Page 100 - Culture Society and the Media

90 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
way the opinions and actions of individual members of the audience. Content
analysis was often used as a tool in this kind of research and its focus on a simple
level of manifest content allowed a straightforward transition to be made
between violence on the screen and delinquency, gangfights and muggings
elsewhere. Semiological studies, on the other hand, focused on film as a
discourse, on the film as a communication about violence rather than violence
itself, and in that sense, reoriented research towards the system of rules which
governed that discourse generally, and the gangster film in particular, rather than
specific violent episodes. Within this kind of analysis the codes governing the
genre of film noir gave different violent episodes different meanings. Indeed, the
violent act could only be understood in relation to other elements in the film and
in terms of the conventions of the genre. Such acts were no longer seen to have a
single fixed meaning but to be capable of signifying different values and
presenting different codes of behaviour depending upon how they are articulated
as signs amongst other signifying elements within a discourse.
Semiological studies present their own ambiguities and difficulties not least
because semiology, unlike content analysis, is not a method but constitutes a
constellation of studies in art, literature, anthropology and the mass media which
in some way developed or made use of linguistic theory. As a philosophy, as a
theory, as a set of concepts and as a method of analysis, semiology has had many
facets and has been subject to various interpretations, debates and polemics.
Semiology emerged from the study of language problems and the structure of
language. Barthes once defined structuralism as a method for the study of cultural
artefacts which orginated in the methods of contemporary linguistics. The early
structuralist studies attempted to uncover the internal relationships which gave
different languages their form and function. Later semiological work took a
broader view and attempted to lay down the basis for a science of signs which
would include not only languages but also any other signifying system.
The contributions that linguistic analogies made to the study of other cultural
forms did not rest solely on the blind application of the methods of one discipline
to another, but developed in rather different ways in relation to different
theoretical contexts. For our purpose, in working out the methods through which
semiologists examine the mass media, it is worth noting some distinctive
features of semiological studies in which there is a certain tension. Semiology is
distinguished by its insistence on the importance of the sign. This involves the
initial isolation of the signifier as an object of study from the signified. This is
relatively easy to understand when the object of investigation is language but is
perhaps less easy to comprehend when the object of research is a non-verbal sign
system. One famous structuralist anthropological study is Lévi-Strauss’s analysis
of kinship. Here Lévi-Strauss (1969) considers marriage rules and systems of
kinship in a number of ‘primitive’ societies as a ‘kind of language’, that is to say,
‘a set of operations designed to ensure a certain type of communication between
individuals and groups’ (Jameson, 1972, p. 111). The message is made up of the
women of the group who circulate between the clans, dynasties and families,