Words!

Semiotics, sign systems, semiology is always already at play; slipping, sliding, asymptotic link between the space between you and me and the reality that can never be truly known, never understood, except by what we think (but can never know for sure) that it is not, by its negation, its lack, its never ending meaning spiraling into the ether and preventing me from finding the end of this sentence....

Whew. I'm not sure that I agree with ryano ([|http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1059416)] (or just google "how to talk like Jaques Derrida") that writing like Derrida is exactly fun.. I feel sort of dizzy. Maybe I should try more parentheses, (parent)theses.

Ok, in actuality, here's what I find useful about semiotics:

-Language and reality do not have a one-to-one correlation. Therefore, what I think I am communicating may not match what you think I am communicating and vice versa. Good. We can see that happening all the time. It's why sometimes we find ourselves explaining something several different ways to someone else, trying to find the phrases that appear to create the closest match between what we mean and what someone else understands us to mean. The possibility (even inevitability) of miscommunication, of misunderstanding is clearly useful to keep in mind.

-Despite the fact that language, and signs, do not have a one-to-one correlation with reality, signs are nevertheless how we interpret the world. So if I were to speak, and my voice quavered, and my hands shook--purely physical/biological events that have no relation to my words, if you were to yawn as I were speaking--another physical/biological event that hopefully, also has no relation to my words, the shaking and yawning would be interpreted by all present as signs--speaker is nervous, audience is bored. Those are cultural meanings that have been assigned to those biological events, and by ascribing them meanings, our culture has turned those events into signs. Now it may well be that I am nervous and you are bored. But it might also be that I am having a low blood-sugar crash and that you stayed up all night writing a Derridean style sentence that refused to end. But those would be unexpected interpretations in the context of our cultural sign system. And we can do this with pretty much everything. Our culture ascribes meanings to things/events/etc., which thus turns them into signs which we then use to interpret the world.

This aspect of semiotics is also useful. The theory that our understanding of the world is mediated through sign-systems gives us a tool for thinking through how culture affects our understanding of and response to the world, each other, other cultures, etc. Where I think it breaks down is with the claim that that sign systems are our only way of making sense of the world. I think at the individual level at least, we can understand the world without sign systems, although we are so embedded in those systems that it isn't easy to extricate ourselves. Nevertheless, I think that anyone who has meditated would agree that you can reach a state in which you are no longer thinking in signs, but are still thinking, still engaged with the world, but in a different way and at a different level. (Whether that kind of thinking is translatable into a sign system and thus communicable is another question, of course.) It also points to what I find to be the limitation of theories like structuralism—the fundamental assumption that langauge is the foundation from which theories, meanings, etc. must derive. It seems to me to be a case of trying to analyze the system using the system’s tools, which necessarily means that the picture will be skewed in particular ways (a problem which I know has been discussed, although I don’t know if it’s ever been discussed within the context of structuralism itself). (It’s also entirely possible that the primacy of language is not a fundamental assumption and that I’ve just missed something key….)