Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

I was at a gathering recently where a film historian I know casually remarked that “semiotics is pretty much dead.” Well, here I am in New Orleans at the annual Semiotic Society of America Conference, and I can say unequivocally that semiotics is not dead! However, it is very diffuse and diluted. There are people here speaking on many areas, invoking the label of semiotics in the abstract of their paper, yet in the pith of it hardly even aware of what semiotic stances genuinely entail.

I don’t mean to be hard on the papers given here. This is a reflection of the state of the area. The diversity of theories of semiotics, the confusion of semiology and semiosis, Peircian vs. Saussurean, Greimasian linguistic approaches vs. simple-minded discourse approaches, and at the root of it all, a confusion over just “what constitutes a sign?” No avoiding the crazy-quilt!

My own approach comes from the synthesis of John Poinsot and C.S. Peirce first recovered and elaborated by John Deely, and my philosophical mentor, Fr. Ralph Powell, O.P. in the early to mid 1980s. It is friendly to the recovery of traditional Latin philosophical thought (the scholastic tradition) and points to a bona fide future that grapples with reality, rather than being caught in an encapsulated dream world of “signs” modeled on a neo-Platonic Ουρανòς.

I will endeavor to write a little about this approach over the next few months, both to affirm that semiotics is still alive and also to provide a depth to the conversation about the topic.