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The Sign in the Theater

An Introduction To the Semiology of the Art of the Spectacle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Tadeusz Kowzan
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The idea of sign, σημα (sema), has been popular in philosophy and the history of the sciences. Hippocrates and the Stoics, Plato and Aristotle, Saint Augustine and Descartes, Leibniz and Locke, Hegel and Humboldt figure among those who have dealt penetratingly with it. It has engendered a wide variety of sciences and disciplines: semiology, semiotics, semasiology, semantics, sematology which changed their name and content with the influence of time and sometimes of fashion, becoming forgotten to reappear with the impetus of a great thinker. The history of the sciences of the sign deserves systematic study. We shall content ourselves to point out that, of the terms quoted above, semiotics and semiology (or semeiology) have had a longer and richer career than the others. Since Greek antiquity they were applied to two apparently distant fields: military art (the science of manoeuvring troops with the help of signals) and medicine, in which they showed a greater perseverance. In many countries, throughout the 19th century and even today, medical study of the symptoms of illnesses is called semiology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 16 , Issue 61 , March 1968 , pp. 52 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 Cours de linguistique générale, Paris, 1966, pp. 33-35.

2 "L'art comme fait sémiologique," in Actes du Huitième Congrès International de Philosophie à Prague, 2-7 september 1934, Prague, 1936, pp. 1065-1070.

3 Les langages et le discours. Essai de linguistique fonctionnelle dans le cadre de la sémiologie, Bruxelles, 1943, p. 37.

4 Op. cit., p. 56.

5 Cf. the articles by Christian Metz, especially "Le cinéma: langue ou langage?" Communications, No. 4 (1964), pp. 52-90.

6 The Arts and Their Interrelations, New York, 1949.

7 F. de Saussure distinguishes the natural sign from the arbitrary sign. Charles Bally opposes index to sign. The term conventional sign is also used in opposition to natural sign.

8 The famous line from Racine: "Pour qui sont ces serpents qui sifflent sur vos têtes" (Phèdre).