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Semiotics Quotes

Browse 41 quotes about Semiotics.

Semiotics Quotes

“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.”

MindLanguageInformationCommunicationHumanExperienceSymbolsConstraintsSemanticsSemiotics
Book:The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
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“If metaphors require an underlying cultural framework, then the heiroglyphhic language of the gods cannot be a merely primitive stage of human consciousness: it needs the presence of both the symbolic language of heroes and the epistolary language of me as its starting point. Thus Vico is not speaking of a linear development from a metaphorical language to a more conventional language, but of a continual, cyclical activity. The language of the gods is a heap of unrelated synedoches and metonymies…”

LanguageMetaphorSymbolsHeroesGodsLinguisticsSignsSemiotics
Book:Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
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“No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer’s precise instructions, no matter what the volume of organized information to be fed in. The success of a metaphor is a function of the sociocultural format of the interpreting subjects; encyclopedia. In this perspective, metaphors are produced solely on the basis of a rich cultural framework, on the basis, that is, of a universe of content that is already organized into networks of interpretation, which decide semiotically) the identities and differences of properties.”

CultureLanguageMetaphorInterpretationLinguisticsAlgorithmSemioticsNetworks
Book:Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
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“There is no reason to assume that the unceasing forward march of techne will not eventually achieve a mimesis which replaces a natural world with an intelligible artificial one. If the simulacrum is so well designed that it becomes an effective organizer of reality, then surely it is man, not the simulacrum, who is turned into an abstraction.”

PhilosophySemioticsBaudrillardSimulacraPost Structuralism
Book:The System of Objects
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“The ‘healthy’ sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to its own arbitrariness—which does not try to palm itself off as ‘natural’ but which, in the very moment of conveying a meaning, communicates something of its own relative, artificial status as well. …Signs which pass themselves off as natural, which offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world, are by that token authoritarian and ideological. It is one of the functions of ideology to ‘naturalize’ social reality, to make it seem as innocent and unchangeable as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into Nature, and the ‘natural’ sign is one of its weapons. Saluting a flag, or agreeing that Western democracy represents the true meaning of the word ‘freedom’, become the most obvious, spontaneous responses in the world. Ideology, in this sense, is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.”

NatureHistoryIdeologySemioticsBarthesMythologiesStructuralism
Book:Literary Theory: An Introduction
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“Eco's emphasis is a productivist one: his view of sign production, and especially of the mode he calls invention, associating it with art and creativity, is from the perspective of the maker, the speaker, the artist, the producer of signs. But what about the woman? She has no access to the codes of the invisible city which represents her and absents her; she is not in the place of Eco's "subject of semiosis"-homo faber, the city builder, the producer of signs. Nor is she in the repre­sentation which inscribes her as absent. The woman cannot transform the codes; she can only transgress them, make trouble, provoke, per­vert, turn the representation into a trap ("this ugly city, this trap"). For semiotics too, finally, the founding tale remains the same. Though now the place of the female subject in language, in discourse, and in the social may be understood another way, it is an equally impossible position. She now finds herself in the empty space between the signs, in a void of meaning, where no demand is possible and no code available; or, going back to the cinema, she finds herself in the place of the female spectator, between the look of the camera (the masculine representation) and the image on the screen (the specular fixity of the feminine representation), not one or the other but both and neither.”

CinemaSemioticsUmberto Eco
Book:Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema
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“à l’ombre des quelques hommes riches qui bombent le ventre pour étaler leur importance sociale se cache une foule des personnages grotesques, présentés sur les scènes de l’histoire comme des êtres parasites, cupides et caricaturaux.”

GrotesqueSocial StatusSemioticsParasiteGluttonGrossophobia
Book:Mangeuses : Histoire de celles qui dévorent, savourent ou se privent à l'excès
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“Codes and semiotic conventions are a challenge for human communication, since they seal off people with a privacy protection label and make them accessible only by means of a barcode that might estrange them from their surroundings but, at the same time, procure them a kind of reassurance in their comfort zone. This dialectical situation may keep them struggling during their entire life. ("The unbreakable code " )”

Comfort ZoneReassuranceUnbreakableSemioticsLabelSealCodesDialectical Behavioral TherapyHuman CommunicationPrivacy Protection
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“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.”

IfsShouldIdeasWarChristianChristianityNovelFiguresHeroMouthsOriginalsJewLibertarianRadicalWhat IfParadoxGossipAnti WarSocialistControversialParablesWord Of MouthSemiotics
Author:Robert Montgomery
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“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.”

WritingBodyFormChoicesTermStyleMovementOffersTraditionCombinationPrincipalRepresentationFormalModernismExperimentationLinguisticsPostmodernismDeconstructionSemiotics
Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
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“If you hand an adult a lump of clay, they're likely to respond by fashioning something representative out of the raw material. For the most part, they'll simply forge an object that signifies something "real" in the world, even if that something is as abstract as an emotion or an energy. A child, on the other hand, will just as often produce something totally without semiotic meaning, a shape or a mass that represents nothing that exists outside of their imagination. Or else, they'll eat it or throw it or ignore it, wholesale.”

IfsWorldChildrenRealHandsEnergyImaginationEmotionObjectsProduceMaterialsShapesMassAdultsAbstractRepresentativesClayLumpsRaw MaterialsWholesaleSomething RealSemiotics
Author:Keith Murray
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“One of the reasons I love language is that concerning semiotics, language is an arbitrary sign system, which means the signs within it are free-floating, but we put them in a certain order to get them to have meaning for us. If we left them alone, they'd be like water, like the ocean. It would be just this vast field of free-floating matter or signs, so in this way, I think language and water have much in common. It's only us bringing grammar and syntax and diction and the human need for meaning that orders language, hierarchizes it.”

ThinkingMeanReasonLanguageWaterCommonOceanSemiotics
Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
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“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”

TryingBelieveLittlesMomentsFatherI BelieveParentTeachDependsDadParentingMy DadOddFatherhoodOur FatherScrapFathers DayFather SonYour DadBeing A FatherPendulumsGood ParentGreat FatherBeing A DadHappy First Fathers DayBest FatherFathers Day InspirationalGreat DadParenthood FunnySemioticsNew FatherBest DadFatherhood InspirationalBecoming A FatherBeing A Good ParentBecoming A Parent
Book:Foucault's Pendulum
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“I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing.”

MenChildrenStillsImportantHardLife IsBornDifferencesActivityExpectationsEthicsFemaleImportant ThingsMalesDetermineFactorsMannersClothingsVocabularyOutlookInnateUsageChild RearingSemioticsChildbearing
Book:The Left Hand of Darkness
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“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.”

PeopleMenWorldKindHandsHappensReadingFeltEnjoyNovelCenturyTheorySafeEmptyWeightGuiltAll KindsNarrativeExquisiteIrresistibleNineteenth CenturyGloomyAustenJoggingSemioticsMadeleines
Author:Jeffrey Eugenides
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“An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.”

ThinkingWayWritingMatterFactsCertainReadingSocialActingTalkingPrinciplesPracticeDisciplineAcademicTransformedDomainWay Of ThinkingDistinctiveWriting And ReadingSemiotics
Book:What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition
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