ROLAND BARTHES

SEMIOTICS

BACKGROUND INFORMATION…• Roland Barthes was born on the 12 November 1915

and died on the 26 March 1980.• He was one of the earliest structuralist or

poststructuralist theorists of culture. His work pioneered ideas of structure and signification which have come to underpin cultural studies and critical theory today. He was also an early instance of marginal criticism.

• Barthes is one of the leading theorists of semiotics, the study of signs.

“A garment, an automobile, a dish of cooked food, a gesture, a film, a piece of music, an advertising image, a piece of furniture, a newspaper headline—these indeed appear to be heterogeneous objects. What might they have in common? This at least: all are signs…this car tells me the social status of its owner, this garment tells me quite precisely the degree of its wearer's conformism or eccentricity.” - Roland Barthes

SEMIOTICS …• Our actions and thoughts – what we do automatically, are often

governed by a complex set of cultural messages and conventions, and dependent upon our ability to interpret them instinctively and instantly.

• For instance, when we see the different colours of a traffic light, we automatically know how to react to them. We know this without even thinking about it. But this is a sign which has been established by cultural convention over a long period of time and which we learn as children, and requires a deal of unconscious cultural knowledge to understand its meaning.

• Everyone is a semiotician, because everyone is constantly unconsciously interpreting the meaning of signs around them, and signs don’t only need to be visual – they can be aural or sonic signs too, such as the sound of a police siren, usually heard before the vehicle is seen.

SEMIOTICS IN MEDIA…• Semiotics is the study of signs. A sign in this context,

refers to something which conveys meaning – for example, a written or spoken word, a symbol or a myth.

• The semiotic tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications.

• As with many semioticists, one of Barthes’s main themes was the importance of avoiding the confusion of culture with nature, or the naturalisation of social phenomena.

SIGNS• There are three types of signs in the study of semiotics: 1) Iconic signs – icons are signs where meaning is based on similarity of appearance.2) Indexical signs –Indexical signs have a cause-and-effect relationship between the sign and the meaning of the sign. There is a direct link between the two. 3) Symbolic signs – these signs have an arbitrary or conventional link.

SIGNIFIER AND SIGNIFIED…• In each case, the sign can be

broken into two parts, the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the thing, item, or code that we ‘read’ – so, a drawing, a word, a photo etc.

• Each signifier has a signified, the idea or meaning being expressed by that signifier. Only together do they form a sign. There is often no intrinsic or direct relationship between a signifier and a signified

Example…• If we take the spoken

word ‘cool’ as a signifier, what might be the signified? In one context or situation, cool might refer to temperature. But in another, it might refer to something as ‘stylish’ or ‘popular’. The relationship between signifier and signified can change over time and in different contexts.