Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
not address processes of production, audience interpretation or even authorial intentions. It ignores
particular practices, institutional frameworks and the cultural, social, economic and political context.
Even Roland Barthes, who argues that texts are codified to encourage a reading which favours the
interests of the dominant class, confines his attention to the internal textual organization and does not
engage with the social context of interpretation (Gardiner 1992, 149-50). It cannot be assumed that
preferred readings will go unchallenged (Hall 1980). The sociologist Don Slater has criticised the
functionalism of structuralist semiotics, arguing that material practices such as the 'reading of texts'
must be related to the social relations which give rise to the 'politics of cultural practice'.
Functionalism, he comments, 'admits of thoroughly internal solutions to problems of determination'
(Slater 1983, 259). David Buxton also argues that structuralist approaches 'deny... social
determination' and he insists that 'the text must be related to something other than its own structure:
in other words, we must explain how it comes to be structured' (Buxton 1990, 13). We must consider
not only how signs signify (structurally) but also why (socially); structures are not causes. The
relationships between signifiers and their signifieds may be ontologically arbitrary but they are not
socially arbitrary. We should beware of allowing the notion of the sign as arbitrary to foster the myth
of the neutrality of the medium.
Dominic Strinati notes:
How can we know that a bunch of roses signifies passion unless we also know the intention of
the sender and the reaction of the receiver, and the kind of relationship they are involved in? If
they are lovers and accept the conventions of giving and receiving flowers as an aspect of
romantic, sexual love, then we might accept... [this] interpretation. But if we do this, we do so
on the basis not of the sign but of the social relationships in which we can locate the sign...
The roses may also be sent as a joke, an insult, a sign of gratitude, and so on. They may
indicate passion on the part of the sender but repulsion on the part of the receiver; they may
signify family relations between grandparents and grandchildren rather than relations between
lovers, and so on. They might even connote sexual harassment. (Strinati 1995, 125).
Feminist theorists have suggested that despite its usefulness to feminists in some respects,
structuralist semiotics 'has often obscured the significance of power relations in the constitution of
difference, such as patriarchal forms of domination and subordination' (Franklin et al. 1996, 263).
Synchronic analysis studies a phenomenon as if it were frozen at one moment in time; diachronic
analysis focuses on change over time. Insofar as semiotics tends to focus on synchronic rather than
diachronic analysis (as it does in Saussurean semiotics), it underplays the dynamic nature of media
conventions (for instance, television conventions change fairly rapidly compared to conventions for
written English). It can also underplay dynamic changes in the cultural myths which signification both
alludes to and helps to shape. Purely structuralist semiotics ignores process and historicity - unlike
historical theories like Marxism.
As Hodge and Tripp note, there can hardly be 'an exhaustive semiotic analysis... because a
"complete" analysis... would still be located in particular social and historical circumstances' (Hodge &
Tripp 1986, 27). This is reinforced by the poststructuralist stance that we cannot step outside our
signifying systems. Semioticians seek to distance themselves from dominant codes by strategies
aimed at denaturalization. The notion of 'making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar' is now
a recurrent feature of artistic and photographic manifestos and of creative 'brainstorming' sessions in