Semiotics, Communication, and Cultural Theory:
Basic Assumptions

1. Cultures are formed through language. Language is public, social, and communal, not private or personal. (If anyone used a private language, it would be very uninteresting to the rest of the world.) 

2. Users of a common language form what is called a "speech community," though we use "speech" in this context to include many kinds of communication communities (subcultures, dialects, ethnic groups, social-class specific communities, etc.); any individual can participate in multiple "speech communities". 

3. Language is a system with rules (its own internal structure). Language as a system is multi-leveled, from speech sounds, words, and sentences to longer units called discourse. Discourse circulates through a culture, providing meanings, values, and social identities to individuals. 

4. Discourse is the level studied by most cultural theory and semiotics. All of our cultural statements--from "mainstream" and official "high culture" products to popular culture genres and emerging new cultural forms--can thus be studied as forms of discourse, parts of a larger cultural "language." 

5. Communication and meaning are formed by mediations--representive or symbolic vehicles that "stand for" things, meanings, and values. The mediating vehicles are called "signs". For example, words in a language, images, sounds, or other perceptible signifiers. 

5.1. Thus signs and sign-systems never present a copy of "reality"--the order of things external to language and our mediated way of knowing things--but a socially interpreted and valued representation. 

6. The study of how a society produces meanings and values in a communication system is called semiotics, from the Greek term semion, "sign". (Here "sign" has a specialized meaning, referring to our social and cultural vehicles for signification or meaning.) Languages, and other symbolic systems like music and images, are called sign systems because they are governed by learnable and transmittable rules and conventions shared by a community. 

Semiotic Models: Dyadic and Triadic

Ferdinand de Saussure


Simple two-part model of the sign: a signifier (sign vehicle; material perceptible content like sound or visual information) and the signified (a conceptual and abstract content)

Saussure: Descriptive model


Charles Sanders Peirce: Triadic Model

Peirce used a different set of terms to describe sign functions, which for him were a conceptual process, continually unfolding and unending (what he termed "unlimited semiosis," the chain of meaning-making by new signs interpreting a prior sign or set of signs).

In Peirce's model, meaning is generated through chains of signs (becoming interpretants), which is parallel with Mikhail Bakhtin's model of dialogism, in which every cultural expression is always already a response or answer to prior expression, and which generates further responses by being addressible to others.

7. Semiotics isolates sign functions for social analysis; French semiotics distinguishes two main sign-functions, the signifier (the level of expression, like the bare acoustic impression of speech sounds or the visual impression of written marks and images) and the signified (the level of content or value, what is associated with the signifier in a language). But what allows the sign to work as a whole unit of social meaning is a code, the rule for combining a sensory impression with a mental content, and the basic signifiers in a language into a system of meanings. 

7.1. The relation between signifier and signified is not natural, but arbitrary, part of the internal rules of a language. Having an arbitrary relation to things signified, the signs of a culture can be analyzed for how societies construct, produce, and circulate meanings and values. 

8. Sign systems are often organized as sets of differences (differential values) and hierarchies that structure social values. The form that these differences take is governed by ideology. (For example, the large set of socially constructed meanings for things considered "masculine" and "feminine," a pervasive set of binary oppositions. "Masculine" and "feminine" have little meaning apart from their mutual definition in a socially encoded binary structure.) 

The majority of our complex social use of signs reveals a network of relationships, rather than simple binaries.

9. Signification is therefore a process, a product, and a social event, not something closed, static, or completed one and for all. All members of a society are interpreters or decoders. 

9.1. Signification occurs in the encoding and decoding process. 
9.2. Position of the interpreter/receiver of communication is inscribed in the system itself. Ability to decode and understand signification is based on competence with the sign system and with a larger cultural encyclopedia of codes and correspondences. 
10. Semiotics, however, moves beyond language to study all the meaning systems in a society--fashion, advertising, popular culture genres like TV and movies, music, political discourse, all forms of writing and speech. Semiotics contributes to communication studies by providing a method for uncovering and analyzing how a whole system of signification like a movie genre, fashion images, or TV works in a culture. 
10.1. Semiotics, then, looks at culture broadly as a language considered as a sign system, or the ways signs and language map onto culture as a whole. 

Application

  • Sign: something that stands for something else in a system of signification (language, images, etc.).
  • Code: the relational system that allows a sign to have meaning, the social organization of meanings into binary oppositions, hierarchies, and differential systems. 
  • Image is Everything: how is meaning formed in a social system of signification? Decode: 
    • Example 1, Example 2 
    • The Fashion System: meaning only in system of differences (differentiations, hierarchies, distinctions): Benetton (in context: 1 | 2)
    • Style.com: site for Vogue and W magazine

    Martin Irvine, 1998-2010