Lecture 5 - semiotics, communication, myth

unites: concept + sound image

(signified + signifier)

there is an arbitrary connection (not natural), governed by convention

if there WAS a natural connection, different languages couldn’t have different names for things

1. onomatopoeia

2. symbols (there is a connection beween signified + signifier, if not natural it is historical)

-> stylized fish “ichtys” is an acronym of ancient greek (no arbitrary connection)

“in contrast to visual signifiers which can offer simultaneous groupings, auditory signifiers have at their present command only the dimension of time. Their elements are presented in succession, they form a chain”

-> texts can’t be taken in all at once, a picture CAN be recognized immediately

The object in the real world, represented by the lingustic sign

referent: pipe irl

signifier: painting AND the word

signified: concept of a pipe

1. signifier

2. signified

3. sign (meaning)

• lived from 1915-1980

• french essayist, social critic

• helped establish semiotics

• chair of literary semiology at Collège de France

• died in bus accident

• posthumously outed as gay

• his book “S/Z”, a model analysis of a short story by Balzac (dissects codes present in literary texts)

• book “mythologies” seeks to uncover assumptions behind objects of popular culture

• investigated (non-)language-based sign systems (fashion, sports, ads, …)

• a type of speech, a system of communication chosen by history (= cannot evolve from “the nature of things”)

• myth are “models of writing and representation” (film, photos,…)

• NOT an object, concept, idea

  
  

the study of a type of speech

both a part of semiolog as much as it is a formal science/historical science

“myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system.

That which is a sign in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second system”

1. language

2. myth

goes from sign (meaning) to the 2. signifier, called FORM

form

concept

a black boy, dressed in an uniform, eyes lifted to something off-screen, giving french salute

signification

• France is a great empire

• there is no racial discrimination

• criticism of colonialism is wrong

• ex-colonised serve of their own free will

• France is using people who can’t object to fight its colonial wars

• calling a war “the events” makes it sound harmless/trivial

1. indication

2. signification

3. communication

the receiver judges the context and decides to read something as an index of something else

the receiver shares a code with the producer of a sign and can decipher to which signified is linked

a sender produces a message with the intenion of having it heard/read AND understood by a receiver

The nautical sign “Lima”

stands for both the letter L and “stop your vessel immediately” or “quarantined ship”

because it addresses you directly as a subject, it invites you

myth is the vehicle of ideology but does everything to avoid being seen as such

makes itself look neutral and innocent

it is histor, but wants to appear as nature

• the naturalization of a concept

• it distorts and sells the cultural as natural

by claiming that something is natural because it has always been that way

implies therefore that something ELSE is unnatural and dangerous

• the world supplies historical reality, myth gives a “natural image” of this reality, things lose the memory that they once were made

• myth has tunred reality inside out, emptied it of history and filled it with nature

• rhethoric of common sense

• naturalisation

• ideological core od diverse cultural practices

• looking for “the invisible seam between language, experience and reality” -> prising it open through semiotic analysis

leader of an anti-intellectual, racist, populist political party

- a forerunner of the front national

(to Barthes times; business is business)

today: trumpism, tea party, brexit is brexit