Page 180 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE STUDIES AT THE CENTRE 169

Early work on semiology
It was in the context of Media Studies that questions of language and
signification were first posed at the Centre. Following the publication of Roland
Barthes’s essay, ‘The rhetoric of the image’, the Media Group devoted some time
4
to a study of news photographs, a study which appears in several articles in WPCS
3, particularly Stuart Hall’s ‘The determinations of news photographs’. Here the
concern with written forms of signification is not central, but it is necessary, as
Barthes and Hall refer to the ‘linguistic anchorage’ of the news photo in a
headline or caption. According to this analysis, the necessity for a ‘linguistic
anchorage’ arises out of the polysemic nature of the visual sign (that is, its openness
to a variety of readings). Its meaning is impossible to pin down, partly because a
photo contains a plurality of signifiers. Our attention must therefore be directed
to those sets of significations ‘preferred’ in the editorial practice of the newspaper.
For example, Barthes discusses the generalized qualities of ‘Italian-ness’
signified by a French advertisement for pasta, and Stuart Hall develops this
theme:

In any particular instance, then, the item—photo or text—perfectly indexes
the thematic of the ideology it elaborates. But its general sphere of
reference remains diffuse. It is there and yet it is not there. It appears,
indeed, as if the general structure of a dominant ideology is almost
impossible to grasp, reflexively and analytically, as a whole. 5

Here ‘linguistic anchorage’ both indicates what, in the image, we are supposed to
be looking at and defines the ideological field, in this case ‘nationalism’, through
which visual meaning is produced. The written text effects an ideological
‘closure’ in relation to the polysemic visual sign: ‘It is therefore common to find
a loosely coded expression in a photo used in a “closed” way—the closure being
effected by an anchoring text, caption or headline.’ 6
This theory of linguistic function, developed in early issues of Working
Papers in Cultural Studies, is based on Barthes’s early semiological work, which
takes its primary linguistic impetus from the work of Saussure and Jakobsen. Its
key principles are contained in two texts by Barthes: Elements of Semiology
(1967) and Mythologies (1972), in particular the essay ‘Myth today’ in this latter
text. The analysis of ‘Myth today’ operates with a twofold distinction. First,
following Saussure, a distinction is made between the signifier (sound image)
and the signified (concept), which come together to form the sign. These two
parts of the linguistic sign are related in an arbitrary fashion—that is, there is no
natural connection between them and no immediate dependence of the signified
on its material referent. Second, within the theory of myth itself Barthes
establishes a distinction between ‘language’ and ‘metalanguage’. Metalanguage
takes, as its signifier, an already constituted linguistic sign. Barthes’s famous
example is a photo in Paris-Match of a black soldier saluting a French flag. Here