Deleuze, Peirce and the cinematic sign

In this essay I will explain Deleuze’s semiotics in detail. There is a paucity of texts concerned with an examination of and engagement with Deleuze’s concept of the sign. And more broadly, not much has been written on the potential of semeiotics for a semiotic analysis of the moving image. There have been inroads into this problem, but these have only gone as far as to consider the moving image in relation to the typology Peirce builds around the representative condition of the sign — in other words, the sign-object relation as a First (Icon), Second (Index) or Third (Symbol) — using this range of representation as a way of offering an alternative to semiology’s preference for the coded sign. I will make clear how Deleuze’s use of Peirce and development of a semiotics is much more complicated and yields a great potential for future semiotic analyses of the cinema. Most important about my argument is the way Deleuze translates his concept of expression into semeiotics and develops a rich and practical range of signs in the cinema. Looking closely at the cinema, reading between the lines of Deleuze’s thesis, reveals a version of Peirce’s Tri-Square of sign elements underlying the cinema books, and in terms of the (hierarchical) combination of these elements, a version of Peirce’s triadic (completed) signs. The difference, however, is the sense in which Deleuze’s signs are expressions of semiotic matter, and consequently, that the structure of Deleuze’s semiotics is a structure of immanence. Deleuze doesn’t say as much, yet I think breaking his argument down to its bare bones and thinking about his signs in this way gives us a practical semiotics we can take from the cinema books and apply to all films.