Page 104 - Culture Society and the Media

94 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
Signifier—Sign—Signified
The relationships involved here are not those between the word and the real
world but between the signifier (an acoustic image, for example) and the
signified (the concept). In this sense, semiology excludes consideration of the
‘real world’ but at the same time the notion of the sign inevitably suggests a
reality beyond itself. There is then a certain ambivalence in semiological studies
between the analysis of signifying systems such as the mass media as internally
and logically structured and the search-for underlying structures. Different
theorists have attempted to locate the underlying structures, in areas as different
as ‘literariness’ or the universal qualities of the human mind. The theoretical
alliance of semiology and Marxism in the study of the mass media has produced
the argument that the underlying structure is that of ‘myth’ or ‘ideology’.
Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1972) suggested both that semiotics could be
applied to areas which had not previously been noted for their ‘meaning’ and
that the results of such an analysis constituted an account of contemporary
ideology, as in the following passage.

If we are to believe the weekly Elle which some time ago mustered twenty
women novelists on one photograph, the woman of letters is a remarkable
zoological species: she brings forth pell-mell, novels and children. We are
introduced, for example, to Jaqueline Lenoir (two daughters, one novel);
Marina Grey (one son, one novel); Nicole Dutreil (two sons, four novels),
etc. What does this mean? This: to write is a glorious but bold activity; the
writer is an ‘artist’, one recognizes that he is entitled to a little
bohemianism. As he is in general entrusted—at least in the France of Elle—
with giving society reasons for its clear conscience, he must, after all, be
paid for his services: one tacitly grants him the right to some individuality.
But make no mistake: let no women believe that they can take advantage
of this pace without having first submitted to the eternal statute of
womanhood. Women are on the earth to give children to men; let them
write as much as they like, let them decorate their condition, but above all,
let them not depart from it: let their biblical fate not be disturbed by the
promotion which is conceded to them, and let them pay immediately, by
the tribute of their motherhood for this bohemianism which has a natural
link with a writer’s life. (Barthes, 1972, p. 50)
Barthes was in no sense remarkable for his identification of ideological forms.
After all Marxists had been describing paintings, novels and the mass media as
ideological for many years, and rather more occasionally had analysed the
meanings of specific ideological forms. What Barthes established was the use of
semiology as a preamble to the study of myth or ideology and in so doing, he
pointed to some of the specific problems of analysing the mass media as
signifying systems.
In abstract it is not difficult to apply the central concepts of the structuralist
conceptual apparatus, ‘sign’, ‘code’ (language) and ‘message’ (speech) to the