Quotes About Semiotics

A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.

but words are symbols, and symbols never resonate the same for everyone.

If a sign is not necessary then it is meaningless. That is the meaning of Occam's razor. (If everything in the symbolism works as though a sign had meaning, then it has meaning.)

It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.

All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.

moral judgments can never be taken literally: literally, they always contain nothing but nonsense. But they are semiotically invaluable all the same: they reveal, at least to those who are in the know, the most valuable realities of cultures and inner states that did not know enough to "understand" themselves. Morality is just a sign language, just a symptomatology: you already have to know what it's all about in order to get any use out of it.

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising.

The unfolding scene was a semiotician's fantasia.

Die gesprochenen Worte sind die Zeichen von Vorstellungen in der Seele und die geschriebenen Worte sind die Zeichen von gesprochenen Worten. So wie nun die Schriftzeichen nicht bei allen Menschen dieselben sind, so sind auch die Worte nicht bei allen Menschen dieselben; aber die Vorstellungen in der Rede, deren unmittelbare Zeichen die Worte sind, sind bei allen Menschen dieselben und eben so sind die Gegenstände überall dieselben, von welchen diese Vorstellungen die Abbilder sind.

After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

Our symbols aren't supposed to matter, but that's wishful thinking—symbols always matter.

a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

Though I thought there weren't any words any more, only fucking signifiers. And since texts have no objective univocal meaning, I feel sure that when I call you a bunch of moronic cunts you will be able to decode that sequence of sequential signifiers with the appropriate emancipated subjectivity.

The industrial age defined as the age of insects . . . It's even worse nowadays: you can't tell in advance which stratum is going to communicate with which other, or in what direction . . . a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystallization produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter . . .

O que quer dizer metalíngua senão tradução? Não se pode falar de uma língua senão em outra língua." Jacques Lacan, L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre

articulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is "the arbitrariness of the sign," the wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning. The word dog does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or woof like a dog, but it means "dog" just the same. It does so because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning.

On the one hand we need the image of "the text" in order to focus on anything at all; on the other hand we use the metaphor of "reading" to signal that our apprehension of a text will always be partial, that we never quite reach the "text itself," a realization that has led certain critics to question the very existence of such an object.

It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

Whether the photograph is understood as a naïve object or the work of an experienced artificer, its meaning—and the viewer's response—depends on how the picture is identified or misidentified; that is, on words.