69249454-chandler-semiotics

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the ‘first principle’ of the sign, and as we have seen it was through
the influence of Peirce that this concept gained widespread acceptance.
Nevertheless, the enduring value of Saussure’s emphasis on
arbitrariness lies in alerting us to the conventional character of many
signs which we experience as natural. All signs, texts and codes need
to be read. When we interpret television or photography as ‘a window
on the world’ we treat the signified as unmediated or transparent.
Saussurean-inspired semiotics demonstrates that the transparency of
the medium is illusory.
Saussure’s emphasis on arbitrariness was based on his adoption
of language as his model for semiotic systems – even Jakobson
acknowledged ‘the predominantly symbolic character of language’
(Jakobson 1966, 420). Subsequent structuralists sought to apply
verbal language as a model to media which are non-verbal or not
solely or primarily verbal. Such attempts at a unifying approach were
seen by critics as failing to allow for the diversity of media, though
Jakobson rejected this criticism: ‘I have looked forward to the development
of semiotics, which helps to delineate the specificity of
language among all the various systems of signs, as well as the
invariants binding language to related sign systems’ (Jakobson 1981,
65; cf. 1960, 351 and 1970, 455). Despite the Jakobsonian stance,
a key example of the problem identified by critics is that analogical
images (such as in traditional painting and photography) cannot be
unproblematically reduced to discrete and meaningfully recombinable
units in the way that verbal language can. Yet some semioticians
have insisted that a ‘grammar’ can nevertheless be discerned at some
level of analysis in visual and audio-visual media. While we may
acknowledge the role of conventions in painting, in the case of an
indexical medium such as photography, common sense suggests that
we are dealing with ‘a message without a code’. Thus, semiotic references
to ‘reading’ photographs, films and television lead some to
dispute that we need to learn the formal codes of such media, and
to argue that the resemblance of their images to observable reality
is not merely a matter of cultural convention: ‘to a substantial degree
the formal conventions encountered in still or motion pictures should
make a good deal of sense even to a first-time viewer’ (Messaris
1994, 7). Semioticians in the Saussurean tradition insist that such