New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

I
THE ORIGINS OF SEMIOTICS
The emergence of SEMIOTICS* as the study of signs, signification and
signifying systems, must be seen within the broader context of the
language-haunted nature of contemporary thought. Although language has
been an object of philosophical reflexion for millennia, it is only recently
that it has come to constitute a fundamental paradigm, a virtual “key” to
the mind, to artistic and social praxis, and indeed to human existence
generally. Central to the project of a wide spectrum of twentieth-century
thinkers—Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty
and Derrida—is a concern with the crucial shaping importance of language
in human life and thought. The overarching meta-discipline of semiotics, in
this sense, can be seen as a local manifestation of a more widespread
“linguistic turn,” an attempt to reconceptualize the world “through”
linguistics.
SEMIOTICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
Human beings have never ceased reflecting on their own language. The
Hebrew Bible suggests a linguistic theory by claiming that God brought the
beasts of the field and the fowl of the air to Adam “to see what he would
call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the
name thereof” (Genesis II, 19–20). Here name-giving is seen as the
spontaneous exercise of a natural faculty, but we are never told the precise
principles which ordered Adam’s activity. The Babel story, mean-while,
points to the problem of language difference, the origins of the diversity of
human languages and their mutual incomprehensibility. At Babel, God
deliberately confused the correlations between name and thing which had
obtained when all the world was “of one speech.” Linguistic speculations
also dot the classical texts of Greek, Indian and Chinese culture, and
arguably form part of all cultures, including oral cultures. Semiotics
proper, however, traces its origins back to the western philosophi cal
tradition of speculation concerning language and the relation between
words and things. The Greek pre-Socratic philosophers explored the issue
of the MOTIVATION of signs, i.e. the question of whether a direct