Semiotics

frenchie deconstructionism

Dina Mehta: Applying Semiotics: Just got a call from an old friend in advertising, who's recently quit India's largest ad agency after many many years and is taking a year's sabbatical to figure out where he's bound next. Well he says he's smelling the flowers after a long long while - lucky guy ! Someone he knows is working on re-engineering a power brand and wants to explore the role of semiotics in reinventing the logo and pack graphics. He called me to ask if i could give him some leads...Compelled me to look for good reads as a starting point. At a more academic level, there's loads of good stuff written about semiotics and many many books available. I wanted to look for developments in the use and application of semiotics in design specifically for brands - and i found a few links which i share here...

https://boxesandarrows.com/semiotics-a-primer-for-designers/

David Chandler intro http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

Michel Foucault admitted to his friend John Searle that he intentionally complicated his writings to appease his French audience. Searle claims Foucault told him: “In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a profound thinker.”... Foucault said that Jacques Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.”

Cosma Shalizi: Semiotics, the academic discipline, should on no account be confused with linguistics; with rhetoric; with formal language theory; with cognitive science; with mathematical logic and meta-mathematics; or even with information theory. All of these, whatever their troubles, conduct themselves with at least a modicum of rigor and (where applicable) empirical controls, and have actual results, some of them even of practical utility, to show for themselves. On the other hand, semioticians are quite at home with structuralist, literary critics, psychoanalysts, soi-disant narratologists, and the more dubious sort of philosophers, which speaks for itself. The story of semiotics has been one of "institutional success and intellectual bankruptcy," as Sperber and Wilson (an anthropologist and a linguist, respectively) put it.

I took a ContinuingEd class with Marshall Blonsky back in the day.

https://twitter.com/BillSeitz/status/902131955579408385