Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

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Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler intertextuality (highlighting what texts owe to other texts). Individuals are not unconstrained in their construction of meanings. As Stuart Hall puts it, our 'systems of signs... speak us as much as we speak in and through them' (Hall 1977, 328). 'Common-sense' suggests that 'I' am a unique individual with a stable, unified identity and ideas of my own. Semiotics can help us to realise that such notions are created and maintained by our engagement with sign systems: our sense of identity is established through signs. We derive a sense of 'self' from drawing upon conventional, pre-existing repertoires of signs and codes which we did not ourselves create. We are thus the subjects of our sign systems rather than being simply instrumental 'users' who are fully in control of them. Whilst we are not determined by semiotic processes we are shaped by them far more than we realise. Pierre Guiraud goes further: 'Man [sic] is the vehicle and the substance of the sign, he is both the signifier and the signified; in fact, he is a sign and therefore a convention' (Guiraud 1975, 83). The postmodernist notion of fragmented and shifting identities may provide a useful corrective to the myth of the unified self. But unlike those postmodernist stances which simply celebrate radical relativism, semiotics can help us to focus on how we make sense of ourselves, whilst social semiotics anchors us to the study of situated practices in the construction of identities and the part that our engagement with sign systems plays in such processes. Justin Lewis notes that 'we are part of a prearranged semiological world. From the cradle to the grave, we are encouraged by the shape of our environment to engage with the world of signifiers in particular ways' (Lewis 1991, 30). Guy Cook argues that 'forty years ago, the method was a revolutionary one, and justly captured the intellectual imagination, not only for the added complexity it could bring to analysis but also for its political and philosophical implications. Its visions of cultures and cultural artefacts, no matter how superficially different, as fundamentally similar was a powerful weapon against racism and cultural chauvinism, and held out hope of the discovery of abstract structures universal in human culture' (Cook 1992, 70-71). Feminist theorists note that structuralist semiotics has been important for feminists as a tool for critiques of reductionism and essentialism and has 'facilitated the analysis of contradictory meanings and identities' (Franklin et al. 1996, 263). Semiotics has sought to study cultural artifacts and practices of whatever kind on the basis of unified principles, at its best bringing some coherence to media and cultural studies. Whilst semiotic analysis has been widely applied to the literary, artistic and musical canon, it has been applied to the 'decoding' of a wide variety of popular cultural phenomena. It has thus helped to stimulate the serious study of popular culture. Anthony Wilden has observed that 'all language is communication but very little communication is language' (Wilden 1987, 137). In an increasingly visual age, an important contribution of semiotics from Roland Barthes onwards has been a concern with imagistic as well as linguistic signs, particularly in the context of advertising, photography and audio-visual media. Semiotics may encourage us not to dismiss a particular medium as of less worth than another: literary and film critics often regard television as of less worth than prose fiction or 'artistic' film. To élitist literary critics, of course, this would be a weakness of semiotics. Potentially, semiotics could help us to realize differences as well as similarities between various media. It could help us to avoid the routine privileging of one semiotic mode over another, such as the spoken over the written or the verbal over the non-verbal. We need to recognize, as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen note, that 'different semiotic modes - the visual, the verbal, the gestural... have their potentialities, and their limitations' (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 31). Such a realization could lead to the recognition of the importance of new literacies in a changing semiotic ecology. At present, 'with regard to images, most people in most societies are mostly confined to the role of spectator of other people's productions' (Messaris 1994, 121). Most people feel unable to draw or paint, and even amongst those who own video-cameras not
Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler everyone knows how to make effective use of them. This is a legacy of an educational system which still focuses almost exclusively on the acquisition of one kind of symbolic literacy (that of verbal language) at the expense of most other semiotic modes (in particular the iconic mode). This institutional bias disempowers people not only by excluding many from engaging in those representational practices which are not purely linguistic but by handicapping them as critical readers of the majority of texts to which they are routinely exposed throughout their lives. A working understanding of key concepts in semiotics - including their practical application - can be seen as essential for everyone who wants to understand the complex and dynamic communication ecologies within which we live. Those who cannot understand such environments are in the greatest danger of being manipulated by those who can. For Peirce, 'the universe... is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs' (Peirce 1931-58, 5.449n). There is no escape from signs. As Bill Nichols puts it, 'As long as signs are produced, we will be obliged to understand them. This is a matter of nothing less than survival' (Nichols 1981, 8). D.I.Y. Semiotic Analysis: Advice to My Own Students Semiotics can be applied to anything which can be seen as signifying something - in other words, to everything which has meaning within a culture. Even within the context of the mass media you can apply semiotic analysis to any media texts (including television and radio programmes, films, cartoons, newspaper and magazine articles, posters and other ads) and to the practices involved in producing and interpreting such texts. Within the Saussurean tradition, the task of the semiotician is to look beyond the specific texts or practices to the systems of functional distinctions operating within them. The primary goal is to establish the underlying conventions, identifying significant differences and oppositions in an attempt to model the system of categories, relations (syntagmatic and paradigmatic), connotations, distinctions and rules of combination employed. For instance, 'What differentiates a polite from an impolite greeting, a fashionable from an unfashionable garment?' (Culler 1985, 93); the investigation of such practices involves trying to make explicit what is usually only implicit. A 'text' (such as a printed advertisement, an animated cartoon or a radio news bulletin) is in itself a complex sign containing other signs. Your initial analytical task is to identify the signs within the text and the codes within which these signs have meaning (e.g. 'textual codes' such as camerawork or 'social codes' such as body language). Within these codes you need to identify paradigm sets (such as shot size: long shot, mid shot, close up). You also need to identify the structural relationships between the various signifiers (syntagms). Finally you need to discuss the ideological functions of the signs in the text and of the text as a whole. What sort of reality does the text construct and how does it do so? How does it seek to naturalize its own perspectives? What assumptions does it make about its readers? I strongly recommend detailed comparison and contrast of paired texts dealing with a similar topic: this is a lot easier than trying to analyse a single text. It may also help to use an example of semiotic analysis by an experienced practitioner as a model for your own analysis. • Identifying the text o Wherever possible, include a copy of the text with your analysis of it, noting any significant shortcomings of the copy. Where including a copy is not practicable, offer a
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Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

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