Structuralism and Semiotics

Introduction
• This chapter focuses on structuralist theories
of media and the method of semiotics.
• The work of a linguist,
Ferdinand de Saussure,
will begin our
discussion.
• Central to Saussure’s theory of language is
the distinction between synchronic and
diachronic forms of analysis.

• Synchronic analysis explores language as a

system at a given moment in time.
• It is a ‘snapshot’ form of analysis.
• Diachronic analysis, on the other hand,
explores a language system as it evolves
over a period of time.
• Etymology is a type of diachronic analysis.
• By contrast:
▫ Structuralism as a whole is necessarily
synchronic; it is concerned to study particular
systems or structures under artificial and
ahistorical conditions (Sturrock 1979: 9).
• Unlike theories of modernity, structuralism is
oblivious to history in its search for what
language means and represents here and now.
• Semiotics is the method that serves this
purpose.
• Semiotics analyses language as a whole
system that structures its individual parts into
distinct units of meaning.
• These units of meaning are referred to as
signs.
• Since the system is constantly changing –
new signs emerge, old signs become
obsolete – what semiotics does is freeze
the moment in order to analyse the system
at work.
• Language is the system par excellence, but
inextricably linked to language are social,
cultural, political and economic systems.
• Societies, like languages, structure their
individual parts (i.e. citizens).
• Our social lives are structured by powerful
agents of the social system such as
governments.
• Media institutions are also powerful agents of
the social system, but at the same time these
agents are structured by the system too.
• As we will discuss in relation to structuralist
theories of myth, ideology and hegemony, it
is possible to theorize media texts (especially
news) and the institutions that produce them
as meaning-makers.
• The ways in which we perceive our social
and cultural lives are shaped to a great
extent by what we see on television or read
in newspapers or hear on the radio.
• Media – among other meaning systems –
structure our lives.
• Of course, we do not simply accept what
we see on television or read in the
newspapers or hear on the radio.
• As Hall (1980) notes, we ‘decode’ media
texts in different ways – sometimes we
agree, sometimes we disagree.
• Nonetheless, the power to decide what
stories, ideas, tastes and values are offered
to us via media communications is
structured unequally in favour of some
interests (the ruling ones) rather than
others (the interests of the silent majority).
Saussure and Barthes: language and myth

• Before we can begin to understand

structuralist theories of media, it is first
necessary to probe in greater depth the
theory of language outlined by
Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics
(first published in 1916).
• Saussure dismissed the notion that language
simply reflects reality and instead suggested
that language operates within its own system.

• This system
constructs meanings
within a language –
meanings do not
evolve in any natural
or unique way.
• He called this approach semiology, which
means the study of signs, but we will use
the more common term for this approach,
known as semiotics.
• A sign (word) such as ‘rat’, for instance, has
two properties: a sound and an idea.
• But there is no connection between the
sound and the idea: ‘the choice of a given
slice of sound to name a given idea is
completely arbitrary’ (Saussure 1966: 113).
• Even a sign like ‘sizzle’ – which some would
cite as an example of onomatopoeia – has no
meaning in relation to its sound, according to
Saussure’s theory of language.
• Working as a system, the signs (i.e. words)
that form a language are able to signify ideas
precisely because they are different from other
signs: ‘Language is a system of interdependent
terms in which the value of each term results
solely from the simultaneous presence of the
others’ (Saussure 1966: 114).
• So language is structured through difference, and
different ideas depend on different sounds.
• Phonic differences make possible to distinguish any
one word from all others.
• For example, we can only understand the
word ‘rat’ as a unit of meaning in the English
language because its sound – as well as the
idea or thing it signifies – differs from that of
other words, such as ‘mouse’ or ‘cat’.
• If ‘rat’ was the word used to signify all of
these ‘real’ things (i.e. mouse and cat as well
as rat), its meaning would be imprecise and
the whole system of language would have
effectively failed to signify.
• However, in Latin there is only one term –
‘mus’ – to refer to both a rat and a mouse.
• Latin speakers, historically, have not
distinguished between the two creatures
because they are ‘indifferent’ to Latin
cultures.
• Likewise, Eskimos have several different
words to describe ‘snow’ whereas English
speakers only use one.
• As Umberto Eco rightly
demonstrates in
support of Saussure,
‘any cultural
phenomenon is also a
sign phenomenon’ (Eco
1973: 61).
• Cultural meanings are therefore specific to
language systems that operate within the
rules of semiotics.
• Saussure shows, therefore, that any single
sign (or word) in a language system is
inextricably linked with the system as a whole.
• A word’s ‘content is really fixed only by the
concurrence of everything that exists around
it’ (Saussure 1966: 115).
• In order to illustrate this, he makes a
distinction between the langue (the whole
system or structure) and the parole (specific
utterances within this system) of a given
language.
• An utterance (parole) can only signify meaning
effectively in its relation to the whole system of a
language (langue).
• Following Saussure, Roland Barthes’s
theory of myth is indebted to his
predecessor’s claim that a word’s idea (its
signified element) and its sound (its
signifier element) are unconnected but
together make up the total meaning of that
word (its sign), which can only be
understood in relation to all other signs –
as in the relationship between langue and
parole.
• However, Barthes
extends Saussure’s
theory of language
systems by applying it
to the systems by which
societies and cultures
develop ‘myths’.
• Barthes’s most
important work in this
respect is Mythologies
(first published in 1957).
• Here he develops Saussure’s notion that
meanings do not simply refer to real
things.
• Furthermore, meanings can develop
beyond their linguistic properties and take
on the status of myths.
• Saussure suggested that the meaning of
any term in a language system consists of
a signifier plus a signified to give a sign
(Figure 4.2).
• Language – the first order of signification
in Barthes’s model – is therefore capable
of generating a second order of
signification called myth.
• This is the basis for Barthes’s approach to
semiotics.
• In Figure 4.3 we can see how a sign (i.e. an
idea plus a sound) such as ‘rat’, which
operates in a first order of signification,
becomes a signifier within a second-order
‘myth’ system of signification.
• In the case of rat, therefore, its sign in the
‘language’ order of signification defines it as,
say, ‘a small rodent with a pointed snout’.
• However, its sign in the ‘myth’ order of
signification would be extended to what rat
means in particular social and cultural contexts.
• In English-speaking,
Western countries such as
Britain, rat as a myth
signifies dirt, disease, the
darkness of underground
sewers and cellars.
• Most of the mythical meanings that we attach
to ‘rat’ are negative, because most of us
dislike or even fear the ‘real’ creature which
the word signifies.
• But in Thailand for instance, rat meat has been
eaten in some of poorer regions for years and it
is now becoming a delicacy which can cost even
more than chicken or pork.
• The distinction between language and myth
is sometimes equated to the distinction
between denotation and connotation.
• Denotation is similar to a dictionary
definition of a sign; connotation, by
contrast, refers to the wider social and
cultural meanings (myths) attached to a
sign.
• Rat denotes rodent; it connotes much,
much more (dirt, disease, and so on).
• How does Barthes’s semiotic – or
structuralist – theory of myth apply to
media?
• If we consider media to be an important –
perhaps the most important – element
within a social and cultural system of signs
that are capable of generating myths, then
clearly television, the internet and other
mass communications can help to nurture
some myths and not others.
• Barthes’s best-known example of myth-
making derives from a medium.
• He analyses the front cover of an issue of
Paris-Match, a French magazine, which
depicts a black boy in military outfit looking
upwards and saluting what is assumed to be
the French flag.
• Barthes reads this image (i.e. sign) as
language and myth.
• On the level of language, the image denotes a
black boy giving a French salute.
• Far more can be read into what this image
connotes though.
• As a myth, Barthes suggests that the image
signifies ‘that France is a great Empire, that
all her sons, without any colour
discrimination, faithfully serve under her
flag’ (Barthes 1993: 116).
• The image of the proud black soldier
connotes a myth that France is a
multicultural land of opportunity far from an
oppressive colonizer of foreign peoples.
• Clearly, the meanings signified by this image
as language and myth are only made possible
in how they compare with the vast range of
other meanings that an image like this might
depict if it was configured differently.
• If the boy in the image is white and not black,
the image’s meaning is radically changed.
• Barthes applies his theory of myth to several
‘mythologies’ associated with his native
French culture, such as wine and Citroen cars.
• We can apply his theory to contemporary
media mythologies, although we would need
to stretch our imagination and thought
processes in the same way that Barthes did.
• For instance, BBC
News 24 occasionally
broadcasts a pre-
recorded trailer just
before headlines
appear ‘on the hour’.
• In the order of a language system, the moving
images shown denote foreign correspondents
‘on location’ in various parts of the world,
reporting on different kinds of news stories
(environmental, political, financial, and so on).
• A timer counts down the seconds from 30
to 0 in anticipation of the headlines that
will immediately follow once the trailer
has finished.
• But we can read this sequence of images on
the more sophisticated order of a myth
system.
• From this reading we can appreciate how the
BBC News 24 channel – and its journalists –
takes on connotations of a professional
organization dedicated to fast, concise, global
news coverage.
• BBC foreign correspondents are eyewitnesses
to international affairs in a not dissimilar way
that Britain has its metaphorical eyes on the
world.
• We seek out evil, we search out poverty and
disease – ‘we’ the BBC, like the country we
represent, are a force for good, and a picture
of fine health compared to the tyranny and
misfortune of others.
• The timer, moreover, connotes punctuality
and recency (i.e. BBC news values).
• News does not occur on the hour – in reality,
it can occur at any time – but news is always
made fresh by headlines ‘on the hour’ to
reinforce the myth that news is always ‘new’.
• A timer that began counting down the
seconds from 30 minutes to zero, rather
than 30 seconds, would generate very
different meanings (and myths) about
BBC News 24.
• Instead of pandering to breaking news or
the headline stories, we might read this
news channel as dedicated to
programming that deals with in-depth
debate and dialogue.
• The need to ‘stretch one’s imagination’
when identifying media mythologies points
to a weakness with semiotics as a method
and the structuralist theory it informs.
• Far from a science, semiotics is a highly
subjective method of reading social and
cultural myths that depends entirely on ‘the
analytical brilliance of the semiotician’
(Couldry 2000a: 75).
• Moreover, as well as being unable to
account for historical changes in language
and myth, semiotics is only able to analyse
one particular text in isolation.
• Semiotics as a method of textual analysis
is easily abused to make claims about how
media texts signify meanings in everyday
use.
• Angela McRobbie acknowledges that while
semiotics can ‘read’ ideologies in media
texts, it cannot account for the views of
readers/audiences and therefore cannot
‘understand the complex and contested
social processes’ (McRobbie 1994: 165).
• Semiotics, given that it can only ever be
one person’s interpretation of what they
read, hear or see, is certainly not a
substitute for empirical audience research.