Semiotics is the study of how meaning is socially created with signs, created by whom, and for whom. The topic has scope that encompasses between a scientific discipline and a world-view. The term is derived from the Greek word seemeiootikee, meaning the study of signs, what they represent or signify, and how we act and think in their universe. Semiotics is categorized among the humanities because it deals with a phenomenon of which we are a part, and which we affect and develops by being a part of it. Urban semiotics is concerned with signs of and related to the city, and thus with the meaning of urban areas. Urban semiotics is preoccupied with the visions and the cultural dynamics of signs, objects and its signification in urban areas. It also studies the historical changes of urban signs.
Look at a door, a building, a facade or a road sign; listen to steps, an advertising message, a piece of music, a shout or a car engine; gulp down a lungful of air loaded with exhaust fumes or the smell of chip fat. These random sensory impressions are the things of the city. We cannot avoid reading these signs in much the same way, as we cannot choose not to feel hungry or choose not to understand a language we know. And when we are in the city, neither can we avoid generating signs, which others take note of and relates to. In the city it is not things that crowd in on us, but rather the significations (meaning) that we bestow upon it.
Random Sander
Semiotics, or semiology, is usually traced back to both Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Ferdinand de Saussure, who had foreseen that linguistics would eventually be only one department of a much more general science of signs, which he called, specifically semiology. "Now, this semiological project has receives in recent years, a currency, a new power, because other sciences, others subsidiary disciplines have undergone a considerable development, in particular information theory, structural linguistics, formal logic, and certain investigations in anthropology; all these inquiries help to focus the preoccupation of a semiological discipline which would study how humanity gives meaning to things."
Till now, one science has studied how humanity gives meaning to articulated sounds: this is linguistics, but how does humanity gives meaning to the things that are not sounds? It is this exploration that now remains before the investigators. If it has not yet made decisive steps, this is for several reasons, first of all, because we have studied on this level, only extremely rudimentary codes; which have no sociological interest, for instance, the highway code; then because everything which signifies in the world is always more or less mixed up with language: we never have signifying systems of objects in the pure state; language always intervenes, as a relay, notably in image systems, as titles, captions, articles which is why it is not fair to say that we live exclusively in a civilization of the image.
The basic unit of meaning, at least in Saussure's version of semiotics, is the Sign. "A sign is anything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stand in for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot in fact be used to tell at all."
All signs have two aspects: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is any material thing that signifies, e.g., words on a page, a facial expression, a picture, a rose, a bit of graffiti, a building in urban area. The signified is the concept that a signifier refers to. For example, the letters "rose" would be the signifier, and the signified would be the concept of the particular flower -the concept in your head (passion). The basic, most fundamental form of sign, that is, the relation of signifier to signified, is denotation, roughly, the literal meaning of a sign. The word "rose" literally denotes a kind of flower. But semiotics starts to get interesting when it explores connotation. Connotations involve signifying signs, signs that become the signifier for a second signified, or the subtext of sign or object.
For example, a quick glance at a Marlboro ad instantly brings to mind a whole host of associations or connotations that belong in the paradigm of "The Cowboy": the American West with its vast, rugged, and beautiful landscapes, hard physical work out-of-doors, horses, cattle, the strong, silent kind of machismo that we've all learned to associate with cowboys in countless Hollywood movies. The makers of Marlboro cigarettes hope we will include their cigarette in this paradigm, that is, we will come to understand that the Marlboro cigarettes connote all those things that belong in the cowboy paradigm: they want their cigarette to be a sign for "cowboyish-ness" in the same way that we understand that wearing a tie is associated with masculinity. If an office worker smokes Marlboros, s/he is no more a cowboy than is a woman who wears a tie is not a man. She is not a man, but she is dressing in a "mannish" way; the cigarette does not make you a cowboy, but it signifies "cowboy-ishness."
All advertising is a message; we can try to apply to the advertising message a method of analysis that has come quite recently from linguistics. Every message is the encounter of a level of expression or signification, and a level of content, or signifier. Now, if we examine an advertising sentence, we readily see that such a sentence contains in fact two messages. By the articulation of the two messages, advertising language when it is ('successful') open us to a spoken representation of the world which is 'narrative': all advertising says the product but tells something else; by [transferring] the product in advertising language, mankind gives it meaning and thereby transforms its simple use into an experience of the mind.
At the start of the semiological project, it was thought that the main task was, in Saussure's phrase, to study the life of signs at the heart of social life, and consequently to [recreate] the semantic system of objects (garments, food, images, rituals, protocols, music, etc.) This is yet to be done. But as semiology advances into this already vast projects, it encounters new tasks, for example, to study the mysterious operation by which any message may be infuse with a secondary meaning, which is known as the 'connoted meaning'. If the tasks of semiology are constantly enlarging, this is indeed because we are constantly discovering more of signification's importance and extent in the world.
Ordinarily, we define the object or sign as 'something used for something'. There is virtually never an object for nothing, there are objects presented under the form of useless trinkets, but these trinkets always have an esthetic finality. The paradox is that these objects always have, in principle, a function, a utility, a purpose. We experience it as pure instruments, whereas in reality they carry something else: the object effectively serves some purpose, but it also serves to communicate information; we might sum it up by saying there is always a meaning which overflows the object's use.
For example, the appearance of a telephone always has a meaning independent of its function: a white telephone always transmit a certain notion of luxury or femininity; there are bureaucratic telephones, there are old-fashioned telephones which transmit the notion of a certain period (1925); similarly, a pen necessarily parades a certain sense of wealth, of simplicity, of seriousness, of whimsicality, etc. The plates we ate on always have a meaning, when they feign to have none, then precisely they end up by having the meaning of having no meaning. Consequently, there is no object that escapes meaning.
Throughout the history of Western thought, the idea of a semiotic theory-however differently defines, was always labeled as a doctrine of signs. The disparity of meanings ascribed each time to the notion of sign calls for a rigorous critique. In an article I found on the web, Semiotics for Beginners, Daniel Chandler provide a critical analysis of the weakness and strength of semiotic. It is as follow:
[Criticisms of Semiotic Analysis: Other than 'the study of signs' there is relatively little agreement amongst semioticians themselves as to the scope and methodology of semiotics. Although Saussure had looked forward to the day when semiotics would become part of the social sciences, semiotics is still a relatively loosely defined critical practice rather than a unified, fully-fledged analytical method or theory. At worst, what passes for 'semiotic analysis' is little more than a pretentious form of literary criticism applied beyond the bounds of literature and based merely on subjective interpretation and grand assertions. This kind of abuse has earned semiotics an unenviable reputation in some quarters as the last refuge for academic charlatans. Criticisms of structuralist semiotics have led some theorists to abandon semiotics altogether, whilst others have sought to merge it with new perspectives. It is difficult to offer a critique of a shifting target, which changes its form so fluidly as it moves.
Semiotics is often criticized as 'imperialistic', since some semioticians appear to regard it as concerned with, and applicable to, anything and everything, trespassing on almost every academic discipline. John Sturrock comments that the 'dramatic extension of the semiotic field, to include the whole of culture, is looked on by those suspicious of it as a kind of intellectual terrorism, overfilling our lives with meanings' (Sturrock 1986, 89). Semioticians do not always make explicit the limitations of their techniques, and semiotics is sometimes uncritically presented as a general-purpose tool. Few semioticians seem to feel much need to provide empirical evidence for particular interpretations, and much semiotic analysis is loosely impressionistic and highly unsystematic. Some semioticians seem to choose examples which illustrate the points they wish to make rather than applying semiotic analysis to an extensive random sample (Leiss et al. 1990, 214). William Leiss and his colleagues argue that a major disadvantage of semiotics is that 'it is heavily dependent upon the skill of the individual analyst'. Less skilful practitioners 'can do little more than state the obvious in a complex and often pretentious manner' (Leiss et al. 1990, 214). Certainly, in some cases, semiotic analysis seems little more than an excuse for interpreters to display the appearance of mastery through the use of jargon which excludes most people from participation. In practice, semiotic analysis invariably consists of individual readings. Semiotics is not, never has been, and seems unlikely ever to be, an academic discipline in its own right.]
[Strengths of Semiotic Analysis: Semiotics can help to denaturalize theoretical assumptions in academia just as in everyday life; it can thus raise new theoretical issues (Culler 1985, 102; Douglas 1982, 199). While many scholars who encounter semiotics find it unsettling, others find it exciting. Semiotic techniques 'in which the analogy of language as a system is extended to culture as a whole' can be seen as representing 'a substantial break from the positivist and empirical traditions which had limited much previous cultural theory' (Franklin et al. 1996, 263). Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress argue that unlike many academic disciplines, 'semiotics offers the promise of a systematic, comprehensive and coherent study of communications phenomena as a whole, not just instances of it' (Hodge & Kress 1988, 1). Semiotics provides us with a potentially unifying conceptual framework and a set of methods and terms for use across the full range of signifying practices, which include gesture, posture, dress, writing, speech, photography, film, television and radio.
Semiotics may not itself be a discipline but it is at least a focus of inquiry, with a central concern for meaning-making practices which conventional academic disciplines treat as peripheral. As David Sless notes, 'we consult linguists to find out about language, art historians or critics to find out about paintings, and anthropologists to find out how people in different societies signal to each other through gesture, dress or decoration. But if we want to know what all these different things have in common then we need to find someone with a semiotic point of view, a vantage point from which to survey our world' (Sless 1986, 1). Semiotics can also help us to realize that whatever assertions seem to us to be 'obvious', 'natural', universal, given, permanent and incontrovertible are generated by the ways in which sign systems operate in our discourse communities. Art historian Keith Mosley comments that: Semiotics makes us aware that the cultural values with which we make sense of the world are a tissue of conventions that have been handed down from generation to generation, by the members of the culture of which we are a part. It reminds us that there is nothing 'natural' about our values; they are social constructs that not only vary enormously in the course of time but also differ radically from culture to culture. (cited in Schroeder 1998, 225).]
Many key figures work with semiotic in term of linguistic, not so much with visual (picture, image, or object). The first notable attempts to do so took place in the 1960s in Europe, especially France, with writers like Roland Barthes, who attempted to analyze the production of meaning in all sorts of visual images, from advertisements for Italian food products to photography and motion pictures. To Barthes, "the signifier has two aspects: one full, which is the meaning, one empty, which is the form". In his book Empire of Sign, he apply his abstract analysis of today city: [Quadrangular, reticulated cities, Los Angeles, for instance, are said to produce a profound uneasiness, which requires that any urban space have a center to go to, to return from, a complete site to dream of and in relation to which to advance or retreat; in a word, to invent oneself. For many reasons (historical, economic, religious, military) the western metaphysics; for which every center is the site of truth, the center of our cities is always full; a marked site, it is here that the values of civilization are gathered and condensed: spirituality (churches) power (offices), money (banks), or merchandise (department store). To go downtown or center-city is to encounter the social "truth" to participate in the proud plentitude of reality.]
Traveling through urban areas, one would almost never miss such objects as "a garment, an automobile, a dish of cooked foods, a gesture, a film, a piece of music, an advertising image, a piece of furniture, a newspaper headline. These indeed appear to be heterogeneous objects. What might they have in common? This at least: all are signs. When we walk through the streets or through life-and encounter these objects, we apply to all of them a certain reading. Modern man, urban man, spends his time reading. He reads, first of all and above all, images, gestures, behaviors: this car tell me the social status of its owner, this garment tells me quite precisely the degree of its wearer's conformism or eccentricity, this aperitif (whiskey or white wine) reveals my host's lifestyle. Even with regard to a written text, we are constantly given a second message to read between the lines of the first: if I read in the headlines: PAUL VI AFRAID, this also means: if you read what follows, you will know why.
There is semiotic for virtually everything except, urban semiotic. Not many texts have been written about it, but in The Semiotic Challenge, Barthes provides a clue as to why: Anyone who wants to sketch a semiotics of the city must be at once a semiologist (specialist in signs), a geographer, a historian, an urbanist, an architect and probably a psychoanalyst. Aside from those authors explicitly entertain the notion of a semantic of the city; we note a growing consciousness of the functions of symbols in urban space. The city is a discourse, and this discourse is actually a language: the city speak to its inhabitants, we speak to our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it. Meaning is always a phenomenon of culture, a product of culture. Now, in our society, this phenomenon of culture is constantly naturalized, reconverted into nature by speech. Yet, the problem is to exact an expression like 'language of the city' from the purely metaphorical stage. It is metaphorically very easy to speak of the language of the city as we speak of the language of the cinema or of the language of flowers. The real scientific leap will be achieved when we can speak of the language of the city without metaphor...emptying this expression of its metaphorical meaning in order to give it a real meaning. We have difficulty inserting into a model the urban data supplied us by psychology, sociology, geography, demography, this is precisely because we lack a final technique, that of symbols. We need a new scientific energy in order to transform such data, to shift from metaphor to the description of signification, and it is here that semiology may by a still unpredictable development afford us some assistance.
Every city is constructed, conventionally created by us. In this attempt at a semantic approach to the city, we must try to understand the interplay of signs. If we seek to undertake a semiology of the city, the best approach, as indeed for any semantic enterprise, will be a certain ingenuity on the reader's part. It will require many of us to attempt to decipher the city where we are, beginning, if necessary, with a personal report. Mustering all these readings of various categories of readers (for we have a complete range of readers, from the sedentary to the foreigner), we would thereby elaborate the language of the city. This is why the most important thing is not so much to multiply investigations of functional studies of the city as to multiply the readings of the city.
In conclusion, I can summarize the idea of semiotic as: semiotic is the study of how society conventionally gives meaning to an object, how an objects can be created to have meaning in so many levels; who in society have the power to create the meaning of the objects, and for whom; and how overtime, the socially constructed meaning of a given object could be reify to a natural meaning. The key is to analyze the object and determine what is socially constructed meaning and what is natural. But this way of studying signs does not need a new discipline such as semiotic. A signs or objects with multiple meaning can be understood by applying critical analysis with psychology or sociology; if that is not enough, then apply macro sociological analysis. From my reading of semiotic so far, I tend to believe Chandler's critical analysis of the weakness of semiotic. It has not many uses because it is too confusing beyond its simple definition. Even the experts could not agree beyond the simple definition. Maybe someone can put it all together and make some uses of it, but I certainly find it so confusing, useless and uninteresting beyond its few definitions.
Bibliography:
1. Battistella, Edwin. Encyclopedia of Semiotics. 1998. Oxford University Press.
2. Barthes. Roland. Empire of Signs. 1982 Hill and Wang. Translated by Richard Howard.
3. Barthes. Roland. The Semiotic Challenge.1994. University of California Press.
4. Chandler, Daniel. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html
5. Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. 1976. Indiana University Press. P.7
6. Larsen, Svend Erik.
7. Streeter, Tom.
Note: 1-24-2008
Semiotics: Signs and the City Revisited.
When I was researching this paper in college, it never occurred to me that some years later I will be working for a company that makes sign-making software. Now it is interesting to note how it all comes together in time. Therefore, I am compelled to update my conclusion about semiotics and sign-making. It is important to realize how important signs could be as a form of communication; and as a form use to generate the economy. I think Semiotics is central to its study and will emerge as an important discipline in its own rights.
A long time ago, much of the human populations were living in agrarian society. Literacy rate were low in this type of societal arrangement. It was not a major requirement for farming and living in the country sides. Even so, there were still distinction between a person who can read and write; and those who cannot read a written language. Such latter people were considered illiterate as it is today. There were not that much signs for them to read on a daily basis anyway.
Nowadays, there are signs everywhere. So much of our language now involves using signs and symbols; it is fast becoming a new standard of literacy. Because of the high percentage of literacy in industrialized countries, there is nothing unique about being able to read traditional written languages. But not everyone can understand signs and art works as a form of language communication. Signs and images are often use in a deceptive way. Their connotations are not always readily apparent. Therefore, if one cannot read or understand a sign or a piece of art work, such person could now be consider illiterate. I think in this respect, understanding signs and their significance is an important part of improving a person intellectual level of our time.
Another interesting aspect of signs is their economic value. Signs, images, and advertising are a multi-billion dollars industry. There is no doubt it is ubiquitous. You cannot avoid seeing signs advertising products and services walking down a city street. There are hundreds of sign making shops busy generating revenue and contributing to the economy. Printed signs and images can communicate to people at various levels more powerful than written words. In certain scenarios, it is preferable for advertiser to use images over written language because its effect on viewer can be immediate and longer lasting.
In urban areas, there is no escape. Signs are very much relevant to our daily life because it is everywhere. It is a common entity that bound all people together because we are all affects by it one way or another. Much of these signs we see daily demand attention and obedience. We don't normally think about how much signs we see in a day. In fact, we may go through our day not thinking about it at all. But unconsciously, we obey it one way or another when we see it. They have the power to direct us to a certain level of stimuli and directions. Therefore, semiotics is more than just the study of meaning and definitions. It studies an important phenomenon that affects us all every day. It is useful to continue to examine its impact on our everyday life.