Quotes About Semiotics

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Adrian Forty was perhaps the first person to propose that the surprise answer to the missing term in the old equation, architecture = buildings + x, was words. If that's right, as I am increasingly persuaded, it explains why so much talk and writing envelops the practice of design.

Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.

The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.

There is nothing outside of the text.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.

The unconscious is structured like a language.

Many people talk about messages everywhere, inside the organism a hormone is a message, a beam of light to obtain teleguidance to a plane or from a satellite is a message, and so on; but the message in language is absolutely different. The message. Our message, in all cases comes from the Other by which I understand "from the place of the Other.

Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

That was the thing about signs, they were open for interpretation. Meaning was in the eye of the beholder.

The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary…

We may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweeps me on from the signs toward meaning—sedimented language and speech.

What if language expresses as much by what is between words as by words themselves? By that which it does not "say" as by what it "says"? And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a second-order language in which signs once again lead the vague life of colors, and in which significations never free themselves completely from the intercourse of signs?

Saussure may show that each act of expression becomes significant only as a modulation of a general system of expression and only insofar as it is differentiated from other linguistic gestures. The marvel is that before Saussure we did not know anything about this, and that we forget it again each time we speak--to begin with when we speak of Saussure's ideas.

Signs do not simply evoke other signs for us and so on without end, and language is not like a prison we are locked into or a guide we must blindly follow; for what these linguistic gestures mean and gain us such complete access to that we seem to have no further need of them to refer to it finally appears at the intersection of all of them.

In truth, Derrida has always been preoccupied (in the strongest senses of that word) by what precedes or exceeds language.

Deconstruction wouldn't make much sense without the structures that are subject to destructuring.

Differance brings together the two notions of differing and deferring.

And this fact again illustrates a major problem in Latour's formulation. If his article was meant to be a formal, or semiotic, reading of Einstein's text, it is not relevant to arbitrarily substitute words whose meanings are not justified by the text. Furthermore, the very premise of his "semiotic" reading of a text in translation begs the question of whether he is imputing meaning to the author or the translator.

No one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word "day.

Balzac's semiotics is all about detection, the need to discover who people really are.