On Semiotics
Many people, since I started at U of T, have asked what semiotics means. In this directly lifted text from a convo with C, I explained it:
"Semiotics" comes from the Greek work "simenon," meaning "sign." Semiotics is about studying signs and deriving or creating meaning from them. And ANYTHING is a sign, in a context.
As an example, think of a cat. Now, YOUR idea of cat is going to be different from MY idea of cat, but they'll have a lot in common. What does yours look like? [C: Black. Short-ish fur. Green eyes. No collar. Grey paws.] Mine's chubby and orange and sitting up with it's tails wrapped around its feet, which is weird because I HATE orange cats. But they have basic similarities.
The difference is that "C-A-T" doesn't mean anything, if you don't have something it refers to. So, if I asked you to describe to me a Squorble, you and I could both do it, but they'd be different descriptions, because we aren't referring to reality. Semiotics is about interpreting signs IN context, in their environment. Postmodernism (which has never been definitively spelled out, but only as a group of concepts) is about interpreting signs OUT of context.
So, like, if you have Mao's Little Red Book, you can look at it and say
"That's evidence of a communist sympathy; that's appropriating the colour red as a political symbol; that's a historical record of a dictatorship manifesto; that's relaying the Philosophy to The People". That's IN context. If you wedged the book under your table leg to stop it rocking, you've suddenly taken it out of context. You've changed the meaning of the object. It doesn't matter now whether it's Mao's book or Hitler's (as long as they're both the right thickness), what matters is that it's serving a different purpose from what was intended. So you've changed the meaning of the sign (in this case, a red book by Mao.)
Every sign if made up of 3 parts: the signifier (the word "C-A-T"), the signified (the furry animal we both thought of), and the signification (what it means to us.) Semiotics is about how you manipulate those. [C: So if like in El Hazard the cat served as armour, it would be a post-modern cat?] ( Pretty much. ;) Unless one of its original uses ({or intentions, or designs, or abilities} was armour.)
That's why my whole idea about transgendering is relevant to semiotics. "Straight" means when the signifier (i.e. "a straight man") and the signified ("a human male being attracted to women") are typically associated, so when you see a straight man, the signification is "Oh, he's straight because he's attracted to women."
When the signification is WRONG, you have a different sign. "Gay" means when the signifier "man" has a signified of "attracted to men"; you then have a different sign. A different meaning.
In transgendering, this means that the signifier "man" is incorrect, because the person themself feels they should be a woman- trannies sometimes view their maleness (in this case) as something akin to a birth defect. So for a transgendered (original) male, the signifier "man" (which comprises their appearance, genetic code, characteristics, sex organs, voice, etc.) is WRONG, and the signified is really "woman" (who they feel they really are, or should be- who they are meant to be.) The outwards indicators are all wrong, and indicate the wrong gender, for them. When they get a sex change, they are merely correcting a flawed sign- they are aligning the signifier ("man") to the signified ("woman"), so that the whole sign, the signification, which involves the appearance, manners, voice, genitals, dress, etc., means "WOMAN." The original sign must be changed so that its true meaning is evident.
Transexuality is one of my bonnet-bees ;) Especially in terms of Semiotics.
Ok, so that might have been a little technical, but that's the essence of a first-year semiotics course!
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