Semiotics

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Semiotics

THE ORIGINS OF SEMIOLOGY
SEMIOLOGY AND FRENCH CULTURAL THEORY
SEMIOLOGY AND FILM THEORY
FURTHER READING

The terms "semiology" and "semiotics" are frequently used interchangeably by academics and film theorists. Broadly speaking, both terms refer to the study of signs and language systems, though the term semiology owes its provenance to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and semiotics to the American philosopher Charles Peirce (1839–1914). This is a deceptively simple definition of semiology, which in fact encompasses a wide range of academic debates and positions. Semiology is a theoretical model for the study of language, and its methods have been used for the analysis of a range of cultural texts, including film. This method has been championed by Structuralist academics, and its aim is to uncover what and why it is that the signs and symbols used in a cultural system mean what they do. Semiology, then, is concerned with language in its broadest sense and has given birth to some of the most notoriously difficult and abstract of theories. As a method, it focuses uncovering meaning in signs.

THE ORIGINS OF SEMIOLOGY

As a field of academic enquiry, semiology has its origin in linguistics as developed by the Swiss academic Ferdinand de Saussure. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Saussure gave an influential series of lectures on linguistics in which he proposed semiology as a model for the investigation of language and language systems. Saussure's work was unusual in several respects, not least because, counter to the dominant approach advocated by linguists at the time, he was not concerned with uncovering the etymology of language but with the ways in which language was used in the here and now, an approach that is now usually referred to as "'synchronic' rather than 'diachronic."' Saussure did not publish his work, but following his death in 1912, his students collected his lecture notes and published them as Course in General Linguistics.

Saussure's major concern was to develop a science of signs. A sign can be understood as anything that carries meaning, although Saussure himself was interested exclusively in linguistic signs—that is, words. He argued that a sign consists of two indivisible components: the signifier (the way the sign is communicated) and the signified (the mental concept the sign communicates). We know that something is a sign because its two parts are indivisible—that is, we see something and we can make sense of it by giving a name to it. Saussure called this process of reading and making sense of a sign "signification."

By way of an example, the three letters C- A- T, in this specific order, mean something in our language system and culture. They stand in for a cat. So in this order, these three letters are a sign. The signifier here is the three letters in THIS specific order, and the signified is OUR mental concept of a cat. Crucially, Saussure notes, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is an arbitrary one. For example, the word "cat" does not look like a cat, nor does it have any essential "catness" about it. Through convention, people have agreed that those three letters stand for the concept of cat in our language and culture. The evidence of this is that in Switzerland and France, for example, the four letters C- H- A- T are a sign meaning the same thing in French.

In the United States during this same period, the pragmatist and philosopher Charles Peirce was investigating signs and sign systems, and he developed a theoretical model that he called semiotics. Peirce's semiotics was not confined to linguistic theory in the same way as Saussure's; it was more fully integrated into his philosophical interests, and it is this broader application of a theory of meaning systems that distinguishes his work.

Peirce argued that signs can be categorized as belonging to three distinct categories; iconic, indexical, and symbolic. An iconic sign looks like the thing it represents. For Peirce, this was the most effective of all forms of sign system. An indexical sign possesses some kind of physical link between the sign and the thing it represents, providing evidence that the thing represented was there. Smoke, for example, is an indexical sign of fire. A symbolic sign is arbitrarily linked to what it represents; it neither looks like the thing represented nor possesses a physical link to the thing represented. It is a sign that stands in the place of the thing represented. The written word is the best example of a symbolic sign.

Signs in Peirce's model can belong to more than one category simultaneously. This is important in film, where cinematic images are both iconic—that is, they look like the thing represented—and indexical—that is, they are evidence that someone/thing was present to be photographed. Animated and computer-generated images can be iconic but not indexical. Similarly, sound can be iconic (a voice can sound like the filmed person's voice), indexical (noises in another room can suggest that someone is there), or symbolic (a musical theme can suggest a character in a film).

SEMIOLOGY AND FRENCH CULTURAL THEORY

The theoretical model formulated by Saussure was to become especially influential amongst French cultural theorists and has inspired some of the most widely developed ideas shaping cultural products, including film. French cultural theory, especially since the late 1960s, has shaped and influenced much of the progressive research into popular culture. Perhaps the key French theorist for cultural commentators is Roland Barthes (1915–1980), who adopted Saussure's linguistic model in order to analyse popular culture from the 1950s onward, most notably in his collection of essays Mythologies (1957). Barthes was especially interested in what Saussure had described as the process of signification (how we make sense of signs.) He argued that signification operates at two levels: "denotation" and "connotation." Denotation describes the literal meaning of a sign. Connotation describes the process we use to interpret what we see. At the level of connotation, we judge and interpret what we have already recognized at a simpler level; we read deeper levels of meaning into things at a connotative level. For example, in the film Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) the color red is used repeatedly as a motif. The titles of the film are in a bold red, James Dean wears a red jacket, Natalie Wood is first seen in a red coat and red is used as a color that links the protagonists of the film to the idea of rebellion. So, at a denotative level, we might recognize the bold red of the film's titles or James Dean's jacket as simply titles written in red and a red jacket; but at a connotative level we are able to draw on our culture's understanding of the symbolic importance of red, representing danger, anger, love, and passion.

For Barthes, analysis of popular culture using Saussure's methods uncovered the hidden or obscured meanings that lie beneath the everyday, commonsense notions of popular culture. Using semiology, Barthes conducted detailed textual analysis to "deconstruct" cultural products. His aim in this project was to reveal the workings of ideology through what he termed "myth." Barthes's concept of myth parallels the Marxist concept of "false consciousness." It is a form of naturalized language or discourse that hides itself in the notion of the commonsense. Doing so helps to maintain the status quo or consensus within a culture about socially acceptable norms of behavior and values (dominant ideology). Barthes analyzed a range of cultural products, including magazine articles, photographs, and films in order to uncover myths concerning class, ethnicity, and cultural imperialism.

While Barthes used semiology to analyze film, he was driven chiefly by the goal of uncovering the hidden ideological workings of popular culture. Even so, his approach demonstrated the usefulness of semiology as a method for systematically analyzing cinematic texts. Adopting Barthes's method, critics could undertake detailed microanalysis of films, frame by frame, in order to discuss the formal construction of cinematic images and the ways in which they are used to construct meaning. After Barthes's work became readily available in English, notably with the publication of a translation of Mythologies in 1972, his ideas became extremely popular among a new generation of film theorists, along with those of the French Marxist Louis Althusser. The method of analysis advocated by Barthes has been extremely useful for theorists, including Marxists, feminists, gays, and lesbians, as well as those concerned with questions of race and ethnicity.

SEMIOLOGY AND FILM THEORY

While Barthes's methods still play an important role in the development of film theory, it was Christian Metz, one of the giants of French film theory, who became best known for the use of semiology as a method to analyze cinema. In Film Language (1968), Metz argued that cinema is structured like a language. Adopting Saussure's models, Metz made the distinction between "langue," a language system, and "language," a less clearly defined system of recognizable conventions. Metz contends that film cannot be regarded as comprising a "langue," in the sense of having a strict grammar and syntax equivalent to that of the written or spoken word. Unlike the written word, film's basic unit, which Metz argues is the shot, is neither symbolic nor arbitrary but iconic; therefore, it is laden with specific meaning. Metz suggests that film is a language in which each shot used in a sequence works like a unit in a linguistic statement. In his theoretical model, known as the "grande syntagmatique," Metz argues that individual cinematic texts construct their own meaning systems rather than share a unified grammar.

These ideas were developed upon and expanded by a wide range of theorists including Raymond Bellour in The Unattainable Text (1975), who largely supported Metz's views. Metz's ideas were nonetheless controversial and became the catalyst for heated debate amongst theorists during the 1970s and the 1980s, especially among Left Wing cultural theorists in Britain and the United States. The Italian Umberto Eco argued in "Articulations of the Cinematic Code," that the photographic image is arbitrarily constructed, just as the linguistic code is arbitrary. Stephen Heath challenged Metz's arguments, suggesting in Questions of Cinema (1981) that all cinema is concerned with representation and that representation itself is a form of language equivalent to Saussure's linguistic model of "langue." In a similar vein, Sam Rohdie took issue with some of Metz's key statements while calling for a continued investment in the systematic textual analysis that semiology makes possible (1975).

By the mid 1980s, the version of semiology that Metz had developed had increasingly lost favor and had become largely replaced in film studies debates by an interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis. This shift was perhaps due to a range of factors, including the waning interest in the radical leftist politics espoused by most structuralist thinkers and the emerging interest, especially amongst feminist academics within film studies, in psychoanalysis as a theoretical paradigm. Indeed, Metz himself had moved away from his investment in semiology to emphasize psychoanalysis during the mid-1970s, thus forecasting the direction that film studies would take as an academic discipline.