Semiotics: The Basics by Daniel Chandler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
As titled, this book is an introduction to semiotics. I honestly can’t image the book to be written any clearer. As an introductory text, Chandler does an amazing job navigating the tangled web of methodologies and conceptual frameworks that both define semiotics as a field as well as separating out the various schools and limitations inherent in each framework.
As a structuralist practice, semiotics is largely incomplete in the sense that semiotics tries to find objective kernels to tie down sense-making… these kernels are often come in the method of form — which while helpful for a particular sign, is not helpful when many signs are considered in a chain.
Thus the last chapter of this tight book approaches the “non-basic” methods, which include grounding a reader in the text, either in the form of a subject or in the form of other texts. Semiotics works well intrinsically as its own code, but is sorely limited when external constraints are imposed in the particular approaches to reading that we take daily… which is where post-structuralism starts (analysis of ideology, connection of form as a background to foreground ideological relations)…. and of course, the analysis of how semiotics creates a reader, or imposes relations on readers, and those ideological positionings of subjectivity.
Chandler’s exegesis explains these complex fields as well, touching on their differences from structural semiotics while clearly highlightly the benefits of these other approaches (which, one assumes is not basic). I was very impressed with his approach, and his ability to keep several methodologies clearly different even while many of them overlap (but also diverge) in their use of terms and meanings.
All in all, an impressive textbook. My only thought, in the manner of helping readers who are less metaphysical however, Chandler might assume a painting or a short story to show how different semiotic analysises could overlap.
