Semiotics is the study of the sign. The difficulty in defining this approach is that it is invented and reinvented by a number of people over time. The basic distinction made by all of semiotics is the difference between the word and the thing or the word and the idea. The signifier would be the word or image and the signified is what the word or image is supposed to represent. Saussure (1966), a Swiss linguist whose form of semiotics was highly influential in the early development of postmodern thinking, pointed out that the relationship between these things is arbitrary. There are any number of words for “dog” in various languages and we could easily invent another. I might look at a picture of a bulldog and get a meaning that corresponds to a biological dog or I might get a meaning of “TLU.” There is no inherent connection.
Although 17th century theologian and scientist John Wilkins wanted to invent a perfect philosophic language where one word represented one and only one idea (see Borges, n.d), it proved impossible. And even if Wilkins could have succeeded, the words he chose would not somehow be “essentially” the idea they were supposed to represent.
So we are left with words whose meanings float. But communication is possible, so it cannot just be chaotic. One way a sign’s meanings stabilize for the text’s readers or viewers or listeners is through the sign’s relationship with other signs. We can look to relationships of signs within a text and to relationships with other signs that are not in the text but might have been. We might call this an analysis of the grammar of signs. There are two typical ways to frame this analysis (Vande Berg, Wenner & Gronbeck, 1998):
- Syntagmatic relationships are clusters of signs that give meanings to each other either through narrative sequence or spatial arrangement. In the sentence “Snoopy kisses Lucy,” the presence of Snoopy gives meaning to the kiss. The “I’ve been kissed by dog lips!” reaction that Lucy has is likely to be our reaction then, even before she has it. The image of the athlete on the Wheaties box creates a syntagmatic relation communicating health and fitness and success. This crosses from the athlete to the Wheaties-- “Look, it’s healthy because the U.S. Gymnastics Team eats it, and they would know!”, but now that Wheaties is a famous sign, it crosses the other way too – “Look, Curt Schilling in on a Wheaties box; he must really be a good pitcher.”
- Paradigmatic relationships are the substitutability relationships between signs. Signs can conceptually be exchanged for each other (“car,” “Prius,” “Greased Lightnin’,” “my ride,” “truck,” “Chevy,” etc.) so that even if only one appears in a text, it might gain meaning from the possible relationship with the implicit other signs it is connected with or with that whole family of signs. This is why Marlboro ads with only a cowboy work. His image calls into mind all the other signs that connect with “cowboy,” and we do the work to craft the implied argument: “Smoking Marloboros will make me tough, self-reliant and manly.”
It is as if the analyst is looking to understand what the relationship is among the things present (symtagms) and what the relationship is with things not present (paradigms).
An example of how this works might be helpful. Kate McGowan (2007) analyzes a 9/11 photograph taken by James Nachtwey:
(http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/jn/images/02-JN_WTC_3-34GA.jpg)
McGowan argues that we might read this as an image of the struggle and triumph of the Christian faith. But there are other images that do that message better, like the many taken of the cross of girders found in the Ground Zero rubble. Indeed, an image of firefighters around the cross with a flag in the background uses the other signs (flag, etc.) to anchor the preferred meaning of those photographs, an articulation of hope. But the Nachtwey image has a more fluid and contested set of anchorages and articulations. Here’s how McGowan writes we might read it:
The cross, in this reading, may well seem resolute, but the smoke which approaches it will overcome it. We might say that, in some respects, this is a pathetic image in that it displays the futility of an impossible belief in meaning grounded by faith. (p. 18)
Do you agree with McGowan’s interpretation? Although semiotics recognizes the instability of meanings, all is not complete uncertainty. We should be able to judge semiotic accounts of images, poems, films, etc. Perhaps her use of “pathetic,” especially, strikes you as an off-note. But perhaps if you’d seen this image first on 9-11 and not today, you might see in this image a reflection of your own distressed wonderings about why God would allow such a thing to happen. And even the most optimistic viewing of this image would have to reckon with the way the cross is being overwhelmed. Any sense of hope after the smoke clears is brought to the text with ideology.
Let’s apply the basic semiotic method thus far. What are the signs and what are their syntagmatic relationships? We have a cross, a church roof, a building, smoke and debris, and a World Trade Center Tower. Note that this is where photography is revealed as a device to represent reality and not reality itself. The image could show the burning top of the WTC tower. It could show the front of the church building. But these things are not there. Their presence is called upon only. Because the cross is small and in shadow and seems to fade into the darkness under the debris fall, it seems to be a lesser thing than the lit, big, active explosion of debris that seems to be falling toward it. Yet, because the cross is in the foreground of the image and because it is unclear that the debris in the background will actually ever fall on it, it might be that the cross and the debris are very separate things or that the cross is the powerful force here. The reddish building behind is looming over the church, but it is being destroyed. The WTC tower is looming, and we don’t see it being destroyed except for a wisp of smoke at the top of the image.
The paradigmatic relationships are clear. We could imagine what this scene looked like on 9/10, when everything was whole. We could also substitute the burning WTC tower, the collapsing tower or the plane hitting it, depending on how this photo provokes out memories of that day, memories that serve as paradigmatic connections. More complex is whether you perform other substitutions. Do you imagine the people in the building or on the streets? Do you substitute an image of the street behind the church and wonder if there are people there? Do you substitute another cross, the debris girder crosses photographed at Ground Zero? Does the repetition of the cross amongst many 9/11 photos encourage such a paradigmatic relationship?
These two steps are only the beginning of the semiotic method. They should give us more questions than answers. This example reveals the reason you are learning this. How do we know that your interpretation of this image as inspiring or pathetic is the better interpretation of how it circulates through most viewers? We break open our first look and try to test our a variety of options. Now we narrow down the field.
Signs are a site of struggle. V. N. Volosinov critiqued Saussure for not paying enough attention to this question of how groups attempt to make their meanings and ideologies dominant in a society. Signs are produced in this struggle. As Shirato and Yell (2000) put it, “meaning is always produced through conflict” (p. 27). This is not necessarily about the conflict around, say, the writer’s table on Roseanne, where they might have had arguments about whether or not the show should have Darlene’s boyfriend David move into the Connor house. Such things happen and we might see the traces of that conflict in the text itself. But on a more complex level, when Meredith Brooks used “Bitch” in her popular song, even though she wants to claim the word for a positive, we hear the song and think of other possible or past anchorages and other articulations. Sometimes these conflicts show up explicitly in the comparative matrix of signs in an advertisement comparing two different kinds of window cleaner, for example.
In the photo above, we have a clear struggle over meaning and interpretation. Perhaps, like much of popular culture, it comes across with both meanings. It is fragmented and complicated. But perhaps the struggle resolves. There are two additions to our process to help decide.
First, at the syntagmatic level, we have anchorage. Roland Barthes (1990) argues that because of this, texts are “always paradoxical” (p. 158), with contradictory meanings and cultural messages. But often this chaos is managed by anchorage, by self-referential messages about how the text would prefer that we read or view it. When a car leaps over a hill on the street, speeding, it can signify a number of different things. But if it is accompanied by the Steppenwolf song “Magic Carpet Ride” on the soundtrack, we are more likely to read the car’s speed as a joyride and not as an evil car looking to run people over (which had very different music in the 1983 film Christine). The song and the car’s jump, as well as the bright color of the car’s paint and the empty road in front of it are four signs that create a syntagmatic anchorage. It drives us to see it a certain way.
Do the signs in the 9/11 photo drive us in a certain way? It seems to me as if the two buildings being destroyed looming over the church, as well as the smoke and debris cloud, communicate that the cross is under threat here. The fact that it is in shadow, unlike the portion of the building to the immediate right, supports that. If you want to see the cross as victorious, you’d have to bring something else outside of the image to bear (your faith that God always wins, for example).
But how do we know what the most common “something else”’s are? Paradigmatically, a set of signs often comes with a set of preferred meanings. These can be basic sets of meanings. Williamson (1978) defines the simplest element here as the invocation of “referent systems,” things like Nature, Magic and Time. These things are often linked habitually to signs in a culture. A clock, for example, almost always means time. That is regardless of ideology. But there are ideological complexities there, too, though. The two-handed clock might represent the horrible fastness of industrial culture. Conversely, it might represent old-fashioned technology of Swiss geared watches that used to look like the future but now looks like the past. It might represent our mortality or being late for a date or Coldplay or Flavor Flav. That depends on particularities of what the clock looks like, but it also depends on how hegemonic struggles over meaning are articulated in the culture.
Remember, articulation is how potential ideological contradictions are sutured by a culture. What does the two-handed clock represent? Think of all the two-handed clocks you see in popular culture and what they are connected with. What are the paradigmatic substitutions you can make for a clock? A sundial? A digital clock? A time readout on a cell phone? A stopwatch? Few of these actually are truly paradigmatic for a clock these days. You could almost more easily substitute what American culture seems to also lump into the “old and useless technology category,” like cassette tape decks, computer floppy disks, pagers and rotary telephones. This kind of analysis should then tell us which is the preferred meaning if there is one. Grossberg (1992) helps us here by defining articulation more broadly, as the way something calls or names or speaks or negotiates or links to something else. Which meaning or voice speaks the loudest?
Thus far we have a reasonably understandable method of semiotic analysis:
1) Identify the signs.
2) Map out their syntagmatic relationships.
3) Identify anchorages.
4) Identify important paradigmatic relationships.
5) Map out how those are articulated.
6) Conclude with what degree the meaning of a text collapses on one or two key ideas and to what extent it remains a site of struggle.
This is an easier task with still images than it is with moving images or with sound and text, but your job is to treat the words, images, sounds, etc. as all signs. We’ll demonstrate how that works in class.
by Steven Vrooman, revised June 2010
References
Barthes, R. (1990). Image-music-text. Trans. S. Heath. London: Fontana.
Borges, J. L. (n.d.). The analytical language of John Wilkins. http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/wilkins.html
Grossberg, Lawrence. 1992. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York and London: Routledge.
McGowan, K. (2007). Key issues in critical and cultural theory. Berkshire, UK: Open UP.
Rose, G. (2001). Visual methodologies. London: Sage.
Saussure, F. (1966). Course in general linguistics. Trans. W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Schirato, T., & Yell, S. (2000). Communication and culture. London: Sage.
Vande Berg, L. R. , Wenner, L. A., & Gronbeck, B. E. (1998). Critical approaches to television. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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