Art Historians Read a Media Text Through Three Levels of Signification

Semiotics for Beginners

Daniel Chandler

Denotation, Connotation and Myth

Beyond its 'literal' meaning (its denotation), a detail word may accept connotations: for example, sexual connotations. 'Is in that location any such affair as a single entendre?' quipped the comic role player Kenneth Williams (nosotros all know that 'a thing is a phallic symbol if it'southward longer than information technology'south wide', as the singer Melanie put information technology). In semiotics, denotation and connotation are terms describing the relationship between the signifier and its signified, and an analytic distinction is made betwixt 2 types of signifieds: a denotative signified and a connotative signified. Meaning includes both denotation and connotation.

'Denotation' tends to exist described as the definitional, 'literal', 'obvious' or 'commonsense' meaning of a sign. In the case of linguistic signs, the denotative meaning is what the dictionary attempts to provide. For the fine art historian Erwin Panofsky, the denotation of a representational visual image is what all viewers from any culture and at any time would recognize the image as depicting (Panofsky 1970a, 51-3). Fifty-fifty such a definition raises issues - all viewers? One suspects that this excludes very immature children and those regarded equally insane, for example. But if information technology really ways 'culturally well-adjusted' and then it is already culture-specific, which takes u.s. into the territory of connotation. The term 'connotation' is used to refer to the socio-cultural and 'personal' associations (ideological, emotional etc.) of the sign. These are typically related to the interpreter's class, historic period, gender, ethnicity and so on. Signs are more 'polysemic' - more than open to interpretation - in their connotations than their denotations. Denotation is sometimes regarded every bit a digital code and connotation as an counterpart code (Wilden 1987, 224).

As Roland Barthes noted, Saussure's model of the sign focused on denotation at the expense of connotation and information technology was left to subsequent theorists (notably Barthes himself) to offer an account of this of import dimension of meaning (Barthes 1967, 89ff). In 'The Photographic Bulletin' (1961) and 'The Rhetoric of the Image' (1964), Barthes argued that in photography connotation can exist (analytically) distinguished from denotation (Barthes 1977, 15-31, 32-51). As Fiske puts information technology 'denotation is what is photographed, connotation is how information technology is photographed' (Fiske 1982, 91). However, in photography, denotation is foregrounded at the expense of connotation. The photographic signifier seems to be virtually identical with its signified, and the photograph appears to be a 'natural sign' produced without the intervention of a code (Hall 1980, 132). Barthes initially argued that only at a level higher than the 'literal' level of denotation, could a code be identified - that of connotation (we volition render to this effect when nosotros talk over codes). Past 1973 Barthes had shifted his basis on this issue. In analysing the realist literary text Barthes came to the conclusion that 'denotation is non the beginning significant, merely pretends to be so; nether this illusion, information technology is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the ane which seems both to establish and close the reading), the superior myth by which the text pretends to return to the nature of language, to linguistic communication as nature' (Barthes 1974, 9). Connotation, in brusque, produces the illusion of denotation, the illusion of language as transparent and of the signifier and the signified as being identical. Thus denotation is just another connotation. From such a perspective denotation can exist seen as no more of a 'natural' meaning than is connotation but rather as a process of naturalization. Such a procedure leads to the powerful illusion that denotation is a purely literal and universal pregnant which is not at all ideological, and indeed that those connotations which seem most obvious to individual interpreters are simply equally 'natural'. According to an Althusserian reading, when we outset acquire denotations, we are also existence positioned within ideology by learning dominant connotations at the same fourth dimension (Silverman 1983, xxx).

Consequently, whilst theorists may notice it analytically useful to distinguish connotation from denotation, in exercise such meanings cannot be neatly separated. Most semioticians debate that no sign is purely denotative - lacking connotation. Valentin Voloshinov insisted that no strict division can be made between denotation and connotation considering 'referential meaning is moulded by evaluation... meaning is ever permeated with value judgement' (Voloshinov 1973, 105). In that location tin exist no neutral, objective description which is complimentary of an evaluative element. David Mick and Laura Politi note that choosing not to differentiate denotation and connotation is allied to regarding comprehension and interpretation as similarly inseparable (Mick & Politi 1989, 85).

For nearly semioticians both denotation and connotation involve the use of codes. Structural semioticians who emphasise the relative arbitrariness of signifiers and social semioticians who emphasize diversity of interpretation and the importance of cultural and historical contexts are hardly probable to have the notion of a 'literal' meaning. Denotation simply involves a broader consensus. The denotational meaning of a sign would exist broadly agreed upon by members of the aforementioned culture, whereas 'nobody is e'er taken to task because their connotations are incorrect', so no inventory of the connotational meanings generated by any sign could e'er exist consummate (Barnard 1996, 83). Even so, there is a danger hither of stressing the 'individual subjectivity' of connotation: 'intersubjective' responses are shared to some degree by members of a civilization; with any private instance but a limited range of connotations would make whatsoever sense. Connotations are not purely 'personal' meanings - they are determined by the codes to which the interpreter has access. Cultural codes provide a connotational framework since they are 'organized around key oppositions and equations', each term being 'aligned with a cluster of symbolic attributes' (Silverman 1983, 36). Certain connotations would be widely recognized within a civilisation. Almost adults in Western cultures would know that a motorcar can connote virility or freedom.

In the following excerpt from his essay 'Rhetoric of the Image', Roland Barthes demonstrates the subtlety and power of connotation in the context of ad.

Here we have a Panzani ad: some packets of pasta, a tin can, a sachet, some tomatoes, onions, peppers, a mushroom, all emerging from a half-open string handbag, in yellows and greens on a red background. Allow us try to 'skim off' the dissimilar messages it contains.

The paradigm immediately yields a first message, whose substance is linguistic; its supports are the caption, which is marginal, and the labels, these being inserted into the natural disposition of the scene, 'en abyme'. The code from which this message has been taken is none other than that of the French language; the only knowledge required to decipher it is a knowledge of writing and of French. In fact, this message tin can itself be farther broken down, for the sign Panzani gives not simply the name of the firm but too, by its assonance, a additional signified, that of 'Italianicity'. The linguistic bulletin is therefore twofold (at least in this particular prototype): denotational and connotational. Since, however, we have here only a unmarried typical sign, namely that of articulated (written) language, it volition be counted every bit i message.

Putting aside the linguistic bulletin, we are left with the pure image (fifty-fifty if the labels are office of it, anecdotally). This image straightaway provides a series of discontinuous signs. First (the order is unimportant as these signs are non linear), the idea that what we accept in the scene represented is a return from the market. A signified which itself implies two euphoric values: that of the freshness of the products and that of the substantially domestic training for which they are destined. Its signifier is the half-open purse which lets the provisions spill out over the table, 'unpacked'. To read this first sign requires only a knowledge which is in some sort implanted every bit role of the habits of a very widespread culture where 'shopping around for oneself' is opposed to the hasty stocking upward (preserves, refrigerators) of a more 'mechanical' civilization. A second sign is more or less equally evident; its signifier is the bringing together of the lycopersicon esculentum, the pepper and the tricoloured hues (yellow, green, cerise) of the poster; its signified is Italy, or rather Italianicity. This sign stands in a relation of redundancy with the connoted sign of the linguistic message (the Italian assonance of the proper name Panzani) and the knowledge it draws upon is already more particular; it is a specifically 'French' knowledge (an Italian would barely perceive the connotation of the name, no more probably than he would the Italianicity of tomato and pepper), based on a familiarity with certain tourist stereotypes. Standing to explore the paradigm (which is not to say that it is not entirely articulate at the starting time glance), there is no difficulty in discovering at least two other signs: in the commencement, the serried collection of different objects transmits the idea of a total culinary service, on the one hand every bit though Panzani furnished everything necessary for a carefully balanced dish and on the other as though the concentrate in the tin were equivalent to the natural produce surrounding it; in the other sign, the composition of the image, evoking the memory of innumerable alimentary paintings, sends u.s.a. to an aesthetic signified: the 'nature morte' or, as information technology is better expressed in other languages, the 'nevertheless life'; the knowledge on which this sign depends is heavily cultural.

(Barthes 1977, 33)

Connotation and denotation are oft described in terms of levels of representation or levels of meaning. Roland Barthes adopted from Louis Hjelmslev the notion that there are different orders of signification (Barthes 1957; Hjelmslev 1961, 114ff). The outset lodge of signification is that of denotation: at this level in that location is a sign consisting of a signifier and a signified. Connotation is a 2nd-social club of signification which uses the denotative sign (signifier and signified) as its signifier and attaches to it an additional signified. In this framework connotation is a sign which derives from the signifier of a denotative sign (so denotation leads to a chain of connotations). This tends to propose that denotation is an underlying and primary meaning - a notion which many other commentators have challenged. Barthes himself later gave priority to connotation, and in 1971 noted that it was no longer easy to split up the signifier from the signified, the ideological from the 'literal' (Barthes 1977, 166). In passing, we may annotation that this formulation underlines the bespeak that 'what is a signifier or a signified depends entirely on the level at which the analysis operates: a signified on ane level can become a signifier on another level' (Willemen 1994, 105). This is the mechanism by which signs may seem to signify one thing just are loaded with multiple meanings.

Changing the form of the signifier while keeping the aforementioned signified can generate different connotations. Changes of way or tone may involve different connotations, such as when using different typefaces for exactly the same text, or changing from abrupt focus to soft focus when taking a photograph. The choice of words often involves connotations, every bit in references to 'strikes' vs. 'disputes', 'union demands' vs. 'management offers', and then on. Tropes such as metaphor generate connotations.

Connotation is non a purely paradigmatic dimension, as Saussure'due south characterization of the paradigmatic dimension as 'associative' might advise. Whilst absent signifiers with which it is associated are conspicuously a key factor in generating connotations, and then too are syntagmatic associations. The connotations of a signifier chronicle in function to the other signifiers with which information technology occurs within a detail text. Nevertheless, referring to connotation entirely in terms of paradigms and syntagms confines u.s. to the language system, and yet connotation is very much a question of how linguistic communication is used. A purely structuralist account also limits us to a synchronic perspective and nevertheless both connotations and denotations are subject non merely to socio-cultural variability but also to historical factors: they change over time. Signs referring to disempowered groups (such equally 'woman') tin exist seen as having had far more negative denotations as well as negative connotations than they practice now because of their framing inside dominant and authoritative codes of their time - including even supposedly 'objective' scientific codes. Fiske warns that 'it is oftentimes easy to read connotative values as denotative facts' (Fiske 1982, 92). Just equally dangerously seductive, withal, is the tendency to accept denotation as the 'literal', 'self-evident' 'truth'. Semiotic analysis tin help us to counter such habits of listen.

Whilst the dominant methodologies in semiotic analysis are qualitative, semiotics is non incompatible with the use of quantitative techniques. In 1957 the psychologist Charles Osgood published a book on The Measurement of Significant together with some of his colleagues (Osgood et al. 1957). In it these communication researchers outlined a technique called the semantic differential for the systematic mapping of connotations (or 'melancholia meanings'). The technique involves a pencil-and-paper exam in which people are asked to give their impressionistic responses to a particular object, country or event by indicating specific positions in relation to at least nine pairs of bipolar adjectives on a scale of i to 7. The aim is to locate a concept in 'semantic space' in iii dimensions: evaluation (due east.g. good/bad); say-so (due east.chiliad. strong/weak); and activity (e.g. active/passive). The method has proved useful in studying attitudes and emotional reactions. It has been used, for instance, to make comparisons between different cultural groups. Whilst the technique has been used fairly widely in social science, information technology has not ofttimes been used by semioticians (including the self-styled 'scientist of connotations', Roland Barthes), although binary oppositions have routinely provided theoretical building-blocks for structuralist semioticians.

Related to connotation is what Roland Barthes refers to as myth. We usually associate myths with classical fables almost the exploits of gods and heroes. But for Barthes myths were the dominant ideologies of our time. In a deviation from Hjelmslev'southward model Barthes argues that the orders of signification called denotation and connotation combine to produce ideology - which has been described (though non by Barthes) as a third guild of signification (Fiske & Hartley 1978, 43; O'Sullivan et al. 1994, 287). In a very famous example from his essay 'Myth Today' (in Mythologies), Barthes illustrates this concept of myth:

I am at the barber's, and a copy of Paris-Lucifer is offered to me. On the cover, a immature Negro* in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the significant of the flick. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a groovy Empire, that all her sons, without whatever colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that in that location is no better reply to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro* in serving his so-chosen oppressors. I am therefore again faced with a greater semiological arrangement: there is a signifier, itself already formed with a previous organization (a blackness soldier is giving the French salute); in that location is a signified (it is hither a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is a presence of the signified through the signifier... In myth (and this is the chief peculiarity of the latter), the signifier is already formed by the signs of the language... Myth has in fact a double function: it points out and information technology notifies, information technology makes u.s. empathize something and it imposes it on us... One must put the biography of the Negro* in parentheses if one wants to free the picture, and ready information technology to receive its signified... The class does not suppress the meaning, it only impoverishes it, it puts it at a altitude... It is this constant game of hide-and-seek between the pregnant and the grade which defines myth. The class of myth is not a symbol: the Negro* who salutes is not the symbol of the French Empire: he has too much presence, he appears every bit a rich, fully experienced, spontaneous, innocent, indisputable prototype. Only at the same time this presence is tamed, put at a distance, made almost transparent; information technology recedes a little, it becomes the accomplice of a concept which comes to it fully armed, French imperiality... Myth is... defined by its intention... much more than by its literal sense... In spite of this, its intention is somehow frozen, purified, eternalized, made absent by this literal sense (The French Empire? Information technology's just a fact: await at this skilful Negro* who salutes like ane of our own boys). This constituent ambiguity... has ii consequences for the signification, which henceforth appears both like a notification and similar a argument of fact... French imperiality condemns the saluting Negro* to be zilch more than an instrumental signifier, the Negro* suddenly hails me in the name of French imperiality; but at the same moment the Negro's* salute thickens, becomes vitrified, freezes into an eternal reference meant to institute French imperiality... Nosotros reach here the very principle of myth: information technology transforms history into nature... In the case of the soldier-Negro*... what is got rid of is certainly not French imperiality (on the contrary, since what must be actualized is its presence); information technology is the contingent, historical, in one discussion: fabricated, quality of colonialism. Myth does not deny things, on the opposite, its part is to talk well-nigh them; only, it purifies them, information technology makes them innocent, information technology gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a argument of fact. If I state the fact of French imperiality without explaining it, I am very near to finding that it is natural and goes without saying: I am reassured. In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: information technology abolishes the complication of man acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with whatever going dorsum across what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions... Things appear to hateful something by themselves... *Translator's term - not the choice of this author (Barthes 1987)

Signs and codes are generated by myths and in turn serve to maintain them. Pop usage of the term 'myth' suggests that it refers to beliefs which are demonstrably false, only the semiotic apply of the term does not necessarily suggest this. Myths can be seen as extended metaphors. Like metaphors, myths help us to make sense of our experiences within a culture (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 185-6). They express and serve to organize shared means of conceptualizing something within a civilization. Semioticians in the Saussurean tradition care for the relationship between nature and civilization as relatively arbitrary (L�half dozen-Strauss 1972, 90, 95). For Barthes, myths serve the ideological part of naturalization (Barthes 1977, 45-half-dozen). Their function is to naturalize the cultural - in other words, to make dominant cultural and historical values, attitudes and behavior seem entirely 'natural', 'normal', self-evident, timeless, obvious 'common-sense' - and thus objective and 'truthful' reflections of 'the way things are'. Gimmicky sociologists argue that social groups tend to regard as 'natural' any confers privilege and power upon themselves. Barthes saw myth equally serving the ideological interests of the bourgeoisie. 'Bourgeois credo... turns culture into nature,' he declares (Barthes 1974, 206). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson outline fundamental features of the myth of objectivism which is dominant and pervasive in Western civilisation - a myth which allies itself with scientific truth, rationality, accuracy, fairness and impartiality and which is reflected in the discourse of science, law, regime, journalism, morality, business, economics and scholarship (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 188-ix). Myths can function to hide the ideological role of signs and codes. The power of such myths is that they 'get without saying' and and then appear not to demand to be deciphered, interpreted or demystified.

Differences betwixt the 3 orders of signification are not articulate-cut, but for descriptive and analytic purposes some theorists distinguish them along the post-obit lines. The first (denotative) society (or level) of signification is seen as primarily representational and relatively self-contained. The second (connotative) club of signification reflects 'expressive' values which are attached to a sign. In the third (mythological or ideological) gild of signification the sign reflects major culturally-variable concepts underpinning a particular worldview - such every bit masculinity, femininity, freedom, individualism, objectivism, Englishness so on. Susan Hayward offers a useful example of the three orders of signification in relation to a photo of Marilyn Monroe:



At the denotative level this is a photo of the picture star Marilyn Monroe. At a connotative level we associate this photo with Marilyn Monroe's star qualities of glamour, sexuality, dazzler - if this is an early on photograph - only besides with her depression, drug-taking and untimely death if it is one of her final photographs. At a mythic level we sympathise this sign as activating the myth of Hollywood: the dream factory that produces glamour in the class of the stars it constructs, but also the dream car that can beat them - all with a view to profit and expediency. (Hayward 1996, 310)

The semiotic analysis of cultural myths involves an try to deconstruct the ways in which codes operate within particular popular texts or genres, with the goal of revealing how certain values, attitudes and beliefs are supported whilst others are suppressed. The task of 'denaturalizing' such cultural assumptions is problematic when the semiotician is also a product of the same culture, since membership of a civilisation involves 'taking for granted' many of its dominant ideas. Nevertheless, where we seek to analyse our ain cultures in this mode information technology is essential to endeavor to be explicitly reflexive about 'our own' values.



Contents

• Contents Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Signs
• Modality and representation
• Paradigms and syntagms
• Syntagmatic analysis
• Paradigmatic analysis
• Denotation, connotation and myth
• Rhetorical tropes
• Codes
• Modes of accost
• Encoding/Decoding
• Articulation
• Intertextuality
• Criticisms of semiotic analysis
• Strengths of semiotic analysis
• D.I.Y. semiotic analysis
• Glossary of key terms
• Suggested reading
• Semiosis bookstore
• References
• Index
• Semiotics: The Basics

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Source: http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/sem06.html

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