Semiotics

Semiotics is defined as the study of signs and sign systems within society. Anything that is capable of conveying meaning is a sign (e.g words, images, clothes, gestures, symbols). Often, signs are grouped together to form codes, such as gestures (body language) and clothing/dress (dress codes). Clothing is in fact a cultural sign system which has strong communicative value and which is used on  a daily basis to negotiate meaning and interaction on the basis of that negotiated meaning. Semiotics provides a useful framework for deconstructing visual ‘texts’ around us, and looking beyond their mere surface at any underlying cultural messages and ideas. 

Semiotics Terminology

- Signifier: physical representation (stimulus: verbal or textual context)
- Signified: mental concept (response: cognitive reading) (signifier + signified = sign)
- Langue: whole language system 
- Sign: single word
- Parole: partial example of speech or writing
- Syntagm: a complete, ordered sequence of signs, eg a sentence (eg my dog smells bad)
- Paradigm: point of substitution in a sentence (or a group of signs) which allows for an exchange of a similar sign, abstract sign or metaphorical sign without changing the overall structure

Roland Barthes: The World of Wrestling from Mythologies

- ‘The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have seen that of ancient theatres.’
- ‘Even in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bull fights.’
- ‘The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not.’
- ‘It abandons itself to the primary virtue of a spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what one thinks, but what one sees.’
- ‘Wrestling offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning.’ 
- ‘The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasises and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle.’
- ‘Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity since one must always understand everything on the spot.’