Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
wire constructs with loose bits and pieces hovering weightlessly in between. Even if they
deciphered this aspect of the code, what would they make of the woman's right arm that tapers
off like a flamingo's neck and beak? The creatures are 'drawn to scale against the outline of
the spacecraft,' but if the recipients are supposed to understand foreshortening, they might
also expect to see perspective and conceive the craft as being further back, which would make
the scale of the manikins minute. As for the fact that 'the man has his right hand raised in
greeting' (the female of the species presumably being less outgoing), not even an earthly
Chinese or Indian would be able to correctly interpret this gesture from his own repertory.
The representation of humans is accompanied by a chart: a pattern of lines beside the figures
standing for the 14 pulsars of the Milky Way, the whole being designed to locate the sun of our
universe. A second drawing (how are they to know it is not part of the same chart?) 'shows the
earth and the other planets in relation to the sun and the path of Pioneer from earth and
swinging past Jupiter.' The trajectory, it will be noticed, is endowed with a directional
arrowhead; it seems to have escaped the designers that this is a conventional symbol
unknown to a race that never had the equivalent of bows and arrows. (Gombrich 1974, 255-8;
Gombrich 1982, 150-151).
Gombrich's commentary on this attempt at communication with alien beings highlights the importance
of what semioticians call codes. The concept of the 'code' is fundamental in semiotics. Whilst
Saussure dealt only with the overall code of language, he did of course stress that signs are not
meaningful in isolation, but only when they are interpreted in relation to each other. It was another
linguistic structuralist, Roman Jakobson, who emphasized that the production and interpretation of
texts depends upon the existence of codes or conventions for communication (Jakobson 1971). Since
the meaning of a sign depends on the code within which it is situated, codes provide a framework
within which signs make sense. Indeed, we cannot grant something the status of a sign if it does not
function within a code. Furthermore, if the relationship between a signifier and its signified is relatively
arbitrary, then it is clear that interpreting the conventional meaning of signs requires familiarity with
appropriate sets of conventions. Reading a text involves relating it to relevant 'codes'. Even an
indexical and iconic sign such as a photograph involves a translation from three dimensions into two,
and anthropologists have often reported the initial difficulties experienced by people in primal tribes in
making sense of photographs and films (Deregowski 1980), whilst historians note that even in recent
times the first instant snapshots confounded Western viewers because they were not accustomed to
arrested images of transient movements and needed to go through a process of cultural habituation
or training (Gombrich 1982, 100, 273). As Elizabeth Chaplin puts it, 'photography introduced a new
way of seeing which had to be learned before it was rendered invisible' (Chaplin 1994, 179). What
human beings see does not resemble a sequence of rectangular frames, and camerawork and editing
conventions are not direct replications of the way in which we see the everyday world. When we look
at things around us in everyday life we gain a sense of depth from our binocular vision, by rotating our
head or by moving in relation to what we are looking at. To get a clearer view we can adjust the focus
of our eyes. But for making sense of depth when we look at a photograph none of this helps. We
have to decode the cues. Semioticians argue that, although exposure over time leads 'visual
language' to seem 'natural', we need to learn how to 'read' even visual and audio-visual texts (though
see Messaris 1982 and 1994 for a critique of this stance). Any Westerners who feel somehow
superior to those primal tribesfolk who experience initial difficulties with photography and film should
consider what sense they themselves might make of unfamiliar artefacts - such as Oriental