1. Media Studies:
Week 6: Semiotics
Citroën DS-19

2. What is semiotics?
It is the study of processes and systems of signification. Or how meaning is communicated through signs and symbols.
A sign is something that stands for something else. It is a discrete unit of meaning.

3. What is semiotics?
There are two primary origins of contemporary semiotic thought: the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure ( ) and the work of the American pragmatic philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce ( ).
De Saussure studied human language systems and discovered that there is no intrinsic meaning to linguistic signs.
Linguistic signs acquire meaning purely by convention, they must be learnt.
Just as there is nothing inherently “dog-like” in the word D-O-G, there is also nothing intrinsically “p-like” in the letter “p”.

4. What is Semiotics?
The Sign
So linguistic signs, de Saussure theorized, are made up of two elements: a signifier (the sound-image) and a signified (the concept).
But the relationship between the two is arbitrary.

5. What is Semiotics?
TREE
De Saussure emphasized that signs acquire meaning within linguistic systems through relations of difference. A “p” is a “p” because it is not an “e” or a “t” and it can be differentiated from these other signs.

6. What is Semiotics?
TREE
De Saussure also makes the distinction between langue (language) and parole (speech).
Langue is the structure of rules that make meaning possible and parole is the individual usage of these conventions in order to communicate something.

7. What is Semiotics?
C.S. Peirce’s categorization of 3 different types of signs:
Iconic Signs:
Indexical Signs:
Symbolic Signs:
Signifies by resemblance (a picture of a tree)
Signifies by causal/physical connection (the leaf of a tree)
Signifies by learnt convention (the word tree)

8. Roland Barthes: “The Rhetoric of the Image”
Interested in determining how signification occurs through images.
“How does meaning get into the image?”
Chooses to look at advertising because the signification of advertising images is intentional, frank and emphatic.
The Panzani Ad

9. Roland Barthes: “The Rhetoric of the Image”
Barthes claims there are 3 levels or types of messages at work in the Panzani Ad:
The linguistic message (including both the caption and the labels on the products).
A coded iconic message (all the meanings associated with the image).
The open bag signifying freshness
3 colours signifying ‘Italianicity’
A total culinary service
The aesthetic signified of the “still life”
3. A non-coded iconic message (the literal image).
The Panzani Ad

10. Roland Barthes: “The Rhetoric of the Image”
Barthes makes the distinction between denotative and connotative meaning. Denotation refers to the literal meaning of the sign, whereas connotation refers to the cultural or personal associations we draw from or connect with the sign.
So, the literal or denotative message appears as the support of the ‘symbolic’ or connotative message.
A denotated image appears to be a “message without a code.”
Photography is a medium that has a particularly strong relationship to denotative meaning. It often presents itself as being simply a “recording” of reality. It presents itself as “innocent” and reinforces its myth of “naturalness” because it appears to be a message without a code. In this respect it is different than the iconic images of drawing.

11. Roland Barthes: “The Rhetoric of the Image”
So, the photographic image suggests a “having-been-there” of its subject matter. A “stupefying evidence of this is how it was” (p.23).
“the denotated image naturalizes the symbolic message, it innocents the semantic artifice of connotation, which is extremely dense, especially in advertising” (p.23)
“nature seems spontaneously to produce the scene represented” (p.23)

12. Roland Barthes: “The Rhetoric of the Image”
The linguistic message accompanying an image (and Barthes says that there is almost always a linguistic accompaniment in mass communications) has one of two functions:
1. Anchorage: All images are polysemous (they have more than one meaning). In the process of anchorage, the textual information fixes the process of signification and limits the polysemic possibilities of an image. The text directs or “dispatches” the reader towards a meaning chosen in advance.
2. Relay: Here text and image stand in a complementary relationship, they both work together towards a higher level of meaning - images and dialogue working together to propel the story or narrative of a film for example.

15. Roland Barthes: “The Rhetoric of the Image”
Each image (or lexia) mobilizes a different lexicon (a vocabulary or system of meaning): a portion of the symbolic plane (of language) which corresponds to a body of practices and techniques.
“…each sign corresponds to a body of ‘attitudes’: tourism, housekeeping, knowledge of art - certain of which may obviously be lacking in this or that individual” (p.24)
The signifieds of connotation are difficult to name: “Italianicity is not Italy, it is the condensed essence of everything that could be Italian, from spaghetti to painting” (p.25).

16. Roland Barthes: Mythologies
“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”
- “The New Citroën”

17. Roland Barthes: Mythologies
“The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle.”
“The World of Wrestling”

18. Roland Barthes: Mythologies
“Steak is a part of the same sanguine mythology as wine. It is the heart of meat, it is meat in its pure state; and whoever partakes of it assimilates a bull-like strength. The prestige of steak evidently derives from its quasi-rawness…Full-bloodedness is the raison d’être of steak…”
- “Steak and Chips”

19. Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida
“He is dead and he is going to die…”
Alexander Gardner: Portrait of Lewis Payne. 1865

20. Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida
“The mask is meaning, insofar as it is absolutely pure…”
R. Avedon: William Casby, Born a Slave. 1963

21. Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida
“What I stubbornly see are one boy’s bad teeth…”
William Klein: Little Italy. New York, 1954

22. Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida
“I dismiss all knowledge, all culture… I see only the boy’s huge Danton collar, the girl’s finger bandage”
Lewis H. Hine: Idiot Children in an Institution. New Jersey, 1924

23. Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida
“Bob Wilson holds me, but I cannot say why…”
R. Maplethorpe: Phil Glass and Bob Wilson

24. What is the “punctum” of these images?

25. What is the “punctum” of these images?

26. What is the “punctum” of these images?

27. Michel de Certeau: “Walking in the City”
Like Barthes, he uses a blend of concepts drawn from semiotics and rhetoric.
The essay is also concerned with the visual field, but his gaze and speculations are turned to the city rather than the advertising image.
He opens his essay by describing two perspectives on Manhattan, that of the voyeur and that of the walker.
These become conceptual metaphors for his discussion of two implied ideas: strategies and tactics.

28. Michel de Certeau: “Walking in the City”
Commissioners’ proposal for Manhattan Grid 1811

29. Michel de Certeau: “Walking in the City”
New York City Grid

30. Michel de Certeau: “Walking in the City”
New York City Sidewalk

31. Michel de Certeau: “Walking in the City”
Strategies: the structures of power that are set out for us to follow. Govern the organization of space. This is the perspective of the urban planner or cartographer, attempting to look at the city from above.
Tactics: how users negotiate the strategies that are put in place. The practices of everyday life that attempt to “make do” in the best way possible with the rules and restrictions implemented from above.

32. Michel de Certeau: “Walking in the City”
Those that are in a position to strategize the organization of the city do so in three ways:
Through the production of its own space: rational organization that represses anything that threatens to pollute this organization
The substitution of a nowhen: present this organization as unchanging and eternal, outside the processes of history
The creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: think of the personification and branding of places like “New York,” “London” and “Paris”

33. Michel de Certeau: “Walking in the City”
The walker, as opposed to these top down strategies of organization, experiences the city through his or movement through it at street level.
“walkers…whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (p.153)
“one can analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance…” (p.156)