Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
'natural'. The 'New Critics', W K Wimsatt and M C Beardsley, whilst not structuralists, advanced the
formalist argument that meaning lay within the text and defined as 'the affective fallacy' the notion that
the meaning of a poem depended on the 'subjective' responses of the reader, which they saw as 'a
confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does)' (Wimsatt & Beardsley 1954,
21). Such accounts tend towards 'textual determinism', assuming that texts are invariably read much
as was intended by their makers, leaving little scope either for contradictions within and between texts
or for variations amongst their interpreters. Monolithic theories of this kind ignore what Saussure had
referred to as 'the role of signs as part of social life' (Saussure 1983, 15; Saussure 1974, 16).
Contemporary semioticians refer to the creation and interpretation of texts as 'encoding' and
'decoding' respectively. This unfortunately tends to make these processes sound too programmatic:
the use of these terms is of course intended to emphasize the importance of the semiotic codes
involved, and thus to highlight social factors. For semioticians, there is no such thing as an uncoded
message, so that - for those who argue that all experience is coded - even 'encoding' might be more
accurately described as 'recoding' (Hawkes 1977, 104, 106, 107). In the context of semiotics,
'decoding' involves not simply basic recognition and comprehension of what a text 'says' but also the
interpretation and evaluation of its meaning with reference to relevant codes. Where a distinction is
made between comprehension and interpretation this tends to be primarily with reference to purely
verbal text, but even in this context such a distinction is untenable; what is 'meant' is invariably more
than what is 'said' (Smith 1988, Olson 1994). Everyday references to communication are based on a
'transmission' model in which a sender transmits a message to a receiver - a formula which reduces
meaning to 'content' which is delivered like a parcel (Reddy 1979). This is the basis of Shannon and
Weaver's well-known model of communication, which makes no allowance for the importance of
social contexts and codes (Shannon and Weaver 1949).
Whilst Saussure's model of oral communication is (for its time)
innovatingly labelled as a 'speech circuit' and includes directional
arrows indicating the involvement of both participants (thus at
least implying 'feedback'), it too was nevertheless a linear
transmission model (albeit a 'two-track' one). It was based on the
notion that comprehension on the part of the listener is a kind of
mirror of the speaker's initial process of expressing a thought
(Saussure 1983, 11-13; Saussure 1974, 11-13; Harris 1987, 22-
25, 204-218). In this model there is only the briefest of allusions
to the speaker's use of 'the code provided by the language',
together with the implicit assumption that a fixed code is shared
(Saussure 1983, 14; Saussure 1974, 14; Harris 1987, 216,
230).
In 1960 another structural linguist - Roman Jakobson
(drawing on work by Bühler dating from the 1930s) -
proposed a model of interpersonal verbal communication
which moved beyond the basic transmission model of
communication and highlighted the importance of the codes
and social contexts involved (Jakobson 1960). He noted
elsewhere that 'the efficiency of a speech event demands the use of a common code by its