Week 3 Schedule

Week 3 Schedule

Becoming a Cultural Detective: Doing Visual Analysis

Look at this advertisement:

What can it tell us? How can we visually deconstruct its meaning?

There are many ways to analyse a media object. This week we are going to focus on analysing media objects using semiotics.

Major names in Semiotics include Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce and Roland Barthes.

Semiotics, sometimes known as semiology, is the study of signs. It was developed by a french linguist called Ferdinand de Saussure that is primarily focused on the way that sign systems actually ‘structure’ the realities that they seem to describe, as opposed to merely describing the world ‘as is’. It is used to describe and ask questions about how meanings are constructed in language and culture.

Semiotics looks at language by saying that language is constructed and inherited, by people using it, to produce meanings. By looking at language and texts in this way we can say that things are always experienced through mediation.

Semiotics is therefore structuralist in that it sees language as a construction as opposed to being a natural thing. It is merely through our shared ‘perceptions of sign systems’ that we are able to collectively relate to meaning in signs in the same way. These can shift (for example think of the word ‘Black’, ‘Gay’, ‘Sick’, ‘Bad’ and how their meaning has changed/slipped) over time and can be culturally specific.

Semiotics uses the term signs to describe the way that meanings are produced. A sign has several characteristics:

• The signifier: The actual physical form of the sign. The sound-image.
• The signified: The concept the signifier refers to.
• The referent: the real thing that the signifier and signified refer to.
• Sign systems are Constructed. (ie Inuits and snow)

Very often these categories work by means of creating differences (binary oppositions) see Claude Levi-Strauss (ie a man is a man precisely because he is NOT a woman).

Recap on Terminology

C. S. Peirce’s 3 types of Visual Sign:

• Indexical: There is a causal, contiguous or sequential relation to the sign and what it stands for. (eg smoke is sequential to ‘fire’, a thermometer is an index of temperature)
• Iconic: Always resemble what they signify (ie a photograph of a dog, a sign on a toilet door, a ‘child crossing’ roadsign)
• Symbolic: Nothing in a symbol produces intrinsic meaning. (eg words, nike logo, flags). It is arbitrarily linked to its referent.

Look at the following example and try and relate some of the above terminology to it:

Other useful terminology:

• Metonym– a sign that denotes one thing but stands for another (eg 10 Downing Street stands for the UK government/prime minister, fleet street refers to the British Press)
• Synecdoche- a part of something is used to stand for the whole (eg a car gets referred to as wheels, a sail refers to a ship)
• Diegesis–  the meaning of the sum total of a number of signs
• Intertextuality– the shaping of texts meanings through other texts.
• Polysemy– when a sign is polysemic it is capable of having several meanings. (eg words like wood, bank)
• Anchorage- sometimes used to control polysemic or ambiguous meanings, common in advertising

Thinking about the terminology we have just discussed, in pairs analyse this advertisement:

Denotation, Connotation and Myth

What do you understand by the term Myth?

Denotation: the explicit or direct meaning or set of meanings of a word or expression, as distinguished from the ideas or meanings associated with it. What it actually is. (ie ‘red’ denotes a certain colour, a ‘car’ denotes a vehicle for moving people and things around, the McDonalds golden arches denote a fast-food restaurant, the twin towers denote(d) a place of work in New York)

Connotation: the associated or secondary meaning of a word or expression in addition to its explicit or primary meaning. (ie ‘red’ connotes danger/passion/communism, a ‘car’ connotes freedom, the McDonalds arches can connote ‘americanisation’, what do the twin towers denote) This is very often cultural and can depend on context.

Myth: Roland Barthes in Mythologies explores this further by looking at the mechanisms through which meanings are produced and circulated. He is interested in ‘How’ things mean.

Mythologies (1957) contains 54 short articles on a variety of subjects and trends that took place in France in the 1950s. He looks at film, newspapers, magazines, events, photographs, toys and popular pastimes such as tourism and wrestling.

He is interested in how apparently apolitical activities are expressive of certain ideological positions.

This is Roland Barthes famous example of exploring myth with a cover of Paris Match.

For Barthes, Myth subtly obscures, distorts and hides truth and reality. So much so that the reality is robbed from us. Barthes argues that myth functions to naturalise an ideology.

“It is now possible to complete the semiological definition of myth in a bourgeois society:  myth is depoliticized speech. One must naturally understand political in its deeper meaning, as describing the whole of human relations in their real, social structure, in their power of making the world [….] Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. [….] In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.” Barthes. Mythologies (1957), selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 142-143. Excerpt from chapter “Myth Today”

 

How about representations of Australianness? How does Myth function here:

And what about in real texts? Can we apply visual analysis to this:

Things to look for:

Colour, Age, Gender, Race, looks, beauty, nationality, nature, technology, manners, eye contact/gaze, composition. Also be aware of what we dont see.

Why is semiotics important to media producers?

Mis-en-scene- adding levels of contextual meaning to the work that you produce.

Semiotics is not the only way that we can interpret texts, other types of analysis include content analysis, discourse analysis, narrative analysis, psychoanalysis, feminist analysis and many more…

Recommended Reading:

Chapter 1 from Toynbee, J and Hesmondhalgh, D (2006) Analysing Media Texts. Open University Press

Further Reading

Williamson, J (1978) Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Marion Boyers

Barthes, R ‘Myth Today’ in Storey, J (1993) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A reader. Prentice Hall

Hall, Stuart (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’. In Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Ed.): Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson

Workshop Task: Analysis of Chanel No. 5 Advert:

Analyse the above advert with the following considerations:

1. Signs- Identify the signs within the advertisement. How do they work together?

2. Connotation/myth – How might the advertisement be producing secondary meanings?

3. Conventions- What conventions/codes are being used in the advertisement?

4. Context- can we draw upon any contextual evidence that might impact on the meaning of the advertisement.