The Big Names in Semiotics
As semiotics’ two head honchos, Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce are the theorists who have had the most impact on the field. Saussure’s model of the signifier and signified remains at the heart of semiotics and has influenced a boat-load of scholars.
However, while structure was Saussure’s catchword, Peirce’s model shifted the focus to process, arguing that even our thought processes are social. We all know what it’s like to feel like we’re of two minds or to go over the ins and outs of something. In Peirce’s terms, this is a case the self being in dialogue with the deeper self.
So you’re dealing with your surface thoughts about an issue as well as how you’ve been socialized to see the various parts of the puzzle over your whole life. Peirce’s triangular model also branched out from Saussure’s, suggesting that there are other ways in which we can theorize signification—the ways that we see things as having certain meanings. It’s not all just built-in, you know!
Though semiotics began as the study of linguistics, scholars such as Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco (also a novelist, so super into games with language) broadened its horizons by exploring how we might apply semiotics to other sorts of material. This meant not only visual texts, but also things like objects and gestures, with scholars having taken language as their model when exploring a bunch of other stuff: Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, studied anthropology (human histories and cultures) from the perspective of a structural semiotician, while psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan explored the unconscious through this lens.
Even though semiotics was founded in linguistics, its influence has since spread much wider. Theorists have, however, voiced notes of caution: Jay David Bolter, for example, has stressed that signs are always rooted in a medium (TV, movies, magazines, books, blogs, etc.), while Marshall McLuhan coined the influential phrase “the medium is the message.” For some theorists, then, we need to keep in mind the particular medium that we’re dealing with rather than just thinking, “a sign’s a sign, period.”
Another thing that scholars have argued is that Saussure’s theory focuses on structure at the expense of historical and contextual issues. A major theorist here is Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov, whose interests in Marxism and literary theory encouraged him to see language as being rooted in social processes.
Roland Barthes has also extended semiotics into this territory, especially in his 1957 work Mythologies, which focused on the motives that can be involved in sign production. Typically, this sort of approach involves analyzing cultural texts in a way that can reveal their underlying values. Is South Park really just about a group of potty-mouthed cartoon kids? Nope, the creators probably had some sort of message with that portrayal of America’s youth—you know, just a thought.
If we step into the realm of poststructuralism, Jacques Derrida emerges as another big player that we need to name-drop. In Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida took issue with the rigidness of Saussure’s model. Loosen up a bit, Saucy! Derrida argued that, by ignoring the material qualities of the linguistic sign, Saussure was guilty of privileging speech over writing (in Derrida’s swank-tastic terms, ‘phonocentrism’).
Sure, Saussure was hardly alone in this, with the spoken word having been privileged in Western culture as far back as Plato. Still, Derrida made a point of shifting the balance in favor of the written word. Can’t be SO SURE about that, Saussure!