Semiotics: the Basics by Daniel Chandler is Indeed the Book I Need

“We learn from semiotics that we live in a world of signs and we have no way of understanding anything except through signs and the codes into which they are organized...To decline the study of signs is to leave to others the control of the world of meaning which we inhabit” (11)

About a week ago, I was labeling books in my school library when Ms. Mueller, one of my wonderful English teachers, pushed this book into my hands. “You need this,” she announced. “This is what you’ve been looking for.”

She was right. I need Semiotics: The Basics, Daniel Chandler’s 220-page guide to that most obscure of theories. I needed it in my freshman year of high school, when I went overboard trying to a denotative definition of “hero,” I need it now and I will need it when I go to college. I need to highlight important terms (syntagms? bricolage?) and reread challenging passages. I need to incorporate its lessons into my feeble attempts at fiction. A lot of other people might need it too.

“There is no escape from signs” (225)

Even if you haven’t studied semiotics formally, you’ve probably thought about it. Between the pages of Semiotics: the Basics I discovered confirmations of many of my adolescent suspicions, realized and articulated much more coherently than the half-baked theories I had once concocted. Without the guidance this book (and Ms. Mueller) provide, I would never have discovered there was a whole discipline devoted to the flimsiness of language, genre and code! I probably wouldn’t even have recognized the term “semiotics.”

It turns out semiotics—a piece of academic jargon if ever there was one—is pretty much what it says on the tin, as well as what the tin’s label-maker says, the relationship between tin-sayings and tin-contents, and how various people might interpret the tin. More laconically, it’s the study of signs.

Chandler allows a pretty broad definition of the “sign” or “sign system,” which is helpful for new readers like me. He even criticizes the arbitrary nature of some semiotic theories, which have a reputation for being deliberately obtuse and academic, without coming off like an anti-intellectual asshole. He explains in the preface to Semiotics: the Basics that his role is to provide an introduction to the field, or a “reader’s companion” to its denser texts.

I think he succeeds. His prose is challenging but not unreadable, and the charts he provides are very helpful. Chandler teaches media studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and this book makes me want to take a class with him. 

Semiotics: the Basics is useful. Chandler makes a good case for the practical applications of semiotics: the discipline too. If you’re curious about the “rules” that underpin human communication, both the field and its field guide will prove useful for you, as it did for me.

So thank you, Ms. Mueller, for this book and everything you have taught me. In your infinite wisdom, you diagnosed what I needed. The fact that what I needed was a book (as it is in most cases) doesn’t mean you’re uncreative. It might mean that I’m terribly predictable. But more likely it just means that you’re a great teacher.

At least, that’s how I prefer to interpret it.