Semiotics: Social Semiotics

Chandler's Questions

• What does a purely structural analysis of the text downplay or ignore?
• Who created the sign? Try to consider all of those involved in the process.
• Whose realities does it represent and whose does it exclude?
• How do might those claims to reality be questioned? How can we look at what presents itself as natural, and denaturalize it?
• For whom was it intended? Look carefully at the clues and try to be as detailed as you can.
• How do people differ in their interpretation of the sign? Clearly this needs direct investigation.
• On what do their interpretations seem to depend?
• Illustrate, where possible, dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings.
• How might a change of context influence interpretation?

Semiotics in its strict sense has not been concerned with the social, but rather with the cultural. Remember that the cultural is that which has a kind of fixedness. Semiotics focusses on the synchronic, and therefore accesses the fixed structure of meaning.

At one level, this is very useful. It allows a focal-point in the midst of the shifting signifiers of life. It is like studying English (langue), rather than specific expressions (parole).

The problem is that this fixedness may leave behind certain aspects of society which might be part of our apprehension of meaning. For example:

1. History: Semiotics cares little for history. There are other interpretive strategies, however, that take history very seriously. Marxism is one example.

2. The subject: For semiotics, it is not worth asking what anyone intended by doing something, apart from how their action signifies some signifieds. There is no "self" that produces meaning - it is all in the web of signifiers and signifieds. There is no expression of the inner self, no getting to know yourself.

3. Semiotics doesn't care much about how people actually interpret texts in the world, but rather what the set of meanings are at a given moment. People may in fact draw on things other than the interplay of signifiers to understand their world. We could make semiotics into a totalizing theory by asserting that, whatever people say, they really are just responding to the web of signifiers, but that doesn't really solve anything. We will just make the post-modern shift to post-structuralism then.

4. Often the signifiers conflict, or are layered in complex ways. What do we then draw on to understand?

5. Following on this, the conflict or layering of signifiers might occur because there are different interests at stake. Part of the social responsibility of interpretation is to ask in whose interests an interpretation exists. And, as post-structuralism points out, we cannot step outside of our signifying system. So, does semiotics give us the possibility of a radical critique of the given, or the status quo?

6. Most classic narratives present a reality to us as if it were natural. Relationships seem to be part of nature, rather than negotiated or contingent on history or circumstance. Men and women have their roles, different classes have their roles - all reinforced by a set of signs that tell the same story over and over. But just as signs naturalize in this way, they can also denaturalize, that is, they can question that status quo. Much gay literature and film, for instance, questions the history of gender roles by re-interpreting classic material ironically. Drag queens sing songs about a woman's place, and the fact of her singing that song brings forth new possible meanings in the song.