Semiotics and the making of meanings

Recap lecture 1 

• What is theory and why study it? Importance of having a language/vocabulary to articulate your ideas. 

• Designer as author – giving yourself a voice (Anthony Burrill, Don’t Say Nothing principle). 
• Theory as a vehicle for expressing your own ideas and as a source of inspiration (Anthony Burrill, I Like It, What Is It? 
• Thinking creatively, processes-led design – Conceptual Design and Daniel Eatock. 
• Theory realised as a Manifesto – thinking up a framework for realising your ideas. 
• Criticality and asking questions. 
• Historical understanding – influence of the past on work being made today. 

Why do we need to know about Semiotics? 

Tools, vocabulary, confidence in your ideas - Professional designers need to be able to explain to a client/viewer/audience/publisher how the choices they make effect and transform the message they are crafting for the intended audience. 

•The ability to explain how visual communication works, how it can be manipulated to the benefit of the message, and how a professional adds value to a product – a key area that separates the professional from the amateur. 

•It is not just about having the tools and the knowledge to make design that looks good; you need to be able to analyse and explain why your ideas work. 

All good designers are semioticians. 

Semiotics – the theory(ies) which explore how systems of signs work to make meaning. 

•Signs - spoken and written language, codes, symbols, sounds, non-linguistic. Signs can mean different things to different people depending on individual experiences, expectations. Signs can have an emotional impact. 

•As both creators and consumers of visual art and design – and as participants in a culture which functions on the basis of shared meanings and common understandings – we decode meaning from signs and symbols with ease. We are highly sophisticated readers of signs and do this subconsciously. 

•A good idea along with a brilliant aesthetic may fall down in the absence of proper and effective communication of the idea through the aesthetic. This is where semiotics comes in: Understanding semiotics can help us to ensure we're communicating messages effectively. 

Paul Rand IBM logo 

'Ideas do not need to be esoteric to be original or exciting‘ (Paul Rand) 

•Paul Rand's popular Eye-Bee-M poster, an image-word ‘puzzle’ known as a rebus, was created in 1981. described as, 'Not just an identity but a basic design philosophy which permeated corporate consciousness and public awareness.’ 

Semiotics – the basics

Understanding how words and images – together with ideas and interpretations – are used to make sense of the world. 

How words and images communicate meaning. 

To understand how design works, we need first to understand how language – visual and verbal – works. 

This site is a useful starting point for understanding semiotics

Colour semiotics 

• Colours as ‘coded’ - how do colours act as vehicles for communicating a specific message or evoking a certain emotion? 
• Culturally conditioned – through habituation, interpretation becomes subconscious. Our actions and thoughts – the things we do automatically – are often governed by a complex set of cultural messages and conventions, and dependent upon our ability to interpret them instinctively and instantly. When we see the different colours of a traffic light, we automatically know how to react to them. This response has been taught – we learn such responses as children. For many signs, an amount of cultural knowledge is required to understand its meaning (or to interpret it in the desired way). Viewing and interpreting (or decoding) signs enable us to navigate the societal landscape. 
• 'Reality is divided up into arbitrary categories by every language and the conceptual world with which each of us is familiar could have been divided up very differently. Indeed, no two languages categorize reality in the same way. As John Passmore puts it, ‘Languages differ by differentiating differently’ (Passmore 1985,24)’. (Daniel Chandler, Semiotics) 
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• Two approaches to understanding visual communication have become definitive foundations for examinations of the topic. Ferdinand de Saussure (Swiss linguist) and Charles Sanders Peirce (American philosopher). 
• •Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics. Theory of signs and symbols which he called Semiology. Revolutionary in the world of linguistics, put culture at the centre of thought. His ideas were founded on the principle that there are no ideas in the mind before language puts them there: 'In itself, thought is like a swirling cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of linguistic structure.‘ (Saussure).
• Phonemes (sounds) form words, which in turn are signifiers: c -a –t / ‘cat’ = ‘signifier’. The thing to which it refers (a cat/idea of a cat) = the ‘signified’. The two brought together = ‘sign’. 

Arbitrariness 

• ‘Linguistic categories are not simply a consequence of some predefined structure in the world. There are no natural concepts or categories which are simply reflected in language. Language plays a crucial role in constructing reality.’ (Daniel Chandler, Semiotics) 
• •Saussure noted that linguistic signs are inherently arbitrary. The fact that a meanings are expressed using different words across different languages demonstrates that neither the sound nor their written form bears any resemblance to the object/meaning to which it refers. In this sense, meaning is purely subjective. 
• •Nothing about the 'c', 'a' or 't', or about the full word 'cat' have any inherent 'cat-ness' about them. Associating this word with the mental image of a cat is learned behaviour. 
• •The exception – onomatopoeia (where a word sounds like the thing to which it is referring e.g. ‘crash’, ‘splat’. Dictionary definition: ‘the formation of a word, as cuckoo, meow, honk, or boom, by imitation of a sound made by or associated with its referent.’ How might this onomatopoeic relationship be extended to visual art/design through the combining of form and content? 

Peirce’s three categories of signs

• Symbol – no logical connection to referent, arbitrary, relies on habit or rule. E.g. words, flags, alphabet, 
• •Icon – resembles the sign, likeness. Representation question – will always entail a degree of convention/agreement about modes of representation. E.g. photograph, onomatopoeic word. 
• •Index – direct link between sign and object, factual relationship – causal/physical. E.g smoke is an index of fire. 
• As we learned in the lecture, many signs we read can be interpreted as one or more of these simultaneously! The boundaries are not always clear and are dependent upon context. 

Creative semiotics 

Understanding semiotics means you can play with how words and images communicate, subvert conventions and question how it all works. 'Where there is choice there is meaning' (David Crow)

                            In advertising 

• Because semiotics relies on common understandings and culturally shared conventions, even where the signified is absent the sign can still be meaningful in certain contexts. 
• Communicates that Heinz Ketchup is so iconic and irreplaceable that the viewer doesn't need to see it to know that it is the subject of the advert. Sense of confidence. 

Semiotics and the history of visual communication - early beginnings 

• An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek word for 'idea' and 'gráphō'; 'to write') is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. 
• Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as 'pictograms' or 'pictographs'. 
• Pictograms form part of our daily lives through their use in medication, transport, computing etc. They indicate – in iconic form – places, directions, actions or constraints on actions in either the real world (a town, a road, etc.) or virtual space (computer desktop, Internet, etc.). A stylised figurative drawing that is used to convey information. 
• They are used to replace written indications and instructions, expressing regulatory, mandatory, and warning information, often used when that information must be processed quickly (e.g. road traffic signs) as well as when users speak different languages, have limited linguistic ability, or have visual problems, and especially when there is a legal obligation to inform or for the user to comply with instructions. 

Semiotics and fashion  

• What assumptions do we make from a semiotic 'reading' of clothing?’ 
• Roland Barthes (literary theorist, philosopher, linguist) is widely regarded as one of the most subtle and perceptive critics of the 2oth century. He was particularly fascinated with language and fashion, and the history of clothes. 
• 'Clothing concerns all of the human person, all of the body all the relationships of man to body as well as the relationships of body to society' - Roland Barthes. 
• 'Blue is the Fashion This Year': A Note on Research into Signifying Units in Fashion Clothing ‘When I read in a fashion magazine that an item is defined as THE accessory for springtime, or that blue is in fashion this year, I cannot but see a semantic structure in these suggestions...I see imposed upon me a link of equivalence between a concept (spring, youth, fashion this year) and a form (the accessory, this suit, the colour blue); between a signifier and a signified. A raincoat protects from the rain, but also and indissociably , it points to its status as a raincoat. This is moreover the fundamental status of clothes: an item of clothing that is purely functional us conceivable only outside of any notion of society - as soon as an item is actually manufactured, it inevitably becomes an element in semiology. (Roland Barthes). 
• We give off signs/signals about ourselves through our clothing – even if unintentional (and often misconstrued). Semiotics aids us in constructing opinions about others and assists us in adapting to our environment. Fashion, with its own idiolect can, arguably, be seen, and interpreted, as a type of visual language. 
• Example of Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphries of OMD (1980s) saw themselves as artists not popstars, so purposely chose to look exceptionally ordinary – buying bank clerk-style clothes off the peg from C&A, intending not to let anything distract from their music. Perhaps inevitably, and despite their intentions, this caught on as a style statement. 

                        Anchorage and relay (Barthes) 

• Anchorage – text which anchors or ‘pins down' how the image is read. The reader is directed through a ‘floating chain of signifiers’. The text clarifies or ‘anchors’ the meaning, hinted at through visual clues. Where the image is complex, it helps to underline a relationship between text and image. E.g. adverts, maps, narrated documentaries on TV. 
• Relay – the words and images tell a story more ‘equally’ and stand in a complementary relationship. Important in film and comic strips, the text advances the reading of the images and supplies meanings not found in the images alone. Both the words and images are fragments which together create the unity of the message – which is ultimately realised on a higher level. 

Semiotics in art Joseph Kosuth 

• American conceptual artist, thinker and writer. The work comprises a life-size photograph of a chair, the actual chair positioned in the same spot as it was photographed, and a photograph of a dictionary definition of the word ‘chair’. 
• •Consider - which is the sign, signifier and signified? Do they shift depending upon how they’re read/their context? 
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• •‘Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context – as art – they provide no information whatsoever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art.’ (Joseph Kosuth). 
• •Kosuth investigates what it means to make art, to experience art, to think about art, to see it as a global model for language and culture. ‘If one wanted to make a work of art devoid of meaning, it would be impossible because we’ve already given meaning to the work by indicating that it’s a work of art’ (Joseph Kosuth). 

Rene Magritte 

• His interest was in probing how words and images differ in their modes of signifying. Magritte was not making a primer in semiotics: he was making a sort of ‘meta’ art; that which de-automatises conventions and makes us aware of the processes by which we see and read the world. These works are also violations that provide a way of seeing how early schooling teaches us canonical recognition forms both of language and visual representation. But the side-, eye-level views of the objects, their lack of extraneous detail such as labels or decoration, and their presentation floating in a dark, featureless space without shadows conforms to the rules for creating images of 'a class of objects' that are part of our common visual culture. 
• •‘When, in the twentieth century, an artist decisively abandons representation in favour of ‘abstraction’ or a focus on formal values and medium, the title represents the image itself, usually in terms of its main compositional features (e.g. Red Square and White Square, Improvisation: Green Centre). When representation is itself under scrutiny, the titles tend to become oblique and sometimes teasingly definite references to things that are not part of common knowledge or experience, allusions to things in a code we don't share (e.g. Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even) 

Martha Rosler 

• The Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) 
• Semiotics of the Kitchen is a feminist parody video and performance piece released in 1975 by Martha Rosler. The video is considered a critique of the commodified versions of traditional women's roles in modern society. Featuring Rosler as a generic cooking show host, the camera observes as she presents an array of kitchen hand utensils, many of them out-dated or strange, and, after identifying them, plays out unproductive, sometimes, violent, uses for each. It uses a largely static camera and a plain set, allowing the viewer to focus more on Rosler's performance and adding a primitive quality. Letter by letter, Rosler navigates a culinary lexicon, using a different kitchen implement for each step along the way. She begins with an apron, which she ties around her waist, and, with deadpan humour, journeys through the alphabet. The focus on linguistics and words is important, since Rosler intended the video to challenge 'the familiar system of everyday kitchen meanings - the securely understood signs of domestic industry and food production. 

Criticisms of Semiotic AnalysisSemioticians 

• Semiotics does not always make explicit the limitations of its techniques, and semiotics is sometimes uncritically presented as a general-purpose tool. Saussurean semiotics is based on a linguistic model but not everyone agrees that it is productive to treat photography and film, for instance, as 'languages'. Some people believe that we can’t 'read' the formal codes of photographic and audio-visual media, arguing that the resemblance of their images to observable reality is not merely a matter of cultural convention: 'to a substantial degree the formal conventions encountered in still or motion pictures should make a good deal of sense even to a first-time viewer'. (Messaris 1994, 7). 
• •The way in which some semioticians have treated almost anything as a code, whilst leaving the details of such codes inexplicit, has been criticised. (Corner 1980). 
• •Sometimes semioticians present their analyses as if they were purely objective 'scientific' accounts rather than subjective interpretations. Some semioticians seem to choose examples which illustrate the points they wish to make rather than applying semiotic analysis to an extensive random sample. (Leiss et al. 1990, 214). 
• •Some semiotic analysis has been criticised as nothing more than an abstract and 'arid formalism' which is preoccupied with classification. Some people believe that semiotics can lead to 'a crushing of the aesthetic response through the weight of the theoretical framework' (Susan Hayward 1996, 352).