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DAVID SCOTTS SEMIOTICS

By Robin Fuller
Introduction
Writing on how best to approach the semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas, Fredric Jameson
states that one should feel free to bricolate, that is, in plainer language, simply to steal the
pieces that interest or fascinate us, and to carry off our fragmentary booty to our intellectual
caves.[1] I think we can approach David Scotts writings in a similar manner: as a rich
repository of semiotic tools to be appropriated by the bricoleur. Scott has too, in his own way,
taken a bricoleurs approach: since his early publications Scott has remained committed to
semiotics in general, without dogmatically following to the end any one theorists semiotic
programme. Rather than attempt to resolve theories into one unified theory of semiotics, Scott
has appropriated theoretical approaches according to their use-value as a follower of Charles
Sanders Peirce might say in addressing particular subjects.

Nevertheless in the twenty-first century, Scott has increasingly prioritised Peircean semiotic
analysis, as this approach is useful (as will be demonstrated below) in avoiding certain
limitations which according to some critics are inherent to semiotics. Unlike other theorists one
encounters in Scotts writings such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Pictorialist Poetics (1988),
or Claude Levi-Strauss in Semiologies of Travel (2004) whose writing Scott subjects to deep
exegesis, Peirce is never the topic of Scotts studies. Peirce is to be used. However, Scotts
Peirceanism is not doctrinaire: Scotts Peirce is not a master-philosopher and supplier of truths;
rather Peirce is the name of a set of analytical tools, tools which prove useful in analysis of the
interaction of the textual and visual. Further, Scotts own approach to Peircean analysis is
supplemented, and even supported, by the ideas of theorists philosophically and
chronologically distant from Peirce, including Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard.

As Jameson wrote of Greimas, after we carry off our fragmentary booty of theory, we will find
ourselves obliged, in the fullness of time, to return to the central laboratory complex for
conceptual spare parts and missing tools and instruments;[2] so it is for the reader of Scott. For
the bricoleur in search of a theoretical framework, Scotts writing is not simply a well-curated
collection of theorists tools: in his adaption of a Peircean semiotics informed by French
structuralism and post-structuralism to the study of the textual-visual, Scott has developed a
rigorous and (crucially) useful method of semiotic analysis.

The aim of this essay is to outline several of Scotts key theoretical approaches, not simply to
enumerate them, but to demonstrate the ways in which they are united as products of the same
central laboratory complex. Nevertheless, this is not an attempt to neutrally re-present Scotts
writings as a bricoleur these are the parts which I have found most useful, and transformed in
the process, in constructing my own machine. Below I explore Scotts answers to questions I
have been asking myself since I first attended his classes on textual and visual studies:
questions such as is a sign a process or a thing?, what role, if any, does reference play in
semiosis? and how does Peirces semiotic theory relate to structuralism?. Sections one and two
below demonstrate the way that Scotts Peircean approach addresses many of the supposed
shortcomings of semiotics (they therefore repeat much of Scotts own more trenchant defence
of semiotics, co-authored with Keyan G. Tomaselli).[3] Finally, we will see the way Scott,
informed by Michel Foucault, handles the distinction between semiotics and semiology.

1. The end of semiotics

For some time now in certain areas of academia semiotics has been used as a name for
something which is said to have come and gone. While there are definitely areas in which
semiotics is very much central, and increasingly so (notably in sociolinguistics and studies of
the Linguistic Landscape), it is also true that in many areas of study (particularly, but not
exclusively, literary studies) semiotics is not as prominent as it once was. Semiotics eulogists
include the sociolgist-of-science Bruno Latour, who in 1993 wrote of the end of a period of
semiotics turns,[4] and are even so far flung as to show up in the field of architectural practice:
among a list of approaches to architecture said to have become discredited by the close of the
twentieth-century, Robert Venturi includes idiotic applications of semiotic theory.[5] Even
semioticians themselves are noting that, if not the entire enterprise of semiotics, a certain
moment has passed: Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, in Reading Images, describe the
end of what they call the second phase of semiotics, which they name the Paris School and
describe as the application of Saussurean linguistics to the study of painting, film, photography,
etc.[6]

One of the difficulties then with the alleged demise of semiotics is a problem of definition: is
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One of the difficulties then with the alleged demise of semiotics is a problem of definition: is
semiotics the name of a method of analysis (or style of writing even) which came into being
around the early twentieth century, and peaked some time during the second half of the
century?; is semiotics a diverse area of activity, and what is in demise is one particular school?;
or is semiotics, as David Sless put it, a thing that has always been a feature of human
intellectual life, and which occurs whenever we stand back from our ways of understanding
and communication, and ask how these ways of understanding and communication arise, what
form they take, and why.[7] As is often the case with issues of terminology, the task is not to
find the correct answer (as structuralist linguistics has taught us that the meaning of a term lies
in its use, not through appeal to an authority-dictionary or uncovered etymology), but to find a
way of handling terminology precisely and consistently. In this and the following sections we
will see the way Scotts terminological distinctions respond to the criticisms levelled at
semiotics, and in section three we will explicitly discuss Scotts distinctions between semiotics
and semiology and the centrality of these distinctions in understanding his approach to
semiotic analysis.

Fig. 1. Left: Peirce and his model of semiosis; right: Saussure and his sign.

One of the principal criticisms levelled at semiotics in recent decades has been the claim that
semiotics institutes a sort of platonic ideal world of abstract structures behind appearances. In
its focus on systems of communication and meaning, semiotics prioritises the relations between
elements, and fails to attend to the realities of the world and the subjects who operate within
such structures. Scott himself, writing with Tomaselli, has expressed this criticism as follows:

The analytical tendency has been to naturalize the structure of difference [] into a
formal map onto the grid of which all signs relate in one-to-one correspondence with
specific reference points. In these theories, every sign consists of a signifier and a
signified in arbitrary dyadic relationships that signify by virtue of their difference to
other such pairs. In terms of this logic, we are imprisoned in a world of linguistic
structures. The mess and confusion found in everyday life, to use Husserls term, are
bracketed out because they obscure the clarity of the structure.[8]

Scotts response is simple: such a critique is valid for (much of) the semiological tradition (what
Kress and Van Leeuwen call the Paris school), but not for Peircean semiotics. While the
Saussure-based linguistic model [] brackets the referent, Peircean semiotics places emphasis
on the complexity of the meaning-making process or semiosis on the part of the receiver. Far
from bracketing out reference, the subject, history, or ideology, Scotts Peircean analysis
involves an uncovering of the historical and political layers of sign construction, and a focus on
the process of subjective interpretation of signs. As Scott and Tomaselli put it:

The nature of the sign in Peirce is such that we can relate social entities be they
individual or collective to discourse on the one hand and to practice on the other, in
quite a coherent way. Since the semiotic relationship is triadic, a given situation can be
analysed in considerably more complex and creative ways than can be done via an
application of a dyadic semiology alone. One has the means to look at the simultaneous
relations between, for example, a sign and the habit it engenders in practice, the practice
and the signifying subject, and the subject and the system of signification. It follows that
any political aspects of such situations cannot be readily separated out from such a study:
one would first have to justify why any links cannot be hierarchical, and consequently
not be political.[9]

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Scotts analysis in the terms of Peirces second trichotomy of the sign (icon, index, symbol) is
never a simple case of (al-) locating (and thereby exhausting) a semiotic status; it is always a
case of exposing a shifting of semiotic functions.[10] It is precisely this unpacking of
multivalent signs the interaction of icon, index and symbol that exposes the historical and
political inherent in signification. For example, in European Stamp Design (1995), Scott
discusses the use of the abbreviation RF for Rpublique franaise on French postage stamps.
These alphabetical characters (symbols) serve to fulfil the primary indexical function of the
stamp: to denote the country of origin. Yet these symbols are not only functionally indexical
RF has come to serve as a sort of logotype on postage stamps, and the logotype (as will be
returned to below) involves a process of iconisation of the symbol becoming an icon when it
receives a noticeable degree of typographical definition or is placed in a prominent and isolated
position.[11] Yet there is a more specific way in which the symbol RF became iconised.
Following the liberation of France, the reappearance of RF on postage stamps (replacing the
Vichy regimes Postes franaises) graphically represents the re-establishment of the French
Republic, and becomes a significant element in an iconic syntax conveying a specific
ideological message, namely Frances liberation and the re-establishment of Peace, Liberty and
French Republican values after the humiliation suffered in World War II.[12]

Scotts detailed analysis of Britannia in The Semiotics of Cultural Icons: the example of
Britannia, exposes the historical and political process of sign formation. Cultural Icons, such
as Britannia, are iconic signs to which a transparent but often complex overlaying of
connotations has accrued, usually after a certain period of time [] The longer the history of
the icon, the richer the layering of indexical and symbolic significances organically attached to
it.[13] The construction of Britannia, which navely at first seems an iconic depiction, is
supported by symbols functioning as indices of Britain such as the Union Jack. Britannia is
typically placed in the context of a shore, which serves as a metonym, and thereby an index for,
Britain as an island nation and a maritime force, exposing the historical moment of Britannias
consolidation as a cultural icon.

Britannia so constructed is then susceptible to two sorts of semiotic manipulation.[14] As a

national icon it is highly regulated in its design and use, and its meaning (its interpretation) is
closely guarded and rigorously observed as it is embodied in forms [such as] coins, seals,
statues and monuments.[15] Thus it comes to be interpreted as a symbol in the sense that
recognition of its meaning is a matter of convention. Yet this attempt at semiotic fixity itself
leaves Britannia vulnerable to parodic exploitation. So, for example, Britannia the symbol,
becomes re-iconised, when removed from a controlled context and inserted in a field of wider
reference,[16] such as the satirical cartoons of James Gilray, in which the symbol Britannia is
re-iconised as woman and subjected to humiliation.

What we see in such examples is that Scotts approach is not simply supplemented by historical
and political research; rather the process of analysis is a process of exposing the historical and
political in sign construction and interpretation.

As noted above, one of the claims made against the validity of semiotics is that it is either
preoccupied with language (or a particular theoretical account of language), to the exclusion of
all else (or to the extent that this description of language is taken as the model to describe all
areas of human activity), based on a belief that (structuralist) linguistics provides for the first
time the possibility of addressing cultural issues scientifically. Such a view is put forth by Julia
Kristeva:

[O]ur era is bringing about a revolution [] since it is replacing the latest cult, that of
Man, with language, a system amenable to scientific analysis. Considering man as
language and putting language in the place of man constitutes the demystifying gesture
par excellence. It introduces science where ideologies and religions are (usually)
established. Linguistics [] posits language as an object of science, and teaches us the
laws of its functioning.[17]

Further, to exchange goods or women, or to produce objects of art:

is a form of secondary linguistic system with respect to language [] to study their

particularities as types of language, is the second characteristic of modern thinking,
which uses linguistics as the basis for its study of man.[18]

Beginning with Pictorialist Poetics (1988) which studies the relationships between poetry and
the visual arts in nineteenth-century France Scott has frequently taken the opposite path to
that of the fabled Parisian semiologist who describes the world in the image of language and
only allows the visual to attain meaning once it takes on the characteristics of language. In
highlighting the ways in which printed language can involve semiotic strategies not normally
considered proper or native to language, Scott reveals the iconic (visual) inherent in a field
considered to be primarily textual. In Pictorialist Poetics, Scott studies the profound
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considered to be primarily textual. In Pictorialist Poetics, Scott studies the profound
connections between the verbal and visual, and demonstrates the infinitely complex
relationship between the two in which elements from one side have to be used in constituting
the nature of other.[19] Thus, in Mallarms Un Coup de Ds, the printed poem is not simply
composed of symbolic/conventional alphabetical signs, as the disposition of the text and
variation in typographic size and treatment introduce iconic signification. However it is not an
icon in the sense that the disposition of the text is directly depictive, rather (and in noticeably
close accord with Peirces account of the visual and spatial nature of thought) it is an icon as a
diagram which attempt[s] to picture forth a mental landscape, one, that is, in which the models
and structures of thought and language interact with those of visual impression.[20]

This preoccupation with the interaction of the textual and the visual continues in Scotts later
(more intensely Peircean) studies into forms of graphic design, including the postage stamp
which Scott describes as having an ideological density per square centimetre that is probably
more concentrated than any other medium of cultural expression[21] and the poster. The
Poetics of the Poster (2010) is a study which in a sense moves in the opposite direction to
Pictorialist Poetics: if Pictorialist Poetics exposed the iconic in what at first seems to be a
primarily textual (symbolic), The Poetics of the Poster, as the title suggests, attempts to explain a
medium more ostensibly recognised as visual communication (the poster) in a manner which
emulates the study of the literary. However, this poetics is not an example of an attempt to
master a field of visual representation with a verbal discourse,[22] precisely because it is
Peircean. Peircean semiotics neither claims all meaning to reside in language, nor does it deny
that thought, and even language itself, includes indexical and iconic semioses. Language not
being purely symbolic can be explained with the rather mundane example of demonstratives
this and that which preform an indexical function. More interesting is Peirces account of the
visual processes (alluded to above in discussion of Mallarm) by which an interpretant of an
object is produced through the use of symbolic signs:

Suppose, for example, I detect a person with whom I have to deal in an act of dishonesty. I
have in mind something like a composite photograph [emphasis added] of all the
persons that I have known and read that have that character, and at that instant I make
the discovery concerning that person, who is distinguished from others for me by certain
indications, upon that index at that moment goes the stamp of RASCAL, to remain
indefinitely.[23]

Similarly, the process of reasoning, according to Peirce, involves the spatial and visual, as one
makes some sort of mental diagram by which [one] sees that his alternative conclusions must
be true, if the premise is so; and this diagram is an icon or likeness. [24]

In the Poetics of the Poster, Peircean analysis of the corporate logo provides the opportunity to
again examine the mutual interactions of the textual and visual in constituting one another. If
we begin with a textual logotype the name or initials of a brand one of the primary activities
of branding is to iconize the symbol, that is to transform the textual expression of the company
name into an image susceptible of immediate, sensual and memorable apprehension.[25] This
icon/symbol hybrid functions as an indexical sinsign, a diagrammatic motif which suggests or
indicates the qualities of the object or service that it represents and which remains tied to its
object [the brand or product] in which it stands in a metonymical, contiguous relationship. The
semiotic slippage does not finish there: in so far as the logo functions as a means of
distinguishing a brand or product from others, and the logo serves as part of a formally
established branding vocabulary, it veers back towards the poll of Thirdness convention in
that as an iconic legisign as it integrates an icon [the iconised symbol] into a regular system to
the extent that it operates almost like a conventional sign. Thus the Peircean triadic approach,
allows a vivid and precise discussion of the shifting layering semioses in which the textual and
visual are not binarily opposed, nor is the visual subsumed in linguistic discourse, but the two
are constitutive of one another.

2. Ontology or interpretation?
Above we have seen that Peircean semiotics (more specifically, Scotts Peircean approach)
avoids the pitfalls of ignoring history and politics, and subject and referent, as well as the
danger of (mis-) describing the meaningful world in the image of language. However, with the
vogue to declare the death of semiology/otics, Peirce has at times been explicitly included as
belonging to the same bygone paradigm. Two of the causes for this are the following fallacies:
the first is to view Peirce as having simply supplied a supplement to semiology in the form of
the second trichotomy of the sign; the second, which often follows the first, is to treat the
categories of the second trichotomy not as the names for semiotic processes but as descriptions
of the ontological status of things.

As noted above, in the introduction to Reading Images, Kress and Van Leeuwen provide a three-
stage history of semiotics more precisely schools of semiotics [which] applied ideas from the
domain of linguistics to non-linguistic modes of communication. The three phases are: Russian
formalism, Paris school semiology, and finally the Michael Halliday-influenced third phase to
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formalism, Paris school semiology, and finally the Michael Halliday-influenced third phase to
which they belong. As their account is of schools which applied ideas from the domain of
linguistics, Peirce finds no place in their history. Peirce is included only as having provided a
theoretical supplement to the Paris school in the form of his second trichotomy of the sign.[26]
Although they note that such an absorption in fact contradicts some of the key ideas in Peirces
semiotics, they do not elaborate on the precise nature of the contradiction, and thenceforth
consign Peirce to the completed second phase of their history.

One area in which the demise of the relevance of Peirce has been explicitly stated is in the
nebulous field of photography theory. James Elkins opened a panel discussion on photography
theory by noting that discussion of the index dominated photography theory for
approximately three decades, yet reference to the index in this field has often involved a
shallow understanding of Peircean semiotics.[27] Joel Snyder, the second contributor to the
discussion, correctly notes that when Peirce is referenced in photography theory it is always
the same six or seven lines by him that are trotted out.[28] The general sense among the
panellists is that theorisations upon the index have failed to account for (or interestingly
describe) photography, and that it would best if photography theory were to move on. This may
well be the case, however when Snyder asserts that it is probably true that Peirce didnt have
a theory of signs; he had a list of signs, the poor-Peirceanism of certain photography theorists is
mistaken for Peirces own.[29] Snyders assertion can only make no sense to anyone who has
attempted to read more than six or seven lines of Peirce. Peirce was nothing if not as even
one critics unsympathetic description of that infuriating philosopher concedes the architect
of a fantastically elaborate semio-metaphysical System.[30] This being the case, it is often
easier, even for those of us who are sympathetic, to ignore the full theoretical implications of
Peirce and to simply use his work as a list of categories. If Peirce is to blame at all for this, it is
because he had too much, rather than too little, theory.

A central characteristic of the use of Peircean terminology in photography theory (and in art
criticism and visual studies more generally) has been the use of the term index to designate a
class of things. This is perhaps best exemplified by a 1977 two-part essay (not directly on
photography) by Rosalind Krauss, entitled Notes on the Index: seventies art in America. Krauss
of course borrows the term index from Peirce; yet Krauss would infact fit into Kress and van
Leeuwens description of a Paris School semiologist (Roland Barthes is especially important to
Krauss) who incorporates the second trichotomy. In Krausss work, Peirces contribution to
semiology is reduced even further, as the second trichotomy is narrowed to a near exclusive
preoccupation with the index. Further still, the index itself is impoverished. In Notes on the
Index Krauss initially defines index in a generally Peircean manner, as being formed on the
basis of existential connection between sign and object.[31] However, most often Kraus defines
the index (and it is always with the demonstrative the index as Snyder has noted)[32] as
marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object
they signify,[33] or that type of sign which arises as the physical manifestation of a cause, of
which traces, imprints, and clues are examples.[34] This is the understanding of index that
Krauss maintains in her later writings, and is representative of the general use of the term in
photography theory.[35] This narrow definition introduces two specifications to Peirces
existential connection. Firstly, it specifies causality in the direction object/referent to sign (this
excludes the use of linguistic indices such as demonstratives as we cannot say an object caused
us to refer to it as that). Secondly, and crucially, the index is an object found in the material
world, a type of mark, a thing.

Rather than being terms for classes of things, icon, index, and symbol refer to the form of a sign
in so far as it mediates the relationship between object and interpretant: the second trichotomy
is not a list of things but a list of rules of action:[36] As Michelle M. Metro-Roland has put it: a
sign can embody each of the qualities and what matters is the way in which signs function
iconically, indexically, and/or symbolically rather than their ontological status [emphasis
added] as one of the types.[37] As is already clear from the discussions of Scotts semiotic
analyses above, Scott avoids the use of the second trichotomy to attempt to exhaust the ontology
of things. Scotts Peirceanism is not a simple taxonomic enterprise into signifying things, but a
hermeneutic process of unwrapping layers of accumulated meaning, and a mapping of the way
in such meanings accumulate. One of the problems with signs, Scott notes, is that they are
difficult to pin down.[38] The task is to reveal the successive glazes of the sign. Peirce saw
signs as being always iconic, indexical, and symbolic, always subject to the interpretant, the
idea to which the sign gives rise.[39] Iconic, indexical, and symbolic functions not only interact
with one another, but also serve to constitute to one another: Scott notes, it is difficult to
instance an absolutely pure index, or to find any sign devoid of indexical quality; symbols
commonly involve a sort of index while indices involve a sort of icon.[40]

as Peirce stressed in relation to his triadic semiotic categories, mobility as much as stasis
is the principle governing the play of signs:[] [Signs] become modified in their
interaction [] all are potentially volatile, their ongoing vitality being neccessarily
predicated on variation and change.[41]

3. Semiotics as hermeneutics
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In the above sections we have distinguished the semiological tradition from Peircean semiotics;
however the usage of the terms semiotics and semiology is not stable and often the two terms
are often treated as interchangeable. Some would separate the terms semiotics and semiology
respectively into Peircean and Saussurean. But others, such as Umberto Eco whose theory of
semiotics is a synthesis of aspects of structuralist linguistics (principally derived from Louis
Hjelmslev) and Peirce-informed concepts, pose difficulties to sustaining the distinction.[42] As
we have already seen, it is useful to distinguish semiology from Peircean semiotics in discussion
of the relative strengths of certain approaches to semiotic analysis. But if semiotics and
semiology are the names of two specific approaches, each created at a moment in history, what
then of Slesss statement that semiotics/ology has always been a feature of human intellectual
life? Here Scott makes important and subtle distinctions.

Fig. 2. Left: Foucault distinguishes hermeneutics and semiology; right: Scott distinguishes semiotics and
semiology.

Scott uses both semiotics and semiology in two ways. Firstly, semiotics is the name of the theory
proposed by Peirce, and semiology that by Saussure.[43] This is a historical understanding of
the terms: semiotics and semiology were invented at a particular point in history by particular
individuals, and so on. The other way he uses the terms (which in fact overlaps with the first) is
closer to Slesss sentiment cited above, though more precise. From Foucault, Scott appropriates
the following distinction (which he cites on more than one occaison) between hermeneutics and
semiology:

let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make the signs speak
and to discover their meaning, hermeneutics; let us call the totality of the learning and
skills that enable one to distinguish the location of the signs, to define what constitutes
them as signs, and to know how and by what laws they are linked, semiology.[44]

In The Order of Things, Foucault describes the different ways in which the semiological and the
hermeneutic were related in different pistmes pre-dating the invention and naming of
Saussure and Peirces philosophies. Scott appropriates Foucaults distinction between the
hermeneutic and the semiological to clarify the differences between structuralism and Peirce:

Although both [Peirce and Saussure] elaborated semiotic theories comprehensive enough
to embrace both the hermeneutic and semiological aspects of sign articulation and
recognition [] the emphasis in each tends towards one or other of these two. In Peirce, it
is the mechanisms of interpretation (or hermeneutics) that are given more extensive
elaboration than in Saussure, while the latter focuses more particularly on the internal
structure of the sign [] One might say that Saussurean semiology is concerned with
difference, whether within a given system or as between different systems, while
Peircean hermeneutics is concerned with the other, in particular in so far as it
approaches the real. This difference is reflected in the varying structural emphasis of the
Peircean and Saussurean systems: Saussure works within a format of binary opposition
same/different while Peirces thinking is essentially triadic. Where Saussure, bracketing
the signs referent, concentrates his attention on the internal structure of the sign []
Peirce is concerned with the triangular relation between sign, interpretant and object.[45]

Thus Scotts distinction between semiological and semiotic is at once attentive to Slesss
assertion that semiotics pre-dates its naming as a discipline, while at the same time recognises
the particular contingent forms the study of signs has taken since (roughly) the beginning of the
twentieth century. As Scott emphasises above, Peirces triangular model of semiosis better
addresses our understanding of the external world through the inclusion of the object. Yet this
is not a case of an un-mediated fragment of external reality being somehow smuggled into a
system of linguistic meaning (as the index often seems to be described in semiological
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system of linguistic meaning (as the index often seems to be described in semiological
photography theory). The object is not fully contained by the sign referring to it, notes Scott.
[46] Peirces distinction between the dynamic and immediate object addresses this: the object as
encountered in the sign is the immediate, as opposed to the unmediated real dynamic object.
The dynamic object is never encountered in semiosis, but the fact that new immediate objects
can be encountered testifies to the existence of a dynamic object outside of semiosis.

Of central importance for Scotts account of semiotics as hermeneutics is the role of the
interpretant, which emphasises the role of the hermeneutic process in making sense of signs
and sense of objects through signs. The interpretant produced on encounter with the immediate
object is likewise immediate in that it need grasp no more of the object than is suggested by the
sign referring to it. But unlike the fixity of the signifier/signified relationship, the interpretant
is mobile:

further interpretation is required which calls for a more complex process of semiosis in
which collateral experience of various sorts (memory, imagination, prior knowledge)
must be drawn on. In such a case the interpretant must itself become dynamic, in effort
to deduce through various logical strategies (inductive or abductive as well as the
deductive logic of the immediate interpretant) a wider or deeper interpretation of the
object than that proposed by the sign.[47]

By highlighting this hermeneutic process the subject is given centrality in the process of
signification. The recognition of meaning amounts not only to competence with a code, but a
creative act on the part of the interpreter:

The intrepretant locates meaning with the interpreter or interpretive communities,

rather than assuming, as does semiology, that meaning resides solely within the dyadic
structure of language sans reception by a perceptive being. At its most effective, an
interpretant necessarily gives rise to new signs or to new uses of signs, and new sign (or
interpretative) communities (new practices). This is known as unlimited semiotics.[48]

Therefore the interpretant is not directly synonymous with Saussures signified: the signified is
fixed within a system of difference, awaiting recognition, only changing gradually and
imperceptibly to the speaker of language. The interpretant is arrived at, logically and creatively,
through the process of interpretation, and it itself becomes a sign in a new triad of semiosis.

Conclusion
As stated in the introduction, this is not an attempt to objectively and exhaustively explain
Scotts semiotics. It would be inaccurate to think that Peircean semiotics provides the only tools
which Scott deploys. Where other tools prove more useful be they appropriated from poetics,
history, or Futurist theory semiotics can be set aside. I have highlighted aspects of Scotts
semiotics which I have myself found useful in understanding the relationship of the textual to
the visual and the nature of semiosis. If Scotts theoretical approach has been the object of this
paper, this has been an account of the interpretation of a particular immediate object. The
dynamic object awaits dynamic interpretation.

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Fig. 3.David Scott infinite semiosis. All illustrations by the author.

Bibliography
Deledalle, Grard. Charles S. Peirces Philosophy of Signs: essays in comparative semiotics.
Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1976.

Elkins, James, Joel Snyder, Jan Baetens, Diarmuid Costello, Jonathan Friday, Margaret Iverson,
Sabine Kreibal, Margaret Olin and Graham Smith. The Art Seminar. In Photography Theory,
edited by James Elkins, 129203. London: Routledge, 2007.

The DS Project: Image, Text, Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. London: Routledge Classics, 2002.
Space/Place, 1830-2015.

For David Scott, curated and Harman, Gilbert. Eco-location. In Film Theory and Criticism: introductory readings, 2nd edn,
edited by Sinad Furlong-Clancy.
edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 234236. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

. Film Image and Film Language. In Film Theory and Criticism: introductory readings,
2nd edn, edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 204216. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
HOME
1979.

ABOUT
Jameson, Fredric. Foreword to On Meaning: selected writings in semiotic theory, by Algirdas
INDEX Julien Greimas, vixxii. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Krauss, Rosalind. Notes on the Index: Seventies art in America. October 3 (1977): 6881.

. Notes on the Index: seventies art in America. Part 2. October 4 (1977): 5867.

. Perpetual Inventory. October 88 (1999): 86116.

.Tracing Nadar, in October 5 (1978): 2947.

Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. Reading Images: the grammar of visual design, 2nd
edn. London: Routledge, 2006.

Kristeva Julia. Language, the unknown: an initiation into linguistics, 2nd edn. Translated by
Anne M. Menke. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Metro-Roland, Michelle M. Tourists, Signs and the City: the semiotics of culture in an urban
landscape. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011.
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Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago, Ill.: Chicago University Press, 1994.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. The Grammatical Theory of Judgement and Inference. In Collected
Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 2, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 265269.
Bristol: Thoemmes, 1998.

. What is a Sign? In The Essential Peirce: selected philosophical writings, vol. 2, edited by
the Peirce Edition Project, 410. Bloomington, Ind.: The University of Indiana Press, 1998.

Rorty, Richard. The Pragmatists Progress: Umberto Eco on interpretation. In Philosophy and
Social Hope by Richard Rorty, 131147. London: Penguin 1999.

Scott, David. European Stamp Design: a semiotic approach to designing messages. London:
Academy Editions, 1995.

The DSProject 2015

. The Poetics of the Poster: the rhetoric of image-text. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2010.

. Pictorialist Poetics: poetry and the visual arts in nineteenth-century France. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.

. Semiologies of Travel: from Gautier to Baudrillard. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2004.

. The Semiotics of Cultural Icons: the example of Britannia. In Cultural Icons, edited by
David Scott and Kenyan G. Tomaselli, 135153. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009.

. Stamp Semiotics: reading ideological messages in philatelic signs. In Semiotics around

the World: synthesis in diversity, vol. 2. edited by Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr, 735
738. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997.

Scott, David and Keyan G. Tomaselli. Cultural Icons. In Cultural Icons, edited by David Scott
and Keyan G. Tomaselli, 724. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009.

Sless, David, In Search of Semiotics. London: Croom Helm, 1986

Venturi, Robert. Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture: a view from the
drafting room. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.

Notes
[1] Fredric Jameson, foreword to On Meaning: selected writings in semiotic theory, by Algirdas
Julien Greimas (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), vixxii, viii.

[2] Jameson, foreword, viii.

[3] David Scott and Keyan G. Tomaselli, Cultural Icons, in Cultural Icons, ed. Scott and
Tomaselli (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009), 724, 717.

[4] Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1993), 6265.

[5] Robert Venturi, Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture: a view from the
drafting room (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 8.

[6] Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, Reading Images: the grammar of visual design, 2nd
edn (London: Routledge, 2006), 6.

[7] David Sless, In Search of Semiotics (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 1. Sless states that he
suspect[s] that furious semiotic debates erupted while the paint was still wet on the walls of the
caves of Lascaux, preface.

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[8] Scott and Tomaselli, Cultural Icons, 9.

[9] Scott and Tomaselli, Cultural Icons, 1516.

[10] David Scott, Stamp Semiotics: reading ideological messages in philatelic signs, in Semiotics
Around the World: synthesis in diversity, vol. 2, ed. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr
(Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997) 735738, 735.

[11] David Scott, European Stamp Design: a semiotic approach to designing messages (London:
Academy Editions, 1995), 7.

[12] Scott, European Stamp Design, 9.

[13] Scott and Tomaselli, Cultural Icons, 18.

[14] David Scott, The Semiotics of Cultural Icons: the example of Britannia, in Cultural Icons,
ed. David Scott and Kenyan G. Tomaselli (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009), 135153,
135.

[15] Scott, Britannia, 135.

[16] Scott, Britannia, 136.

[17] Julia Kristeva, Language, the unknown: an initiation into linguistics, 2nd edn, trans. Anne
M. Menke (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 4.

[18] Kristeva, Language, 45.

[19] David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics: poetry and the visual arts in nineteenth-century France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 172.

[20] Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 144.

[21] Scott, Stamp Semiotics, 735.

[22] W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, Ill.: Chicago University Press, 1994), 9.

[23] Charles Sanders Peirce, The Grammatical Theory of Judgement and Inference, in Collected
Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 2, ed. by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Bristol:
Thoemmes, 1998), 265269.

[24] Charles Sanders Peirce, What is a Sign?, in The Essential Peirce: selected philosophical
writings, vol. 2, ed. the Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington, Ind.: The University of Indiana
Press, 1998), 410, 10.

[25] David Scott, The Poetics of the Poster: the rhetoric of image-text (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2010), 2829.

[26] Kress and Van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 6.

[27] James Elkins, Joel Snyder, et. al, The Art Seminar, in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins
(London: Routledge, 2007), 129203, 130.

[28] Elkins, Snyder, et al., The Art Seminar, 131.

[29] Elkins, Snyder, et al., The Art Seminar, 131132. Snyder mistakenly attributes the
argument that Peirce had a list rather than a theory of signs to: Gilbert Harman, Eco-
location, in Film Theory and Criticism: introductory readings, 2nd edn, ed. by Gerald Mast and
Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 234236. In fact the relevant text
occurs in a different essay by Harman in the same volume Film Image and Film Language,
204216 in which Harman states that the theory of signs, in Peirces sense, contains no laws or
general principles; at best it contains a few categories of classification. The subject of Harmans
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general principles; at best it contains a few categories of classification. The subject of Harmans
essays is an (often convincing) critique of the semiotics of cinema proposed by Christian Metz,
Peter Wollen and Umberto Eco, however his statement regarding Peirce is unconvincing.

[30] Richard Rorty, The Pragmatists Progress: Umberto Eco on interpretation, in Rorty,
Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin 1999), 131147, 135.

[31] Rosalind Krauss, Notes on the Index: Seventies art in America, October 3 (1977), 6881, 70.

[32] Elkins, Snyder, et al., The Art Seminar, 131.

[33] Krauss, Notes on the Index, 70.

[34] Krauss, Notes on the Index: seventies art in America. Part 2, October 4 (1977), 5867, 59.

[35] cf. Krauss, Perpetual Inventory, October 88 (1999), 86116; Krauss, Tracing Nadar, in
October 5 (1978), 2947.

[36] Grard Deledalle, Charles S. Peirces Philosophy of Signs: essays in comparative semiotics
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2000), 102.

[37] Michelle M. Metro-Roland, Tourists, Signs and the City: the semiotics of culture in an urban
landscape (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 22. This use of the term sign (at least to my tastes, if not to
Scotts) raises problems with the definition of sign: if an icon/ index/ symbol is not a sign but
one of the many functions a sign may have, what is this sign prior to, or other than, a
function? Here a little structuralism may be of use. Applying Louis Hjelmslevs distinction
between expression (or signifier) substance and form: the sign is the expression substance,
and the iconic/ indexical/ symbolic function is the expression form.

[38] Scott, Stamp Semiotics, 735.

[39] Scott and Tomaselli, Cultural Icons, 10.

[40] Scott, Stamp Semiotics, 735.

[41] Scott, Britannia, 151.

[42] Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1976),
passim.

[43] David Scott, Semiologies of Travel: from Gautier to Baudrillard (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 10.

[44] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge Classics, 2002) [Les mots et les
choses (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966)], 33. Scott cites this passage in Semiologies of Travel and
Cultural Icons.

[45] Scott, Semiologies of Travel, 1011.

[46] Scott, Semiologies of Travel, 57.

[47] Scott, Semiologies of Travel, 57.

[48] Scott and Tomaselli, Cultural Icons, 10.

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