Literary Code(s) and Ideology

Out of the euphoria which followed upon the advances of linguistics, there appeared on the horizon of the sciences of man the figure of a possible science of meaning: semiology. It satisfied the requirements for both generalisation and formalisation which, in our tradition, characterize a discipline as scientific. As science, it created its own lexicon and metalanguage. So, owing to the conceptual unity of the metadiscourse2, the term code serves to homogenize all signifying practices by reducing them to their mode of signalling. Yet, for us, the essential difficulty of semiology3 lies in this homogenizing. It supposes that a single model of intelligibility (the differential model of signalling borrowed from information theory) can account for the totality of practices. Semiology thus limits the space of the signifying process to that of the system, eliminating that of the subject for whom and by whom the system is systematic. This theory of a generalized semiotics is derived from two essential characteristics of the sign in the Saussurean system: arbitrariness and discreteness; these determine the selection of models of analysis

Arbitrariness · Biosemiotics · Epistemology · Ideology · Linguistics · Political science · Semiotics · Sociology · Law · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Philosophy