ABSTRACT
Structuralist semioticians seek to infer organizational relations from the explicit features of texts. In cultural studies, semiotics has often been identified with structuralist approaches. Saussurean-inspired semiotics demonstrates that the transparency of the medium is illusory. Even the 'semiological' tradition has been far from monolithic: there have been various inflections of both structuralist and poststructuralist semiotics. Poststructuralist theorists have argued that the structuralist enterprise is impossible – we cannot stand outside our sign systems. Poststructuralist theory derived some of its inspiration from Peircean concepts. Thinking in 'ecological' terms about the interaction of different semiotic structures and languages led the Tartu school cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman to coin the term 'semiosphere' to refer to 'the whole semiotic space of the culture in question'. While all verbal language is communication, most communication is non-verbal. In an increasingly multimodal culture, an important contribution of semiotics from Roland Barthes onwards has been a concern with advertising, photography, and audio-visual media.
