Semiotics
The theory behind
media literacy
Semiotics and other basic theories — 2
Critical skills — and media literacy
is a critical skill — are not natural or
instinctive. Theory helps us to organize
our thinking and to analyze what we
see. Semiotics, the theory behind media
literacy, provides:
A common set of terms■■ , such as
sign and code as defined by semioticians.
These words and others
will become tools for discussing
and analyzing media texts.
A framework■■ for breaking down
a media text into its component
parts to reveal the text’s purposeful
structure. This in turn will become
useful to students when they
construct media texts of their own.
A way to map out relationships■■
between media and other social
phenomena. The ideas proposed in
the field of cultural studies serve a
special purpose in helping students
to understand the role media plays
in a society’s power structure and
how media affects our view the
society around us.
Semiotics is the study of signs. Media
literacy is largely about reading and understanding the signs that
the media produce and manipulate. The media are engaged in signifying
practices, “a kind of symbolic work” that gives meaning to things
and communicates that meaning to someone else (Hall 1997, 14).
Semiotic theory sets forth a model of how media texts are constructed,
of how signs are produced or selected and combined into
messages. When we say that a medium has its own “codes and conventions”
— a creative language with its own rules — we are talking
about sign systems (Kellner and Share 2005).
Cultural industries
Throughout this discussion of theory, we will turn often to writings
in the field of cultural studies, a wide and diverse academic pursuit
that uses semiotics as one of its tools. Cultural theorists will help us
A world of signs
PHOTO BY MICHAEL O’DONNELL
A street in Yerevan, Armenia. Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the originators of semiotic theory,
stated, “The universe is perfused with signs.”
Semiotics and other basic theories — 3
connect the analytical tools from semiotics with the ideology, values
and motives contained in media texts.
To begin, we will define culture itself in semiotic terms:
Culture consists of the symbols of expression that individuals,
groups and societies use to make sense of daily life.
We think about life in symbolic ways, starting with the language
we use to describe what goes on around us. According to the American
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, the act of thinking itself is a
process of interpreting signs (Peirce 1991). We take symbolic action
thousands of times a day: We wave, shake hands, say hello, talk on
the phone, add up the cost of groceries, read a book. Each of these
actions involves interpreting and using the signs common to us and
others living in our culture.
Our world has many cultures, and we all live in several at the same
time: the world, the nation, the community, the family — the culture
inside our heads. We navigate each culture using a mutually
agreed upon set of signs in a mutually agreed upon structure. The
anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes that the human being “is an
animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” and
he defines culture “to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be ...
an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973, 5).
The media literacy movement is concerned mostly with those webs
of meaning spun by the mass media, the producers of much of our
culture:
Mass media are cultural industries that produce and distribute
songs, novels, newspapers, movies, Internet services and
other cultural products to large numbers of people.
Media literacy practices, then, use semiotic theory to sort out the
sign systems used and produced by the mass media, and to interpret
what those systems mean.
What’s in a sign?
Semiotics by its shortest definition is the study of signs. The simplicity
of that definition belies a complex and far-flung field of study
that crosses disciplines in the sciences and humanities.
Semiotics originated in the work of two thinkers. In the late 19th
The average kitchen cupboard contains hundreds of signs of every
variety. We live in a world awash with signs.
Semiotics and other basic theories — 4
Century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and
the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) developed
their semiotic theories independently, an ocean apart. Saussure
thought of his sémiologie as a science that studies “the roles of signs
as part of social life.” For Peirce, his semeiotic was a “formal doctrine
of signs.” The word semiotics today is used to refer to both traditions
(Chandler 2002, 2-4):
Semiotics is the study of signs. It involves the theory and
analysis of signs, codes and signifying practices.
So what is a sign? The word suggests the obvious: the traffic sign
telling drivers to stop, the sign over a store telling customers that
it sells groceries. These are indeed signs, but in semiotic theory, the
word sign has a much broader meaning:
A sign is an image, object, sound or action that stands for
something else, including objects and concepts.
The first step toward becoming media literate is to grasp two ideas:
Everything can be seen as a sign of something else. Those in■■
the mass media understand this. They carefully select what
they put in their messages — objects, images, words, sounds,
even color — while taking into account the signifying value of
each.
Signs are everywhere. Peirce wrote, “The universe is perfused■■
with signs,” and the statement is even more true today that it
was a hundred years ago.
We live in a semiotic world. Sitting alone in my kitchen, I see
brand names on the appliances and food products. Digital clocks blink
the time; notes from my family are stuck on the refrigerator; the
newspaper sits on the table. I write on my computer, producing even
more signs.
The mass media contribute a torrent of images and sounds that we
must negotiate even as we walk down the street.
Every sign, Saussure wrote, has two parts, the signifier and the
signified:
The signifier is the material or physical form a sign takes,■■
something that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted.
The signified is the object or concept to which the signifier■■
refers.
The signifier and the signified relate to each other through the
process of signification, represented in Figure 1 by the arrows. The
dashed line is known as the bar. Saussure considered the signifier and
the signified as inseparable with each triggering the other. The bar
suggests that the two can be separated to allow us to study the way
signs work.
A sign makes sense only in how it relates to other signs, as part
of a sign system. Saussure, concerned mostly with linguistics, wrote
that in languages, “there are only differences,” and a letter or a word
is defined by what it is not (Saussure 1966, 120). Peirce expressed a
similar thought in that we can know a quality of an object “only by
means of its contrast with or similarity to another” (Peirce 1961, 27).
Signs refer first of all to each other and make no sense by themselves,
and they refer to each other in a systematic way (Figure 2).
FIGURE 1� Saussure’s two-part model of the sign.
FIGURE 2� What is signified depends on the sign’s two parts, but the
value of a sign depends on its relationship to other signs.
tree
Signified
Signifier
Signified
Signifier
Signified
Signifier
Signified
Signifier
Semiotics and other basic theories — 5
In the most basic sense, the ability of a sign to communicate something
depends on whether you can tell that it is different from another
sign. Printers, for example, look for typefaces that are considered
legible, meaning that we can easily tell the letters apart; we know the
letter “b” because we can see that it is not an “h.” As a more complex
example, consider two versions of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (Figure 3). The
image on the left is the original, one of the most familiar works of
art in the world. The image on the right becomes meaningful as an ad
for a hair-care product because it resembles the Mona Lisa but is also
different. The advertisement seems to be saying that this product can
improve even a universally accepted example of beauty.
The structure of codes
The differences between signs become apparent and meaningful
when signs are organized into sign systems, or codes:
A code is a system of signs, a “framework within which signs
make sense” (Chandler 2002, 245).
When we internalize a code such as language into a “system
of thought,” the code enables us to make sense of what goes on
around us (Scholes 1982, 143). We think in codes.
A code is subject to rules for how signs are selected (paradigmatic)
and combined (syntagmatic). The rules can be formal, as in
language, or informal, as in personal interaction.
Each sign’s meaning is determined by how it compares with other
signs (paradigmatic) and also by the sign’s place in the order of the
code (syntagmatic).
Let’s return to our definition of culture as consisting of “the symbols
of expression that individuals, groups and societies use to make
sense of daily life.” We could say, then, that a culture is primarily
made up of codes. For the communicator, production and interpretation
of media texts depends these codes (Jakobson 1971), with
a text being a complex “network of different messages depending
on different codes and working at different levels of signification”
(Eco 1971, 425). Those who produce media texts understand this; a
large part of what market researchers do, in essence, is try to “crack
multiple consumer codes” (Stern 1994, 13).
Our definition says a code has rules, although the rules of some
codes are rarely articulated. We know that body language does carry
meaning, or in semiotic terms, that body language signifies. But we
probably would not think of body language as a code with any formal
rules. Even so, body movements often have deep meanings that vary
from culture to culture and from situation to situation. Consider just
one gesture, the handshake. In the United States, business people use
the handshake as a greeting and as welcoming sign to a new colleague
or prospective customer. A weak handshake can give a wrong impression
that may be difficult to overcome, while a firm handshake sends
a strong signal for the relationship to follow. At least one American
university includes a section on how to shake hands in its curriculum
(http://linguistics.byu.edu/resources/lp/lpc3.html).
Others have tried to articulate the rules governing informal body
language. The magazine Cosmopolitan on its Web site offers a “body
language decoder” for young women trying to gain an informational
edge on their male friends (http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/
body-language/).
FIGURE 3: The advertisement makes sense because of its differences from
DaVinci’s original. It is also an example of intertextuality.
Semiotics and other basic theories — 6
Code subsets
A code often has specialized subsets. One formal subset of the code
of body language is the football referee’s signals (Figure 1.5). Spoken
and written languages have these subsets, too; medical and military
jargon are two examples. These specialized subsets allow people to
communicate efficiently within
the context of their profession.
The rules governing a code
work in two ways: paradigmatic
rules concern a sign’s value, and
syntigmatic rules concern the order
in which signs are combined.
Value is not what a sign
“means,” or in semiotic terms,
what it signifies. The value of a
sign is a category or typology that
depends on a sign’s relationship to
other signs. The value of a written
or spoken word could be its part
of speech — noun, verb or adjective, for example. The value of a word
also could relates to its synonyms, antonyms and homonyms.
Here is an example: Consider two musical instruments, the oboe
and the Armenian duduk. They share the value of being wind instruments
with double-reed mouthpieces, but we can tell a duduk from
an oboe by their differences. We know what a duduk is by referring to
the other instruments that it isn’t: oboe, bassoon, English horn. This
idea becomes more clear when we consider a word that has only one
other comparable word, such as our earlier example of “father” and
“mother.” Being a father can be defined to some degree as not being a
mother.
Figure 1.6 shows a useful way of thinking about the relationship
between signs, each its own sign system. Paradigmatic substitutes
are aligned along the vertical axis and syntigmatic order along the
horizontal axis. Words with a shared value can be substituted for one
another. The idea of an orange dog or a brown apricot seems silly: The
brown apricot ate the orange dog. But the statement makes sense as a
sentence because the words have logical values in the correct order,
according to the rules of the English language. If we change the words
around at random, the sentence ceases to make sense: Brown the ate
dog orange pomegranate the. Syntigmatic rules are flexible to a certain
extent. In the Star Wars movies, the character Yoda speaks in weirdly
inverted sentences, such as the often quoted line from Return of the
Jedi: “When 900 years you reach, look as good you will not.” We
understand what Yoda is saying, although it takes a bit of conscious
decoding.
In analyzing any sign system, sooner or later we must decide on the
basic unit of the system. In Figure 4, the basic sign unit is a single
word. Umberto Eco, using Peirce’s terms, classifies the basic sign units
as tokens and types. In written language, the total number of tokens
is the total number of words used; the total number of types is the
total number of different words, ignoring repetition. This is not as
simple as it sounds. How do we classify homonyms, words that are
pronounced alike but have different meanings? Or synonyms, words
with the same meaning but spelled differently? Nevertheless, tokens
and types add insight to the structure of sign systems.
Saussure uses the word langue to refer to the rules and structures
governing a code. Because everyone using the code has to agree on
the rules, Saussure believed those rules came from social interaction.
If we accept this idea, we can see why the culture of a nation or society
is so closely entwined with its language.
big cat looked
tall
The
Our
is
apricot saw
SYNTAGMATIC RULES
DETERMINE ORDER
dogsmallA
was
fast
orange
slow
brown
PARADIGMATIC RULES
DETERMINE VALUE
FIGURE 4: The right signs in the right order allow for unambiguous
communication. It prevents abberant decoding.
Semiotics and other basic theories — 7
Saussure gave the name parole to any
single act of using the code. A spoken or
written word or sentence is parole. The difference
between langue and parole is the
difference between language and speech,
or between code and message. Any medium
or genre or other type of communication
has langue, an underlying structure.
Real or not real:
The immateriality of signs
Return for a moment to our definition of
the signified as a “concept.” In Saussure’s
semiotics, the signifier calls up a mental
image, not a material object. We see
the signifier and think about the object
it stands for; we do not experience the
object directly. What is signified is not
the object, only an idea of the object. As
Saussure put it, “Both parts of the sign are
psychological” (Saussure 1966, 16).
If we think about this proposal, we
might conclude, as some media theorists
have, that nothing real exists independently
of our use of codes. Another way of
saying this, as a cultural theorists might, is
that language “does not reflect reality but
rather constructs it” (Chandler 2002, 25).
Many things we think of as real we know
only from hearing about them or seeing them in a mediated form. In
interpersonal communication, we here a friend tell about her vacation
and we see her photographs. We did not experience of the vacation,
but we can conceive of it and believe the vacation was real.
Any event that happens in the world apart from us we experience
this way, often through a mass medium. As we relate what we see
and hear in a media text to the world around us, we may think that
we are experiencing “reality,” but we must remember that media give
us is a carefully constructed version of “reality.” The cultural theorist
Stuart Hall states that the media re-present
events to us, and in doing so, attach
meaning to those events.
So what is real? Hall makes the distinction
between what things mean as separate
from whether things exist. Of course, things
exist “out there” as material objects, Hall
says, but he adds that “nothing meaningful
exists outside of discourse.” This, he
says, is far different from saying “nothing
exists outside of discourse,” a statement
he believes is false. When we talk about a
thing or an event, or when we hear or see
a re-presentation of an event in the media,
it enters our consciousness and we begin
to making meaning out of the event.
“As far as meaning is concerned, you
need discourse ... the frameworks of understanding
and interpretation to make
meaningful sense of it,” Hall says (Hall
1997, 12).
Discourse is a signifying practice, and
in our discourse we deal with concepts
as well as material objects. Concepts that
are culturally important to us exist only
as ideas expressed by language: freedom,
independence and patriotism, for example.
Those concepts and the images associated
with them are powerful precisely because
they don’t exist outside of our talking and thinking. Saussure assumed
that concepts did not exist “independent of words” (Chandler
2002, 61). Hall adds that concepts “allow us also to think about a
wide range of things, which are not, in any simple sense, ‘out there in
the world.’ That’s a very rich notion” (Hall 1997, 10).
Concepts such as freedom and patriotism are powerful because they
are open to interpretation and even manipulation. Media message
makers know this and are eager to exploit these concepts (Figure 5).
Let us reconsider Hall’s statement that nothing meaningful exists
FIGURE 5: Patriotic signs are used extensively in ads.
Semiotics and other basic theories — 8
outside of discourse and apply that idea to a major event in
recent U.S. history, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Imagine a student at a college in the American Midwest who has
overslept on the morning of September 11. She tosses on some
clothes and rushes to school without hearing a radio, watching
television or reading a newspaper. She arrives in the classroom
and finds the teacher and other students staring transfixed at
a TV screen showing the smoking heap that had been the World
Trade Center in New York.
Up until that moment, the attacks did not exist for her. We
speak of events being off our radar, meaning that news of the
event hasn’t crossed our informational horizon. In that sense,
the theorist who says nothing exists outside of discourse might
have a point, as our student would attest. But the attacks did
exist, and even if our student had been a hermit in the remotest
corner of the globe, the news eventually would have reached her.
Back in the classroom, she sees television pictures of destruction
and asks what happened. Her classmates tell her that
airplanes hit the towers and they collapsed. The pictures on the
screen begin to take on meaning.
Throughout the morning of September 11, 2001, people across
American gathered around television screens as the story of
the attacks unfolded on CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX or another
news source. During the day, the news networks tried to provide
meaning: Were the crashes accidental? Did the terrorists have other
targets? Who was behind the attacks? How many people were killed?
For most Americans, the attacks of September 11, 2001, still exist
only as portrayed in the media — as portrayed though discourse. The
media shaped their reality.
The arbitrary nature of signs
A principle of media literacy states that each medium uses its own
creative language with its own rules — its own “codes and conventions”
(Kellner and Share 2005, 374). A convention is something
people in a culture have agreed to, either through a formal decision
or through collective habit or use.
Saussure said that signifier and signified have no natural or direct
link. No “natural” link exists between the word sun and the star at
the center of our solar system. We could use any word to mean “sun”
as long as we all agreed on its use.
For many of us, this idea of the arbitrary nature of signs is difficult
to accept because we are so deeply invested in our native language.
But we can see this arbitrariness when we explore other languages;
the word for sun in the Armenian language is արեւ, pronounced arev.
This does not mean that communication through a sign system is
arbitrary. You and I cannot violate the rules of the code and expect
to be understood. But the mass media often send messages that purposefully
bend or break the rules to attract attention or make a point.
Artists also play against our expectations — against the code — as in
Figure 6, Salvador Dali’s surrealist painting The Persistence of Memory.
Although the painting goes against how we expect a clock to appear,
objects in the painting are recognizable.
FIGURE 6: Salvador Dali, La persistencia de la memoria (1931) or The Persistence
of Memory.
Semiotics and other basic theories — 9
Peirce’s three-part sign
Peirce in his writings does not agree with Saussure that all signs
are arbitrary. Peirce said a sign must have some “real connection with
the thing it signifies” and gives the example of the weather vane. The
weather vane is a “sign of the wind” that “would not be so unless the
wind made it turn round” (Peirce 1991, 141). Peirce incorporates this
idea into his own three-part model of the sign.
Peirce’s model included two parts similar to Saussure’s signifier and
signified:
Peirce’s■■ representamen, often called the sign vehicle, is the form
of the sign in sound or image.
The■■ interpretant is the sense made of the sign. The interpretant
is a mental construct, or in Peirce’s words, “an equivalent sign,
or perhaps a more developed sign.”
To these two parts, Peirce added a third that he called the■■ object
(Figure 7), something that exist “out there.”
The interpretant, then, is the idea a person has of the object when
he or she sees the sign vehicle. Do not confuse the term sign vehicle
with the word sign. The sign vehicle is only part of the sign.
All three are essential to Peirce’s model. The sign is “a unity of what
is represented (the object), how it is represented (the sign vehicle) and
how it is interpreted (the interpretant)” (Chandler 2002, 29).
Peirce’s model makes a place for “reality” that Saussure’s two-part
signification process does not. Second, the three-part model implies
that a person must receive the sign and to some degree determine its
meaning. Said another way, the meaning of a sign “is not contained
within it, but arises in its interpretation” (Chandler 2002, 32). Peirce’s
model acknowledges that objects such as trees do exist, but Peirce also
acknowledges that when someone utters the word “tree,” those who
hear it will bring to mind differing concepts. They will imagine different
trees.
Peirce, unlike Saussure, considered meaning-making to be a dialogue
if only between you and your inner self. The Russian literary
critic Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that when a sign enters this inner dialogue,
it enters a “tension-filled environment of alien words, value
judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships,
merges with some, recoils from other, intersects with yet a
third group” (Bakhtin 1981, 276). The interpretant that comes out of
this environment often can be something quite different from that of
someone else.
A principle of media literacy is that audiences negotiate meaning.
This principle springs from the concept of signification as dialogue.
When the media sends a message, it must consider the audience’s culture
— its language, its value judgments and accents, and its codes.
INTERPRETANT
SIGNVEHICLE OBJECT
interpretant
sign vehicle
object
signifier
signified
PeirceSaussure
FIGURE 7� Peirce adds the interpretant to Saussure’s model, giving the
viewer of a sign an active role in determining a sign’s meaning.
FIGURE 8� We process each of the sign modes by different methods.
Sign mode
Signifies by
Examples
Process
Iconic
Resemblance
Mug shot
Recognize it
Indexical
Physical or causal
connection
Footprint (animal)
Smoke (fire)
Figure it out
Symbolic
Convention
Corporate logo
Church symbol
Must learn it
Semiotics and other basic theories — 10
Symbolic, indexical and iconic
The connection between a sign vehicle and its object, in Peirce’s
scheme, can be described as three sign modes (Figure 8):
Iconic mode.■■ The sign vehicle’s meaning is expressed through
resemblance. The iconic signifier appears similar to its object,
and we process the sign through recognition.
Indexical mode.■■ The sign vehicle’s meaning is expressed
through a physical connection with its object, through cause
and effect. The indexical signifier is evidence that something
exists or has occurred, and we process the sign using reasoning.
Symbolic mode.■■ Meaning is arbitrary, and we process the sign
using a set of conventions we have learned.
Do not mistake the term mode for category. A sign can signify in any
and all of the three modes depending on how the signifier is interpreted.
In Figure 9, Armenian
President Serge Sargsian,
right, shakes hands with Turkish
President Abdullah Gul.
On the iconic level, Armenians
would recognize
their president and probably
would recognize the Turkish
president. If not, the caption
would clarify their identities,
raising the question of
whether any signifier is completely
iconic. We know who
they are through the convention
of attaching a name to a
person. But the iconic mode
is at work because the men in
the photo resemble real, wellknown
men.
On the indexical level, the
photo is evidence that the
men met and shook hands.
Photography has held a privileged
spot among media as providing “evidence about a scene, about
the way things were” that is “better evidence than any other kind of
picture” (Mitchell 2001, 24). A painting can be a picture of something
fanciful (Figure 10), but the photo as signifier adheres to the referent,
to the thing it signifies. Digital photography and the ability of artists
to alter photographs in fantastic ways could make photographs less
believable and thus less indexical; we cannot assume that a photo is
“truthful.” But most people would accept this photo as evidence that
the men met.
On the symbolic level, the photo contains signifiers that would be
meaningful to people in many cultures, such as the handshake, a symbol
of friendship, trust and cooperation. The men wear business suits
and are surrounded by other men in suits, indicating some sort of formal
or official meeting. These are sign vehicles that signify through
convention; we have to learn their meaning.
FIGURE 9: Turkish President Abdullah Gul, left, and Armenian President
Serge Sarkisian met Sept. 6, 2008, in Yerevan, Armenia. Gul came to
watch Turkey play Armenia in a World Cup qualifier game. (Misha Japaridze/Associated
Press)
FIGURE 10: William Adolphe Bouguereau,
Virgin of the Angels (1871)
Semiotics and other basic theories — 11
The photo of the Turkish and Armenian leaders is symbolic in ways
that are meaningful only to those who have studied Armenian history.
Turks of the Ottoman Empire first invaded Armenia in the 11th
Century, and for centuries parts of historical Armenia have been under
Turkish rule. In the late 19th Century, as nations began to win their
independence from the crumbling empire, the Turks began a reign of
oppression on Armenians living in Turkish territory. It culminated in
attacks and forced emigration that lasted from 1915 to 1918 and left
more than a million Armenian dead. Armenians refer to this as the
first genocide of the 20th Century, but the official Turkish position
rejects the label of genocide. Today, relations remain frozen between
Armenia and Turkey. The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
at the University of Minnesota presents a retelling of the Armenian
genocide, along with photos and other evidence at www.chgs.umn.
edu/histories/armenian.
Gul’s visit, then, was deeply symbolic to Armenians and something
of a calculated risk for the Armenian president.
A continuum of meaning
Another way of thinking of the iconic, indexical and symbolic
modes would be as a continuum (Figure 9).
These continua should not be taken too literally. The indexical
signifier is less motivated than the iconic signifier, but the difference
between an indexical signifier and an iconic signifier is more than a
difference of degree. The indexical sign vehicle signifies in an entirely
different way from the iconic.
But the continua make the point that iconic and indexical signifiers
are more constrained by referential signifieds. If an iconic sign vehicle
(signifier) resembles its referent (signified), then its meaning is limited
to what it resembles. A symbolic signifier, with only an arbitrary
connection to its signified, is not constrained in meaning. Along the
continuum, then, as a signifier is placed more and more to the right,
it signifies more through convention and refers less to a specific signified.
Saussure uses the term motivation to indicate the relationship
between a signifier and its signified. An iconic signifier is said to be
highly motivated by its signified, while a symbolic sign is considered
unmotivated.
Scott McCloud offers another continuum, or rather a set of continua,
in which a signifier moves from photographic resemblance of a
person to simpler and simpler versions until it becomes the completely
symbolic word face. Figure 1.13 differs somewhat from McCloud’s
original diagram so that the terms used are more in agreement with
Peirce’s theories.
Note that the word face could mean any face, even that of a clock
or a building rather than a person, but the photographic image can
stand for only one person. Another way of thinking about this idea is
to consider the level of details in an image: The more detailed the image,
the more motivated that image is as a signifier.
Those who work in mass media take this into account when choosing
what signifiers to include in a media text. Often when a person
is chosen to appear in an ad, the advertiser is looking for someone of
average appearance. The aim is to present someone with whom consumers
can identify.
ICONIC INDEXICAL SYMBOLIC
NOT MOTIVATEDMOTIVATED
Hugh
Grant
FIGURE 11� The continuum from iconic to symbolic is handy, but the
indexical sign doesn’t always fit at the halfway point.
FIGURE 12� For Scott McCloud, signs fall along a continuum from those
we can recognize (received) to those we must learn (perceived).
RECEIVED PERCEIVED
FACE
Semiotics and other basic theories — 12
Structuralism and media studies
When Saussure and Peirce first expressed
the concepts behind semiotics, they were
most concerned with written and spoken
language. Others since have taken their ideas
and applied them to a wide range of social
phenomena. The concept that codes have
paradigmatic and syntigmatic rules gave rise
to structuralism and the application of semiotics
to fields of study ranging from cinema to
anthropology.
A key idea of structuralism is that any
social practice is similar in structure to language.
Structuralists “search for the ‘deep
structures’ underlying the ‘surface features’ of
sign systems” (Chandler 2002, 5).
Structuralism contributes directly to media
literacy instruction and practice. The structure
of a text is a special code related to how
it is constructed.
Media texts that share a common code and
structure are grouped into a genre. Genre, a
French word meaning type or class, is used in
media theory to refer to a distinctive type of
text. The term goes beyond naming and classifying
media. In semiotics, a genre can be considered
a code within the text that is shared
by those who made the text and those who view and interpret it.
A genre is not a clear, sharply defined group of media texts, nor
are we limited to one accepted criteria for how we divide texts into
genres. We could assign genres based on medium (radio, television,
movies) and discuss how the visual language of TV is different from
that of movies. But what happens when movies are viewed on television?
Or when a television show is made into a feature-length film?
Even so, any student can recite three or four common genres for
TV shows or motion pictures: comedy, documentary, western, science
fiction, animation. Each uses a common code that the producer and
the viewer understand. If we see a man in a movie wearing futuristic
clothing and driving a flying car, we understand
that the movie producer is “speaking”
to us in the code of science fiction.
A science fiction movie shares its conventions
with other science fiction movies —
and with moviegoers. The shared codes provide
context in the form of objects and sounds
that signify a sense of place. Generic codes
save the media producer the need to explain
the setting of a movie. The moviegoer knows
the genre and understands how it works. In
the words of literary theorist Jonathan Culler,
a genre is a “contract” between the author of
a text and its reader, with expectations that
the author will comply enough to make the
text intelligible.
Genre is an important concept for media
literacy teachers. When we say that a producer
of a media text seeks to make the work
seem “natural,” we often mean natural to a
certain genre. Roland Barthes argued that we
make sense of the events within a text by its
relationship to other texts within a genre,
not by its relationship to real life.
As an example, think of the conventions
common to documentary movies:
Events are not staged to create a fictional sense of reality; real-■■
ity is “captured” by the filmmaker.
Subjects represented are real, not fictitious “characters” or “pro-■■
tagonists.”
The filmmaker makes no effort to obscure the use of the camera.■■
The camera and the act of filmmaking are made obvious.
The filmmaker attempts to argue a point of fact.■■
The filmmaker supports the argument using visual evidence.■■
Through more than 80 years of producing documentaries, beginning
in 1922 with Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (Figure 13), film
producers have established these documentary conventions.
FIGURE 13: Nanook of the North (1922) is considered
the earliest documentary film
Semiotics and other basic theories — 13
Gillo Pontecorvo in his 1965 film The Battle of Algiers exploits documentary
conventions to make his fictional film feel authentic (Figure 14). The scenes
seem unrehearsed; they unfold almost haphazardly. He uses hand-held cameras
that follow the action at eye level, simulating the actions of a documentary
cinematographer. We are made aware of the camera on purpose, and of
its power to produce “evidence.” One analysis stated, “Shot on the streets or
Algiers and cast primarily with non-actors — including Yacef Saadi, who was
one of the leaders of the 1957 uprising — the film, based on actual events,
seemed to have been snatched from real life” (Smith 2008, 109).
The danger is that the viewer will see it as history, rather than a representation
of history. At least one history teacher uses Pontecorvo’s movie
in class (Vann 2002). And the Pentagon showed the film in 2003 as a lesson
in counterinsurgency. A flier for the screening read: “How to win a battle
against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at pointblank
range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population
builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds
tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing
of this film” (Kaufman 2003).
Others consider it to be propaganda. One reviewer wrote that The Battle
of Algiers “was designed as a propaganda device, one that would convey the
revolution’s ideals with the immediacy and drive of a cinema verite documentary”
(Hornaday 2004).
Pontecorvo has stated the need to “win over audiences.” He set out to
“impose a dictatatorship of truth that gave the impression of a documentary,
a newsreel. This despite the fact that it was a work of fiction.” He added that
the grainy newsreel photography “was crucial” (Pontecorvo 1992).
Pontecorvo’s use of conventions from one genre to use in another is an
example of intertextuality. Advertising uses intertextuality as a standard
procedure. Indeed, advertisers could not get their message across in a single
printed image or a 30-second television commercial without the rich context
provided by film and literary genres.
Final thoughts on theory
Theory gives us the tools to understand that universe by revealing common
conventions and practices. Media literacy is as much about understanding
the people who make media texts as it is about the texts themselves. To
study media is to become familiar with the imaginative universe in which
the media producer’s every act is a sign. Theory applied well will help us
crack the code.
FIGURE 14: Jean Martin as paratrooper Col. Mathieu in Gillo Pontecorvo’s
The Battle of Algiers.
Semiotics and other basic theories — 14
Sources
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Berger, Arthur
Asa (2008). Seeing is Believing. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Caillé, Patricia (2007). “The Illegitimate Legitimacy of The Battle of Algiers in French
Film Culture.” Interventions 9.3: 371-388.
Chandler, Daniel (2001). Semiotics: The Basics. London: Routledge.
Hornaday, Ann (2004). “ ‘Battle of Algiers’: A Revolution in Film.” The Washington Post,
Jan. 9, final edition. C4
Eco, Umberto (1976). A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press.
Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books.
Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation & the Media. Northhampton, MA: Media Education
Foundation. Video ranscript http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/409/
tran¬script_409.pdf (accessed November 10, 2008).
Jakobson, Roman (1960). “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” in Style in Language,
ed. Thomas Sebeok. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 350-377.
Kaufman, Michael T. (2003) “What Does the Pentagon See in ‘Battle of Algiers’?” The New
York Times, Sept. 7.
Levi-Strauss, Claude (1983). Structural Anthropology. Trans. Monique Layton. Chicago:
University Of Chicago Press.
McCloud, Scott (1993). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins.
Mitchell, William J. (2001). The Reconfigured Eye: Visual truth in the post-photographic
era. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1991). Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic. Ed. James Hoopes.
Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.
Pontecorvo, Gillo (1992). Gillo Pontecorvo: The Dictatorship of Truth. Directed by Oliver
Curtis. Disc 2. The Battle of Algiers, special ed. DVD. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. New
York: The Criterion Collection, 2004.
Rawlinson, George, trans. (1952). The History of Herodotus. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britan-
nica.
Reid, Donald (2005). “Re-viewing The Battle of Algiers with Germaine Tillion.” History
Workshop Journal 60: 93-115.
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1966). Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New
York: McGraw-Hill.
Scholes, Robert (1982). Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press.
Smith, Wendy (2008). “From Oppressed to Oppressors: The Battle of Algiers took a pitiless
look at the war for Algerian independence, but the filmmakers could not foresee the
failures that would result.” American Scholar 77.4 (Autumn): 109-116.
Stern, Barbara B. (1994). “A revised communication model for advertising: Multiple dimensions
of the source, the message, and the recipient.” Journal of Advertising 23.2: 5-15.
Vann, Michael G. (2002). “The Colonial Casbah on the Silver Screen: Using Pépé le Moko
and The Battle of Algiers to Teach Colonialism, Race, and Globalization in French History.”
Radical History Review 83.83 (spring): 186-192.
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet shortly after he took power
in September 1973. This image is loaded with signs, some obvious
and some not.