Quotes About Semiotics

Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.

Para Shen, un vestido no era un mero trozo de tela, sino una imagen llena de significados y de asociaciones.

I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually.

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.

It is our relationship to the symbol, the Word, that is important.

An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another.

The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

Every decoding is another encoding.

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even though but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.

Symbols are important. It depends on how they're used.

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

Symbols, or their absence, do not always mean what they seem to symbolize. Nevertheless, I suppose they always symbolize something.

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the

Reality is symbolic. We build it using only the 26 symbols of the alphabet alongside images that speak to us on a linguistic level built from the 26 symbols of the alphabet.

There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.