Semiotics and Discourse

 

Semiotics (or semiology) isthe study of the social production of

meaning from sign systems. Semiotics isn’t so much an academic discipline as a theoretical approach and its associated methods of analysis. It has not become widely institutionalized as a ‘subject’. An indication of semiotics’ provisional and marginal status is that it is still usually defined in the terms first proposed by its so-called ‘father’, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. He suggested a ‘science that studies the life of signs within society’, in a book published in 1916. The suggestion was taken up principally by the French structuralist Roland Barthes, who was chiefly responsible for popularizing and extending semiotics in the 1960s. Semiotics as an intellectual enterprise endeavours to reveal and analyse the extent to which meaningsare produced out of the structural relations that exist within any signsystem, and not from the external reality they seem so naturally to depict.

Since it is committed to the notion of systematic relations operating in abstract structures (that is, structures that cannot be observed directly, like language), semiotics has a tendency towards abstraction, formalism and lack of historical grounding. However, since it is equally committed to the social production of meaning (language cannot be invented by individuals) semiotics has always sought to relate the production of meanings to other kinds of social production and to social relations.

Semiotics as a method takes its terminology from linguistics and uses spoken language as the prime example of a sign system. However, its growth and success is not so much in the analysis of speech as of other sign systems, especially literature, cinema, publicity, photography and television. In fact semiotics has become associated largely with the increasingly serious study of various forms of popular culture.

It has been especially useful in this context, since popular culture was previously a very neglected field in academic study, and such attention as it did receive was often either highly derogatory or else a limited side branch of American empiricalsociology. Semiotics does not, in principle at least, approach popular culture with prior notions of artistic or moral merit by which to judge a given text(an approach

common in certain kinds of literary criticism) and unlike empirical sociology it is able to deal with the single text rather than with large-scale patterns.

Thus semiotics is in the first place text-centred, since it is devoted to analysing how meaning systemsproduce meanings via texts. But as it has developed, greater attention has been paid to the role of the reader in realizing or producing meanings out of textual resources in an interactive way. Thus semiotics began by showing how texts were structured reworkings of the signs, codes, and so on of their particular sign systems, and how these structures generated myths, connotations, and so on. It went on to demonstrate how such textual structures and devices as point-of-view, mode of address or preferred reading proposed or even fixed a position from which sense could be made by a reader – the positioning of the subject. At this point it became clear that ‘actual’ readers might not necessarily occupy the position proposed for them by ideological texts and discourses, and further that hitherto too much attention had been paid to the cognitiveor rational activities involved in reading, and not sufficient to the pleasureand desire involved.

Thus semiotics was forced to take account of the social processes in which texts are encountered, and of the role of pleasure in these social processes. Clearly such issues as these are not the exclusive preserve of semiotics, and there has in fact been a fruitful crossfertilization between it and other intellectual enterprises, notably psychoanalytical theory, Marxism, feminism and various sociological approaches. The distinctive feature of semiotics remains, however, its attempt to specify in general and in detail how meaning is socially produced (not individually created), and subject to powerrelations and struggles just like other kinds of social production. When it turns its attention to the individual reader, this should not be understood as a return to the freefloating abstract individual but rather the individual/subject whose individuality is largely a product of the ideological discourses and signifying practices which s/he inhabits or encounters in social relations.

Discourse (adjective = discursive) is a term now quite widely used in a number of different disciplines and schools of thought, often with different purposes. Most uncontroversially, it is used in linguistics to refer to verbal utterances of greater magnitude than the sentence.

Discourse analysis is concerned not only with complex utterances by one speaker, but more frequently with the turn-taking interaction between two or more, and with the linguistic rules and conventions that are taken to be in play and governing such discourses in their given context.

However, the concept of discourse has also developed, separately, out of post-structuralismand semiotics. Here it really represents an attempt to fix, within one term, some of the theoretical ground gained in the early days of the structuralist enterprise. To grasp its significance you have to remember that in this early period structuralism / semiotics was above all an oppositional intellectual force, whose proponents were attempting to criticize and transform the inherited habits of thought and analysis about the question of where meaning comes from. Traditionally, and even now most ‘obviously’, meaning was ascribed to objects ‘out there’ in the world, and to the inner essences and feelings of individuals. Structuralism took issue with these ideas, insisting that meaning is an effect of signification, and that signification is a property not of the world out there nor of individual people, but of language. It follows that both the world out there and individual consciousness are themselves comprehensible only as products, not sources, of language / signification. We are what we say, and the world is what we say it is. But the problem with this conclusion is that it is too free-floating and abstract; it gives the impression that – not only in principle but also in practice – the world and the word can mean whatever we like. Life isn’t so simple. The abstract concept of ‘language’ proved inadequate to account for the historical, political and cultural ‘fixing’ of certain meanings, and their constant reproduction and circulation via established kinds of speech, forms of representation, and in particular institutional settings. This is the point at which the concept of discourse began to supplant the now flabby and imprecise notion of ‘language’. Unlike ‘language’, the term discourse itself is both a noun and a verb. So it is easier to retain the sense of discourse as an act, where the noun ‘language’ often seems to refer to a thing. In its established usages, discourse referred both to the interactive process and the end result of thought and communication. Discourse is the social process of making and reproducing sense(s). Once taken up by structuralism, largely through the writings of Michel Foucault, the concept of discourse proved useful to represent both a very general theoretical notion and numbers of specific discourses.

The general theoretical notion is that while meaning can be generated only from the langueor abstract system of language, and while we can apprehend the world only through language systems, the fact remains that the resources of language-in-general are and always have been subjected to the historical developments and conflicts of social relations in general. In short, although languemay be abstract, meaning never is. Discourses are the product of social, historical and institutional formations, and meanings are produced by these institutionalized discourses. It follows that the potentially infinite senses any language system is capable of producing are always limited and fixed by the structure of social relations which prevails in a given time and place, and which is itself represented through various discourses.

Thus individuals don’t simply learn languages as abstract skills. On the contrary, everyone is predated by established discourses in which various subjectivities are representedalready – for instance, those of class, gender, nation, ethnicity, age, family and individuality. We establish and experienceour own individuality by ‘inhabiting’ numbers of such discursive subjectivities (some of which confirm each other; others however coexist far from peacefully). The theory of discourse proposes that individuality itself is the site, as it were, on which socially produced and historically established discourses are reproduced and regulated. Once the general theoretical notion of discourse has been achieved, attention turns to specific discourses in which socially established sense is encountered and contested. These

range from media discourses like television and news, to institutionalized discourses like medicine, literature and science.

Discourses are structured and interrelated; some are more prestigious, legitimated and hence ‘more obvious’ than others, while there are discourses that have an uphill struggle to win any recognition at all. Thus discourses are power relations. It follows that much of the social sense-making we’re subjected to – in the media, at school, in conversation – is the working through of ideological struggle between

discourses: a good contemporary example is that between the discourses of (legitimated, naturalized) patriarchy and (emergent, marginalized) feminism. Textual analysis can be employed to follow the moves in this struggle, by showing how particular texts take up elements of different discourses and articulatethem (that is, ‘knit them together’).

However, though discourses may be traced in texts, and though texts may be the means by which discursive knowledges are circulated, established or suppressed, discourses are not themselves textual.