Simple explanation of semiotics?

I need to write a small amount of research (about 2 pages) on semiotics for college. But I have no idea what it’s all about, and everything I’ve read about it online is complete gobbledygook. It just makes no sense at all to me.

Does anyone know where I can find a very simple explanation, perhaps specifically relating to art?

(The context is, it’s for a project about making art from materials that have some sort of connection to the subject.)

Semiotics is just the study of signs, symbols and meaning. If you are using water colours because that’s what you have handy, or you like the pretty effects, then your choice of material has no semiotic significance - it is not meant to mean anything. If you use found items from the city dump to make an artwork about pollution, then your choice of material is meaningful - the materials themselves symbolise something.

I’d take it a little further, and say that semiotics is the study of signs, symbols, meaning, and the various ways and contexts in which they can be expressed. There are layers and layers and layers of context in which meaning can be assigned.

Think about an average man: He might be wearing a wedding ring, school ring, or armed services ring. His tie might express an affiliation with a particular school or even clan. (i.e., certain tartans) He may be wearing a T-shirt that says something. He may have tattoos that express something as well. Then there’s that whole code of bandanas in the back pocket that may come into play in certain contexts.

You might paint a landscape using pigments obtained in the area itself. (minerals, ocher, etc.) I myself have used toothpaste, (my own) blood, 1940’s “Victory Ink,” eyeshadow, and all kinds of other things to paint with.

You might weave someone’s hair and threads from their garments into something attached to the surface of a portrait.

I once made a collage expressing my grief over breaking up with my son’s father. At the center of it was a label I had taken from the bottom of a candle. It said: “Do not leave burning unattended.”

The problem when trying to talk about semiotics is that every single semiotician defines and re-defines terms differently from the others. The easiest way to understand it, though, is probably from a historical perspective.

The “father” of semiotics was the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. When talking about language he realised that he needed a new concept to refer to the smallest units of meaning. “Words” are no good: some expressions are made up of several words but can’t be analysed in terms of their parts. He thus came up with the notion of “sign.” A sign, for Saussure, had two dimensions: a mental image you meant to communicate (the signifed) and something physical you used to do so, like a sound or a shape (the signifier).

Once you break down a text into its signs, you can then analyse the resulting structure; that’s the “syntagm.” However, you can also look at how signs relate to other similar signs; the “paradigm.” For instance, in the sentence “He wore shoes” the relationship between “he” and “shoes” is syntagmatic and the relationship between “shoes” and “sandals” is “paradigmatic” – you can substitute “shoes” for “sandals.”

After Saussure, other thinkers realised that signs don’t need to be limited to speech. Everything has potential meaning. Thus, you could use semiotics to analyse anything. One of the more famous semioticians is Roland Barthes, who studied, among many other things, fashion. If you look at what a person is wearing, you can talk about the syntagm of their dress, the relationship between their shirt, their tie and their trousers. You can also talk about paradigms – the relationship between jackets and sweaters, and between the great many different designs of sweaters. Saussure was interested in how you could substitute the words “shoes” for “sandals,” but Barthes was interested in how you could literally substitute shoes for sandals.

Another important semiotician is the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who defined signs differently from Saussure. Because his interests were broader than linguistic, he was interested in the relationship between a mental image (the interpretant), a object used to convey meaning (the sign) and the actual thing being signified (the object.) If you define signs that way, you can then talk about “symbols,” signs that have arbitrary relationships between sign and object, and “icons,” where signs share something with the objects.

For instance, the English word “tree” – the shape you see on your screen share no characteristics with actual trees. It’s a symbol. A photograph of a tree, however, is an icon, and so is the Chinese character for “tree”: 木. It’s a stylised drawing of a tree.

This is really the basics, but if you wish to go further it’s important to remember the following:

  1. Semiotics is merely a set of tools that, if used properly, can allow you dissect the meaning of something finely. Semiotics is not an ideology, and it is of absolutely no help when it comes to finding out what something means. It’s a collection of knives, scissors and scalpels that may allow you to find out how something means something.

  2. The overwhelming majority, if not the near totality of semiotic writing is crap. It is crap because the writers forgot about the point above.

  3. Jargon. I think you already noticed, but semioticians like to make words up. Also, they like to change the meaning of existing words. And, they don’t agree with each other. I already wrote that, but really that’s also a big reason for point #2.

  4. Nevertheless I think that sometimes, yes, a scalpel is the right tool for the job and sometimes, yes, semiotics analysis can be enlightening. I mentioned Roland Barthes and I think he’s a good example of someone who had something to say first and then used semiotics to say it more precisely. Also see this paper, it’s both hilarious and fascinating. That’s semiotics done right:

Signs of Life beyond Earth: A Semiotic Analysis of Interstellar Messages

I am not Saussure about all this. :frowning:

I also really like sean hall’s book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1856697355

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Jovan, I really appreciate the effort you put into your detailed response, but unfortunately I can’t get my head round it at all :frowning: As you’ve noted yourself, everything written about the subject is full of jargon, and I think that’s what’s getting in my way.

Don’t feel bad. I was an English major and it gave me headaches, too.

Read Saussure. Maybe Lacan. Grog what you can, and then talk to a linguistics professor or a really sharp English major. You don’t need a super deep understanding–just enough to understand what the “sign” is, how it relates to the signifier/signified, how that relationship can be arbitrary, and how they progress to metaphor/metonym.

I think that’s where your assignment probably wants you to go–the usage of certain signifiers in art (how, for example, does the color blue lead the viewer into feeling depression? Or how scale can be used to imply distance. Or how a painting of a tree leads the viewer to understand strength.)

Wish I could do better than that, but it’s much easier to do when you’re actually talking with someone face to face!

Semi otic, from the latin: Half an ear.
What?

I must say, I thought jovan’s post was the clearest, most sensible, and most succinct thing I have ever seen on the subject. I don’t think you are going to do better than that.

Very vaguely on topic, i would like to give a shout-out to the excellent BBC radio series “Baldi”, which is about a semiotician, who also happens to be a Franciscan Friar and Catholic Priest “on sabbatical”, with doubts about his vocation, and who, despite having an Italian name and ancestry, and the show being set in Ireland (with mostly Irish characters) speaks with a strong and unmistakeable English accent, … and solves murders.

One feels all this random weirdness (he is also involved in an ongoing Platonic love affair with an Irish policewoman and a difficult relationship with his Father Confessor) might be some sort of commentary on semiotics. When he is solving his murders he talks about using a semiotic method, what (he says) involves piling up facts and associations in a random sort of way without bothering about logical connections, but, like most semiotic related things, quite what this is supposed to be saying on the subject is hard to discern. It is a pretty good murder mystery show though.

You can just imagine the script conferences though, can’t you? “Now what sort of person solving murders haven’t we done yet? A priest? No that’s been done death. How about a priest - no a friar - who’s also a semiotician? But he is in Ireland, but he’s English, or maybe Italian. Has that been done?”

Terry Eagleton’s “Literary Theory: An Introduction” does a great job of summarizing semiotics for literary criticism. Not sure if/how it translates to art, but it covers Saussure and Barthes and serves as a good overview to a bunch of areas,

Thank you very much for your kind words. It’s also in dire need of proofreading.

Anyway, Kiyoshi, behind all the jargon, semiotics isn’t all that complicated. Semiotics is like dissection. You take a frog and you cut it up, ending up with a whole bunch of frog parts. That’s dissection. You take a text or a painting and you break it down, ending up with a bunch of text parts or painting parts (shapes, colours, people, flowers, trees), that’s semiotics.

If you start wantonly dissecting a frog for no particular reason, you end up with nothing but a bloody mess that really doesn’t tell you much about frogs other than what’s inside. You should dissect a frog because you have a question and this question can only be answered by looking at frog parts.

Semiotics is the same, but all too often semiotic analysis just consists of people breaking up a text or a painting into signs and going: there! You need a question first and not all questions are best answered by a semiotic analysis.

Did you try reading the paper I linked to? That’s a great example of someone starting with a question (how do you talk to extra-terrestrials) and finding that semiotics is a good tool to answer that question.

Dude, check out the library.

Wow!

Definitely not dire. I don’t doubt that you could improve it, but it’s smooth and easily understood as it is.