Semiotics - R. Barthes

Until the 1950's academic study if culture was largely limited to an exploration of high culture. Literature, art, architecture, music, etc were deemed worthy of study because supposedly they articulated sophisticated and nuanced modes of thinking.

Popular culture, conversely, was rejected as unworthy of analysis because the stories told by advertising, cinema and the then-emerging form of TV were thought to be constructed with so little precision, and their effects so simple, that any academic attention was undeserving.

Barthes, however, realised the mass media ought to be taken seriously.

His 1957 essay collection Mythologies stands as one of the first attempts to evaluate the finesse and impact of mass media narratives. 

Indeed, Barthes Mythologies revels in popular culture, analysing anything and everything from wrestling to horoscopes, from car adverts to political news. His writing intuited that mass media forms affected a deep presence within society - an ideological presence whose scope and influence far outstripped the nuanced reach of high culture.

Concept 1: denotation and connotation 

Denotation/connotation 

Barthes tells us that media products are decoded by their readers - in the first instance at least - using what he calls a 'denotative reading'. Denotative readings, he suggests, occur when readers recognise the literal or physical content of media imagery.

Barthes tells us that readers quickly move beyond the simple recognition of image content and subsequently engage in what he calls 'connotative decoding.'

Connotative readings, he suggests, refer to the deeper understanding prompted by media imagery and to the emotional, symbolic or even ideological significance produced as a result of those readings.

Text and image

Barthes, of course, understood that photographic imagery does not construct meaning by itself. Imagery, in print-based products, works alongside text-based components. Headers and taglines give meaning to photos, while photos themselves provide an accompanying visual explanation for news copy.

The interplay between text and image, Barthes tells us, is determined by the positioning of textual components and by the relative size of each element. Barthes also details the use of text to 'anchor' image meanings in advertisements and print news.

Photo captions, headers and taglines, Barthes tells us, guide readers towards defined significations.

Without anchorage, Barthes suggests, media imagery is likely to produce polysemic connotations or multiple meanings. Anchorage, Barthes tells us, constructs, 'a vice which holds the connoted meanings from proliferating.' (Barthes 2007, 39)

Barthes five code symphony 

Barthes's denotation/connotation model provides an excellent framework for analysing print media. We can use it to diagnose the effects of costume choice or settings, or to think about the significations created through shot distance or shot composition.

Barthes's denotation model, however, is less effective when we have to consider the way in which elements combine to produce singular effects. Narratives, for instance, set up meanings at the start of stories that are connected to later narrative events - stories for example teases with mysteries that are only resolved at the end. Similarly, some connotations are used throughout a text in a way that gives them a deeper connotative meaning than if they appeared just once. e.g- repeated use of food-orientated references in Hansel and Gretel - breadcrumbs, gingerbread house, cooking of the witch - creates an enhanced symbolic effect.

To account for this, Barthes produced a more nuanced version of his denotation/connotation model in which a symphony of five explicit coding effects are used to create meanings. These connotative effects, he argues, operate like instruments or voices in a band - sometimes playing in unison, while at other moments they are muted so the single codes can deliver solo effects.

Hermeneutic codes

Enigmas

Construct moments of mystery to intrigue the reader or viewer. Enigmas also hook readers compelling further reading or viewing to locate answers to the questions. Readers are prompted to ponder. Some products, Barthes tells us, rely on hermeneutic codes more than others - crime dramas for instance, usually convey and reinforce long-standing enigmas throughout their narratives.

Proairetic codes

Actions

Narratives also offer moments in which meaning is conveyed through action or demonstration. Action provides explanation or excitement, sometimes working to resolve the enigmas that earlier narrative sequences might pose. Again, some products deploy proairetic codes more than others: science fiction, thrillers and crime drama, for instance, typically rely on moments of concentrated actions to generate viewer excitement.

Semantic codes

Connotative elements

Refers to any element within a media text that produces a single connotative effect. Semantic codes include lighting, mise-en-scene, and colour usage. They also refer to the use of compositional effects, pose or even to typographic decisions and the significations that text size or font selection convey

Symbolic codes 

semantic and symbolic codes are highly similar and often quite hard to tease apart. Perhaps one of the easiest ways to seek out the symbolic codes within a product is to search for repeated symbols that convey a deeper meaning. In television, symbolic codes often surface as repeated themes or visual motifs and are referenced throughout the story in a thread of continuous underlying meaning.

Cultural codes

Referential codes

Refers to the inclusion of material that generates meaning from outside the product. Cultural codes might include the use of proverbs, sayings or idioms. They might also include references to scientific or historical knowledge - in short, anything that relies on the audiences knowledge beyond the text. Intertextual references, too, can be considered to be a form of cultural code in that they reference meanings from outside the product.

Concept 2: the media's ideological effects

Media as myth

Traditional myths, Barthes tells us, are important because they present a collective representation of the world. Myths have an elevated status; they are important enough to be passed down from one generation to the next, while the anonymisation of their authors further suggests that mythic tales represent a collective rather than a singular view. Myths too are allegorical - they present moral outlooks and tell us how we ought to behave

When, for instance, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection, we, too are being warned about the dangers of vanity and self-absorption.

Barthes suggests that the media has replaced or at least replicates, the functions of traditional myth-making. The press, television, advertising and radio, he argues, convey meaning with the same sort of authority as myths and, more importantly, induce similar ideological effects.

Indeed, Barthes hugely influential essay collection, Mythologies, sought to identify those mythic effects, suggesting that advertising invests cars with a godlike spirituality, that politicians manufacture imagery to convince us of their ordinariness and that soap detergent effect a 'euphoria' of cleanliness through their marketing appeals.

Barthes identifies the following ideological effects of media consumption

Naturalisation 

As a result of the media's uncanny ability to look and feel realistic, media products, Barthes tells us present ideas as natural, matter of fact or common sense. Indeed, if a range of media texts repeats the same idea enough times audiences come to believe that those ideas are not a matter of perspective but are, in fact, an immutable social norm. 

For instance, advertising that positions women as mothers or as responsible for domestic chores naturalise the idea that a woman's place ought to be in the home.

Media myths are reductive 

Barthes tells us that the media, by and large, simplifies, reduces or purifies ideas, turning complexity into easily digestible information. The use of simplicity creates audience appeal, Barthes argues and also has the effect of de-intellectualising and depoliticising ideas. Message reduction also discourages audiences from questioning or analysing media content too closely.

Media myths reinforce existing social power structures

'The oppressed is nothing, he has only one language, that of his emancipation,' Barthes writes, while 'the oppressor is everything, his language is rich, multiform, supple' (Barthes 2007, 176)

He argues that those who have power tend to control the myth-making process, either owning or indirectly channelling media content through privileged access arrangements. The powerful, in that sense, hold all the cards and are able to harness the creative allure of the media industry to maintain the illusion that the system we live in, the system that benefits the powerful the most, is naturally ordered and unchangeable.