Semiotics
From monstrouspossibility
Jackson Barry on the second page of Art, Culture, and the Semiotics of Meaning suggests that, "meaning is simply the referent of the sign", that meaning existed, perceived, in the suggestion of a symbol (sign).
John Poinsot, from Tractatus de Signis on page 195 describes signs as: "an objective cause, not the principle objective cause, but a substitutive one, by version of which a sign is said to be instrumental, not indeed as if it were an instrument of an acting agent, but as it is a substitute for an object, not informing as a specifying form, but representing form outside what it represents."
Across many texts and persons the issues of sign, signifier and signified have become object in the field of study designated, Semiotics.
Kaja Silverman defines Semiotics in, The Subject of Semiotics as: "The study of signification, but signification cannot be isolated from the human subject who uses it and is defined by means of it, or from the cultural system which generates it," (3). Silverman would then dictate that semiotics is a study of the people and culture that use the signification system under study.
However, Umberto Eco would seem to believe that there is essential to a given mode of process of communication; "If every communication process must be explained as relating to a system of significations, it is necessary to single out the elmentary structure of communication at the point where communication may be seen in its most elementary terms. Although every pattern of signification is a cultural convention, there is one communicative process in which there seems to be no cultureal convention at all, but only -- as was proposed in 0.7 -- the passage of stimuli. This occurs when so-called physical 'information' os transmitted between two mechanical devices," (A Theory of Semiotics page 32).
Charles S. Pierce, a logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist (Wikipedia [[1]]) also did important work in Semiotics spending, "the greater part of his mature intellectual like developing a "semiotic" in the form of a methodologically aware, general, quasi-formal theory," (Semiotics an Introductory Anthology, Robert E. Innis, Page 1). Peirce also seems to believe that the study of semiotics is similarily the study of man and all of humanity: "There is no element whatever of man's consciousness that has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word of sign that man ises is the man himself. For, as the fact that ever thought is a sign, taken in conjuction with the fact that like is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought," (Semiotics an Introductory Anthology, Robert E. Innis, Page 2).
Eco takes this position farther saying that knowledge of oneself then comes not from thinking about oneself, introspection but instead, "from reflection upon the field of expressions in which one finds oneself, individually and socially. The self is 'semiotically' defined as well as semiotically accessible.
[edit] General Remarks
Calvino's way-deep in the semiotics, to be sure. If on a winter's night a traveler is partially structured based on his play with Greimas's Semiotic Squares[[2]].
What is semiotics? [[3]]
The study of signs. It is especially concerned, I would say, with the understanding of "sign" as more than a linguistic term and therefore with how a structuralist approach to language and literature can be transferred to the study of "signs" in the world, that is, the presence of units of meaning that structure our perception, knowledge, etc.
Calvino is the jester of semiotics, Barthes is its Lear. His collection of observations, Mythologies, is a great example of an informal approach to semiotics. Here is Barthes at Wikipedia: [[4]]
A recent version of a semiotic approach to critiquing meaning takes the form of "culture jamming" [[5]]
