Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
Preface
I have been asked on a number of occasions how I came to write this text, and for whom. I wrote it
initially in 1994 for myself and for my students in preparation for a course I teach on Media Education
for 3rd year undergraduates at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. In my opinion, an understanding
of semiotics is essential for anyone studying the mass media - or communication or cultural studies.
No comparable text on the subject existed at the time so I rashly attempted to create one which
suited my own purposes and those of my students. It was partly a way of advancing and clarifying my
own understanding of the subject. Like many other readers my forays into semiotics had been
frustrated by many of the existing books on the subject which frequently seemed almost impossible to
understand. As an educationalist, I felt that the authors of such books should be thoroughly ashamed
of themselves. The subject of meaning-making is of understandable fascination for a very wide
readership, but most of the existing books seemed to seek to make it confusing, dull and deeply
obscure.
The academic priorities which led me to write this text had consequences for its evolution. However,
since I wrote the original text I have broadened its scope considerably, so that there are now frequent
references not only to the mass media but also to other subjects, such as literature, art and
mythology. One of the things that attracted me to semiotics was the way in which it supports my own
enjoyment of crossing the 'boundaries' of academic disciplines, and of making connections between
apparently disparate phenomena. I have grown with the text: its easily revisable online form has
allowed me not to feel that I have 'outgrown' it. However, I am not a polymath, so there are inevitably
many subjects which are neglected here. In this text I have confined myself to human semiosis, so
that this is not the place to find an introduction to such branches of semiotics as that concerned with
the behaviour and communication of animals (zoosemiotics). Nor do I discuss the semiotics of
communication between machines. My focus is on the humanities and so there is no mathematical
semiotics here either. Even within the humanities, I did not feel competent to cover musical or
architectural semiotics. I know that students of some of these subjects are amongst those who have
consulted the online text, which lends me some hope that they will still find the exploration of general
principles of some relevance to their own priorities. The exclusion of certain subjects is not, of course,
to suggest that they are any less important to the semiotic enterprise. The unavoidable selectivity of
the text invites the productivity of the reader in its deconstruction. Driven by their own purposes,
readers will no doubt be alert 'what is conspicuous by its absence'.
Semiotics is a huge field, and no treatment of it can claim to be comprehensive. My attempt to offer a
coherent account of some key concepts is in some ways misleading: there are divergent schools of
thought in semiotics, and there is remarkably little consensus amongst contemporary theorists
regarding the scope of the subject, core concepts or methodological tools. This particular account
betrays its European origins, focusing on Saussurean and post-Saussurean semiotics (structuralist
semiotics and post-structuralist critiques) rather than, for instance, on Peircean semiotics (although
some key Peircean concepts are mentioned). The focus on structuralist semiotics is intended to be of
value to readers who wish to use semiotics as an approach to textual analysis. However, semiotics is
far more than a method of analysing texts in a variety of media, and I hope I will also inspire the
reader's enthusiasm for exploring some of the fascinating philosophical issues which semiotics raises.