How It All Got Started
Way back in the mists of time, a philosopher called John Locke had this crazy idea that it would be useful to come up with a way of studying signs. It’s not like signs are some new-fangled thing, after all—they’ve been around as long as we have. What Locke did was highlight the need for developing a way of actually studying these signs.
However, it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that semiotics really got going, courtesy of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Locke and other theorists may have planted the seeds, but Saussure took things to another blossom by planting a model of how signs work and how we can study them. Focusing on the structure of language, Saussure divided the sign up into two parts: the signifier (the form that a sign takes) and signified (the concept that the signifier brings to mind). If you get confused, just remind yourself of the word “tree” vs. the leafy green thing.
One of Saussure’s beefs was with the idea that there’s some sort of natural connection between the signifier and signified. Why is a tree called a tree? (Hey, is that from Shakespeare?)
As far as Saussure was concerned, this is just an illusion: any link that we may make is in our own minds (freaky, man!) and is shaped by the culture in which we live. One of the things about Saussure’s model (and semiotics in general), then, is that it takes the mystery out of the production of signs, starting with Saussure picking apart the structure of texts to explore how meaning is created.
On top of the signified/signified relationship, Saussure came up with a bundle of other distinctions. One example is his famous division between langue and parole, or, in English, language and speech. Saussure saw language as a system of rules that provides the foundation for communication, whereas speech is the way we use communication (French, English, highbrow, slang, to make a purchase, to express a feeling, to explain semiotics—you name it).
In Saussure’s eyes, language is the main thing that we critics need to look at; that is, we need to analyze the foundations of communication before we can get into the details.
Another major player in the early years of semiotics was the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Unlike Saussure’s thing with twos, Peirce was way into trilogies in his own work theorizing the sign, because he believed that the sign is made up of three parts: the representamen (the form that the sign takes), the interpretant (the sense we make of the sign), and the object (whatever it is that the sign refers to).
The representamen and interpretant are a lot like the signifier and signified, but bringing in the object turns this model into a triangle. It’s not like Saussure was oblivious to the object—though he did spend a lot more time theorizing about trees than walking in nature—but that aspect is something that’s left unsaid in Saucy’s model, whereas Peirce gives it more of a leading role.
But what about that thing about two’s company and three’s a crowd? Well, Peirce would beg to disagree. In addition to his three-sided model of the sign, he also divided signs into three varieties: symbolic, which is a lot like Saussure’s arbitrary signifier/signified relationship; iconic, in which the signifier resembles the signified in some way; and indexical, where the signifier is directly related to the signified. (Remember, we talked about these three guys in the Buzzwords section). Peirce emphasized, however, that signs can be part of more than one category: a photo, for instance, is iconic and indexical. Try to pierce through that iron-clad logic! Nope, you can’t.