Semiotics of Pretext, Semiotics of Pre-text

Semioticians obsessively talk about texts and their analysis. Yet, in the history of semiotics, few texts have been analyzed. One might even argue that semiotics has never analyzed texts. Indeed, semioticians, including the fathers of the discipline, have rather turned texts into pretexts: what mattered in their analysis was not to bring about a hermeneutic result (for instance, changing the way in which a community receives the significance of a text) but to demonstrate the validity of a method (for instance, reassuring a community, usually composed of other semioticians, about the epistemological soundness of a certain analytical procedure).