Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
to the dominant form of framing used for paintings. Whilst sharing the single, central viewing point of
painterly artificial perspective, photography involves the most remorseless application of this code.
Photographs sometimes exhibit even more 'distortion' of phenomenal realism than paintings do:
snapshots of tall buildings exhibit a disturbingly pronounced convergence of the vertical lines (we are
less accustomed to vertical convergence because even Renaissance artists avoided it). In 35mm
photography, the illusion of depth is most striking when 'normal' lenses of about 50mm are used: we
become more aware of 'distortion' when a telephoto or wide-angle lens is used (Nichols 1981, 19).
'Photorealism' has nevertheless become the standard by which 'realistic' representations in visual art
are subjectively judged (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 163-164).
Just as illusionism of Renaissance linear perspective performed the ideological function of 'positioning
the subject', so too did the photographic image. 'The installation of the viewer as subject depends
upon reserving a singular place for him or her, the reciprocal in front of the image of the vanishing
point "behind" it, the point of origin from which the camera "took" its view and where we now take
ours' (Nichols 1981, 159). French theorists associated with the journals Tel Quel and Cinéthique
argued that since the code of linear perspective is built into the camera, photography and film which,
whilst appearing to involve simply a neutral recording of reality, serve to reinforce 'a bourgeois
ideology which makes the individual subject the focus and origin of meaning' (Stam 2000, 137). Film
and television add a narrative dimension to the positioning of the subject, incorporating not only linear
perspective but also dominant narrative devices specific to filmic media. Film theorists refer to the use
of 'suture' (surgical stitching) - the 'invisible editing' of shot relationships which seeks to foreground
the narrative and mask the ideological processes which shape the subjectivity of viewers. Some
Lacanian theorists argue that in the context of conventional narrative (with its possibilities of
identification and opposition), the unique character of the cinema (e.g. watching a large bright screen
in the dark) offers us the seductive sense of a 'return' to the pre-linguistic 'mirror-phase' of the
'Imaginary' in which the self was constructed (Nichols 1981, 300).
'A sign... addresses somebody,' Charles Peirce declared (Peirce 1931-58, 2.228). Signs 'address' us
within particular codes. A genre is a semiotic code within which we are 'positioned' as 'ideal readers'
through the use of particular 'modes of address'. Modes of address can be defined as the ways in
which relations between addresser and addressee are constructed in a text. In order to communicate,
a producer of any text must make some assumptions about an intended audience; reflections of such
assumptions may be discerned in the text (advertisements offer particularly clear examples of this).
Rather than a specifically semiotic concept, 'the positioning of the subject' is a structuralist notion -
although Stuart Hall notes its absence in early structuralist discourse (Hall 1996, 46); Saussure did
not discuss it. It is a concept which has been widely adopted by semioticians and so it needs to be
explored in this context. The term 'subject' needs some initial explanation. In 'theories of subjectivity'
a distinction is made between 'the subject' and 'the individual'. As Fiske puts it, 'the individual is
produced by nature; the subject by culture... The subject... is a social construction, not a natural one'
(Fiske 1992, 288; my emphases). Whilst the individual is an actual person, the subject is a set of
roles constructed by dominant cultural and ideological values (e.g. in terms of class, age, gender and
ethnicity). Ideology turns individuals into subjects. Subjects are not actual people but exist only in
relation to the interpretation of texts and are constructed through the use of signs. The
psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lacan undermined the humanist notion of a unified and consistent
subject. The individual can occupy multiple subject positions, some of them contradictory. 'Identity'
can be seen as 'a matrix of subject-positions' (Belsey 1980, 61). The fluidity and fragmentation of