Structuralism

Ferdinand de Saussure
1857-1913

Linguistics
The structure of language
Semiotics

Signs take the form
of words, images,
sounds, odours, flavours,
acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning.
'Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign', declares Peirce.

Anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as 'signifying' something - referring to or standing for something other than itself.

We interpret things as
signs largely unconsciously
by relating them to familiar systems of conventions.
It is this meaningful use of signs which is at the heart of the concerns of semiotics.

We seem as a species to be driven by a desire to make meanings:
above all, we are surely
Homo significans - meaning-makers.

Indeed, according to Peirce, 'we think only in signs'.

Distinctively, we make meanings through our creation and interpretation
of 'signs'.

A sign must have both a signifier and a signified.
You cannot have a totally meaningless signifier
or a completely
formless signified.
A sign is a recognizable combination of a signifier with a particular signified. The same signifier
(the word 'open') could stand for a different signified (and thus be a different sign) if it were
on a push-button inside a lift ('push to open door'). Similarly, many signifiers could stand for the concept 'open' (for instance, on top of a packing carton, a small outline of a box with an open flap for 'open this end') - again, with each unique pairing constituting
a different sign.

Claude Levi-Strauss 1908-2009

Anthropology - Kinship Structures

The basis of the structural anthropology of
Lévi-Strauss is the idea that the human brain systematically processes organised, that is to say structured, units of information that combine and recombine to create models that sometimes explain the world we live in, sometimes suggest imaginary alternatives,
and sometimes give tools with which to operate in it. The task of the anthropologist, for Lévi-Strauss, is not to account for why a culture takes a particular form, but to understand and illustrate the principles of organisation that underlie the onward process of transformation that occurs as carriers of the culture solve problems that are either practical or purely intellectual.

Graphic design Modernism

Otto Neurath

Isotype

Post- Structualism

Roland Barthes

The death of the author

In Elements of Semiology (1964), organized his opinions about the science of signs, based on the concept of language and the analysis of myth and ritual of Ferdinand de Saussure. Barthes then gave her more thorough application of structural linguistics in S / Z (1970). By analyzing point by point, a novel by Balzac, Sarrasine, considered the experience of reading and reports by the reader as subject in relation to the movement of language in texts. According to him, the classical criticism had never properly considered the player. But the reader is the space where all the different aspects of the text meet. In fact, the unity of a text lies not in its origin but in its destination. The study becomes the focal point and a model for literary criticism at several levels, thanks to its analytical concentration on the structural elements that constitute the literary whole.

ISOTYPE was developed to visualize social and economic relations
especially for uneducated persons and to facilitate their understanding of complex data. It was developed from the point of view of a specific socialist conception of adult education and sought to enhance scientific arguments by means of an ‘educationby the eye’

'What is an Author'

Michael Focault

Focault imaginesa time when we might as
"What difference does it make who is speaking"