Les textes, la méthode sémiotique et l'étude des cultures

In this article I attempt to show that semiotics can be regarded as a discipline which uses a very precise method to analyze culture. In the first part I try to investigate the concept of text, which for semioticians is the filter through which culture is studied. The text is often considered in terms of its everyday meaning, as a “piece of work” linked to some kind of support, whereas from the semiotic point of view, text is everything that can be analyzed, regardless of the ways it which it manifests itself. I then focus on the method of analysis and its specific features and try to explain how, in my view, this method can combine Lotman’s theoretical suggestions on how culture works with Greimas’s theory with a «scientific vocation». The semiotics of culture is thus shown to be a semiotics which offers a method and the tools for describing and comparing texts, from both the synchronic and diachronic perspectives.[...]