Quotes About Semiotics

There are deeper types of symbolism, in a sense artificial, and yet such that we could not get on without them. Language, written or spoken, is such a symbolism.

As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

Smith used English as one might use a code book, with tedious and imperfect translation for each symbol.

You cannot be human without the ability to make symbols and recognize what they mean. A red stop sign is a symbol that tells cars to halt at an intersection. Red has zero connection to stop until human beings assign it that meaning.

Designer' is meant to mean whatever it means.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

I have a disease; I see language.

There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to 'express' what is happening to him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often 'chimeras.

The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...

The photographic image is a message without a code.

la vérité est impossible avec le langage

Roland Barthes

printed fashion functions, semiologically speaking, like a true mythology of clothing: it is even because the vestimentary signified is here objectified, thickened, that fashion is mythic. So it is this mythology of clothing (one could also say its utopia) that needs to be the first stage of a vestimentary linguistics.

Roland Barthes

è sterile ricondurre l'opera a qualcosa di puramente esplicito, perché allora non c'è, immediatamente, più nulla da dirne e perché la funzione dell'opera non può consistere nel chiudere le labbra di coloro che la leggono

Roland Barthes

Jesus expressed an earthy, semiotic theology by materializing his message through various media, including images, stories, actions (stilled storms, healed limbs), and objects like spit, fig trees, bursting baskets, etc. He was a master semiotician. You might even say that Jesus' ministry was more a semiotics ministry than a preaching, teaching, or healing ministry.

However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

Peirce's theory of signs—there are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all.

Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?--In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its life?

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

The Text is not a definitive object.