23 INTRODUCTION Semiotics is the study of anything that can be taken as a sign (the Greek word s¯ emeion means ‘sign’). Anything can be a sign as long as someone or, more importantly, a group of people who are part of the same culture or society, interprets it as ‘signifying’ something – that is, as referring to or standing for something other than itself (see Bal and Bryson, 1991). Does this mean that semiotics can be used to study anything at all, and therefore also not much in any real depth, then? In A Theory of Semiotics, Umberto Eco (1976: 7) states that ‘semiotics is in principle the disci- pline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used “to tell” at all’. His state- ment may simply sound like a provocation, and indeed Eco was well known not only for his vast intellectual production but also for his wry sense of humour. However, Eco’s idea that there ought to be a ‘theory of the lie’, together with a whole dis- cipline dedicated to its study, points to the essence of what semiotics contributes to our understand- ing of the world. Semiotics is concerned with how meaning is made and the various ways in which language, here broadly intended, can be used to represent reality and therefore also to tell stories. It is in this sense that signs can always be used to lie as, in fact, there is nothing inherently ‘true’ about any word, picture, or sound that we may use to communicate an idea or a fact. A famous example that is often used in lec- tures introducing students to semiotics is a 1929 painting by the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte that depicts a pipe in a rather realistic manner. Below the pipe, Magritte also painted the phrase ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’, or ‘This is not a pipe’. The painting’s title is La Trahison des Images, or The Treachery of Images (Figure 23.1). Much later, apparently Magritte stated, some- what humorously, that he would have been lying if he had written ‘This is a pipe’ below his picture of a pipe, as the painting was ‘just representation’. Magritte’s painting is a great example of how signs are not the same as what they represent. As Chandler (2002: 70) points out, however, Magritte’s painting is also a reminder that ‘we do habitually refer to such realistic depictions in terms which suggest that they are nothing more nor less than what they depict’. Precisely because we systematically rely on signs to make sense of the world around us, semiotics helps us understand how both language and imagery, for Visual Semiotics: Key Concepts and New Directions Giorgia Aiello BK-SAGE-PAUWELS_MANNAY-190229-Chp23.indd 367 11/8/19 1:11 PM