Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
cannot be replicas. For Bazin, aesthetic realism depended on a broader 'truth to reality' (Bazin 1974,
64; Lovell 1983, 81).
Modality judgements involve comparisons of textual representations with models drawn from the
everyday world and with models based on the genre; they are therefore obviously dependent on
relevant experience of both the world and the medium. Robert Hodge and David Tripp's semiotic
study of Children and Television focuses on the development of children's modality judgements
(Hodge & Tripp 1986).
Ien Ang (1985) argues that watching television soap operas can involve a kind of psychological or
emotional realism for viewers which exists at the connotative rather than the denotative level. Viewers
find some representations emotionally or psychologically 'true-to-life' (even if at the denotative level
the treatment may seem 'unrealistic'). I would argue that especially with long-running soaps (which
may become more 'real' to their fans over time) what we could call generic realism is another factor.
Viewers familiar with the characters and conventions of a particular soap opera may often judge the
programme largely in its own generic terms rather than with reference to some external 'reality'. For
instance, is a character's current behaviour consistent with what we have learnt over time about that
character? The soap may be accepted to some extent as a world in its own right, in which slightly
different rules may sometimes apply. This is of course the basis for what Coleridge called the 'willing
suspension of disbelief' on which drama depends.
Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress argue that:
Different genres, whether classified by medium (e.g. comic, cartoon, film, TV, painting) or by
content (e.g. Western, Science Fiction, Romance, news) establish sets of modality markers,
and an overall value which acts as a baseline for the genre. This baseline can be different for
different kinds of viewer/reader, and for different texts or moments within texts. (Hodge &
Kress 1988, 142)
What are recognized as 'realistic' styles of representation reflect an aesthetic code. Over time, certain
methods of production within a medium and a genre become naturalized. The content comes to be
accepted as a 'reflection of reality'. In the case of popular television and film, for instance, the use of
'invisible editing' represents a widespread set of conventions which has come to seem 'natural' to
most viewers. In 'realistic' texts what is foregrounded is the 'content' rather than the 'form' or style of
production. As in the dominant mode of 'scientific' discourse, the medium and codes are discounted
as neutral and transparent and the makers of the text retreat to invisibility. Consequently, 'reality'
seems to pre-exist its representation and to 'speak for itself'; what is said thus has the aura of 'truth'.
John Tagg argues that
The signifier is treated as if it were identical with a pre-existent signified and... the reader's role
is purely that of a consumer... Signifier and signified appear not only to unite, but the signifier
seems to become transparent so that the concept seems to present itself, and the arbitrary
sign is naturalized by a spurious identity between reference and referents, between the text
and the world. (Tagg 1988, 99)
However, Tagg adds that such a stance need not involve positing 'a closed world of codes' (ibid.,
101) or the denial of the existence of what is represented outside the process which represents it