Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
Semiotics is a theoretical school that’s open to a various approaches; however, one key concept that we keep coming back to is the arbitrariness of the sign. Good grief, another sign that’s not saying “Happy Hour” or “The End”? Think of it as “Pass Go, Collect $200”—in other words, it’s sort of like the home key in an internet browser because we always end up going back there.
It’s worth nothing that for some scholars, there are different degrees of arbitrariness. Some signs are more like the things that they represent (like a photo) than others (Garfield is clearly a cat, but he’s not the most catlike one you’ve ever seen). Still, semiotics as a whole rests on the idea that the signifier-signified relationship is arbitrary.
While this idea applies to all forms of semiotics, some scholars have placed it front and center. This brings us to one of the main debates in semiotics: the extent to which we should bother about historical and social context. Semiotics may have started out as a structuralist thing but it has focused more and more on ideological concerns.
So sure, ideology is one of those concepts with lots of big scary people like Fredric Jameson and Louis Althusser (who actually is kind of scary because of this one time he was thinking too hard about ideology and accidentally strangled his wife). But murderous massage aside, ideology is a useful little term for a credo or line of thought that’s characteristic of a group’s view on the world.
The ideas of a political party, for example, make up an ideology. People who follow a certain religion tend to share an ideology. There are communist ideologies, neoliberal ideologies, Buddhist ideologies, Shmoopist ideologies…the list goes on, but what’s important is to think of it as the lens through which different people view the world—whether or not they’re aware of wearing that lens.
One of the goals of social semiotics is to explore texts in terms of their ideological motives: Marxist scholars, in particular, have used semiotics to reveal power structures that we might otherwise take for granted—and these can take place in cultural artifacts as ranging from Spongebob Squarepants to the Itsy Bitsy Spider song to culture as a whole.
This isn’t an issue that’s exclusive to semiotics, but applies to literary theory in general, even though some theoretical schools, such as New Criticism, have ignored or avoided historical and social analysis and focusing on the text itself. However, this approach (which is known as “Formalism”) has become much less common over the last few decades and is now seen as old-fashioned. That’s why semiotics isn’t just about signs, but what they refer to in the world. Semiotics, keepin’ it fly!
This move toward looking at form alongside broader meaning has brought the author and reader back into the mix, but with the emphasis now less on a sender-receiver model than on how readers engage with texts. When this started to happen, semiotics couldn’t be seen as a totally structuralist project anymore; instead, people began to distinguish structuralist semiotics from social semiotics.
Building on this difference in approaches, semioticians have expressed different views on synchronic and diachronic analysis (remember those from Buzzwords?). Saussure was all about the synchronic approach, which analyzes a structure as it exists at a certain moment in time (like a photo).
Again, though, many semioticians have come to see this as a limiting way of looking at signs that fails to give historical issues a proper shout-out. Rejecting the idea that sign systems are static, they’ve instead emphasized language and signification as being dynamic and “diachronic”—more like a movie than a photo.
The takeaway? With all those debates going down, semiotics is as much like a Hollywood blockbuster it’s possible for a theory school to be. Lights, camera, theorize!