Semiotics:

General Reading List

Week1: Interpretation and communication
Week 2: Image and Text
Week 3: Image and Text II
Week 4: Sign and System
Week 5: Mental Process
Week 6: half term
Week 7: Decoding Advertisements
Week 8: Ideology and Meaning
Week 9: Empirical Applications in Semiotics
Week 10: Modes of analysis Working with Structuralism

Course Work
Children Book: A different elaboration.
CV: A new typology creating deviation
Advert: reconinsing Addresser, Message and Addressee
Logos: showing correspondence between text and image

The following is an outline of the term two design lecture by Sean Hall.

I take out the more important point of each lecture and try to extended with the inclusion of excerpts and images from Fiske, J (1990) an Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Routledge, esp

I also include (please see menu) the course work that we were asked to produce for this design course.

In a second state, I commente my portfolio which includes the three sites made for the Noemi Sadowska’s design class. Those comments will be found in the ‘eveluation’ section of each ‘project’

(Excerpts and image from Fiske, J (1990) an Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Routledge, esp Ch.3)

C.S. Pierce Model is form of 3 elements:

         

“a sign that refers too something other that itself – The object, and is understood by somebody: that is, it has an effect in the mind of the user – the interpretant

The doubled-ended arrows emphasize that each term can be understood only in relation to the others ”

For Saussure, society and not the individual, was the primary form of reality.
Human consciousness, action and language were not the product of the individual, but product of society.

Signifier + Signified = Sign

Signifier is the thing that carries the message and the signified is the message itself. All sign consist of a signifier and a signified. However, there is different set of relations which operate so as to create meaning and give us three basic types of sign.

•Icon: relation of resemblance
•Index: casual relationship
•Symbol: arbitrary relationship

The different kinds of visual production can have various key features.

They include:
•The form of the image
  • Structures: composition and framin
  • Devices: perspective
  • Elements: colour, tone, texture and line
•The content of the image
•The form of the text
•The content of the text

Barthes: the meaning of an image is always related to the text with which interacts. Images are too polysemous. So we secure the meaning of an image by using words with it. Words provide anchors for images

There is two basis relations between text and image
•Verbal text extends the meaning of the image and vice versa: different meaning is created.
•Verbal text elaborates the meaning of the image and vice versa: same meaning is restated.

Elaboration is more common. There is two basis kind of elaboration.
•The text comes first and the image forms an illustration of its meaning.
•The image comes first and the text forms a way of anchoring its meaning

Kress and van Leeuwen maintain that image and text are largely autonomous. In a multimodal text (image + text the image can carry an message whilst the text can carry another

In addition to elements like Addresser, Message, addressee, there are others that may help us to understand the system of signs. We concentrate in a comprehensive version of the model of Roman Jacobson

•Addresser(s) : Where the message says it is coming from. This may be rather different from the Sender which it is its actual source.
Emotive : Is the intended massage/meaning What the Addresser wants to say.
•Addressee(s) : Where the message is going. This may be different from the Receiver which is its actual destination.
Conative : Is what is received/interpreted in the message . To some extent fashioned by what the receiver wishes to hear.
•Message/(Denotative/Connotative) : What the message actually is/how it is composed etc.
•Denotation : First order of signification - working between signifier and signified in the sign and its reference in external reality. The common sense, obvious meaning of the sign.
•Connotation : Second order of signification
•Phatic/Contact: Relationship between the addresser and the addressee
•Referential/Content: The things that are contained in the message.
•Metalingual/Code: The codes for interpreting the message.
•Formal/Form (Poetic): The way in which the communication is set out .
•Contextual: The situation or context in which the message operates

Exercice:
Using a different 'langue' into CV 'parole'

•Langue is a technical term that denotes the code, system or language that is being used
•Parole is about the particular utterance or speech act that is produced

Semiotics is about the system (langue) that underlies certain types of utterance (parole), we need to be aware of what sort of system we are dealing with in each case of parole

Langue is organise in two axes
1. - the choice or selection of interchangeable parts
Paradigm is a set of sign any of which can be chosen and interchanged in a given context.
2. - the combination of elements according to certain rules
Syntagm is an ordered set of sign any of which ca be combined according to certain rules.

So a syntagm is a set of element of a paradigm + rule

In lecture we spoke about the different form of Barthes’s symbolic: metaphor, metonym and simile. I included here also the concept of connotation and denotation (that originally were included in week 8), doing so I manage to put together Barthes’ set of ideas included in chapter 5 and 6 of Fiske book

(Excerpts from Fiske, J (1990) an Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Routledge, esp Ch.5)
“Meaning: a process of negotiation write/reader and test. Roland Barthes, who first set up a systematic model by which this negotiating, interactive idea of meaning could be analysed. At the heart of Barthes’s theory is the idea of two order of signification.

Denotation
The first order of signification. It describe the relationship between the signifier and signified within the sign, and of the sign with its referent in external reality. It refers to the common-sense, obvious meaning of the sign.

Connotation
1st way of the second order of connotation
It describes the interaction that occurs when the sign meets the feelings or emotions of the users and the values of their culture. It is when the meaning move to the subjective. It is when the interpretant is influenced a s much by the interpretant as by the object or the sign. In a photograph, denotation is what is photographed; connotation is how it is photographed
Connotation is largely arbitrary, specific to tone culture, though it frequently has an iconic dimension. In the photograph example give by Fiske, we need the conventional element to decode in this way, to know that soft focus is a significant choice made by the photographer, and not a limitation of the equipment. If all photographs were in soft focus, then it could not connote nostalgia
Because connotation works on the subjective level, we are frequently not made consciously aware of it. It can all too often be read as the connotative meaning. It is often easy to read connotative values as denotative facts. One of the aims of semiotics analysis is to provide us with the analytical method and the frame of mind to guard against this sort of misreading

Myth
2nd way of the second order of connotation
Barthes uses it as a believer, in its original sense. A myth is a story by which a culture explains or understands some aspect of reality or nature. A myth is a culture’s way of thinking about something, a way of conceptualizing or understanding it. It exists before the sign, and the sign activates the chains of concepts that constitute the myth.

If connotation is the second order meaning of the signifier, myth is the second-order meaning of the signified

Barthes argues that the main way myths work is to naturalize history. This points up the fact that myths are actually the product of a social class that has achieved dominance by a particular history: the meanings that its myths circulate must carry this history with them, but their operation as myths makes them try to deny it and present their meanings as natural, not historical or social. Myths mystify or obscure their origins and thus their political or social dimension.

The mythologist reveals the hidden history and thus the socio-political works of myths by 'demystifying' them.
Myths can most effectively naturalize meaning by relating them to some aspect of nature itself.
Myths do not reject the old entirely, but drop some concepts from their chains, and as others: change in myths is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
No myths are universal in a culture. There are dominant myths and there are also counter-myths

The other aspect of myths that Barthes stresses is their dynamism. They change and some can change rapidly in order to meet the changing needs and values of the culture of which they are a part.
Connotation and myth are the main ways in which signs work in the second order of signification that is the order in which the interaction between the sign and the user/culture is most active.

Symbols
Barthes (1977) does refer to a third way of signifying in this order. The symbolic. An object becomes a symbol when it acquires through convention and use a meaning that enables it to stand for something else.

Metaphor
It works by transposing qualities from one plane of reality to another, expressing the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. The jargon terms are ‘vehicle’ for the familiar, ‘tenor’ for the unfamiliar.

But metaphor are not just a literary devices: Lakoff and Johnson(1980) have shown that they have a much more fundamental, everyday experience( up: positive meaning; down: negative meaning). There is nothing natural that links high social position, high earnings, and high morals, but making sense of them through the same metaphor is one way in which the dominant values are spread throughout society.

Such everyday metaphors differ from literary metaphors in a number of ways. They do not draw attention to themselves as metaphors, and thus do not invite us to decode them consciously.

They are thus more insidious, and the sense that they make becomes more easily part of our society's 'common sense'; that is, it becomes part of the uninspected, taken for granted assumptions that are widespread throughout society.

Such common sense appears to be natural, but it never is: it is always socially produced. It is, then, finally, ideological: the power of the dominant classes is maintained partly to the extent that their ideas can be made into the common sense of all classes.

Metonymy
It works by associating meaning in the same plane. Its basic definition is making a part stand for the whole.
The selection of the metonym is clearly crucial, for from it we construct the unknown remainder of reality. The selection of metonym determines the rest of the picture of the event that we construct

In the lecture we also spoke about the simile
Simile : a stated comparison (like/as) between two different objects, images, ideas or likeness. Simile is cliché ridden

(Excerpts from Fiske, J (1990) an Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Routledge, esp Ch.6)
“Norm and Deviation
A norm is statistically average example of behaviour or evaluation. It describes the common practices of a group or society and is thus predictable, the expected.
The unexpected, the non-conventional is a deviation from the norm.

'A Grief Ago' is a deviant use of language in that the syntagm: A... AGO is normally completed by one of a set of words with particular characteristics, that is, words from a particular paradigm. In this characteristics of the normal paradigm are.
(a) words concerned with the measurement of time;
(b) words concerned with regularly recurring events;
(c) words with a plural form.

Thomas has temporarily given it the characteristics of its new paradigm, While retaining those of its original one - that of major emotions. By investing grief with the characteristics of measuring time, regular recurrence, and plurality, he has given the word a new set of meanings that many readers find particularly apt or imaginatively pleasing.

Creativity or originality frequently means breaking norms or conventions and emiotic analysis can help us to understand what norms are being deviated from, to what extent, and, possibly, to what effect.

Those examples (see book for reference) are working metaphorically, in that they are taking units from one paradigm and inserting them into a syntagm which would normally be completed by units from another. By so doing they are associating the characteristics of the two paradigms in a new and imaginatively striking way by the process of transformation. All metaphors are, in this sense, deviations from the norms of language behaviour.”

The work advertising comes from the Greek meaning turn towards Advertising is a form of discourse (Parole). It has its own way of communication.

The most basic model for this form of communication will have the following three elements: Addresser(s) Message(s) Addressee(s)

The basic idea of this model is to establish who is sending a message to whom and what the message means. The addresser in this case is the individual or thing that communicates the message (i.e. the addresser is where it says it is from, as opposed to the Sender, which is its actual source) and the addressee (i.e. the addressee is where it says it is going, as opposed to the Receiver, which is its actual destination) is the individual or group of individuals who are trying to understand the message. The message consists of the meaning that is communicated by the addresser and received by the addressee
Notice that there may be more than one addresser, more than one message and more than one addressee

The Structures of Textual Meaning
a) How is the text read and understood? (i.e. what are its graphological features and semantic features?)

   •Paralanguage. aspect of communication that work alongside, surround or support text. There are all-important forms of non-verbal communication tell us how to understand the pieces of text we are trying to interpret.
   •Positioning. This concerns whether the text is read from the top down or from the bottom up.
   •Voice. This is about which pronoun(s) is employed in the text. (we, I..) In tackling the question b) it is useful to identify key features of how language can sound and what this might serve to communicate. The most interesting elements are:

 b) How does the text sound? (i.e. what are its phonological features?)

   •Prosodic features. These are aspects of stress and intonation. ( typographical features, size and shape, different stylistic features and by aspects of punctuation)
   •Fluency and Non-fluency features. Fluency concerns the extent to which it does not flow.
   •Accent. This may be represented by (say) an alteration of spelling   •Vocabulary. It is possible to give this feeling by using everyday conversation, and regional accents.
   •Repetition. This is often used in stories designed for children to emphasise point that are important. It can, however, be used successfully in adverts.
  

 •Grammar. Grammar concerns the way in which the sentences are constructed. This may also tell you something important about the age, gender, social class, and ethnicity of the persons involved.
   •Interactive markers. These are aspects of language that result from the fact that language is interactive. Overlaps, interruptions, reinforcements that indicate understanding or a lack of It (noises such as 'mm', 'urn', 'er', 'oh', 'yeah', 'ugh', 'eek' and 'aargh'), and monitoring expressions (phrases such as ‘you know’) all can act as interaction markers.
   •Topic changes. Here we should notice the frequency with which there-are topic change


A Note on Intertextuality
Intertextuality is about how one visual or verbal text relates to another visual or verbal text.

Reinforcing the sign and its relation between signifier and signified: including the signified into the signifier.

It is not that the signifier means arbitrarily, in the case, ‘action of hide’ is that the signifier is doing that action and doing so reinforces its meaning.


Second example works in a very similar way

Visual correspondence between words and picture:
oxymoron, rebuses. palindromes, tropes, acronyms, anagrams, lipograms, macronics, onomatopoeia, noncewords, stinky pinkies and Tom Swifties.

A stinky pinky, is a noun modified by an alliterative rhyming adjective. Shapes can rhyme as well as sounds.
A pun plays on the different meanings attached to one word. It is an amusing use of a work or phrase which has several meaning or which sounds like another word
A Tom Swifties is a phrase in which a verb or adverb supplies the pun. For instance, 'Thank God I remembered to take my umbrella,' he drily observed.
An anagram is changing the order of the letters forming a word or phrase, to create another: for instance total abstainers can be happily re-arranged to sit not at ale bars.
Rebus comes from Latin, non verbis sed rebus, meaning, 'not by words but by things'. A rebus is a puzzle in which letters, syllables or words are replaced by visual images such as symbols and pictures.
An anonym is a name written backwards. The concept is not as pointless as it may seem.

Excerpts from Fiske, J (1990) an Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Routledge, esp Ch.9

“Signification and culture
How do these second order meanings fit with the culture within which they operate? Where do the myths and connotations arise
The reader and the text together produce the preferred meaning, and in this collaboration the reader is constituted as someone with a particular set of relationships to the dominant value system and to the rest of society. This is ideology at work.

Ideology
There are a number of definitions of ideology. Raymond Williams (1977) find three main uses:
1. - system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group.
2.- A system of illusory beliefs false ideas or false consciousness which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge.
3.-The general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

Use 1 This is closer to the psychologists use of the word. Psychologists use 'ideology' to refer to the way that attitudes are organized into a coherent pattern. Or, as Brockreide (1968) succinctly puts it, 'attitudes have home in ideologies.
Use 2. Ideology, then, becomes the category of illusions and false consciousness by which the ruling class maintains its dominance over the working class. Because the ruling class controls the main means by which ideology is' propagated and spread throughout society, it can then make the working class see its subordination as 'natural', and therefore right. Herein lies the falseness. These ideological media include the educational, political, and legal systems, and the mass media and publishing.
The meanings generated by any one text are determined partly by the meanings of other texts to which it appears similar. This is called 'intertextuality'.
Use 3 The three uses might almost be modelled as Chinese boxes 1 is inside 2 which is inside 3. Ideology here is a term used to describe the social production of meanings. Ideology, used in this way, is the source of the second order meanings.

Signs: ideology: meanings
The signifier will be the same for both cultures, but the signified will be differ significantly. And the difference in the signifieds is the difference in the ideologies.

Ideology and signification
The only way their commonality can be established and maintained is by their frequent use in communication. Every time a sign is used it reinforces the life of its second order meanings both in the culture and in the user The user of the sign keeps it in currency by using it, and maintains the myths and connoted values of the culture only by responding to their use in communication. The relationship between the sign and its myths and connotations, on the one hand, and the user, on the other, is an ideological one

In using the signs we maintain and give life to the ideology, and by our response to ideological signs
They enable members of a culture to identify their membership of that culture through their acceptance of common, shared myths and values.

Ideology, then, in this third use, is not a static set of values and ways of seeing, but a practice. Ideology constitutes me as a particular member of my western science based culture by the very fact that I am able to use and respond appropriately to signs, connotations, and myths. In anticipating in the signifying practice of my culture I am the means by which ideology maintains itself.

 

Understanding ideology
The theory of ideology as a practice was developed by Louis Althusser (1971)

For Marx, ideology was a relatively straightforward concept. It was the means by which the, ideas of the ruling classes became accepted throughout society as natural and normal.
According to Marx the ideology of the bourgeoisie kept the workers, or proletariat, in a state of false consciousness. People's consciousness of who they are, of how they relate to the rest of society, and therefore of the sense they make of their social experience is produced by society, not by nature or biology. Our consciousness is determined by the society we have been born into, not by our nature or individual psychology.
The concept of ideology as false consciousness was so important in Marx's theory because it appeared to explain why it was that the majority in capitalist societies accepted a social system that disadvantaged them.

Althusser (1971) developed a more sophisticated theory of ideology that freed it from such a close cause and effect relationship with the economic base of society, and redefined it as an ongoing and all pervasive set of practices in which all classes participate, rather than a set of ideas imposed by one class upon the other. it does not mean that the practices themselves no longer serve the interests of the dominant, what it means is that ideology is much more effective than Marx: gave it credit for because it works from within rather than without

 

One of the most ubiquitous and insidious ideological practices is what Althusser calls 'interpellation' or 'hailing'. All communication addresses someone, and in addressing them it places them in a social relationship. In recognizing ourself as the addressee and in responding to the communication, we participate in our own social, and therefore ideological, construction
Communication is a social process and must therefore be ideological: interpellation is a key part of its ideological practice.

Another European second generation Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, introduced into this area another term hegemony which we might like to think of as ideology as struggle. Briefly, hegemony involves the constant winning and rewinning of the consent of the majority to the system that subordinates them. The two elements that Gramsci emphasizes more than Marx or Althusser are resistance and instability.

Hegemony is necessary, and has to work so hard, because the social experience of subordinated groups (whether by class, gender, race, age, or any other factor) constantly contradicts the picture that the dominant ideology paints for them of themselves and their social relations. In other words, the dominant ideology constantly meets resistances that it has to overcome in order to win people's consent to the social order that it is promoting. These resistances may be overcome, but they are never eliminated. So any hegemonic victory, any consent that it wins, is necessarily unstable; it can never be taken for granted, so it has to be constantly rewon and struggled over. Whatever their differences, all ideological theories agree that ideology 'I works to maintain class domination; their differences lie in the ways in which this domination is exercised, the degree of its effectiveness, and the extent of the resistances it meets.

Displacement' is a term that ideological theories have borrowed from Freudian dream theory: when a topic or anxiety is repressed, either psychologically or ideologically, the concern for it can only be expressed by being displaced on to a legitimate, socially acceptable topic.

Another term used in ideological analysis is ‘Incorporation’. This refers to the process by which the dominant classes take elements of resistance from the subordinate and use them to maintain the status quo, rather than to challenge it.

Yet another is ‘Commodification’. Capitalism is the system that, above all others, produces commodities, so making commodities seem natural is at the heart of much ideological practice.

Resistances
Hegemony is the means by which their consent to the system that disadvantages them is won, but its victories are never complete or stable: because of the contradictory experiences of everyday life the struggle is never over, and any ground won by the dominant ideology has to be constantly defended and actively held on to.

The theory of hegemony, however, extends this focus on the forces of domination by encouraging us to look for moments of weakness in texts, for contradictions in their ideological smoothness and coherence. While recognizing that these forces will always attempt to incorporate resistance, it doubts the final effectiveness of this strategy and argues that some traces of that resistance will necessarily remain. These contradictions and traces of resisting meanings may be identified by a hegemonic analysis of texts, but whether or not they are actually taken up and acted upon can be established only by ethnographic study.

The page must contradict itself in the same way that the social experience of the subordinate contradicts the meanings that the dominant ideology proposes for them. Hegemony theory argues that the ideological work of this page to win the consent of young women to patriarchal capitalism is not just an ideological practice but an ideological struggle, and that signs of the resistances it has to overcome can never be wiped out, that some always remain to fuel more resistance in the future.”

(Excerpts from Fiske, J (1990) an Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Routledge, esp Ch. 8)

"These critics would argue that semiotics does not have an empirically validated base of evidence upon which to rest its theory. The aims of empiricism are: to collect and categorize objective facts or data about the world; to form hypotheses to explain them; to eliminate, as far as possible, any human element or bias from this process; and to devise experimental methods to test and prove (or disprove) the reliability of the data and the hypotheses.

Content Analysis
It is designed to produce an objective, measurable, verifiable account of the manifest content of message. It analyses the denotative order of signification
Content analysis must be non-selective: it must cover the whole message, or message system, or a properly constituted sample.
Content analysis can also be used, perhaps paradoxically, to study the form as well as the content.(e.g. Welch (1979) compared the style of TV commercials for toys for boys with that of the commercials for girls’ toys.)
Much of the interest of content analysis derives form the choice of unit to be counted, and that this count should involve a comparison.

Gerbner, content, and culture
He believes that a culture communicates with itself trough its total mass-media output, and that this communication maintains or modifies the broad consensus of values in a culture. For him, the great strength of content analysis is that it analyses the whole message system, and not the individual's selective experience of it. It is the ‘massness', that which is available to the culture as a whole, that is significant, and it is this with which content analysis can cope. Gerbner thinks that the important characteristics of the media are the patterns that lie under the whole output, not the individual television programme. These patterns are absorbed gradually by the viewers, without their ever becoming consciously aware of them. Gerbner's analysis is aimed at revealing these patterns. Much of his work has been on the portrayal of violence on television.

Content analysis and cultural values
While content analysis concerns itself with the denotative order of communication, it can, and does, reveal patters and frequencies within this order that connote values and attitudes
Semantic Differential
Content analysis can provide data relevant to only part of this interaction that we call meaning. We need to study the reader as well. One common method is the semantic differential developed by Charles Osgood (1967) as a way of studying people’s feelings, attitudes, or emotions towards certain concepts. If we assume that these feelings, attitudes, and emotions are derived largely from the individual’s social-cultural experience, then we find that Osgood is trying to measure what Barthes calls ‘connotations’

The negotiation between text and reader produces a meaning that in the case where the audience hold strong views and the ’readings’ are as varied as the audience members is determined more by the reader and in the contrary by the test

Cultivation
Gerbner uses the data derived from content analysis and the audience study to form the basis of the theory of how the mass-media system relates to the culture from which it grows and to which speaks. He calls this relationship one of ‘cultivation’;; that is , the media cultivate attitudes and values in a culture. They do not create them
Content analysis reveals the values embedded in the total message system of a culture; the semantic differential can investigate whether these values are actually ‘cultivated in the reader.

Uses and Gratification Theory
It takes as its basis the belief that the audience has a complex set of needs which it seeks to satisfy in the mass media.
The usual method of the uses and gratifications approach is a questionnaire in which members of the television audience are asked to give their main reasons for watching a particular type of programme. An example of the sort of results that this approach can yield is provided by McQuail, Blumler, and Brown (1972). . In their study of the audience of television, they found, amongst other things, that there were groups of broadly similar 'uses' that people made of television quiz programmes.

McQuail’s four main categories of gratification
1.-Diversion
Escape from the constrains of routine
Escape from the burdens of problems
Emotional release
2. - Personal relationships
Companionship
Social utility: provision of something to talk about
3.-Personal identity
Personal reference: point of direct comparison with their real life
Reality exploration: helps the viewer to understand his own life
Value reinforcement
4.-Surveilance: need for information

Identifying the significant patterns in the results is the hardest part of the operation.
Audience ethnographies"

(Excerpts from Fiske, J (1990) an Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Routledge, esp Ch.7)

Structuralism does not deny the existence of an external, universal reality, it does deny the possibility of human beings having access to this reality in an objective, universal, non-cultural-determine manner. Structuralism’s enterprise is to discover how people make sense of the world, not what the world is.

Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1979)
Two ways of thinking
‘scientific’ thinking works by stabilising differences; it divides nature up into ever finer and more precise categories
‘savage thinking’ is holistic; it attempts to find ways of understanding all of nature not bit of it.
Scientific thinking is not better. Savage thinking may affect our social and political systems; and it may offer apparently truer explanations of subjective experience than empirical science can.

All cultures make sense of the world, and while the meanings that they make of it may be specific to them, the way by which they make those meaning are not; they are universal. Meaning are culture-specific, but the way of making them are universal to all humans beings.

 

Categorization and binary oppositions
Making conceptual categories within a system was the essence of sense-making., at the heart of this process is the binary opposition:

The binary opposition is a system of two related categories that, in its purest form, compromises the universe. In a perfect binary opposition, everything is either in category A or category B, and by imposing such categories we are starting to make sense of it.
In a second state of the sense-making process, when categories that apparently exist in nature, that is categories that correspond very closely to our perception of concrete reality, are used to explain more abstract, more generalized, and more apparently culture-specific concepts, and to ground this explanation in nature and thus to make them appear natural and not cultural.

The logic of the concrete is the process of making-sense of abstract concepts by metaphorically transposing their structure of differences on to differences of the concrete that appear to be natural is which is a common cultural process.
The construction of binary oppositions is a universal make-sense process because it is a product of the physical structure of the human brain and is therefore specific to the species and not to any one culture or society

Anomalous categories
Nature is a series of analogic continua. There is not diving line between day and night that produce categories that resist neat binary oppositions, ones that partake of characteristics of both the binary opposed ones are called anomalous categories. Anomalous categories don’t fit the categories of the binary opposition, dirtying the clarity of their boundaries. They have too much meaning and are conceptually too powerful so they have to be controlled by being designated ‘the sacred’ or ‘the taboo’.

Structured repetition
Structuralism seeks parallel structures that organise apparently quite different parts of our cultural existence in similar ways. (Leach (1964) parallelism between concept of spatial environment, our relation to animals and our relation to people.)

Boundary rituals
The vital importance of boundaries between categories has produced in al societies a series of boundary rituals designed to ease the transition between them. These passages between categories are often marked by anomalous periods (honeymoon..).
The choice of which boundary crossing to mark by rituals and which to ignore can tell us quite a lot about the priorities of a society.

Nature and culture
One of the crucial boundaries that all societies try to make sense of is that between nature and culture. Culture is a make-sense process that makes sense of external reality or nature, social system, social identities and daily activities of the people within that system, sense of ourselves and social relationships.
Cultures differentiate themselves from nature in order to establish their own identity, and then legitimate that identity by comparing it back to nature, and establishing it as natural rather than cultural

Myth
It is a story that is a specific and local transformation of a deep structure of binarily opposed concepts that are important to the culture within which the myth circulates. Myths act as anxiety reducers in that they deal with the contradictions inherent in any structure of binary oppositions
Myths have their own form of parole and will be only deeply understood by an analyst. The teller of the myth will only know its surface

Myth and social values
For Levi -Strauss myth is a narrative that is recognized as a myth even if its meanings are not consciously negotiated by the people using it. For Barthes myth is an associated chain of concepts: people may, well be conscious of the meanings of this-chain but not of its mythic character.
Reading myth is reading social values, but these values do not serve all members of society equally, and thus in patriarchal capitalist societies the mythologist explores the role played by meanings in the distribution of power in society, and that power is both class-based and gender-based.
Structuralism teaches us to look for the deep structures that underlie all cultural and communication systems. It also enables us to demonstrate that the various social and cultural systems that we use to organize and make sense of our lives are not random or disconnected, but are analogous to each other.

Internet
adbusters.org.uk
ban the boot.com
guerrilla media.com
project censored.org

E-zlines
stay free.com
adbusters.com

*Barthes, R. (1973) Mythologies, London: Paladin
Culler, J. (1976), Saussure, Fontana/Collins
*Cobley, P. and Jansz, L. (1997) Semiotics for Beginners, Cambridge: Icon
***Chandler, D., (2002) Semiotics: The Basics, Routledge: London
**Danesi, M. (1999) Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things, Hampshire: Macmillan
Cobley, P. (ed.) (1996) The Communication Theory Reader, London: Routledge
***Fiske, J. (1990) An Introduction to Communication Studies, London: Routledge
Gordon, W. T. (1996) Saussure For Beginners, New York: Writers and Readers
***Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (1996) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, London: Routledge
Mellor, D. H. (1990) Ways of Communicating, Cambridge University Press
Thwaites, T., Davis, L., and Mules, W. (1994) Tools For Cultural Studies: An
Introduction, Macmillan

*enjoyable
**intelligible and low on jargon
***difficult, but rewarding