New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

18 THE ORIGINS OF SEMIOTICS
Realist approaches, including some Marxist and early feminist approaches,
emphasize the context and therefore the referential function of art.
Formalism emphasizes the message and therefore the poetic function of art.
Semiotic theory emphasizes the code and therefore the metalingual function
of art, while textual analysis emphasizes the message and therefore the
poetic as well as the phatic functions of artistic discourse. Reception theory
and spectator-in-the-text theory as well as psychoanalytic approaches
emphasizing the desiring spectator, finally, foreground the receiver and
therefore the conative functions of art.
THE ADVENT OF STRUCTURALISM
As a kind of methodological success story, structural linguistics generated a
rich proliferation of structuralisms, most of them premised on seminal
Saussurean dichotomies such as diachrony/synchrony and langue/parole.
Although Saussure never used the term “structuralism,” his approach was
premised on the idea that any serious study of linguistic phenomena had to
be based on the view of langue as a structure, whose properties were
structural properties; the structure itself creates the units and their mutual
interrelations. Rather than an assemblage of pre-existing blocks, language
exists only as a structural whole. It is important, at this point, to define
structuralism and its relation to semiotics. Roland Barthes defined
STRUCTURALISM as a “mode of analysis of cultural artifacts which
originates in the methods of contemporary linguistics” (Barthes 1967a:
897). For Jean Piaget, structuralism is a method of inquiry based on the
triple principles of totality, transformation and self-regulation (Piaget 1970:
5). For our purposes, we can define structuralism as a theoretical grid
through which behavior, institutions and texts are seen as analyzable in
terms of an underlying network of relationships, the crucial point being
that the elements which constitute the network gain their meaning from the
relations that hold between the elements. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow (1982) distinguish between HOLISTIC STRUCTURALISM, i.e.
one positing structures, deductively determined, which exceed empirical
instantiations, and ATOMISTIC STRUCTURALISM, i.e. one positing
structures determined by inductive generalization.
Common to most varieties of structuralism and semiotics was an
emphasis on the underlying rules and conventions of language rather than
on the surface configurations of speech exchange. In language, Saussure
argued, there are only differences. Going against the tradition of linguistic
thought which saw the core of language as consisting in an inventory of
names designating things, persons and events already given to human
understanding, Saussure argued that language is nothing more than a
“series of phonetic differences matched with a series of conceptual
differences. Concepts, therefore, are purely differential, defined not by their