Page 223 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

SEMIOTICS/SEMIOLOGY

Saussure proposed an approach and terminology that was itself very
influential on structuralism when his theory of language was taken up
later on by such writers as Roland Barthes and Claude Le ´vi-Strauss.
Saussurian semiotics approaches language ‘synchronically’, as a
phenomenon existing in the here and now, rather than ‘diachronically’
(as did the then-ascendant discipline of philology). He was interested in
its structure and the rules that allowed utterances to be generated, not in
existing words. He proposed that language works as a system of difference,
in which what any one element means (its ‘value’ in the system) is
arbitrary, consisting precisely in being what the others are not.
This idea was taken up and applied in contexts going well beyond
the realm of spoken language. Anthropologists looked at the structure
of myths using Saussurian concepts. Barthes used them to analyse both
literary and popular cultural texts, particularly via his Mythologies
(1973). He led the way for those working in media and cultural studies
to begin to apply semiotic terms to the analysis of everything from
advertising (see for example Williamson, 1978) to ideology.
In fact following developments in France in the 1950s and 1960s, in
the 1970s semiotics was knitted together with Marxism and psycho-
analytical approaches by intellectuals working in the Birmingham
tradition of cultural studies and the Screen tradition of cinema studies
respectively. It was this from this conjunction that the emancipatory
potential of semiotics was proposed: it could help to ‘demystify’
dominant ideologies and assist in the effort to understand how
commonsensical representations of an apparently unarguable reality
were in fact constructed, often in line with existing arrangements of
power.
Fiske (1990: 40) argues that semiotics has three main areas of study.

. The sign: for example, an utterance, word or image. This is broken
down into two components that make up the sign – the signifier
and the signified – the former being sound, letters or image that
make up the material form of the sign, the latter representing its
associated mental meaning.
. The codes and systems into which signs are organised. Codes
involve ‘choice and chain’ – paradigm and syntagm.
. The culture within which these signs and codes operate. Meaning is
dependent upon shared structures of understanding. As Saussure
put it, signs have a ‘life in society’.

Recognising that meaning was dependent on, for instance, shared
cultural codes (which are also understood to be historically located and

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