism as the metaphysics of presence, and is opposed to the concept of the centrality of presence, because presence contains within itself, traces of absence, thereby deconstructing its very centrality. In connection to and in opposition to logocentrism, Derrida introduces “ecriture”, a French term roughly translated as writing – which exists beyond the logos and is characterised by absence and differance, where meaning is constantly under erasure, and does not have the authority of the logos, and is hence anti-logocentric. A related word, archi ecriture, refers to writing as an ultimate principle than as a derivative of logos. According to Derrida, even speech can be considered as a form of writing — writing on air waves, or into the memory of the listener. Thus the concept of ecriture subverts the superiority of speech over writing.
Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics proved to be of seminal influence in various fields such as Anthropology (Levi-Strauss), Semiology (Roland Barthes), the literary and philosophical concepts of Derrida, Marxist analysis of ideology by Althusser, psychoanalytical theories of Lacan, and analysis of language conducted by Feminists like Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray.
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