Media Theory and Semiotics: Key Terms and Concepts
Binary structures and semiotic square of oppositions
Many systems of meaning are based on binary structures (masculine/ feminine;
black/white; natural/artificial), two contrary conceptual categories that also entail or
presuppose each other. Semiotic interpretation involves exposing the culturally arbitrary
nature of this binary opposition and describing the deeper consequences of this structure
throughout a culture.
On the semiotic square and logical square of oppositions.
Code
A code is a learned rule for linking signs to their meanings. The term is used in various
ways in media studies and semiotics. In communication studies, a message is often
described as being "encoded" from the sender and then "decoded" by the receiver. The
encoding process works on multiple levels. For semiotics, a code is the framework, a
learned a shared conceptual connection at work in all uses of signs (language, visual). An
easy example is seeing the kinds and levels of language use in anyone's language group.
"English" is a convenient fiction for all the kinds of actual versions of the language. We
have formal, edited, written English (which no one speaks), colloquial, everyday,
regional English (regions in the US, UK, and around the world); social contexts for styles
and specialized vocabularies (work, office, sports, home); ethnic group usage hybrids,
and various kinds of slang (in-group, class-based, group-based, etc.). Moving among all
these is called "code-switching." We know what they mean if we belong to the learned,
rule-governed, shared-code group using one of these kinds and styles of language.
Someone from rural Australia might at first be lost with kind of English spoken in south
LA, a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, or rural Alabama.
But codes also function at the symbolic and ideological level. These interpretive
frames or linking grids were termed "myths" by Roland Barthes in his seminal collection
of essays called Mythologies. The nearly automatic and unconscious use of codes
pervades all aspects of culture from basic verbal communication to mass media. We have
codes for all kinds of popular culture genres, all the symbolic moves in advertising,
political terms, race, and identity.
Culture
The term "culture" is, of course, a contested term with multiple meanings in various
contexts and discourses. In the context of semiotics, culture can be viewed as the sum of
rule-governed, shared, learned and learnable, transmittable, symbolic activity used by a
group in any given place and time.
"Culture is the generator of structuredness... [and] the nonhereditary memory of the
community" (Lotman). Meanings, values, significance circulate in second-order
languages (symbols, values, images, stories, myths) that use both ordinary language
(one's native language) and other sign-systems like visual images, mass media, and
information technology. All these ways of transmitting shared and stored meanings
involve a mediated content. To be in a culture means to be in preexisting but constantly
changing sign-systems.
In the "Cultural Studies" model, "culture" is a field of conflicting and competing forces
resulting from structured asymmetries in power, capital, and value.
Cultural Studies as an academic field has been accused of dematerializing or leveling
media content in order to objectify ideological and political messages for analysis. The
approach is often further characterized as an "effects" model of analysis that focuses on
capitalist and corporate mechanisms of control and usually omits the agency and activity
of individuals, groups, and subcultures who are the receivers and users of media.
Stuart Hall's "cultural marxism" approach builds out a more complex model based on
extending the theory of hegemony, the social-economic processes for "manufacturing
consent" among the lower classes (the "have-nots" or "have-lesses") to buy-in to the view
promoted by ownership classes ("the haves").
In this view of cultural studies, mass media and communications typically encode
(implicitly presuppose as a context for meaning) a dominant ideology which finds mass
acceptance. Media is thus ideologically encoded to maximize the willing consent of the
consumer and "have-nots" to "keep with the program" and perpetuate the status quo of
power and wealth distribution.
Hegemony of ideologies that protect the governing and ownership class is not a matter
of force, coercion, or obvious deliberate manipulation. It functions so well because it
relies on the willing consent of those with less power and wealth to accept a dominant
ideology, to see the world and act according the view of those above.
Examples of mainstream ideologies that circulate in the media and protect hegemonic
power:
* Free speech (as a belief, when few have power in what they voice)
* Individuality (great for marketing, since consumerism requires the simultaneous
presentation of unique personal choices and identities and the need to look and buy like
everyone else in an identity group)
* Freedom of choice (part of our individuality beliefs, also the main assumption in
consumer culture and marketing: the ideology of the shopping mall)
In this view of hegemony and culture, social behavior is overdetermined by multiple
identity factors like race, social class, sex and gender, and nationality, which are encoded
in hierarchies of power, significance, and economic value.
But Hall and others like Dick Hebidge show that people have many strategies for
dealing with media contents: operate in the dominant code, use a negotiable code (accepts
but modifies the meaning based on the viewer's and viewer communities position), or
substitute an oppositional code (using critical awareness, demystification, irony,
subversion, play, parody, like DJ sampling). In this way, many subcultures are formed
around group uses of media, images, and music that create identities and differentiations
from mainstream or dominant culture.
Cultural Dictionary and Cultural Encyclopedia
Ideas developed by Umberto Eco. These terms describe how members of a culture
participate in exchanges of meaning by greater or lesser access to and competence with a
preexisting, constantly accruing, constantly reconfiguring body of words, terms,
concepts, discourses, and actual artifacts maintained in a culture's memory. Our learned
codes for associating signs and symbols with their meanings are a function of this macro-
cultural Encyclopedia. The various vocabularies, discourses, dialects, and the whole
lexicon of a language (like English) form a cultural dictionary, which preexists any
individual user, who has varying levels of access to, and familiarity with, the whole
Dictionary. Language, discourse, narratives, and visual images are the memory machines
of culture. Infocom and media technologies are externalized memory machines for
transmitting culture (Debray), and thus function as a physical or material disseminator of
the larger cultural encyclopedia. Selectivity and privileging of certain contents is a
function of ideology and processes of hegemony (ways in which everyone buys into a
dominant view, those in power co-opting those with lesser power). Ideology privileges
certain contents of the shared Encyclopedia, and selectivity or hierarchizing of cultural
knowledge discloses the social function of the Encyclopedia as culturally constructed, not
given or natural.
The important point about these ideas is their emphasis on process and historical
continuity at the social and cultural level, independent of any individual member of a
group, who is born into a culture that is always already happening.
Diachronic/Synchronic
The distinction between describing language and cultural systems as a complete
system at one historical moment (synchronic), or the successive stages through time
(diachronic). Cultural analysis of the contemporary moment often assumes a present-day
slice of a system functioning with its own internal self-completeness (synchronic
analysis), even though its arrives with a history and memory of earlier formations and
changes over time (diachronic analysis).
Dialogic/Dialogical/Dialogism
Statements in communication always imply a receiver of the statement, and statements
we make are often responses to prior statements made by someone else. In short, what we
say and mean is part of an ongoing dialogue.
Mikhail Bakhtin, the famous Russian theorist and literary scholar, saw that literary
texts were always dialogic in relation to readers and audiences, and that literary discourse
proceeds only by referencing, quoting, assuming an other's speech or words. The
reader/audience is therefore always already inscribed in the medium/message/text/visual
sign. Discourses, texts, cultural message presuppose and embody a network of implicit
references, gestures, an unmarked quotations from other works.
Bakhtin is also credited with first defining intertextual or structural dialogism (see
Intertextuality). He saw literary discourse and individual literary texts as an intersection
of multiple textual surfaces rather than as a fixed point or meaning; that is, as a dialogue
among various texts, genres, and voices: the writer's, the character's, the historical
cultural context, the readers'/audiences.
As Julia Kristeva explained Bakhtin's breakthrough theory, each statement in a
discourse, each expression in a text, is an intersection of words or texts where at least one
other word or text can be read. Discourse thus can be described as having a horizontal
axis, composed of the writer, characters (in a novel), and genre being written, and the
vertical axis, composed of the text and its context in a larger universe of discourses, texts,
meanings, values. Any text, therefore, is always at least double, presupposing,
incorporating, and transforming an other voice, text, discourse.
Ideology
A contested and slippery term in the variety of its ordinary and specialized uses. For
our context, "ideology" does not refer to individually held "personal" beliefs, but to a set
of mediated views of the world that circulate in a culture and provide self-replicating
views of power and inclusion and exclusion. Operative senses of the term:
# Ideology as the world framed in discourse (Foucault) mediating the structures of
power and authority to individuals. Individual subjects are said to take up social
positions--identity positions, subjectivity--already formed in discourse (for example, in
laws, social class language, religious language, social institutions).
# Ideology as the socially constructed sense of identity and values, functioning to
obscure the real sources of power, and to reproduce/perpetuate existing power structures
(by gender, race, class, nationality, etc.) (an extension of the earlier Marxist notion of
ideology as "false consciousness").
# Ideology as the consciously held belief system of individual members of a social
group, which may or may not reflect the underlying structures of power and authority.
Ideology and Discourse
Discourse constitutive of its objects; objects of knowledge do not preexist the
discourse/discursive practices/disciplines which constitute them make them visible,
"objectify" them as such. This is not to say that real-world material facts don't exist, but
that they don't have any meaning to us, aren't knowable, aren't communicable, outside of
a discursive-conceptual field. "History is only known to us in narrative form." (Jameson)
Interpretation and Semiosis
Interpretation is the main outcome of the semiotic process, or semiosis. Interpretation
is the discursive result or output of positing meaning in any sign system. An extension of
the theory of semiosis (Peirce, Eco)--the temporal sequences of sign relations in
generating meaning--is the notion of the homology of form in sign systems:
interpretations often take the same form as the set of signs being interpreted. For
example, the interpretation of a text usually takes the form of another text; the
interpretation of an art object can be found in subsequent art works or supplementary
texts. The important point is to see acts of interpretation, making meaning, as occurring
within a system of symbolic relationships. An interpretation is a supplement to a prior set
of signs. An interpretation is not an opinion but an act of positing meaning in a culturally
significant expression or work. In the terms of semiotics, nothing is prior to interpretation
except intelligibility--something is presented as meaning something, it has the signature
of significance, the grounds of intelligibility, language community recognition,
interpretive community recognition, a sense that something is or isn't "in our language."
Intertextuality/Intermediality
The theory of intertextuality assumes that meaning and intelligibility in discourse and
texts is based on a network prior and concurrent discourse and texts. Every text is a
mosaic of references to other texts, genres, and discourses. Every text or set of signs
presupposes a network of relationships to other signs like strings of quotations that have
lost their exact references. The principle of intertextuality is a ground or precondition for
meaning beyond "texts" in the strict sense of things written, and includes units of
meaning in any media. Expanding the theory for cross-media symbolic activity, we could
call this "intermediality" or "intersemiality" (the structures of meaning presupposed or
embedded in any set of signs like nodes in a network). The notion of "intersemic"
describes the interdependence and implied relation of any unit of signs (like a movie) to a
network of other texts, genres, artifacts, documents, and symbolic works (images,
artworks) in a culture. See also multimedia semiotics and Dialogic/Dialogism.
Mediation/Sign Structure
The most fundamental macro-question in communication, media theory, and cultural
theory is the nature of mediation: we are always already in language, in symbolic
systems, and we know our lived-in world by language, discourse, and signs, not by
immediate access to "things in themselves" (Kant). To be always already in a world of
symbolic mediations means that we're always in a world of socially constructed values,
hierarchies, and ideologies. Much of contemporary media and communication theory
assumes the primacy of mediation in any theoretical model: medium, milieu,
structures/systems of mediation. Debray adds the dimension of cultural transmission over
time (the diachronic, "through time" dimension) to simple mediation or communication
(the synchronic or concurrent dimension) as a theoretical foundation for mediology. The
"Prison House of Language" dilemma (Jameson): all forms of knowledge presuppose that
we are always already in language, and we cannot step outside language and signs to
comprehend an unmediated or non-representable world.
The irreducible structure of any sign system consists in the separation of the signifier
and the signified, something present and something absent, something appearing as a
trace or mark (signifier) and something deferred (signified content or meaning). Derrida's
early model of "differance" (differentiation in binary semantic structures and
deferring/deferral of meaning in signifier/signified structure) has been influential.
An immediate/unmediated presence of meanings and things is unavailable to language
users and thus to culture as a whole. Illusions of direct or immediate (unmediated)
meanings/values/real things are behind ideologies, religions, systems of belief. Semiotics
and post-Foucauldian discourse analysis does not deny the existence of real things or a
world outside language and signs, nor of our need to describe a real world outside of
language and mediation, but exposes our inability to give meaning to anything without
the structuring preconditions of our systems of discourse and cultural sign systems.
* All communication entails, requires, presupposes mediation, not things as they are.
* Fours sense of "medium": media type, channel, mediation, environment.
* The content and form of media present a socially constructed system of meaning,
not "reality" outside representation.
* "History is only accessible to us in narrative form." --Fredric Jameson
* "Film gives us not the world as it is but the world as we desire it to be." --Fritz
Lang, Director, in Godard's Contempt
Reference and Representation
Closely related to the question of mediation and the structure of signs is the problem of
representation and referentiality in language. Philosophers of language in the 20th
century have worked through the problem of how language can be said to refer to real
things or to concepts outside specific statements. Logic and the truth-functions of
scientific language were thought to depend on the ability to use language (in some
formalized way) to refer to real things or states of affairs in the world. Statements of fact
are known as "propositions" in logic (a statement which is either true or false).
Statements are thus said to have "reference" or the property of "referentiality" in pointing
to real things. But today, most philosophers have concluded that logic is mainly internally
self-referential and that using language to refer to things outside language in "the real
world" is only one of thousands of things we do with language. Wittgenstein at first held
a "picture theory" of logical and scientific propositions that represent, in the way that
language can, a world of facts, or, in his terms, "whatever is the case," in the world. He
then exposed the problems in this view. Language and statements follow their own rules
(language games), and allow us to do and say certain things, but the relationship between
our statements and the world outside them is not rule-governed. We can't step outside of
language and look at the world in some kind of unmediated, extra-linguistic or pre-verbal
state. Referring to real things, or using language to construct a category we call "real"
about which statements can be made, is thus only one type of semiotic activity in the sign
system of language. [See Stanford Encyclopedia entry on "reference."]
Semiology/Semiotics
The theory and description of sign systems. Foundational assumption: "All symbolic
systems in a culture function like a second-order language or text." And like a language,
any symbolic system is assumed to be complete and extensive at any given moment in
history (the synchronic dimension). The description of sign systems from language to
visual media and larger human constructions like cities allows an analysis of
interpretation, the structure of social values, and the ideological uses of all kinds of
information we are surrounded by in daily life. The important point is to see all this
meaning-making and symbolic activity as rule-governed, learned, and constructed as
opposed to natural or given in reality. Individual people in a culture may have greater or
lesser knowledge or access to "the cultural encyclopedia" (Eco) of symbolic relationships
and contents. The daily use of available signs and symbols in cultural encoding and
decoding is an issue of a person's "competence," not a question about the sign system
itself. If we think about cultural signs of all kinds as a second-order language, we can
investigate a kind of semiotic deep structure, a grammar of meaning, a repertoire of
codes, acquired by members of a culture in ways similar to, but distinct from,
internalizing the grammar of one's own native language. (See Chomsky on deep structure
and grammar; Peirce, de Saussure, Barthes, Lotman, and Eco on semiology or semiotics
as a system.)
Multimedia Semiotics/Multimodal Semiotics/Social Semiotics
In the everyday use of languages and signs, we combine several kinds of physical
media in communicating and making meaning--from voice and printed texts to mass
media images, music, movies, computer Web content, and digital multimedia. The
various material means of conveying meaning (sometimes called communication
"modalities") often overlap and pass on or interpret meaning from other concurrent media
in our culture. We can talk or write about a movie, watch TV news that interprets an
event, watch a TV mass media genre like a sit-com that requires knowledge of the codes
for this genre, and listen to music, write email, and read over multimedia Web pages all
at the same time. We are constantly sending, receiving, and making meaning in various
kinds of media, often conveying and interpreting meaning from one medium to another.
This practice points to the existence of our larger contemporary and inherited semiotic
system, or what some have termed a semiosphere, the whole universe of available and
possible meanings in a cultural system. Social Semiotics takes the meaning-making
process, "semiosis", to be more fundamental than the system of meaning-relations among
signs themselves, which are considered only the resources to be deployed in making
meaning. Social semiotics examines semiotic practices, specific to a culture and
community, for the making of various kinds of texts and meanings in various situational
contexts and contexts of culturally meaningful activity.
Martin Irvine, 2004-2005