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Intro To Semiology Reading Notes

1) Semiotics is the study of communication systems, both verbal and non-verbal. It examines the formulation, transmission, interpretation, and context of messages between a source and destination. 2) There are different types of messages - iconic resemble what they refer to, indexical point to or are physically connected to an object, and symbolic rely on learned associations. Context is crucial for interpreting messages. 3) Ideology represents social relations in discourse and attempts to reconcile material conditions. It works by naturalizing certain values and orienting individuals to accept social identities through texts that address and interpellate subjects in ways that seem self-evident.

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238 views6 pages

Intro To Semiology Reading Notes

1) Semiotics is the study of communication systems, both verbal and non-verbal. It examines the formulation, transmission, interpretation, and context of messages between a source and destination. 2) There are different types of messages - iconic resemble what they refer to, indexical point to or are physically connected to an object, and symbolic rely on learned associations. Context is crucial for interpreting messages. 3) Ideology represents social relations in discourse and attempts to reconcile material conditions. It works by naturalizing certain values and orienting individuals to accept social identities through texts that address and interpellate subjects in ways that seem self-evident.

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Ryan Drake
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ENGL 306F Readings

Sebeok Pandoras Box


Semiotics: the name of the discipline which brackets the conjoint scientific
study of both verbal and averbal systems of communication. The entire
transaction (semiosis) is concerned with:
- Formulation and encoding of messages by sources,
- The transmission of these messages through channels (human senses
register only a small portion of ambient stimuli),
- The decoding and interpretation of these messages by destinations,
- Their signification
- Takes place within a context
- Problems: human interference, decay over long periods of time
The capacity for containing/replicating/expressing messages distinguishes the
living from the non-living
Verbal messages: Language/linguistics
Averbal messages: not linguistic (terminological chaos leads to negative
delineation)
- Conventional: depend on some prior agreement
- Natural: signify the same things at all times in all places
- Multimessage: interpretation depends on time and place
Context: the organisms cognizance of conditions and manner of appropriate
and effective use of messages Crucial factor in resolving the significance of a
message
All semiotic systems are not only dynamic, but also adaptive
- Adapt to external context (conditions of environment)
- Adapt to internal context (circumstances within the system itself)
- Adaption through the feed process:
1. Feedforward: forecast that biases perception and enables the
source to adjust its performance in anticipation of changeful
happenings
2. Feedback: information about the working efficiency of the
stystem itself
The message received and interpreted by the destination is in practice seldom
identical with the message sent by the source
- Noise: disarrangements that make the output unpredictable even
when the input is known
- Redundancy: decrease the probability of transmission errors by
circumventing noise reflects the efficiency of a communication
system
Message types (Peirce)
- Iconic: resembles agent to which it refers can only be grasped by
those who are already informed of the code
- Indexical: points to an object or is a sample of it (physical connection)

Symbolic: association
1. Emblem: highly formalized symbols in the visual mode
Lots of disagreement on the degree to which pictorial perception highly
depends on cultural experience and individual differences
Communication in artificial languages:
- General purpose languages
- Languages restricted to the communication of some specified subject
matter
Floch - Are you a Surveyor or Daydreamer?
Journey examined as a text Object of semiotic analysis
- Like texts, a journey has a closure (and thus an entry) that enables its
structural organization
- Like texts, a journey can be the object of segmentation
- Like texts, a journey has an orientation Can be regarded as a series
of events that eventually are finalized
- Like texts, a journey has meaning
All travelers live a certain kind of journey behavioural typology of travelers
in the metro/RER and how this ultimately contributes to further thought and
other paths of inquiry
- Different phases of the trajectory
1. Entering
4. Boarding the train
2. Validating
5. Getting off the train
3. Accessing the
6. Exiting
platform

Based on facts and gestures, not on travelers own words on journey


Passenger only gives one version of his/her journey to the investigator
1. Also not recorded on film: documenting is an act of construction
Semiotic square
Semantic axis: two positions presuppose each other
One position only has meaning in relation to another (e.g. good is only
understood in relation to bad)
Three relations:
1. Contrariety
2. Contradiction
3. Complementarity
Discontinuity
Sequencing the particulars
Trajectories
Non-discontinuity
Technical mastery
Enchainments
Continuity
Following familiar paths
Trajections
Non-continuityPause, momentary interruption
Walks

Surveyors
Pros
Daydreamers
Strollers

Four types of travelers are theoretical constructs, defined in relation to


one another
-

Surveyors (portolano):
Encountering what they already know rather than something new (E.g.
familiar forms of entertainment, posters/ads that have been displayed
in the past)
Most responsive to efforts to decorate/renovate
Conversation (Jacques): inventiveness, individual spontaneity,
frequent joking
Pros (diagram):
Attempt to desemanticize, abstract and formalize
Greatest interest in accessibility of stations and their equipment
Negotiation (Jacques): practical technique, know-how that empirically
aims for comporomise
Daydreamers (doodle):
State of automatic response
Most physical relationship to space in railway stations, classify
according to flow of bodies in motion
Avoid sudden/violent breaks in their journey, prefer small connecting
stops
Sensitive to entertainment, but only on their own terms
Criticized content of certain dossier that thrust them into the harsh
details of lived reality
Strollers (calligram):
Unexpected situations
Remains receptive to all different spectacles
Like stations to provide something else to see besides metro itself
Criticized the fact that TUBE offered no opportunity to interact with it
flew in the face of their intent to remain open/responsive
Desire for maximum utilization of TUBEs cable network
Conversation (Jacques): see surveyors
Applications:
Gives insight in to how and to what degree mointors modified the use
of the metro/RER
TUBE is quite successful in meeting their primary goals (presentation
of activities and security)

Contexts analyzed should no longer be considered as heterogeneous


realities, whose place within the purview of a theory of signs/signification
is unclear, for they are thoroughly semiotized and by that fact alone
genuinely pertinent
- Thwaites Ideology (not in here: examples, analysis of the
Patriot)
- Ideology: ideas held in common by social groups in their everyday
lives a logic of ideas

Ideology according to Thwaites:


Key analytical tool in cultural studies
A product of discourse
Ideas are public meanings represent the material/social domain in
which we live
Ideology = the process of representing material social relations, and of
attempting to reconcile them in discourse semiotic process, linked
to mediation
Mediation processes:
Power and address
1. Patriarchal ideology: continual representation of the world in
terms of conflicts resolved through male action/decisiveness
proposes that social order is a matter of male authority
ideology is the way in which roles within discourse get inhabited
2. Differentiation: we all belong the the same us in different ways
Gender differentiation (patriarchal ideology) when the
entire field of gender difference becomes represented by
one term (masculine) and the only forms of relationship
are comparisons to the masculine: myth
Ideology is a matter of the signs we exchange and
their phatic effects
Some texts restrict flexibility with force:
Supported by main structural relationships of power in a society
Backed up by more obviously powerful institutions/apparatuses
E.g. a road sign: backed up by police
Other text dont use force (but can still be seductive)
E.g. an advertisement cant force you to buy something
Interpellation: taking on the role offered to you Ideology
interpellates individuals as subjects
A matter of address
Produces a community
1. Between the one who is interpellated (subject) and the one who
does the interpellating (Subject)
2. Among those who are interpellated
Hegemony: ideology is not imposed on individuals, but offered to them
as something you already agree with (we all want this, dont we?)
Not based on force
Conclusions:
Ideology works by orienting people in social contexts towards
accepting certain values about the world as natural, obvious, selfevident or inevitable

Social identity is reinforced through the continuous replaying of the


ideological fabulations which structure films/television
programmes/the media
Textual analysis reveals the ways the discourses/texts embody
ideology
Readers/viewers construct, reinforce, modify and reject the social
identities offered to them reveals constructedness of social contexts
in which readers and texts interact

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