Semiotics

Shubhda Arora

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How do you read this
visual?

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 What is the
narrative? Who is the
marlboro man?

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Who is the target
audience?
What is the core
message?

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Tony's Chocolonely has unequal
squares as a deliberate design
choice to symbolize and raise
awareness about inequality in the
chocolate industry. The uneven
pieces represent the unfair
distribution of profits and power
within the chocolate supply chain.
Tony's Chocolonely visually and tangibly
communicates its mission to create a more
equitable chocolate industry, drawing
attention to issues such as exploitation,
child labor, and unfair trade practices.
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structuralism

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structuralism
× 20th Century intellectual movement and approach to the human
sciences
× Impacted linguistics, sociology, anthropology and philosophy
× Attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of
interrelated parts.
× Holds that all human activity and its products including
perception and thought are constructed and not natural
× Everything has meaning because of the language system in which
we operate.

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4 common ideas underlying st
ructuralism
× Every system has a structure
× The structure is what determines the position of each element of a
whole
× "Structural laws" deal with coexistence rather than changes
× Structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface or the
appearance of meaning.

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History within linguistics

Geneva School, Prague School, Copenhagen School

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Ferdinand de saussure - Genev
a school
× Swiss linguist and philosopher
× considered one of the founders of 20th-century
linguistics
× Language as a system of relations
× Phenomenological perspective
× A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound
combined with a series of differences of ideas

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Prague school - Roman jakob
son
× Phoneme - is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word
from another in a particular language.
× Bat & Cat

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Copenhagen school
Objective was to establish a framework for understanding
communication as a formal system, and an important part
of this was the development of precise terminology to
describe the different parts of linguistic systems and their
interrelatedness. The basic theoretical framework, called
“Glossematics”

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The linguistic turn
The linguistic turn was a major development in
Western philosophy during the early 20th
century, the most important characteristic of
which is the focusing of philosophy and the other
humanities primarily on the relations between
language, language users, and the world

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Language as a social phenomen
on
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and
we cannot conceive of one without the other.

Of all social institutions language is least amenable to

initiative. It blends with the life of society, and the
latter, inert by nature, is a prime conservative force.

Psychologically our thought-apart from its

expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct
mass.

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langue-parole

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Syntagmatic & paradigmatic
A syntagmatic relationship involves a
sequence of signs that together create
meaning. A paradigmatic relationship
involves signs that can replace each
other, usually changing the meaning with
the substitution

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Meaning occurs through a sy
stem of difference

“Concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive

content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of
the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the
others are not”

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sign-signifier -signified

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Signs can be arbitrary
Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but
these signs do not directly evoke things.

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Signifiers are ambiguous and
polysemic

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Sign-signifier-signified

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Synchronic & diachronic
“Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal
law”
“It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of
different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language
lives, carries on and changes over time.”

Synchronic - An approach that takes a language at the moment in time (present),

without thinking about its history. Horizontal axis.

Diachronic - Considers the evolution and history of language. Understands language

through time. For example - old and modern english ( Semantic, grammatical and
phonological changes)

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Claude Lévi-Strauss
× French anthropologist and ethnologist
× The Elementary structure of kinship : new
perspective on kinship system
× Explains that humans left the state of
animality to enter culture through the
prohibition of incest.
× Based on alliance between two families
× “Myth as language”
× The structural study of Mythology

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Binary opposition

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Roland barthes -1975 -social
semiotics

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What is semiotics?
Barthes, Saussure, Peirce

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semiotics
× Study of signs and symbols
× Sign is anything that communicates a meaning to the sign’s
interpreter.
× Signs can be both intentional or unintentional
× Signs can communicate feelings - the feeling of love // Signs can
be communicated through senses
× Unlike linguistics, semiotics uses also studies non-linguistic sign
system

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The hijab graphic in the Bahraini protest photograph as a sign of women’s erasure,others may see it as honoring women’s
presence as activists in this political context. 41
The work is from the series Searching for California Hang Trees, in which Gonzales-Day documents trees
throughout the state of Cali-fornia on which individuals, many of them Mexican, were hung by lynch mobs.
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 “Culture is produced through
complex networks of making,
watching, talking, gesturing,
looking, and acting—
networks through which
meanings are negotiated among
members of a society or
group.”

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 “It is the participants in a cul-
ture who give meaning to people, objects,
and events. . . . It is by our use of things,and
what we say, think and feel about
them—how we represent them—that we
give them a meaning.” (Stuart Hall)

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This 1955 photograph of passengers on a segregated trolley taken by Robert Frank in New Orleans while
traveling around the United States between 1955 and 1957, funded by two Guggenheim fellowships
awarded to him to document American life. 45
Denotation & connotation
× Connotation is a primary means through which
images convey values.
× Barthes uses the term myth to refer to the
cultural values and beliefs that are expressed
through connotation
× Myth is the hidden set of rules and conventions
through which meanings, which are specific to
certain groups, are made to seem natural,
universal, and given for a whole society.
× Myth allows the connotative meaning of a
particular thing or image to appear as
denotative (that is, literal or natural).

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Bathes & paris match
× France was fighting to retain its colonial power in
Algeria, after having promised to grant its
independence.
× The cover photograph is a close-up on the face of an
African boy in a French military uniform.
× He is saluting.
× Its caption reads: “The nights of the army. Little Diouf
has come from Ouagadougou [now Burkina Faso]
with his comrades, children reared by the A.O.F.
[French West African] army to open the fantastic
spectacle that the French Army presents this week
at the Palaisdes Sports.”

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Bathes & paris match
× The image, Barthes proposes, does not simply present a boy
saluting. It engages in and amplifies a larger myth about the
universal greatness of French nationalism and colonial
imperialism.
× The boy’s eyes are uplifted, suggesting he is saluting a French
flag flying above.
× This,Barthes notes, is the basic meaning of the picture. But
also connoted is the idea “that France is a great Empire, that
all her sons, without any colour discrimination,faithfully serve
under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the
detractors of an alleged colonialism thanthe zeal shown by
this black boy in serving his so-called oppressors.”
× This connoted message, Barthes proposes, is targeted at a
French reader, in whom the photograph will foster the feeling
that French imperialism and paternalism in Africa are natural,
given conditions and not the outcomes of contestation and
historical power struggles.

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Semiotics and signs : PEIRCE
× Charles Sanders Peirce
× Introduced the idea of a science of signs shortly
before Saussure. Peirce believed that language and
thought are processes of sign interpretation.
× For example, we perceive an octagonal red sign
with the letters STOP inscribed. The meaning lies in
our interpretation of the sign and subsequent
action (we stop).
× The production of a sign is dependent on social,
historical, and cultural context. It is also dependent
on the context in which the image is presented
× Company logos operate according to this principle
of instant recognition, counting on the fact that
the denotative meaning (the swoosh equals Nike)
will slide into connotative meanings (the swoosh
means quality, coolness)

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Icon, index, symbol : charles s
anders peirce
Icons - Many paintings and drawings are iconic, as are many comics,
photographs, and film and television images.

Symbolic - Unlike iconic signs, which typically resemble their objects, symbolic
signs,according to Peirce, bear no obvious relationship to their objects. Symbols
are created through an arbitrary (one could say “unnatural”) alliance of an object
and a meaning. For example, languages are symbolic systems that use
conventions to establish meaning. There is no natural link between the word cat
and an actual cat

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icon , index, symbol
Index - Peirce’s discussion of images as indexical is useful in the study of visual culture
and, in particular, photography. Indexical signs have an “existential” relationship to
their objects. This means that they have coexisted in the same place at some time.
Some examples of indexical signs include the symptom of a disease, a pointing
hand, and a weathervane.

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