Semiotics is the study of the relationships of words. It is the difference between denotation and connotation. Denotation would be the dictionary definition of something and connotation would be what the word implies. One of the leaders in this field of semiotics was Ferdinand de Saussure, who specifically studied the relationship between the word and what it actually meant. He found that the word didn’t necessarily connect to the meaning. An example would be to ask 20 different people to imagine a tree. There is no way that every person would imagine the exact same tree.
The painting above reads, “This is not a pipe” in French. This would seem to make a contradiction, considering that it is a picture of a pipe, but René Magritte is making the argument that the pipe is not actually a pipe, but rather a signifier of masculinity. Magritte is making a statement about the cultural construction of a Man. Signifiers are made up of myths. For the sake of Margritte’s pipe, it is a myth that to be a “Man” you must smoke pipes. Other masculinity myths would be that you had to have big muscles or drink scotch. This is the thought that because you embody the myth, you are what the myth connotes. So, according to my argument, pipes, muscles, and scotch would all be signifiers of masculinity because it is myth that you must have or do these things to be masculine.
