New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

6 THE ORIGINS OF SEMIOTICS
Dynamic object by virtue of being in a real relation to it.” An indexical sign
involves a causal, existential link between sign and interpretant, as in the
case of a weathercock, or of a barometer or of smoke as signifying the
existence of fire. A SYMBOLIC SIGN, finally, involves an entirely
conventional link between sign and interpretant, as is the case in the
majority of the words forming part of “natural languages.” Linguistic
signs, that is to say, are symbols in that they represent objects only by
linguistic convention.
The iconic sign, then, exhibits the same configuration of qualities as the
represented object. In a photograph, the person pictured resembles the
actual person in the picture. Diagrams that reproduce or represent
analogical relationships—for example, between rising sales and rising
profits are also, for Peirce, iconic signs. The three types of signs are not
mutually exclusive, however. Although a language like English is largely
composed of conventional symbols, onomatopoeic words like “buzz” and
“hiss” display an iconic dimension in that they function through
resemblance between the actual sounds and the sounds of the phonemes
evoking the sounds. Non-phonetic languages based on hieroglyphs or
ideograms mingle the iconic with the symbolic to a much higher degree.
Iconic signs, meanwhile, can also deploy an indexical or symbolic
dimension. Photographic signs are iconic in that they function through
resemblance, but indexical in their causal, existential—Bazin would say
“ontological”—link between the pro-filmic event and the photographic
representation. One must assume a certain relativity, then, in defining signs
as forming part of one category or another.
It is Saussure, however, who constitutes the founding figure for
European structuralism and semiotics, and thus for much of film semiotics.
Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics ushered in a kind of “Copernican
Revolution” in linguistic thought by seeing language not as a mere adjunct
to our grasp of reality but rather as formative of it. Before we introduce
some of the fundamental concepts of film semiotics, it is essential to outline
some of the principal Saussurean linguistic ideas on which much of
semiotics was based. Saussurean linguistics forms part of a general shift
away from the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the temporal and the
historical—as evidenced by Hegel’s historical dialectic, Marx’s dialectical
materialism, and Darwin’s “evolution of the species”—to the
contemporary concern with the spatial, the systematic and the structural.
Saussure argued that linguistics must move away from the historical
(diachronic) orientation of traditional linguistics, an approach deeply
rooted in nineteenth-century historicism, toward a “synchronic” approach
which studies language as a functional totality at a given point of time. A
linguistic phenomenon is said to be SYNCHRONIC—etymologically
“same time”—when all the elements it brings into play belong to one and
the same moment of the same language. A linguistic phenomenon is said to