What is: Semiotics

I Have Never Met Someone As Beautiful… As A Melon Bread

(I like melon bread *wink* *wonk*)

Meme to meet you,

Okay guys, I’m doing another one of those migraine inducing headaches, a topic called Semiotics. See the bold words? It means this will either fry my tiny brain or yours. Most possibly mine.

So, semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how they are used in communication. It is how ‘meaning’ is created and how it is communicated. Among the signs that I unknowingly studied are analogy, metaphors and symbolism.

Semiotics started out as an academic exploration into the meaning of words which is then called linguistics, before it moved into examining people’s behaviour (anthropology and psychology).  After that, it evolved to become a question into culture and society (sociology and philosophy), then it advanced with analysing of cultural products (films, literature, art theory).

"A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea." Peirce called the sign a representamen, in order to bring out the fact that a sign is something that "represents" something else in order to suggest it (that is, "re-present" it) in some way.

                                                            - Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)

There are a lot fields under semiotics, some of them are:

Biosemiotics: the study of semiotic processes at all levels of biology.

Film semiotics: the study of the various codes and signs of film and how they are understood

Marketing semiotics, or commercial semiotics is an application of semiotic methods and semiotic thinking in the analysis and development of advertising and brand communications in cultural context.

Social semiotics: expands the interpretable semiotic landscape to include all cultural codes, such as in slang, fashion, and advertising

Through the study of semiotics, we become aware that these signs are normally transparent. Living in a world of increasingly visual signs, we need to learn that even the most 'realistic' signs are not what they appear to be. 

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

http://www.signsalad.com/semiotics-explained/

Describe: Post Modernism

That Planet Earth Turns Slowly… But I Don’t

Meme to meet you,

In this week’s blog, I’d like to address to a difficult topic (for me) which is Post Modernism. What is that? Well, according to verifiable resources, Post- Modernism is a huge movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century on philosophy, arts, architecture and criticism which evolved from modernism.

It is categorized by wide skeptism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in declaring and maintaining political and economic power.

In short, it is the era after Modernism, a huge movement in Western arts and literature that started from around 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by intentional rejection of the styles of the past; emphasising on innovation and experimentation in order to create artworks that reflects modern society.

Okay… this topic really fries my tiny brain. Anyways, there are a few people who made their opinions or ideas (philosophies really), known about Post-Modernism that it became influential and famous during that era.

One of them was Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher who objects the philosophical basis of the concepts of "subjectivity" and "objectivity" (whatever that means) and said that similar grounding oppositions in logic ultimately refer to one another. 

Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher and the father of deconstruction, and practiced philosophy as a form of textual criticism. He criticized Western philosophy as privileging the concept of presence and logos, as opposed to absence and markings or writings.

Philosophies on Post-Modernism made a huge impact on arts, architecture, literature and music, among other things.

In architecture, it was a movement or style that pop up during the 60s, as a reaction against the lack of variety of modern architecture and design. The style thrives through the 80s and 90s, probably because during that timeline there were a lot of movies, dramas and theories involved in sci-fi and the future.

Post- Modernism in music is simply music developed in the era. Music that follows the trend of philosophical or appreciation of post modernism. (I’m just repeating what I said lol) It became the trend in the 60s, where psychedelic rock started to grow. Another example would be the rock band, The Beatles.

In every era, there will always be someone who would criticise a new invention or idea. The same could be said with post modernism. Criticism on post modernism was varied and different, Noam Chomsky, an American philosopher said post modernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or demonstrable knowledge.

"The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unliveable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that's not postmodernism; that's modernism!"

                        -A quote from Christian apologist and philosopher William Lane Craig

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/modernism