La semiótica en los estudios comunicacionales desde una perspectiva sistémica (original) (raw)
Epistemological discussion on the current status of semiotics in its institutionalization process
DEGRES-REVUE DE SYNTHESE A ORIENTATION SEMIOLOGIQUE, 2024
It is fascinating to observe the evolution of semiotics, which was once considered a passing trend but has now matured into a multifaceted discipline with significant interactions across various fields. The fact that semiotics, focusing on interpreting all types of signs and elucidating their production processes and underlying motivations, has reached this stage is not surprising. Semiotics, which initially interacted with literary studies to develop itself, test its limits, and put forward a systematic and reliable analytical reasoning model, today interacts with various fields of science. Due to this characteristic, semiotics is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and even a meta-disciplinary domain or an intermediary sphere. However, despite the passage of decades, it is evident that there is still no clear definition of what semiotics is. Therefore, there will be no clear idea about what semiotics is not when it is not known what it is. This quite confusing dialectic has been in existence for a long time. Whether this situation regarding the definition of semiotics is a unique qualitative feature of semiotics or a blurring of ideas caused by different types of views is debatable. This situation of semiotics has the potential to be the subject of discussion in many more studies in different contexts. In the first part of this study, a discussion on the identity of semiotics will be made. The discussion will elucidate whether semiotics is amid an identity crisis and its reasons. In the second part, the interaction of semiotics with other knowledge domains, the role of this interaction in determining its boundaries will be discussed in the context of some descriptive features used for it, and an evaluation will be made on the general situation that emerged in the conclusion.
Theory and Methodology of Semiotics: The Tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure
2020
In Model 14 of the previous chapter, we encountered cultural networks, consisting of cultural relations between the agents activating them. From a semiotic perspective, such relations include linguistic communication and the communication of goods, but Bourdieu founds these semiotic fields on class relations by adding the material interests of the agentsin simple words, to acquire profitthus bringing forward the material aspect of society as an explanatory factor. The agents communicate by using semiotic systems, but these systems have not been created ex nihilo; they are themselves products of social interaction, and this interaction also has the same double aspect, semiotic and extrasemiotic, in fact is founded, according to Bourdieu, on the latter. Thus, the issue of communication leads us to that of the social origin of semiotic systems. The issue of the foundations of semiotic systems led the Paris School to contradictory positions, because it tried to protect the semiotic relevance. The Paris School is aware of a domain that escapes the scope of the Tartu-Moscow School, namely the social sciences. In the entry on sociosemiotics in the first volume of their Dictionary, Greimas and Courtés (1979: Sociosémiotique) start by stating that there is no doubt that language can be correlated with the traditional social classes (the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the people), but in modern industrial societies the criteria for social stratification shift to forms of living (vestimentary and culinary behaviour, dwelling, etc.), which are signifying practices appertaining to the domain of non-linguistic semiotics. According to Greimas and Courtés, seen from this angle, the correlation of semiotics with the social sciences would no longer result in an interdisciplinary sociosemiotics, that is, the bringing together of two heterogeneous fields, but would remain pure semiotic intertextuality (a position that raises the question of the correlation of language with "the traditional social classes", which presumably would require an interdisciplinary perspective). Similarly, the authors argue that, given that communication activates the complex articulation of semiotic systems undertaken by competent subjects, enunciation can be better studied through the utterance than through random sociological variables. They choose methodological coherence over interdisciplinarity. The two options above are clearly presented in the second volume of the Dictionary (Greimas and Courtés 1986: Sociosémiotique). The authors state that the current stage of research reveals two tendencies. The first is to accept that
15th World Congress of Semiotics. Semiotics in the Lifeworld Thessaloniki_Book_of_abstracts
2022
Semiotics, collective and politics. The case of people Applied semiotics have been practicing the analysis of political discourse for a very long time, and more recently the analysis of political practices and interactions, but without the political dimension being considered as a structuring element of the theoretical and methodological organon of semiotics. Politics, in this case, would be just one object of study among others, such as advertising, photography, literature or electronic social networks. Yet another approach is possible, which targets politics as a semiotic problematic, and not just as an object of study; in other words: a political dimension integrated into the global architecture of semiotics. Therefore, we must choose an epistemological horizon and an entry point that allows such integration. This horizon will be that of anthropology, a semiotic anthropology that teaches us and insists that the political dimension of our societies, our civilizations, our daily worlds begin with the choice of a collective reference actant. This collective reference actant will be our entry point: what is it made up of? how is it constituted? how and why is it maintained? what are the possibilities and limits of its metamorphosis? what repositories is it on the initiative of and is it carrying? what is the nature of its interactions with the individual actants that compose it? with other collective actants? Etc. Today, for example, it seems to go without saying in intellectual and academic circles (cf. the popularity of the actor-network theory) that the relevant collective actants, those who can refer to, facing the challenges of our common future, must necessarily be heterogeneous, and include non-humans as well as humans, machines as living beings, natural elements (a river, a mountain) as much as technical or cultural artefacts. But no one can ignore that this perspective is both fundamentally political because it because it challenges the hierarchical and sectoral organization of our societies and our daily lives, and semiotic, because it deeply reconfigures the way in which we conceive our categories of analysis, in particular that of actant or that of values systems, or even the global hierarchy of our conceptual system. The main part of this conference will be devoted, first, to gradually laying down the theoretical and methodological elements which thus make it possible to integrate a political dimension into the semiotic organon, and then to examine the consequences for a type of collective actant which today constitutes a particularly problematic type of collective actant, namely the "people." Bionote Jacques FONTANILLE, born in 1948, is emeritus professor of semiotics at the University of Limoges, and honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is also Honorary President of the International Association of Visual Semiotics, and Honorary President of the French Association of Semiotics. Jacques FONTANILLE was President of the University of Limoges from 2005 to 2012. From 2012 to 2014, he was Advisor and Chief of Staff of the French Minister of Higher Education and Research. He is the author of over two hundred and seventy scholarly publications, in the fields of theoretical semiotics, literary semiotics, visual semiotics, rhetoric and general linguistics, semiotics of practices and biosemiotics. Most of his books have been translated in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Korean, Arabic, etc. He was visiting professor or guest lecturer in eighty American, European, Asian, and African universities. Most of his former PhD students now hold faculty positions at universities in Europe
2013 - The Semiotic Ideology of Semiotics - A Vertiginous Reading
This commentary dwells on the intellectual, methodological, and stylistic characteristics that constitute the novelty of Robert Yelle's approach to the semiotics of religion. While praising Yelle's refreshing approach and his ability to combine a semiotic mindset with accurate comparative perspective, deep contextual knowledge, and historical sensibility, the commentary raises the issue of the extent to which semioticians can, and should, acknowledge the transient, historical nature of their point of view. This acknowledgment, it is argued, does not necessarily result in a self-deconstruction of the semiotic method itself but in the somewhat paradoxical awareness of the semiotic ideology underpinning it.
The book that follows is intended as a methodological guide to a group of semiotic writings frequently taught in advanced un- dergraduate courses in North America and Britain, writings that are for the most part available in English. It should therefore be viewed as a supplementary and explanatory text rather than as one that precedes the reading of any primary semiotic ma- terials. The Subject of Semiotics differs from other synthetic books on post-structuralism in three important ways. First, it maintains the centrality of psychoanalysis to semiotics; it proposes, that is, that the human subject is to a large degree the subject of semi- otics. The chapters of this book approach the connection be- tween psychoanalysis and semiotics in a variety of ways, but each argues that signification occurs only through discourse, that discourse requires a subject, and that the subject itself is an effect of discourse. The final three chapters also situate signi- fication, discourse, and subjectivity within the larger symbolic order that determines their relation to each other. Second, The Subject of Semiotics assumes the connections be- tween literary and cinematic texts and theory to be at all points reciprocal, and it attempts consistently to pose one in relation to the other. Thus theoretical discussions merge into literary and cinematic explorations, and analyses of specific novels, poems, and films return us to broader speculative paths.The third respect in which The Subject of Semiotics must be distinguished from its predecessors is its emphasis upon sexual difference as an organizing principle not only of the symbolic order and its "contents" (signification, discourse, subjectivity), but of the semiotic account of those things. Not only does psy- choanalytic semiotics establish that authoritative vision and speech have traditionally been male prerogatives, whereas women have more frequently figured as the object of that vision and speech, but it provides a vivid dramatization of this role divi- sion at the level of its own articulation. The theoreticians most fully associated with this branch of semiotics—Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan—function as exemplary representatives of the paternal values they locate at the center of the existing sym- bolic order. The relationship of the female subject to semiotic theory is thus necessarily an ambivalent one. That theory affords her a sophisticated understanding of her present cultural condition, but it also seems to confine her forever to the status of one who is seen, spoken, and analyzed. In order for semiotics to be of any real value to the female subject, she must somehow inter- rupt its "always-already"—she must find ways of using it that permit her to look beyond the nightmare of her history. In the sections of this book devoted to sexual difference (Chapters 4 and 5), I have attempted just such a rewriting of female subjectivity. I have tried, that is, to denaturalize the con- dition of woman, and to isolate its cultural determinants. This project puts a certain critical distance between my discourse and those of Freud and Lacan, particularly whenever the Oedipus complex is on the agenda. Chapter 1 of The Subject of Semiotics charts the path leading from Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce to that much more recent body of semiotic theory within which the categories of discourse, subjectivity, and the symbolic order centrally figure. It thus provides a context for the chapters that follow. Chapter 2 explores those signifying processes described by Freud as the "primary" and the "secondary," and which he associates with the two major areas of psychic reality: the un- conscious and the preconscious. Chapter 3 accounts for the sets condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonymy, and paradigm and syntagm in terms of these processes, thereby Preface demonstrating the impossibilityof isolating even the most ru- dimentary of signifying formations from subjectivity. Chapter 4 outlines the two most important theories of the subject made available by semiotics—the Freudian and the Lacanian—theo- ries that give a conspicuous place to discourse and the symbolic order. Chapter 5 uses the theory of suture to articulate the re- lationship between the subject and the discourse of the classic cinematic text, and to explore some of the ideological implica- tions of that relationship. The final chapter of The Subject of Semiotics confronts the subject's relationship to another dis- course (or to be more precise, group of discourses), the literary. It also outlines some of the strategies evolved by Roland Barthes for uncovering the symbolic field inhabited by the individual literary instance. Whenever possible I have utilized English language sources, so as to facilitate ready access to those sources for as wide a range of readers as possible. The numerous literary and cine- matic examples are also intended as aids to the general reader. I would like to thank John Wright for encouraging me to write this book, and Bob Scholes and JoAnn Putnam-Scholes for intellectual and culinary support while I was doing so. I would also like to thank my students (and in particular the "Rome contingent") for their constant stimulation,and for their willingness to share my obsessions. Khachig Tololyan read a late version of this book, and offered such fine and persuasive criticism that I returned enthusiastically to the typewriter, for which I am most grateful. Thanks are also due to Leona Cape- less, whose editorial suggestions untangled many syntactic knots, and helped me to say what I meant. Finally, I would like to thank Michael Silverman, who read this book at every stage of its production with the energy most of us reserve for our own work.