69249454-chandler-semiotics

ANALYSING STRUCTURES 109
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There is a delightfully ironic quip (variously attributed) that
‘The world is divided into those who divide people into two types, and
those who don’t.’ The interpretive usefulness of simple dichotomies
is often challenged on the basis that life and (perhaps by a misleading
realist analogy) texts are ‘seamless webs’ and thus better described in
terms of continua. We may need to remind ourselves that any interpretive
framework cuts up its material into manageable chunks; how
appropriate this is can only be assessed in terms of whether it advances
our understanding of the phenomenon in question. Nevertheless, useful
as it may be to construct an orderly and manageable reality by slicing
experience into mutually exclusive categories, cultural practices
maintaining the conventional borders of what seem to be fundamental
natural distinctions mask the permeability and fragility of the fabric
of social reality. The ambiguous boundary zones between
conceptual categories (what semiotically inspired market researchers
have called areas of ‘cultural contradiction’) can be sacred or taboo in
various cultures, and their exploration can be very revealing (Leach
1976, 33–6).
THE SYNTAGMATIC DIMENSION
Saussure, of course, emphasized the theoretical importance of the
relationship of signs to each other. He also noted that ‘normally we
do not express ourselves by using single linguistic signs, but groups
of signs, organized in complexes which themselves are signs’
(Saussure 1983, 127). However, in practice he treated the individual
word as the primary example of the sign. Thinking and communication
depend on discourse rather than isolated signs. Saussure’s focus
on the language system rather than on its use meant that discourse
was neglected within his framework. The linking together of signs
was conceived solely in terms of the grammatical possibilities which
the system offered. This is a key feature of the Saussurean framework
which led some theorists to abandon semiotics altogether in favour
of a focus on ‘discourse’ while leading others to seek to reformulate
a more socially oriented semiotics (e.g. Hodge and Kress 1988).
However, this is not to suggest that structural analysis is worthless.
Analysts still engage in formal textual studies based on structuralist