The Two Primary Schools of Semiotics
Core Terms
What is semiotics? Simply put, it is the study of signs.
A sign is anything that refers to something other than itself – physical objects, concepts, occurrences, words, etc. – and which has been interpreted, whether consciously or not, to infer some sense of what the sign “means” in a particular context. Interpretation is key: a sign does not become a sign until it has begun to be interpreted.
The forms that signs can take are effectively if not actually infinite. Words, photographs, smells, sounds, footprints, ordered collections of 1s and 0s, the direction of the wind, the darkness of the forest, thoughts, fantasies, clothing, emotions, hyperstitions, gestures, stillness, absence, horror, fear, the contents of a black hole, myths, an encounter with the Other, the sound of a bell, the significance of the ringing of the same bell: all these and more can be signs.
Linguistic signs – words or other intentionally generated human sounds, and combinations of those – are often used to illustrate topics in semiotics. Indeed, linguistics is properly seen as a particular system of applied semiotics. The universality of language among humans provides an accessible way of discussing signs, but we must always keep in mind that linguistics – the study of language – is ultimately a subset of semiotics.
Semiosis is the capacity for perceiving (and thus interpreting) signs. This is not unique to humans or even living beings – the computer interpreting a series of 1s and 0s according to the instructions given it, a tick detecting butyric acid to know a mammal is nearby, a Venus flytrap closing on its prey when certain receptors have been triggered in a certain way, a bee reflexively stinging in response to a threat: all are engaged as much in semiosis as the readers of this essay.
Semiurgy – a word coined by French postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard – refers to the creation of signs and the subsequent use of those signs for affecting reality and the perception of reality.
A syntagma (pronounced “sin-TAG-muh”, sometimes spelled syntagm and pronounced “SIN-tam”) is an ordered collection of signs. With linguistic signs a phrase constitutes a syntagma, as does a clause, a sentence, a paragraph, and so on. A non-linguistic example of a syntagma is the collection of signs used in an advertisement (or for that matter, propaganda) to seed the viewer’s reality with a set of interconnected signs; this syntagma is intended to influence the viewer to accept a specific point of view carried by the network of signs. The plural of syntagma is syntagmata (“sin-tag-MAH-tuh”). A syntagma is also a sign, and can be interpreted to carry meaning beyond what the individual signs might carry in isolation. A syntagma is essentially synonymous with what is called a text in discourse analysis (a particular collection of signs, not necessarily written or even spoken).
Arbitrariness - What it is and isn’t
Arbitrariness of signs is a vitally important concept in all varieties of semiotics. It is also one of the most easily misinterpreted, as the everyday meaning of the word ‘arbitrary’ gives a different sense than its technical, specific use in semiotics.
In semiotics, arbitrariness is the principle that there is no inherent, immutable connection between a sign and its meaning. This is easily seen with linguistic signs: the word “tree”, for example, has nothing about it that necessarily invokes the living thing we denote by that word. That we associate a particular arboreal member of the plant kingdom with that collection of sounds is established solely by convention. (This is referred to as a conventionalized meaning, also known in Peircean semiotics (see below) as an unmotivated sign.)
The arbitrariness of signs does not suggest that they are changed according to whim; it merely observes that the relationship “we call things of that type ‘trees’” only has meaning because speakers of English agree and understand that it has that general meaning. The entirety of that meaning is not shared by every speaker of English, however: individual speakers will always bring their own shades of meaning based on their experiences, preferences, prejudices, context, etc. Thus, the arbitrariness of signs encompasses the fact that meaning is both within and beyond the interpreter of the sign: the tree you picture in your mind when you hear the word will not be the same as in my mind. If linguistic signs did not have any arbitrariness, there would be no inherent reason for meanings and the forms of words to change over time.
What about onomatopoeia (words that mimic the things they sound like, such as “meow” and “boom”)? Even those are arbitrary to an extent, in that the specific sounds used are determined by the speaker’s language – in English, a dog says “woof woof”, but in Spanish it is “guau guau”.
Arbitrariness is the gateway to the use of semiotics in semiurgy. Signs are employed as operative tools using meaning in a context dependent way – for example, what the bell means when rung from a church bell tower is not the same as what it means when a bell signals time for classes to end. Another operative technique of semiurgy is overloading – aka overcoding – a sign or signs to augment them with specific meaning to carry your intent. Semiurgy shifts possibilities into reality, the results from those possibilities being framed in new ways to realize the intent and desire of the semiurgist.
The Two Primary Schools of Semiotics
The two most significant figures in the foundations of semiotics are the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and the American logician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914, pronounced ‘purse’ – as everyone who mentions his name to a possibly unfamiliar audience is obligated to say). Peirce was unaware of Saussure’s work, but there is evidence that Saussure may have had access to some of Peirce’s preliminary writings on semiotics and language (even so, there is nothing significant in Saussure’s work that is identifiably influenced by Peirce).
Saussure’s approach is usually referred to as semiology (but sometimes also ‘semiotics’, ‘structuralism’ or ‘structuralist semiotics’). Peirce sometimes referred to his work as ‘semeiotic’ or ‘semiotic’, although ‘semiotics’ is preferred today. ‘Semiotics’ should be used as a singular noun (like ‘physics’, or ‘maths/mathematics’). For simplicity and consistency, I generally stick to ‘semiotics’ and ‘semiology’ (or Peircean and Saussurean, respectively) to easily distinguish these two schools of thought.
What then distinguishes the two schools?
Semiology (based on Saussure’s work)
There are two fundamental features of Saussure’s semiology that distinguish it most specifically from Peirce’s semiotics: 1) Saussure’s focus was purely on linguistic signs (words and texts (syntagmata) built from words), and 2) Saussure’s model of the sign only had two components: the signifier (the part of the sign that is experienced directly) and the signified (what the sign refers to, which is experienced indirectly through the sign). Bear in mind that the signifier is not the sign; the sign is the combination of the signifier and its signified(s). Saussure’s semiology is thus dyadic on nature (in contrast to Peirce’s triadic typology of signs).
One side effect of Saussure’s exclusive focus on linguistic signs is that this leaves only humans capable of using signs in semiology. Peirce’s conception of signs, being broader in scope, opens the door to disciplines like biosemiotics and the idea that semiosis – the capacity for encountering, producing, and interpreting signs – is available to any sentient thing.
For Saussure, all signs were arbitrary (which we’ve already discussed in relation to words). That is, he would not consider indexes and icons (two critical types of signs in Peirce’s system of semiotics; see below) to be signs as they did not have a linguistic component.
Saussure’s typology of signs also essentially ignores the importance of interpretation (thus ignoring how context can affect what signs mean to different people in different situations). Interpretation was seen to be a concern that was external to semiology itself, whereas for Peirce the act of interpretation was a required factor for something to be considered a sign in the first place.
Thus, Saussure’s system is ultimately limited in its application, but nonetheless it has proven to be an enduring influence on popular awareness of the importance of signs – this is no doubt in part due to the simple and easy to explain dichotomy of sign components. Humans are hardwired to think in binary terms; it may be related to how we relate to the world through our physical form (two arms, two eyes, two legs, etc.), which in turn is a major factor in conceptualizing many metaphors through binary forms (up vs. down, left vs. right, in vs. out, good vs. bad, etc.).
In fact, the overwhelming prevalence of binary forms in the human conceptual apparatus is the basis for what is known as structuralism, which was the dominant intellectual paradigm in the humanities in the West for most of the twentieth century. Here is how I defined structuralism in the glossary of my book The Languages of Magic, which uses the operative semiotics and the philosophy of language to examine both ancient and modern practices usually described with the imperfect and misleading term magic1:
structuralism: an intellectual movement derived from Saussure’s semiology, which holds that thought arises from pairs of opposing ideas (“up and down,” “light and dark,” etc.) projected onto the world to understand its structure and relationships.
Structuralist approaches to anthropology, linguistics, psychology, sociology, etc. emphasized searching for the fundamental pairs of opposites that formed the basis for more complex accumulations of ideas. There was an implicit semiology in structuralist approaches; that was after all a fundamental feature of Saussure’s work in linguistics: synchronic vs. diachronic linguistics, paradigm vs. syntagm, subject vs. object, cohesion vs. coherence, and so on. With structures built from ever more fundamental stuctures, there is a natural tendency toward recognizing if not building hierarchies with some signs (and relations between signs) more dominant than others. This led to structuralist analyses that revealed which signs held more power than others – a potent idea for magical practices based on signs (both for finding the ideal sign(s) for bringing about a desired change or for knowing just where to “strike” to stabilize or destabilize the structure one is attempting to affect). One of the most fully-developed (and accessible) expressions of this approach to hierarchies of signs and their relative influence is found in the work of Roland Barthes – his collection Mythologies is an ideal place to start. Barthes’ work is invaluable for studying the metacommunicative aspects of semiotics.
Semiotics (based on Peirce’s work)
The Triadic Sign
In Peirce’s triadic typology of signs, all signs (linguistic or not) have three components: the representamen, the object, and the interpretant.
The representamen is equivalent to the signifier of Saussure, with the caveat that it is not necessarily linguistic in nature (e.g., the representamen of a linguistic sign is the word itself; the representamen of a photograph interpreted as a sign is the visual component of the photograph).
The object is what the sign refers to, represents, evokes, or is caused by. The object of a sign that is the ringing of the bell is the bell itself. Thus, the object connects the sign with something outside of the sign.
The interpretant is the effect that interpreting the sign has on the entity doing the interpreting. The interpretant is not the one doing the interpreting; rather, it is the effect of the interpreting.
Note the importance of interpretation in Peirce’s semiotics. In Saussure’s semiology, there is an implicit assumption that signs have only one correct interpretation (or at least a dominant interpretation that crowds out other potential ones in a particular context). Another way of saying this is that signs in semiology do not take context into account. With Peirce, context is an inherent part of the sign itself via the interpretant – this makes the potential for imperfectly interpreting or recognizing a sign into a fundamental component of the triadic notion of signs. The potential for seeding alternate interpretations of signs is a crucially important idea in semiurgy.
Types of Signs
Throughout his long lifetime of developing and refining his theory of signs, Peirce experimented with a variety of ways to breaking signs down into types. In the most extreme version (reflecting his deep obsession with groups of three), he could generate 59,049 (3^10) types! Thankfully, we don’t have to get too deep into his typologies in order to work with his semiotic theories. The two collections of three concepts of signs that are most useful to us are: the types of signs in relation to their objects (in this section), and the three qualities of apprehending signs (covered in the next section).
The types of signs in relation to their respective objects are:
- icon
- index
- symbol
An icon resembles its object in some way. A photograph is an iconic sign, but so is a stick figure or an onomatopoeic word (the accuracy of the resemblance doesn’t matter, only that the iconic sign can be interpreted as somehow resembling or suggesting that object).
An index points to, results from, or connects with its object in some way. A footprint is an indexical sign for the animal that left it; so is a smell that alerts you to a nearby chemical or the ringing of a bell that lets you know a bell is present. A written word is an indexical sign for the word it represents (the individual letters, however, are symbolic signs representing or suggesting the sounds of the word; see below).
In contrast to the non-arbitrary relationships that icons and indices have to their objects, a symbol is a conventionalized (arbitrary) sign that has no inherent connection to its object but is still interpreted to refer to that object in some way. In general, symbols have the most latitude in their interpretation. Since there is nothing binding symbols to their objects other than this arbitrary (and thus malleable) interpretation, the meanings of symbols can and do change. This makes symbolic signs the primary focus of semiurgy, as the semiurgist seeks to make alterations in the potential interpretants of such signs in order to alter reality (or the perception of reality).
Qualities of Sign Apprehension
Peirce recognized three potential levels or qualities of apprehending signs: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness (the words are generally capitalized in Peirce’s works, and nearly always capitalized in Peirce scholarship). Firstness always occurs before Secondness, and Secondness always precedes Thirdness; thus, Thirdness builds on Secondness, and Secondness on Firstness.
The initial encounter with a sign is based on Firstness. The sign has grabbed your attention, but has not yet been fully understood or interpreted; all you know initially is that it is a sign. The encounter with the sign is a response to sensing its alterity – it stands out somehow against the background of potential experience and is clearly identified as being separate from you, yet somehow demanding (or at least attracting) your attention. In this sense, the sign is already an extension of your awareness of yourself in relation to the world outside yourself. (For both Saussure and Peirce, signs do not exist in a vacuum but gain distinction through their difference with other potential signs [this takes us into Deleuze territory too, but that’s for much later!].)
Your awareness and interest in the sign may stop there; maybe the initial interpretation of it tells you it no longer needs your attention, or maybe the sign disappeared from your awareness before you could determine its significance.
But if you start to compare the sign to your experiences and instincts, and start to explore or grasp more observations and details about it, your relationship to the sign has progressed to Secondness. The sign and your interpretation of it are now trying to find a place where they meet in the middle, and it is becoming part of your concept of your own being that is expanded through an encounter with the sign. The sign is still separate from you, but knowledge of the sign connects you with it at least temporarily.
If the sign continues to call out to you for deeper interpretation and meaning, you will use what you have learned about it (and your attraction to it) to subtly expand your subjective universe to contain the full significance of the sign. This is Thirdness. The sign continues to exist outside of your Self, but now it has become an object within your subjective universe, fully integrated into the sign networks you have created and can modify. Thirdness not only encompasses the shared interpretation that is associated with a conventionalized sign (a symbol in Peirce’s topology), but also a) those shades of personal meaning connected to the sign by you and you alone, and b) those meaningful factors of interpretation that arise out of the particular context in which you have encountered the sign (and which may not be there the next time you encounter the sign, thus subtly shifting its meaning). Thirdness is the place where personal meaning intersects with shared meaning – the semiurgist must continue to distinguish between the two and understand their relationship as mediated by the sign.
The ways that the qualities of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness map onto the sign-object relations of icon, index, and symbol is a central topic in semiurgy and any other form of applied semiotics.
How can semiotics be used?
Having now just scratched the surface of semiotic theory, what are we supposed to do with any of this?
We can look at this from two perspectives (which will often overlap, especially in semiurgy): the analytic and the creative. From the analytic perspective, you must learn how to identify the types and intent of signs that are in use in a given object of study – this is quite valuable for understanding power relationships, meanings and intents that are smuggled alongside other seemingly more innocuous signs, and the structure of reality as we perceive it through networks of sign.
From the creative point of view, it is necessary to learn to create networks of signs that will nudge the structures of the world (both within and beyond) in new ways; this includes examining how to discover, rearrange, and overcode signs to invest them with new meaning that can be interpreted by the targets of semiurgy. In both perspectives, signs act as an impelling not compelling force. If sheer force of will suffices to bring about a change, that is probably the most efficient approach to use; however, so many things that need to be realigned according to our wills benefit from more subtle approaches – more structures of reality respond better to nudges than to shoves.
Semiotics is never the only tool that can be used for any of these pursuits. Whether or not you agree with this suggestion from a metaphysical standpoint, there is great power in treating all of reality – internal or external; static or changing; concrete or abstract – as networks of signs. I always come to back to this quote from C.S. Peirce (found in his lengthy correspondence with the English philosopher of language Victoria, Lady Welby):
“It has never been in my power to study anything – mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, meteorology – except as a study of semiotic.”
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Hence my preference for semiurgy, which does not carry the same terminological baggage. ↩