CONCLUSION

Even though semiotics has seminal texts, established procedures, scholarly debate, publications, and an academic history, it is, as we have seen, still a rather diverse and eclectic subject. This diversity and eclecticism, particularly in terms of its methods, stems from the many different disciplines that it uses for inspiration, including: linguistics, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, sociology, art history, communication studies, media studies, and material culture. The result of this is that the subject has both a weakness and a strength. Its weakness is that there is no body of knowledge of which semiotics can be certain. Its strength is that the absence of such a body of knowledge gives it the freedom to explore new ways of thinking, avenues of interest, and novel ways of exploring meaning. In other words, because it does not have the doctrinal quality of other intellectual disciplines, semiotics can be actively done rather than just passively learned and digested. For in semiotics we don’t simply decipher a coded meaning and leave it at that. Instead, we are asked continually to reinterpret, reformat, rework, rethink, and reinvigorate the meanings that we find around us. And this is what makes it such a rewarding subject to investigate.