Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

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Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler declaration that 'I... claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact' ('les myths se pensent dans le hommes, et á leur insu') (Lévi-Strauss 1970, 12). It is similarly evident in Althusser: 'Marx observes that what determines a social formation in the last instance... is not the spirit of an essence or a human nature, not man, not even "men", but a relation, the relation of production' - in other words, as Coward and Ellis put it, 'man is not the origin of society, it is rather that society is the origin of man' (Coward & Ellis 1977, 82, including this citation from Althusser). And the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan observed that 'man speaks, but it is only that the symbol has made him man' (cited in Coward & Ellis 1977, 107). Whilst providing the key framework from which much of structuralist (and post-structuralist) theory was derived, Saussure did not himself advance the proposition that the subject is constructed by the (language) system. In an astonishingly contemporary observation published in 1868, the co-founder of what we now know as semiotics, the logician Charles Peirce, declared in a quasi-syllogistic form that 'the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign... Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought' (Peirce 1931-58, 5.314). He went on to note that 'it is hard for man to understand this, because he persists in identifying himself with his will' (ibid., 5.315). As in several other instances, Peirce's notions find their echoes in poststructuralist theory, albeit in more dramatic forms. One hundred years later, the French historian of ideas Michel Foucault declared apocalyptically that 'as the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end' (Foucault 1970, 387). In a famous chapter of his book, The Order of Things, Foucault discusses Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) painted in 1656 by the Spanish artist Diego Velásquez. Whilst the ostensible subject of the painting is the princess, surrounded by her maids of honour, this is an extraordinarily reflexive painting about painting - or more broadly, about the business of representation. It can indeed be seen as a meditation on the role of the artist, on the depiction of reality and perhaps above all on what Ernst Gombrich refers to as 'the beholder's share' in making sense of the visual world. There is a particular irony here in the fact that it is likely that the primary spectators for the Las Meninas were the models whom the artist is here depicted as painting. The painter is standing a little back from his canvas. He is glancing at his model... He is staring at a point to which, even though it is invisible, we, the spectators, can easily assign an object, since it is we, ourselves, who are at that point... The spectacle he is observing is thus doubly invisible: first, because it is not represented within the space of the painting, and, second, because it is situated precisely in that blind point, in that essential hiding-place into which our gaze disappears from ourselves at the moment of our actual looking... In appearance, this locus in a simple one: a matter of pure reciprocity: we are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn
Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler looking out at us... And yet... the painter is turning his eyes towards us only insofar as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself... The great canvas with its back to us on the extreme left of the picture... prevents the relation of these gazes ever being discoverable or definitely established... Because we can see only that reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seen or seeing?... We are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him... Now as it happens, exactly opposite the spectators - ourselves - on the wall forming the far end of the room, Velásquez has represented a series of pictures; and we see that among all those those hanging canvases there is one that shines with particular brightness. Its frame is wider and darker than those of the others... But it isn't a picture: it is a mirror. It offers us at last that enchantment of the double that until now has been denied to us... In fact, it shows nothing of what is represented in the picture itself... What it is reflecting is that which all the figures within the painting are looking at so fixedly, or at least those who are looking straight ahead; it is therefore what the spectator would be able to see if the painting extended further forward, if its bottom edge was brought lower until it included the figures the painter is using as models... At the far end of the room, ignored by all, the unexpected mirror holds in its glow the figures that the painter is looking at (the painter in his represented, objective reality, the reality of the painter at his work); but also the figures that are looking at the painter (in that material reality which the lines and the colours have laid out upon the canvas)... King Philip IV and his wife, Mariana... What all the figures in the picture are looking at are the two figures to whose eyes they too present a scene to be observed. The entire picture is looking out at a scene for which it itself is a scene... Inversely, as far as they stand outside the picture and are therefore withdrawn from it in an essential invisibility, they [the king and his wife] provide the centre around which the entire representation is ordered; it is they who are being faced, it is towards them that everyone is turned... In the realm of the anecdote, this centre is symbolically sovereign since it is occupied by King Philip IV and his wife. But it is so above all because of the triple function it fulfils in relation to the picture. For in it there occurs an exact superimposition of the model's gaze as it is being painted, of the spectator's as he contemplates the painting, and of the painter's as he is composing the picture (not the one represented, but the one in front of us which we are discussing). These three 'observing' functions come together in a point exterior to the picture; that is, an ideal point in relation to what is represented, but a perfectly real one too, since it is also the starting-point that makes the representation possible...
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Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

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