OnSemiotics

Emphasizes **mediation, interpretation, convention**

H'way uses the following to **structure** her book: Semantics: the relation of signs to what they stand for Syntactics: the formal or structural relations between signs Pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters

//As Judith Butler puts it, we need to ask, 'What does transparency keep obscure?' [|(Butler 1999, xix)]. Semiotics helps us to not to take representations for granted as 'reflections of reality', enabling us to take them apart and consider whose realities they represent.//
 * Purpose** of semiotics: to denaturalize signs. We live in a world where all meaning travels through signs, and everything is constructed, not “natural.” If we deconstruct signs we can see how power relations have been built into them and hidden.

//“meaning is not ‘transmitted’ to us – [like malaria is?] we actively create it according to a complex interplay of codes or conventions of which we are normally unaware”//