Does anyone still read this stuff?
Semiotics may not have blossomed into an academic discipline outside of its uses in literature or sociology or linguistics departments, but it has continued to play a role in theorizing and analyzing all sorts of cultural texts. The Saussurian model has always been influential and still gets mentioned today, but semiotics has opened up a lot since its early days. Social semiotics, in particular, has become more and more popular since the 1970s while the structuralist approach has come to be seen as out-of-date.
Another way semiotics has grown over the years is in terms of the material that it analyzes. Saussure was writing from the perspective of a linguist, and semiotics is still important in both linguistics and literary theory. However, semiotics these days is seen as a way of exploring all kinds of cultural texts. It owes as much to Barthes as Saussure in this sense, and has become popular within media and communication studies as well as cultural studies.
The use of semiotics to analyze cultural products is, again, the result of this wider move toward social semiotics. This has led to an interest in the motives that can be involved in the production of texts: it’s not just a question of how a text is put together but why it has been put together in this way. Is Finding Nemo just about a daddy clownfish swimming around the ocean because his son’s off in a dentist aquarium? Sure, but you could also say it gives an important lesson about the importance of families sticking together. That and how to speak whale.
Approaching the subject from this angle helps emphasize the human aspect (or clownfish aspect) that’s at the core of the production and reception of texts, moving away from the idea that texts exist in their own right and are aren’t influenced by culture.
Modern semiotics therefore tends to pay more attention to the conditions in which texts are produced, and this means treating the author as a part of society rather than an individual genius. This has also led to more of an emphasis on the reader, with semioticians examining how texts are encoded and decoded (ever felt like Ulysses is written in code? Yeah, us too).
Whether the reader sees a text as good, bad, Marxist, a survey of English literary history, or totally incomprehensible, the reader isn’t just seen as a passive receiver. Sure, some texts are more open than others, but semiotics these days recognizes our ability as readers to alter or reject a given meaning.
In summary, the move from structuralism to poststructuralism has meant a greater emphasis on meaning as subjective. If we acknowledge the active role of the reader and the importance of social context, then this raises a big question: to what extent is the act of reading shaped by culture, and to what extent is it an individual, subjective thing?
For modern semiotics, then, it’s no longer so much about the structuralist/social debate (which, let’s face it, was getting pretty tired)—it’s more about the balance between the subjective and the social.