What representation is not…

• Media instantaneously planting images and thoughts in our heads

What representation is not…

• Something that takes place in a vacuum

What representation is…

• The production of meaning through symbolic communication (language, images, etc.)

• A system by which all sort of objects, people, places, and events are correlated with a set of concepts or mental representations which we carry around in our heads

• A process that takes place and is made meaningful in specific cultural contexts

Systems of Representation

• Different ways of organizing, clustering, arranging and classifying concepts, and of establishing complex relations between them.

• Meaning depends on the relationships between: 1. Things in the world (people, objects and events, real or

fictional) and,

2. A shared conceptual system (our mental representations of these things)

• Culture, in this sense, is a set of “shared meanings or shared conceptual maps”

Signs• Meaning depends on the relationships between:

1. Things in the world, and

2. Shared conceptual maps

and…3. Signs

• Signs can be iconic (visual) and indexical (written)

• Signs are arbitrary, which is to say that they have no specific meaning by themselves.

Sign = Signifier + Signified

Signifier

• The actual word or image. For example, the word flower

Signified• The idea, thing, or concept

But…

Remember that signs are arbitrary; they have no specific meaning by themselves.

So…

The word ‘flower’ can just

as easily signify this:

or this:

or this:

Similarly, an image of a flower can also function as a signifier instead of something that is signified:

signifier signified

Ferdinand de Saussure

Two key terms in his study of linguistics

Langue – Rule governed structure of language

Parole – Actual speech

Two features of his approach to structuralism– A concern with the underlying relations of cultural

texts and practices: the 'grammar' which makes meaning possible

– Meaning is always the result of the interplay of relationships of opposition and combination, made possible by an underlying structure

Denotation & Connotation

Denotative = literal meaning, descriptive

Connotative = inferred meaning; constructed through a reference

Codes

• Fix and govern the relationships between concepts and signs

• Stabilize meaning by giving us a way to express and interpret language

What are the denotative and connotative messages in the following advertisement?

What are the signifiers and the signifieds?

Semiotic Analysis(other examples)

Myth(Roland Barthes)

MYTH is a type of speech

• Myth is a system of communication and a mode of signification.

• The object of its message does not define myth, but by the way in which it utters this message (context is crucial).

• Myth is not confined to oral speech-it can consist of modes of representation; that is cinema, photography, sport, publicity, etc.

• The science of studying Myth is semiology.

MYTH is a semiological system

• Semiology postulates a relation between signifier and signified.

• But myth is a meta-language that functions as a second order semiological system.

Like so…

Barthes makes a reference to this image:

• Myth is experienced as innocent speech NOT because its intentions are hidden, but because they are NATURALIZED

• What allows the reader to consume myth innocently: myth seems an inductive (natural) system not a semiotic one

Myth naturalizes concepts

It makes images & ideas that are political seem not political…

• It makes phenomena that are culturally and socially constructed seem ‘natural’ “this is normal”

• It erases history “things have always been like this”

• It makes contingency appear eternal “things will always be this way”

And this entire process can take place in the amount of time it takes to view an image…

Myth is depoliticized speech

‘Myth’, in this sense, is basically a system of signification (a method of communication)

through which dominant ideologies are learned and reinforced.