Quotes & Sayings About Semiotics

This is the perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing. — Walker Percy

One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words — William, Saroyan

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

Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages ... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on ... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics. — Umberto Eco

I believe in the semiotics of clothes. They send a message about how the world perceives us. For me it goes beyond clothes, it's grooming. It's accessories. It's the whole head to toe look. — Tim Gunn

The fateful law of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension
and that is the sign-user himself ... The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally. — Walker Percy

This book has two determinants: on the one hand, an ideological critique of the language of so-called mass culture; on the other, an initial semiological dismantling of that language: I had just read Saussure and emerged with the conviction that by treating "collective representations" as sign systems one might hope to transcend pious denunciation and instead account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit bourgeois culture into a universal nature. — Roland Barthes

Derrida is not an excuse — Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward? — Ira Glass

Language disguises thought. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The universal logo for a pizzahut is eight slices painted cross a disc of yellow plywood mounted in the mouth of a taxidermic hippopotapus. — Noah Wareness

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. — Umberto Eco

Graphic Design, which fulfills aesthetic needs, complies with the laws of form and exigencies of two-dimensional space; which speaks in semiotics, sans-serifs, and geometrics; which abstracts, transforms, translates, rotates, dilates, repeats, mirrors, groups, and regroups, is not good design if it is irrelevant. — Paul Rand

One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story. — Ira Glass

[A TV commercial] crossed my desk in 1986. It came with a press release boasting about an enormous production budget employed in service of what it termed a communications "breakthrough". The secret of this particular breakthrough was the science of semiotics - i.e., conveying meaning via powerful symbols imbued with significance far beyond their literal interpretation. It's the sort of thing that Jean Baudrillard and Noam Chomsky write about. Umberto Eco. Dudes like that. Dudes who have no responsibility for marketshare.

Whoa," I said to myself as I eagerly tore the videocassette out of its jacket. "This is gonna suck. — Bob Garfield

My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language--you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing--and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves. — Walker Percy

Shifting the frame only slightly, the choice of a theory from among the range of always ideologically founded theories is itself necessarily ideologically motivated. Positioning is unavoidable; positioning is the result of choice from among a range of possibilities; that choice is socially meaningful - it is ideological. — Gunther Kress

All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring ... From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives.
Such an anthropological model might be provided by semiotics, that is, the study of man as the sign-using creature and, specifically, the study of the self and consciousness as derivatives of the sign-function. — Walker Percy

natural language will always remain the basic interpretation of, and reservoir for, the development of the artificial formalized languages of science. — Doris Bradbury

semiotics tells us things we already know in a language we will never understand' (Paddy Whannel, cited in Seiter 1992, 31). — Anonymous

I am really interested in who owns ideas of religion. What if I say I'm a libertarian, socialist, Occupy-supporting, anti-war, Christian? Is that a controversial idea? I don't see anything really in the original semiotics of Christianity, in the specific parable of the radical socialist Jew from Galilee who becomes the hero figure in the Homeric-word-of-mouth-gossip-novel that becomes the Bible that should make that a paradox. — Robert Montgomery

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write. — Ira Glass

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produces no concept; therefore, it is dumb. — Umberto Eco

In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, 'she' is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of 'woman'. The ancient, dimorphic form 'he', once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of 'she', during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to. — Samuel R. Delany

Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all. — Umberto Eco

The transference of culture in time can, in large measure, be described as the conservation of sign systems serving as a control on behavior. — Doris Bradbury

In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject. — Roland Barthes

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men. — Jeffrey Eugenides

When Britney shaves off all her hair and beats paparazzi with umbrellas - that's what celebrities are supposed to do. They're not supposed to be reasonable, middle-aged guys drinking organic tea talking about semiotics. — Moby

I still notice the burned house, mornings, when I walk along the beach. Well, obviously I do not notice the house. What I notice is what remains of the house. One is still prone to think of a house as a house, however, even if there is not remarkably much left of it. — David Markson

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born
the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. — Aldous Huxley

I had fallen in love. What I mean is: I had begun to recognize, to isolate the signs of one of those from the others, in fact I waited for these signs I had begun to recognize, I sought them, responded to those signs I awaited with other signs I made myself, or rather it was I who aroused them, these signs from her, which I answered with other signs of my own ... — Italo Calvino

I have a disease; I see language. — Roland Barthes

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. — Roger Zelazny

As for poetry 'belonging' in the classroom, it's like the way they taught us sex in those old hygiene classes: not performance but semiotics. If it I had taken Hygiene 71 seriously, I would have become a monk; & if I had taken college English seriously, I would have become an accountant. — Jerome Rothenberg

I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually. — Ira Glass