Semiotics

Paul Cobley, Middlesex Universityp.cobley@mdx.ac.uk

(Word count: 5544)

Abstract

This entry outlines some of the ways semiotics is defined and considers some of the narratives into which semiotics has been fitted, even within communication theory. It discusses the domain of semiotics, the constitution of the sign, the ideas of ‘code’ and ‘text’ and the relation of semiotics to the ‘textual’ turn that still wields influence in media studies. It shows how semiotics has been inflected sometimes in a misleading fashion while also attempting to demonstrate that the semiotic project can be grasped by a focus on the task of illustrating the complex and fluctuating relations which expose the gap between ‘illusion’ and ‘reality’.

Keywords: sign, symbol, relation, signification, semiotics, context, Umwelt, signans, signatum, media, code, text, Saussure, Barthes, Peirce, Poinsot, Sebeok, Deely

Semiotics is defined in numerous ways and is also subject to various narratives, even

within the confines of communication theory. Definitions of semiotics cast it as,

among other things,

- the theory of the sign

- the theory of semiosis

- a ‘sign science’ that encompasses all modes of signification

- a concern with codes and decoding

- a branch of, or supplement to, linguistics

- synonymous with ‘semiology’

- the study of human signification

- the study of comparative Umwelten, comprising the signification of all living

things

Narratives of semiotics depict it as

- founded by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

- founded by Saussure and the American polymath, Charles Sanders Peirce

(1839-1914)

- established by Saussure, Peirce and the Hungarian-American polymath,

Thomas A. Sebeok (1920-2001)

- inaugurated as an enduring pre-Socratic practice by Hippocrates of Cos (460-

377 BCE) and Galen of Pergamon (129-c.200), developed by St. Augustine

(354-430) and John Locke (1632-1704)

- the means to perceive the gap between illusion and reality

- akin to and fashionable during the period of structuralism and post-

structuralism

- largely dead because textual analysis has been superseded by the study of

audience’s meanings

- very much alive because analysis of ‘codes’ and invariants will always be

needed and semiotics does take account of the audience in any case

- an important strand of communication theory

- synonymous with communication theory

As such, semiotics has undergone periods in its history when it has enjoyed centrality

and marginality, and this is no less true of its fate in communication theory.

The domain of semiotics

Increasingly, semiotics has become recognized as the study of all signs, not just the

linguistic ones that dominate the ‘semiology’ projected by Saussure and, later,

Barthes. Historically, semiotics precedes semiology. The term itself is derived from a

Greek root, seme, and was taken up by Charles Sanders Peirce, who sought to classify

all types of signs in the universe. In this way, semiotics constitutes the major tradition

of sign study ultimately derived from the ancient semioticians (see Sebeok 2001). In

the Anglophone world the name ‘semiotics’ was current even while semiology was

dominant, largely because the anthropocentric endeavours of semiologists were

brought together with those of semioticians for the formation of the International

Association for Semiotic Studies in 1969. If semiology created the impression that the

whole of sign study was human discourse and the human sign, semiotics proper

demonstrated something very different. The very localised study of the linguistic sign,

a sign type used by humans alone, is only one component of the study of the sign in

general. The human phenomenon of language is just one minuscule aspect of a

broader semiosis, the action of signs throughout the universe no matter how they

might be embodied.

Semiotics, in a pre-Socratic fashion, has sought to unify science and philosophy by

way of a concern with how the entire cosmos operates – the earth, its inhabitants and

the elements - rather than just the interactions that constitute the polis. Both Peirce

and Sebeok, out of step with the intellectual fashions of their times, shared this

outlook. For the later Peirce, especially, the entirety of logic, philosophy and science

were only approachable through an expansive sign theory, as Poinsot had

demonstrated in 1632 (see Poinsot 2013 and below). Peirce envisaged a sign theory

that would be comprehensive rather than localised, comprising “mathematics, ethics,

metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy,

astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and

women, wine, metrology” (Peirce, 1966, p. 408). He wrote to Lady Welby, late in life,

revealing that he had recognized ten basic types of signs and 59,049 different classes

of signs in all (Peirce, 1966, p. 407). Arguably, communication theory’s focus

contrasts with the comprehensiveness of semiotics. Despite its diversity, the study of

communication, as it has been constituted as a field, has tended to be restricted to

human communication. Studies of (non-human) animal and plant communication

have been located outside this field. Yet, communication theory’s development

alongside information theory in the second part of the twentieth century, with

Shannon and Weaver (1949) as the touchstone, has entailed that communication

theory has maintained links with the study of non-human signs by way of its interest

in technologies of mediation. Thus, Sebeok, like Bateson a formative influence in

both semiotics and cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s, could justifiably assert that

semiotics and communication theory were synonymous.

The constitution of the sign

Whether signs covered the entirety of the universe or just humans’ activity, the history

of sign theorizing from the ancient medics onwards was largely dominated by a

binary distinction of signans (the vehicle which acted as sign) and signatum (that

which was signified). The high point of this binarism is to be found in Saussure’s

Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics 1916; translated into

English in 1959 and 1983). The original book of Saussure’s Cours, based on the

notes of his students, projects ‘semiology’, “a science which studies the role of signs

as part of social life” (1983, p. 15). This entails a study of signs which, rather than

just tracking the ways in which they have been used to refer to objects from one epoch

to the next, institutes a ‘synchronic’ interrogation of the very conditions upon which

signs operate. From the beginning, despite the call for a general sign science, Saussure

focused on the linguistic sign. This feature of communication he sees as a “two-sided

psychological entity” and not as a “link between a thing and a name, but between a

concept and a sound pattern” (1983, p. 66). Referring to the sound pattern as the

signifiant and the concept as the signifié, Saussure insisted that there was a signifié

bound to each signifiant but that the reasons for their binding was not natural or pre-

ordained. This is, for him, the most fundamental characteristic of the sign: that the

relation in it is arbitrary.

Saussure’s concomitant emphasis on the language system (langue) underlying sign

use derives precisely from the principle of arbitrariness. What binds this system is the

sum of differences that occur between linguistic signs, none of which can rely on a

natural process of ‘meaning’ but, rather, consist of the ‘values’ generated by each

other’s arbitrary relation between sound pattern and concept. As such, instances of

linguistic communication – parole – in all their richness and variegation, are not to be

analysed simply in terms of a semantic link that it might be assumed their individual

signs enjoy with the objects to which they refer but, rather, within the frame of a

relationship of difference to all the other linguistic signs in langue. Saussurean

semiology is not principally concerned with how signs indicate or communicate about

specific objects; instead, its focus is how regimes of communication, somewhat

removed from specific objects, are sustained and perpetuated.

Whereas Saussure continued the tradition of the two-sided sign, Peirce broke with this

line of thought and insisted on a triadic sign. The theoretical importance of this break

should not be underestimated, yet it was by no means without precedent. Its roots can

be discovered in Peirce’s profound knowledge of not just classical logic but also of

the Latin scholastic tradition. As with the technicalities of what was taken from

Saussure’s Cours, it is important to consider the mechanics of sign-hood inherited

from this tradition. The Latins took as part of their task the exegesis of the perspective

on signs emanating from the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. The most important of

these exegetes was John (sometimes ‘Jean’ or ‘Joao’) Poinsot: his ‘Tractatus de

Signis’ (2013 [1632]), nearly sixty years before Locke coined the term ‘semiotics’,

offers a realist foregrounding of the sign as the object of study to illuminate two

key states: mind-dependent being and mind-independent being. The Kantian idealist

notion of the “ding an sich”, so important for modern thought, posits an entity that is

unknowable (i.e. totally mind-independent being). Before Kant, though, Poinsot’s

Thomism offered the means to overcome the impasse of the knowable and the

unknowable by demonstrating how cultural reality in the human species is where the

differences between mind-independent and mind-dependent being become knowable

and distinguishable.

Deely, the scholar who rescued Poinsot from mere footnote status, demonstrates how

Poinsot defined an object as always an object of experience (an entity involving mind-

dependence), definitionally distinct from a thing (a mind-independent entity). The

latter may be made an object by the thing being experienced; but, even then, through

the sensations it provokes, the feelings about them and its consequence, that thing is

never available ‘in full’ – it is only available through a sign (1994, pp. 11-22; cf.

2009). The sign is simultaneously of the order of mind-independent and mind-

dependent being, no matter what futile attempts to bracket off one or the other form of

being might be made in an attempt to render the sign as either solely object or thing.

As Peirce noted “trying to peel off signs & get down to the real thing is like trying to

peel an onion and get down to the onion itself” (in Brent, 1993, p. 300 n. 84).

The Latin thought that informs contemporary semiotics was well-apprised of the

faults of representation, as evident in the concept of mind-dependent being (ens

rationis); but more importantly, it recognized, unlike semiology and much modern

thought, that representation is not the whole of the sign. For Poinsot and, later, for

Peirce, the sign needs to be understood as the entire relation of elements that

constitute it, rather than just the representational ‘relation’ between some ground and

some terminus. The real relation that constitutes the sign consists of ground, terminus

and ‘relation’ as a triad. The ‘relation of representation’ must be distinct from that of

‘signification by a sign in general’, must be merely a part of sign action, simply

because an object or terminus can represent another and also represent itself, whereas

it would be a contradiction for a sign to be a sign of itself. A sign is only a sign of

something if that something is other than the sign. Furthermore, Poinsot emphasized

that the relation in a sign is not so much suprasubjective as contextual: in one set of

circumstances the relation in a sign could be of the order of mind-independent being

(known as ens reale by the Latins), in another set it could be of mind-dependent being

(ens rationis).

The Latin heritage of sign study was relatively vaguely known by Peirce scholars,

including Jakobson, the ex-Russian Formalist, and Charles Morris, both of whom

were teachers and friends of Sebeok. The latter encouraged Deely’s recovery of the

scholastics from the late 1960s till the twenty-first century, but it was Sebeok himself

who was to demonstrate at length the broad importance for science of semiotics’

figuring of relations in the triadic sign across different domains and for different

species. Peirce posited a trichotomy consisting of a Sign or ‘Representamen’, an

Object and an ‘Interpretant’. The advance inherent in the triadic sign is that the

Interpretant does two jobs. Firstly, it sets up the sign relation: it is the establishment of

a sign configuration involving Representamen and Object. When a finger

(Representamen) points at something (Object), this is only a sign configuration if

somebody else makes the link between the pointing digit and the something that is

‘pointed to’. This making of the link is the Interpretant. If the finger pointed but was

placed behind its owner’s back, concealed from anyone else in that space, then there

is no sign configuration however much the finger points. Put another way, no

Interpretant is produced. The second feature of the Intrepretant consists in the way

that any person looking at what the finger points to is bound to produce another sign

(e.g. the finger points at the painting on the wall and the onlooker says: “Titian”). So

the Interpretant is another Representamen, “an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more

developed sign” (CP 2.228). The fact that the Interpretant becomes in itself a sign or

Representamen amounts to a sequence of an “interpretant becoming in turn a sign,

and so on ad infinitum” (CP 2.303). Eco (1976) concluded from this that the sign is

constituted by a chain; equally, it could be said that the sign thus exists in a network of

Interpretants (CP 1.339) whose bearing is determined by prevailing circumstances.

The sign is not so much suprasubjective, like a coded entity; rather, it is constituted in

a fashion that renders it wholly susceptible to contextual factors.

Set against the background of Peirce and the late Latin heritage, Sebeok’s semiotics

was sympathetic to research into the natural world without being naïve about the

relation of the sign and world. Emphatically, Sebeok inaugurated zoosemiotics in

1963, six years before he founded the IASS with Emile Benveniste. From the late

1970s onwards, he was responsible for a further reorientation of the sign in his

foundation of biosemiotics. Following his discovery of the 2nd German edition of the

Theoretical Biology of Jakob von Uexküll in 1976, Sebeok began to develop

semiotics (and biosemiotics) in Uexküll’s direction (see Sebeok 2001). The notion of

Umwelt, from von Uexküll, suggests that all species live in an ‘objective world’ that

is constructed out of their own signs, the latter being the result of their own sign-

making and receiving capacities. Peirce had already stated that “A sign, or

representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect

or capacity” (CP 2.228). Moreover, the world of the ‘thing’ is only apprehended by

the sign – that is, any organism’s Umwelt is constituted by its own sign-making

capacity, its own semiosis facilitated by the sensory apparatus it possesses whether it

is a human or a mere tick. Yet, signs in an Umwelt have considerable richness. A

dog’s hearing, for example, has advantages specific to that species; a fly’s antennae

and visual organs, to take another example, invariably enable it to swiftly avoid even

the most deadly of rolled up newspapers. In sum, an Umwelt offers an indispensable

guide to reality which, while not comprehensive, is sufficient to maintain the

continued existence of specific species. There is thus a strong case for asserting that

the study of the vicissitudes of signs in different Umwelten, including that of the

human, and how such study sheds light on the human Umwelt lie at the root of what

contemporary semiotics is. From Sebeok’s rediscovery of Jakob von Uexküll

onwards, semiotics had a remit which involved a semiotics of plants

(‘phytosemiotics’), of fungi (‘mycosemiotics’) and of the 3.5 billion year old global

prokaryotic communication network within and between different bacterial cells

(‘microsemiotics, cytosemiotics’). Additionally, the higher organisms do not simply

traffic signs; they also harbour them, with a mass of signs enacting message transfer

nonverbally within the body (‘endosemiosis’ – the neural code, the genetic code, the

metabolic code, etc.).

Code in semiotics

The topic of biological codes also invokes the issue of ‘code’ in general as an integral

part of semiotics’ bequest to communication theory. However, closer scrutiny reveals

that this narrative is more complicated than might be anticipated. The term as it is

used in semiotics grows out of Saussure’s Cours and subsequent semiology. The

Cours, as promulgated and debated by Karcevskij, Jakobson, Bühler and Vološinov,

was extended by Louis Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen School of linguistics, for

whom the Saussurean dictum that “langue is a form and not a substance” was to be

taken to its logical conclusion and technically developed into a more systematic

semiology. At the root of this development was the understanding that, in spoken

discourse, langue (the language system underlying speech acts) was synonymous with

the code, while parole (the speech act) instantiated the code in a message. The

mapping of code/message onto langue/parole was chiefly carried out in the post-

Second World War era of communication theory by Roman Jakobson. In both

couplets, an abstract, but tacit, system facilitated but also restricted discrete

embodiments of communication for sign users.

Yet, a tension inhered in semiotics’ invocation of ‘code’. Sebeok, for example, even

when developing zoosemiotics, proceeded with a concept of code drawn directly from

an information theory-inflected post-Saussurean linguistics. He figured code as a set

of ‘transformation rules’ known a priori by the addresser and addressee, made up of

“the atomic particles”, the “universal building blocks of language . . . ‘distinctive

features’” (1972, p. 86). Distinctive features were Jakobson’s base units of language,

sounds in speech more fundamental than Saussure’s phonemes and irreducible beyond

their binary status. As Sebeok continued his work on non-human communication, he

moved away from ‘fixed’ codes towards a flexible version of coding. In his later

writings Sebeok referred to a proliferation of ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ codes - from

those in specific film genres to those in the social world of cats, ultimately treating the

term ‘code’ merely as a synonym for ‘interpretant’ (see, for example, 2001, pp. 80 and

191 n. 13) as part of a pluralistic conception of codes which was coupled with an as

yet unspecified determining role of the genetic master code. In his final book, Sebeok

(2001) repeatedly made reference to the five major codes: the immune code, the

genetic code, the metabolic code, the neural code and the verbal code.

Earlier, semiotics had attempted to be more strict about codes. Eco elaborated on the

matter in the influential volume translated into English in 1976 as A Theory of

Semiotics. He considered four different phenomena:

a) a set of signals ruled by combinatory laws

b) a set of states conveyed by almost any kind of signal provided they reach the

destination in a form which becomes intelligible;

c) a set of behavioural responses at the destination (these can be independent of

how a) and b) are composed);

d) a rule coupling some items from the a) system with some from b) and c) (a

syntactic arrangement refers to a semantic configuration).

For Eco, only the rule in d) can really be called a code. However, he points out that

combinatory principles that feature in a), b) and c) are often taken for codes. This is

consistently the case when such phrases as ‘the legal code’, ‘code of practice’, ‘beha-

vioural code’ are in such wide circulation. Yet, what Eco’s semiotics makes clear for

the study of communication is that ‘code’ should strictly be taken as a ‘holistic’ phe-

nomenon in which a rule binds not just the sign-vehicle to the object to which it refers

but also binds it to any response that might arise irrespective of the reference to the

object becoming explicit. At most, a), b) and c) are to be taken as ‘s-codes’ – systems

or ‘structures’ that subsist independently of any communicative purpose. They can be

studied by information theory but they only command attention from communication

theory when they exist within a communicative rule or code, d) (Eco, 1976, pp. 38-

46).

Increasingly, semiotics has been compelled to be concerned with these so-called ‘s-

codes’. Partly, this is the result of the growing realization of the complexity of contex-

tualization of signs in culture – sometimes partaking of mind-dependence, sometimes

partaking of mind-independence. It is also a result of the upsurge in investigations of

semiosis in nature broadly. In particular, the concept of code duality (Hoffmeyer and

Emmeche, 2007, pp. 27) attendant on the insight that some codes – digital ones - en-

dure in the service of evolution while others – analogue - are transient and/or mutable.

Thus, there are codes for ‘action’ and codes for ‘life’. Action in a lifespan is domin-

ated by analogue signs, changeable and interpretable to different degrees, with digital,

genetic signalling not so susceptible. The common understanding of code in the Saus-

surean/Jakobsonian sense persists in communication theory – and in semiotics. In the

latter, however, there has been growing recognition of code duality.

The text

Alongside the rapid development of semiotics in the second part of the twentieth

century, code was already a component of information theory or communication

theory after Shannon and Weaver. In the preceding millennia it had evolved through

magic and divination to spawn the field of cryptography. So, the most enduring

original contribution of semiotics to communication theory is probably the former’s

formulation of textuality – in short, the concept of the ‘text’. The semiotic notion of

text stands between two polarities. On the one hand, there is the conception of

‘message’ in information theory which is concerned with the process of transmission

and for which any meaning that accrues is of no real consequence. On the other hand,

there is the belief in the ‘work’ or the opus which suffused the humanities and framed

messages in terms of authorial intent, richness of allusion and, often, the possibility of

full transmission or pure communication. Roland Barthes’ 1971 essay, ‘From work to

text’ (translated into English in 1977) is a pointed exemplar of this polarity. The idea

of the text can be found, also, in Propp’s study of folktales, then later in the work of

the structural anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss both of which adumbrated the possibility of

a disinterested analysis of literary and other works guided by a classificatory impulse

amidst bewildering heterogeneity. Text, “a discursive unit higher than or interior to

the sentence, yet still structurally different from it” (Barthes, 1981, p. 34), could be

summed up simply as ‘a string of signs’, neutralizing the overcoded, value-centric

concept of the literary work as well as, perhaps, the idea of a full, intentional

‘communication’. Juri Lotman stressed that, as an entity, the text is, in its nature, for

someone and can become for someone by inviting, in its very fabric, specific modes of

reading. This, of course, is not to say that a text is necessarily successful because it is

always accurately targeted and coded according to a consensus: “Non-understanding,

incomplete understanding, or misunderstanding are not side-products of the exchange

of communication but its very essence” (Lotman, 1974, p. 302). Some flavour of the

consanguinity of the idea of the text and communication theory is offered in

Marrone’s (2014, p. 24) observation that the former is “a theoretical option that

emphasizes the methodological procedures, whose aim is to bring to the surface the

multiple – rhetoric, stylistic, linguistic, etc. – forms whence the stream of meaning

originates”. Certainly, the ‘birth of the reader’ from the ‘text’ provided a further

semiotic model for communication and, especially, the study of the media.

The ‘textual turn’ and ‘media semiotics’

Because of the centrality of textuality to semiotics, a current of thought which gained

considerable traction in the humanities and the social sciences in the latter part of the

twentieth century became erroneously associated with semiotics. This was the

‘linguistic turn’, coined by Richard Rorty and coalescing various perspectives

including ones that later became prominent in Anglophone media studies. The idea

that knowledge is ‘constructed in discourse’ with humans’ apprehension of the world

amounting to a mere figment induced by figures in language, arose out of the

‘linguistic turn’ and (post-)structuralism. Yet it has often been associated with

semiotics, particularly where ‘representation’ is concerned. Introduced in its

recognizable form by, among others, Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1973, [1957]),

representation has occupied a privileged role in thinking about signification. Hall

(1997, p. 21) claims that “the meaning is not in the object, person or thing, nor is it in

the word… The meaning is constructed by the system of representation.”

Representation in this strict view, is a matter of ‘text in principle’ rather than the ‘text

in practice.’ Hall (1973), developing Eco, figured representation in terms of the text’s

giving birth to the reader. Drawing also on sociology, he suggested that apprehension

of representations in a text could be ‘dominant’, ‘negotiated’ or ‘oppositional’ – that

is, a reading position that accepts the instilled codes that dominate the media text, one

that accepts some of the codes but rejects or is unsure of others, or one that

strenuously rejects them. Effectively, this replays Lotman’s (1974) formulations on

levels of ‘understanding’, mentioned above. Nevertheless, Hall’s idea was to

influence a generation of researchers into media texts (Morley, Ang, Radway, Lull,

Hermes and others), also sparking a somewhat protracted debate about the active or

passive status of readers or media audiences was conceived. In the 1980s and 1990s,

‘media semiotics’ repeatedly staged this debate as a route to solving the orthodoxy

embedded in its approaches to representation, using the term ‘semiotics’ in general as

a whipping boy for text-based approaches.

Much of the debate of the role of the reader in ‘media semiotics’ derives from the

dated ideas in Barthes’ Mythologies (1973), particularly the concept of myth:

representation that are not a reflection of reality itself (nature) but a reflection of

history (culture). Myths, Barthes argued, are responsible for making ‘culture’ pass as

‘nature’ or for turning "the social, the cultural, the ideological, the historical into the

'natural'" (1973: 165) For example, in discussing the myth of the Romans in films,

Barthes states that “in Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar, all the characters are wearing

fringes. Some have them curly, some straggly, some tufted, some oily, all of them well

combed, and the bald are not admitted, although there are plenty in Roman history”

(Barthes, 1973, p. 26) In short, Barthes underlines the discrepancy between myth

(Romans with a fringe) and reality (Romans who must have suffered hair loss and

thus no fringe). In ‘Myth today’, the final theory-based essay of Mythologies, Barthes

turns this amusing but simple observation into a complex linguistic argument,

invoking different levels of form, substance, plane of expression and plane of content

in the act of representation. At a stroke, Barthes turned semiotics’ ability to expose the

gap between illusion and reality into a party trick, co-opted by media studies, to reveal

the ‘truth’ behind ‘representation’:

The (…) sign, the fringe of Roman-ness (…) reveals a degraded spectacle,

which is equally afraid of simple reality and of total artifice. For although it is a

good thing if a spectacle is created to make the world more explicit, it is both

reprehensible and deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified (Barthes,

1973, p. 27).

Naturalised in media studies, this take on semiotics reduces signification to

representation. It singularly fails to address the question of why

audiences/readers/human beings willingly and persistently allow themselves to ‘get

fooled’ in watching movies that present false Romans or characters or settings that are

equally fictitious.

Yet, the representational and dominant/negotiated/oppostional co-option of semiotics

for addressing the text/reader relationship was rapidly coming into question with the

advent of post-internet media in the early twenty-first century, especially Web 2.0.

These latter putatively entail more demonstrable activity (interactivity, for example)

which suggest that the text/audience relationship can once more be measured in terms

of use (click-throughs, favourites folders, history, for example) and, arguably, involve

a greater concealment of affective or emotional dispositions in communication. Along

with semiotics proper, post-internet media called into question older takes on

representation. ‘Representation’ assumes that human semiosis is mind-dependent (ens

rationis), constantly preventing humans from gaining anything other than a tantalising

glimpse of the mind-independent (ens reale) universe. Yet, as Deely is at pains to

stress in the wake of Poinsot, the sign fluctuates between both forms of dependency

according to context. One might add that implicit in the contextuality of the sign is

the sharing of some parts of signhood across the world of humans, other animals and

plants, the variegation of semiosis being so extensive that ‘representation’ does not

really come close to capturing it. Ultimately, Deely (2009, p. 116) concludes that “the

social construction of reality, no doubt, occurs in the political order” and that “Reality

as we experience it is neither purely objective [in the sense of things experienced as

objects in an Umwelt] nor purely subjective nor purely intersubjective, but rather a

constantly shifting mixture and proportion of all three not at all easy (perhaps not

even fully possible) to keep complete track of”. As a statement about semiosis aligned

with the biosemiotic idea of Umwelt, this demonstrates how semiotics does not really

envisage power in the masking of reality with illusion. Rather, it proceeds from

humans’ suspension in a universe of changing relations, sometimes ‘illusory’,

sometimes ‘real’; sometimes reliable enough to preserve members of a species,

sometimes not. Such fluctuation and change entails that humans are not forever

barred from reality, as the theory of representation insists; nor are they able to easily

access the road to reality as adopting the theory of representation seems to imply.

Semiotics, instead, reveals that humans are charged with the task of enacting a

semiotic awareness appropriate to the vagaries of relation.

Semiotics is slippery. It has not been successfully institutionalized in the same way as

some of its sub-areas have in the global academy – for example, linguistics. It has its

own history, but this is not an institutional history. It has numerous academic journals

and national and international associations, as well as book series; but it has relatively

few professors appointed with the title ‘Semiotics’. It has numerous schools, many of

them transient, that define semiotics in various ways subject to diverse narratives.

Despite this slipperiness, semiotics can be grasped with reference to the most catholic

co-ordinates: a theory of semiosis, encompassing all modes of signification among all

living things, an enduring pre-Socratic practice featuring key texts such as the work

of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce and Thomas A. Sebeok, the

latter of whom made great strides to formalise this disciplinary field’s attempt to

explore the gap between illusion and reality. Its development in modern academic life

has been concurrent, and often convergent with, communication theory.

SEE ALSO: Anthropology; Bakhtin, Mikhail; Barthes, Roland; Bateson, Gregory;

Cultural studies; Cybernetics; Derrida, Jacques; Discourse theory; Dissemination;

Information theory; Jakobson, Roman; Lévi-Strauss, Claude; Linguistics; Meaning;

Myth; Narrative; Peirce, Charles S.; Post-structuralism; Pragmatics; Semantics; Signs,

symbols; Medium Structuralism; Text; Traditions of communication theory

References and further reading

Barthes, R. (1973). Mythologies. trans. A. Lavers, London: Paladin.

Barthes, R. (1977). From ‘Work’ to ‘Text, In Image – Music – Text. (ed. and trans.) S.

Heath, (pp. 155-64), London: Fontana.

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Biography

Paul Cobley, Professor in Language and Media at Middlesex University, is the author of a number of books, including Narrative 2nd edn (2014). He co-edits Social Semi-otics, and is associate editor of Cybernetics and Human Knowing.He is co-series editor (with Kalevi Kull) of Semiotics, Communication and Cognition and (with Peter J. Schulz) of the multi-volume Handbooks of Communication Sci-ences. He was elected President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in 2014, was made 9th Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America in the same year and is secretary of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies.