What is semiotics?

Mr. Zhao Yiheng, director of the Institute of Semiotics-Media of Sichuan University and a leading figure in semiotics, pointed out that without symbols, no meaning can be expressed. On the contrary, any meaning can only be expressed by symbols. Therefore, semiotics is a theory to study meaningful activities, and the research object of semiotics is symbolization, including meaning, communication and explanation. The necessity of semiotics lies in that contemporary culture has entered an era of symbol flooding, with production symbols surpassing production materials and consumption symbols surpassing consumption materials. It has become the main content of the struggle that one party (class or country) competes with the party lacking the symbol right. Semiotics, with the efforts of three generations of scholars in a century, has developed into a very accurate discipline and can become the common denominator of social-humanities disciplines. Without understanding semiotics, we can't understand contemporary culture.

Semiotics is cultural semiotics, and culture is the sum of all meaningful activities in a society. Semiotics provides a universal methodology for various themes of cultural studies. Therefore, semiotics takes cultural research as its main goal.

The four modes and three stages of semiotics, Saussure's linguistic mode, Pierce's logic-rhetoric mode, Cahill's cultural symbolism and Bakhtin's tradition of studying culture from form, some people call it "language-centered Marxism". Three important stages: the first stage is the first half of the twentieth century, which is the stage of establishing and explaining the model. The second stage appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, and semiotics was emerging as a theory. Saussure's semiotics directly developed the wave of structuralism in 1960s. The third stage appeared in the mid-1970s, and it is still developing. The characteristic of this stage is that Pierce's open model replaced Saussure's model, and structuralism broke through itself and became post-structuralism. If you want to know more about semiotics, you can find what you want on semiotics forum.