Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
(such as the highly conventionalized signifier for a punch) and so on (Stam 2000, 212-223; Altman
1992). In the dominant Hollywood tradition, conventional sound codes included features such as:
• diegesis: sounds should be relevant to the story;
• hierarchy: dialogue should override background sound;
• seamlessness: no gaps or abrupt changes in sound;
• integration: no sounds without images or vice versa;
• readability: all sounds should be identifiable;
• motivation: unusual sounds should be what characters are supposed to be hearing.
(Stam 2000, 216-217).
Any text uses not one code, but many. Theorists vary in their classification of such codes. In his book
S/Z, Roland Barthes itemised five codes employed in literary texts: hermeneutic (narrative turningpoints);
proairetic (basic narrative actions); cultural (prior social knowledge); semic (medium-related
codes) and symbolic (themes) (Barthes 1974). Yuri Lotman argued that a poem is a 'system of
systems' - lexical, syntactical, metrical, morphological, phonological and so on - and that the relations
between such systems generated powerful literary effects. Each code sets up expectations which
other codes violate (Lotman 1976). The same signifier may play its part in several different codes.
The meaning of literary texts may thus be 'overdetermined' by several codes. Just as signs need to
be analysed in their relation to other signs, so codes need to be analysed in relation to other codes.
Becoming aware of the interplay of such codes requires a potentially recursive process of re-reading.
Nor can such readings be confined to the internal structure of a text, since the codes utilized within it
extend beyond any specific text - an issue of 'intertextuality' to which we will return.
One simple typology of codes was offered at the start of this section. The typologies of several key
theorists are often cited and it may be useful to alert the reader briefly to them here. Pierre Guiraud
(1975) proposed three basic kinds of codes: logical, aesthetic and social. Umberto Eco offered ten
fundamental codes as instrumental in shaping images: codes of perception, codes of transmission,
codes of recognition, tonal codes, iconic codes, iconographic codes, codes of taste and sensibility,
rhetorical codes, stylistic codes and codes of the unconscious (Eco 1982, 35-8). The value of any
such typologies must clearly be assessed in terms of the interpretive light which they shed on the
phenomena which they are used to explore.
Whatever the nature of any embedded ideology, it has been claimed that as a consequence of their
internalization of the codes of the medium, 'those born in the age of radio perceive the world
differently from those born into the age of television' (Gumpert & Cathcart 1985). Critics have
objected to the degree of technological determinism which is sometimes involved in such stances, but
this is not to suggest that our use of such tools and techniques is without influence on our habits of
mind. If this is so, the subtle phenomenology of new media is worthy of closer attention than is
typically accorded to it. Whatever the medium, learning to notice the operation of codes when
representations and meanings seem natural, obvious and transparent is clearly not an easy task.
Understanding what semioticians have observed about the operation of codes can help us to
denaturalize such codes by making their implicit conventions explicit and amenable to analysis.
Semiotics offers us some conceptual crowbars with which to deconstruct the codes at work in
particular texts and practices, providing that we can find some gaps or fissures which offer us the
chance to exert some leverage.