Passive reading

Passive reading, the desire to be surrounded by the text, is as close as reading can come to being a perceptual rather than a semiotic experience.

The goal of passive reading is to forget oneself by identifying with the narrative world presented. In this sense passive reading is antireading, since true reading is an encounter with signs in which the reader continually asserts (and repeatedly loses) his or her independence of the text.

Like reading technologies, the computer too can be used for antireading.

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What is grammar

In the context of this essay grammar is understood to be that system of rules, what semiotics describes as langue, that one necessarily ascribes to in a language community. Without this grammar we are condemned to a series of idiolects. To not use grammar (whether a formal gramamr or a colloquial grammar) is to risk intelligibility and comprehension in quite fundamental ways, and it is this that makes a grammar a formal system. Hypertext (and classical cinema) may have commonly accepted styles but these are not grammars in the sense of langue. They do not constitute the possibility of utterance in advance, as is the case in our usual experience of language.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links

A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

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New landscapes of philosophy

Semiotics is still an obsession of literary theory, but clearly only one of many approaches to meaning, and may indeed be fading now from the American philosophy scene.

Very few of its ten thousand professional philosophers are rattling the bars of the prison cage of language. Linguistic philosophies continue, but in addition to the traditional fields — philosophy of existence (ontology), meaning (epistemology) art (aesthetics), morals (ethics) and political history — there is increased emphasis on new fields: computer issues, applied ethics, feminism, rights of parenthood, etc.

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Semiotic literay criticism

Later semiotic approaches to literature have not been systematic (or, in some special cases such as Roland Barthes's S/Z, they have been so specifically and exhaustively systematic as to render the possibility of a complete literary semiotics doubtful).

As structuralist linguistics gave way to a post-structuralist philosophy of language which denied the scientific ambitions of the general theory of signs, semiotic literary criticism became more playful and less systematic in its ambitions. Still, some authors harbor more scientific ambition for their literary schemata than others.

Later authors in the semiotic tradition of literary criticism include Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Michael Riffaterre, and Umberto Eco.

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Kristeva vs Barthes

Julia Kristeva sees that for Saussure linguistics is only part of a general science of signs and proposes that linguistics in due course will merge in a universal science or, more colourfully,

"La sémiotique se construira alors à partie du cadavre de la linguistique, d'une mort . . . à laquelle la linguistique se résignerait après avoir preparé le terrain à la sémiotique."

At the other extreme, Roland Barthes asserts the unquestioned primacy of language from which all other sign systems must be derived.

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Computational semiotics

Computational semiotics is an interdisciplinary field that applies, conducts, and draws on research in logic, mathematics, the theory and practice of computation, formal and natural language studies, the cognitive sciences generally, and semiotics proper.

A common theme of this work is the adoption of a sign-theoretic perspective on issues of artificial intelligence and knowledge representation. Many of its applications lie in the field of computer-human interaction (CHI) and the fundamental devices of recognition (work at IASE in California).

One part of this field, known as algebraic semiotics, combines aspects of algebraic specification and social semiotics, and has been applied to user interface design and to the representation of mathematical proofs.

Semiosis and production of meaning

Semiosis is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. Peirce was interested primarily in logic, while Saussure was interested primarily in linguistics, which examines the functions and structures of language.

But both of them recognised that there is more to significant representation than language in the narrow sense of speech and writing alone. So they developed the idea of semiosis to relate language to other sign systems both human and nonhuman. Today, there is disagreement as to the operating cause and effect. One school of thought argues that language is the semiotic prototype and its study illuminates principles that can be applied to other sign systems. The opposing school argues that there is a metasign system and that language is simply one of many codes for communicating meaning, citing the way in which human infants learn about their environment before they have acquired language.

Whichever may be right, a preliminary definition of semiosis is any action or influence for communicating meaning by establishing relationships between signs which are to be interpreted by an audience.

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