engl 3815 survey of popular culture fall 2013 ph 321 dr. david lavery

ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture

Fall 2013PH 321

Dr. David Lavery

Survey of Popular Culture

Daniel Chandler’s Semiotics for Beginners

Watch short videos on semiotics from YouTube.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

http://surveyofpopularculture.blogspot.com/2013/08/semiotics-study-of-signs-short-video.html

http://surveyofpopularculture.blogspot.com/2013/08/semiotics-study-of-signs-short-video.html

Survey of Popular CultureSemiotics

Daniel Chandler’s Definition: “Loosely defined as 'the study of signs' or 'the theory of signs', what Saussure called 'semiology' was: 'a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life'. Saussure's use of the term sémiologie dates from 1894 and Peirce's first use of the term semiotic was in 1897. Semiotics has not become widely institutionalized as a formal academic discipline and it is not really a science. It is not purely a method of textual analysis, but involves both the theory and analysis of signs and signifying practices. Beyond the most basic definition, there is considerable variation amongst leading semioticians as to what semiotics involves, although a distinctive concern is with how things signify, and with representational practices and systems (in the form of codes). In the 1970s, semioticians began to shift away from purely structuralist (Saussurean) semiotics concerned with the structural analysis of formal semiotic systems towards a 'poststructuralist' 'social semiotics' - focusing on 'signifying practices' in specific social contexts.”

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html#semiology

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html#semiology

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html#sign

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html#signifying_practices

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html#representation

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html#code

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html#structuralism

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html#poststructuralism

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html#social_semiotics


Semiotic Samples

SemioticsSurvey of Popular Culture

Rene Magritte (1898-1967). Belgian Painter

To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you

have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.

Rene Magritte Survey of Popular Culture

PerspicacitySurvey of Popular Culture

The Therapeutist


Personal Values


Time Transfixed


The Rape


The Treachery of ImagesSurvey of Popular Culture

“Small isn’t she, and black and white.”—Pablo Picasso’s supposed response when a man showed him a snapshot and announced “This is my daughter.”



http://surveyofpopularculture.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-simpsons-is-made.html


http://surveyofpopularculture.blogspot.com/2013/08/monty-python-hungarian-phrase-book.html

ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies

Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

Movies vs. Television

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/?ref_=sr_2



Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

Movies vs. Television

Watch Blue Velvet’s Famous Opening Sequence

on Amazon Prime.



http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Velvet/dp/B00A2YAA6I/ref=sr_1_1_vod_1_pur?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1374675981&sr=1-1&keywords=blue+velvet





Film StudiesBad Episodes

Film Studies

Film StudiesBad Episodes

http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70196272&trkid=3326039&t=Breaking+Bad:+Ssn+3:+No+M%C3%A1s

:

Film Studies: Movies vs. Television

David Lavery. "’The Catastrophe of My Personality’: Frank O’Hara, Don Draper, and the Poetics of Mad Men." Reading Mad Men, ed. Gary Edgerton, Reading Contemporary Television Series, I. B. Tauris, 2010. 131-44.

Semiotics


:

Jon Hamm (Don Draper)


Don Draper’s Guide to Picking Up Women (on Hulu)

http://www.hulu.com/watch/40972



“The Wheel” (1.13)


http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70136135&trkid=13129420&sod=search-autocomplete#MovieId=70136135&EpisodeMovieId=70143391

Steven Wright


I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.


I intend to live forever. So far, so good.


I put instant coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time.


I saw a sign in a restaurant that said breakfast anytime. I went in and ordered French toast during the Renaissance.


I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake-up letter.


Somebody asked me if I slept OK. No, I answered. I made a couple of mistakes.


I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.


I wrote a few children's books . . . not on purpose.


I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.


If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do all the rest have to drown too?


If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer?


Is it weird in here, or is it just me?


My friend has a baby. I'm recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.


When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction.


When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child . . . eventually.


Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.



The Founders

of Semiotics

Semiotics

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Swiss Linguist

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). American Philosopher

The Co-Inventors/Discoverers of Semiology/Semiotics


Semiotics

“One could . . . assign to semiology a vast field of inquiry. if everything which has meaning within a culture is a sign and therefore an object of semiological investigation, semiology would come to include most disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. Any domain of human activity--be it music, architecture, cooking, etiquette, advertising, fashion, literature--could be approached in semiological

terms.”—Jonathan Culler


Roland Barthes (1915-80). French semiologist and critic.


Semiotics

MYTHOLOGY. For Barthes, investigation into the acquired connotative meanings of cultural signs in order to divest them of their acquired, taken-for-granted meanings. For example, television, though an object of wonder at the beginning of its history, is now a commonplace, its significance now so caught up in the culture's semiotic system that it is difficult to describe or explain. A mythology of TV would seek to decode it, to make its connotations again fresh and visible.


Greta Garbo


“The World of Wrestling““The Romans in Films"“The Writer on Holiday"“The Poor and the Proletariat"“Operation Margarine"“Novels and Children"“Wine and Milk"“The Jet-Man"“Striptease"“The New Citroën"“Plastic"


The New Citroën


The New Citroën


Giles Drives a Citroën

The New Citroën I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object, It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object. We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales. The D.S.—the 'Goddess'—has all the features (or at least the public is unanimous in attributing them to it at first sight) of one of those objects from another universe which have supplied fuel for the neomania of the eighteenth century and that of our own science-fiction: the Déesse is first and foremost a new Nautilus.


The New Citroën This is why it excites interest less by its substance than by the junction of its components. It is well known that smoothness is always an attribute of perfection because its opposite reveals a technical and typically human operation of assembling: Christ's robe was seamless, just as the airships of science-fiction are made of unbroken metal. The D.S. 19 has no pretensions about being as smooth as cake-icing, although its general shape is very rounded; yet it is the dove-tailing of its sections which interest the public most: one keenly fingers the edges of the windows, one feels along the wide rubber grooves which link the back window to its metal surround. There are in the D.S. the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape, which of course is meant to prepare one for the idea of a more benign Nature.


The New Citroën As for the material itself, it is certain that it promotes a taste for lightness in its magical sense. There is a return to a certain degree of streamlining, new, however, since it is less bulky, less incisive, more relaxed than that which one found in the first period of this fashion. Speed here is expressed by less aggressive, less athletic signs, as if it were evolving from a primitive to a classical form. This spiritualization can be seen in the extent, the quality and the material of the glass-work. The Déesse is obviously the exaltation of glass, and pressed metal is only a support for it. Here, the glass surfaces are not windows, openings pierced in a dark shell; they are vast walls of air and space, with the curvature, the spread and the brilliance of soap-bubbles, the hard thinness of a substance more entomological than mineral (the Citroen emblem, with its arrows, has in fact become a winged emblem, as if one was proceeding from the category of propulsion to that of spontaneous motion, from that of the engine to that of the organism).


The New Citroën We are therefore dealing here with a humanized art, and it is possible that the Déesse marks a change in the mythology of cars. Until now, the ultimate in cars belonged rather to the bestiary of power; here it becomes at once more spiritual and more object- like, and despite some concessions to neomania (such as the empty steering wheel), it is now more homely, more attuned to this sublimation of the utensil which one also finds in the design of contemporary household equipment. The dashboard looks more like the working surface of a modern kitchen than the control-room of a factory: the slim panes of matt fluted metal, the small levers topped by a white ball, the very simple dials, the very discreteness of the nickel-work, all this signifies a kind of control exercised over motion, which is henceforth conceived as comfort rather than performance. One is obviously turning from an alchemy of speed to a relish in driving.


The New Citroën The public, it seems, has admirably divined the novelty of the themes which are suggested to it. Responding at first to the neologism (a whole publicity campaign had kept it on the alert for years), it tries very quickly to fall back on a behaviour which indicates adjustment and a readiness to use (“You've got to get used to it’’). In the exhibition halls, the car on show is explored with an intense, amorous studiousness: it is the great tactile phase of discovery, the moment when visual wonder is about to receive the reasoned assault of touch (for touch is the most demystifying of all senses, unlike sight, which is the most magical). The bodywork, the lines of union are touched, the upholstery palpated, the seats tried, the doors caressed, the cushions fondled; before the wheel, one pretends to drive with one's whole body. The object here is totally prostituted, appropriated: originating from the heaven of Metropolis, the Goddess is in a quarter of an hour mediatized, actualizing through this exorcism the very essence of petit-bourgeois advancement.



A Basic Semiotics Lexicon

Semiotics

CODE. In semiotics, the usually unstated rules that govern the interpretation of a sign or signs. A scholar of western films once titled a semiotics of the genre “I Didn’t Know the Gun was Coded”; so, too, are the horse, the white and black hats, the woman, etc.



Semiotics

DENOTATION. The literal meaning of an expression. The first order of signification. A photograph of Barack Obama denotes (is) Barack Obama.



Semiotics

CONNOTATION. The suggestive or associative sense of an expression that extends beyond its literal definition. A second order system of signification which uses the denotation of a sign as its signifier and adds other meanings, other signfiers, often ideological in nature. A picture of Barack Obama denotes the actual person but connotes radically different meanings on the political left or right.



Semiotics

ICON. In Peirce’s semiotics, a sign which represents through resemblance to the signified.


A Basic Semiotics Lexicon Peirce

Semiotics

ICONOGRAPHY. Patterns, continuous over time, of visual imagery or symbols, of recurrent objects and figures, representative of a particular institution, system, genre. A given religion, for example, has its own iconography, but so too does, say, a Western film.



Semiotics

INDEX. In Peirce's semiotics identifies a sign which has been acted upon by the signifier: symptoms of diseases, weathervanes, barometers, photographs.



Semiotics



SEMIOCLASM. The sudden destruction—implosion/explosion—of a sign, sometimes resulting in its complete rewriting.

Semiotics

SEMIOSIS. The ungoing development over time of the meaning of a sign.



Semiotics

SIGNIFIED. The immaterial aspect of a sign; that which the signifier represents. May be approached only through the signifiers of any given text.

SIGNIFIER. The material aspect–an image, an object, a sound–of a sign. Signifiers tend to take on meaning through opposition to other possible alternative signifiers (i.e., woman/horse) not represented in a given syntagm. According to Saussure, the relationship of the signifier to signified in language is entirely arbitrary.



Semiotics

SYMBOL. In Peirce’s semiotics, a sign whose relationship with the signified is established through convention.



Semiotics

From David Lavery, Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992: 91, 99-100. Media critic Ellen Seiter, in a semiotic dissection of the "myth" of the Challenger, has noted that "on the connotative level, the space shuttle was used as a signifier for a set of ideological signifieds such as scientific progress, manifest destiny in space, U.S. superiority over the U.S.S.R." As a sign, the Space Shuttle "consisted of a signifier–the TV image itself–that was coded in certain ways (symmetrical composition, long shot of shuttle on launching pad, daylight, blue sky background) for instant recognition, and the denoted meaning, or signified 'space shuttle.'" This signification had been built up throughout the shuttle's brief history until it had become an ideological given. The explosion of the Challenger "radically displaced" these connotations.


http://surveyofpopularculture.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-explosion-of-challenger.htmlhttp:/surveyofpopularculture.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-simpsons-is-made.html

Semiotics

The connotation of the sign "space shuttle" was destabilized; it became once again subject–as a denotation–to an unpredictable number of individual meanings or competing ideological interpretations. It was as if the explosion restored the sign's original signified, which could then lead to a series of questions and interpretations of the space shuttle that related to its status as a material object, its design, what it was made of, who owned it, who had paid for it, what it was actually going to do on the mission, who had built it, how much control the crew or others at NASA had over it. At such a moment, the potential exists for the production of counterideological connotations. Rather than "scientific progress," the connotation "fallibility of scientific bureaucracy" might have been attached to the space shuttle; "manifest destiny in space" might have been replaced by "waste of human life"; and "U.S. superiority over the U.S.S.R." by "basic human needs sacrificed to technocracy." (31)


Semiotics

Sick Jokes: The Challenger


How do we know that Christa McAuliffe—the first “Teacher in Space, killed in The Challenger

explosion—wasn’t a good teacher?

Semiotics

Sick Jokes: The Challenger


How do we know that Christa McAuliffe—the first “Teacher in Space, killed in The Challenger

explosion—wasn’t a good teacher?

********

Because good teachers don’t blow up in front of their class.

Semiotics

In the New York Times of 29 January 1986, at the bottom of the same page that reprinted the complete text of Reagan's nationally televised tribute to the Challenger crew, a brief note announced the Ford Motor Company's cancellation of the advertising campaign for the Aerostar minivan. The ads, which juxtaposed the Ford vehicle with the shuttle in order to highlight the van's technological precision and aerodynamic shape, had lost their power. The producers of the "soon-to-be-released" summer movie SpaceCamp faced a similar problem. In the movie a woman astronaut and five boys and girls participating in a shuttle engine test on the launch pad are unexpectedly sent into space to prevent an on-ground explosion. Despite concern over how the film would be perceived, they decided to release the film as planned. It did only mediocre business.


Semiotics

More than just seven brave men and women and a billion-dollar piece of machinery may have been lost on 28 January 1986. The prime "vehicle" for the metaphors of America's space boosting may also have been obliterated. "Since Challenger and Chernobyl," David Ehrenfeld has astutely and conclusively observed, "it is no longer reasonable to doubt that the world is entering a new phase of human civilization. The brief but compelling period of overwhelming faith in the promise and power of technology is drawing to a close, to be replaced by an indefinite time of retrenchment, reckoning, and pervasive uncertainty. At best, we will be sweeping up the debris of unbridled technology for decades, perhaps for a longer period than the age, itself, endured" ("The Lesson of the Tower" 367).


Semiotics

Nonetheless, in fall 1987 my daughter's PTA sent home a "Dear Parents" letter displaying at its top a drawing of the space shuttle ("USA/PTA" is visible on the tail assembly) and beginning, "Successful Space Shuttle Missions depend on their dedicated crews to guide them from liftoff to touchdown. Our PTA is no different." And in the college glossy Campus Voice Bi-Weekly, the Air Force saw fit to place an "Aim High" recruiting advertisement with the shuttle on its launching pad as its prominent central image and the headline "Before you work anywhere, take a look at the tools we work with." Such attempts to overcome the post-Challenger connotation of the "fallibility of scientific bureaucracy" and reinstate the shuttle as a metaphoric vehicle reek of non-sequitur and would seem to suggest a clear and perhaps contagious case of historical amnesia; yet they testify as well to the resilience of the dream.



The Meme

and the Seme

Semiotics

http://davidlavery.net/Writings/Meme_and_the_Seme.pdf


Semiotics

Memes, of course, were discovered and named by the Gregor Mendel of memetics, the British ethologist and sociobiologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, who thought of them simply as units of "cultural transmission," of "imitation." With the advent of human culture, Dawkins argued in The Selfish Gene, a new kind of replicator was introduced into the processes of biological evolution. Since the "primeval soup" in which life began, genes have "propagated themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs," but now, in the new "soup" which man himself stirs—what Karl Popper designated as "World 3"—an extra-genetic factor has been at work inspiring evolutionary change, which in the hands of culture is incredibly more rapid than the chancy, hit or miss, utterly unscientific methods which that fledgling scientist "nature" undertakes.


Semiotics

Dawkins derived the term "meme” from the Greek root for imitation—"mimesis"—but altered to resonate with "gene" and suggest as well "memory.”

Examples: "tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or building arches.”

“[M]emes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it onto his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.”


engl 3815 survey of popular culture fall 2013 ph 321 dr. david lavery

Documents

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