Transcript ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular Culture Fall 2013 PH 321 Dr. David Lavery Survey of Popular Culture Daniel Chandler’s Semiotics for Beginners Watch short videos on semiotics from.

ENGL 3815 Survey of
Popular Culture
Fall 2013
PH 321
Dr. David Lavery
Survey of Popular Culture
Daniel Chandler’s
Semiotics for Beginners
Watch short videos on
semiotics from YouTube.
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
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.”
Survey of Popular Culture
Semiotic
Samples
Survey of Popular Culture
Semiotics
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.
Survey
of Popular Culture
Rene
Magritte
Perspicacity
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The Therapeutist
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Personal Values
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Time Transfixed
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The Rape
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The Treachery of Images
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“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.”
Survey of Popular Culture
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
Semiotics
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
Movies vs. Television
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
Watch Blue Velvet’s Famous Opening
Sequence on Amazon Prime.
Movies vs. Television
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies
Bad Episodes
Film Studies
Film Studies
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies
ENGL 6750/7750 Film Studies
Bad Episodes
Film Studies
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.
Film Studies: Movies vs. Television
Survey of Popular Culture
Semiotics
:
Jon Hamm
(Don Draper)
Don Draper’s Guide to Picking
Up Women (on Hulu)
Film Studies: Movies vs. Television
“The Wheel” (1.13)
Film Studies: Movies vs. Television
Steven Wright
Survey of Popular Culture
I drive way too fast to worry about
cholesterol.
Survey of Popular Culture
I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
Survey of Popular Culture
I put instant coffee in a microwave oven
and almost went back in time.
Survey of Popular Culture
I saw a sign in a restaurant that said
breakfast anytime. I went in and ordered
French toast during the Renaissance.
Survey of Popular Culture
I stayed in a really old hotel last night.
They sent me a wake-up letter.
Survey of Popular Culture
Somebody asked me if I slept OK. No, I
answered. I made a couple of mistakes.
Survey of Popular Culture
I was a peripheral visionary. I could see
the future, but only way off to the side.
Survey of Popular Culture
I wrote a few children's books . . . not on
purpose.
Survey of Popular Culture
I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.
Survey of Popular Culture
If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do
all the rest have to drown too?
Survey of Popular Culture
If you shoot at mimes, should you use a
silencer?
Survey of Popular Culture
Is it weird in here, or is it just me?
Survey of Popular Culture
My friend has a baby. I'm recording all the
noises he makes so later I can ask him
what he meant.
Survey of Popular Culture
When I die, I'm leaving my body to
science fiction.
Survey of Popular Culture
When I was a little kid we had a sand box.
It was a quicksand box. I was an only
child . . . eventually.
Survey of Popular Culture
Whenever I think of the past, it brings
back so many memories.
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Survey of Popular Culture
The
Founders
of
Semiotics
The Co-Inventors/Discoverers of
Semiology/Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857-1913). Swiss
Linguist
Survey of Popular Culture
Charles Sanders Peirce
(1839-1914). American
Philosopher
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
“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
Semiotics
Roland Barthes
(1915-80). French
semiologist and
critic.
Survey of Popular Culture
Roland Barthes
(1915-80). French
semiologist and
critic.
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Survey of Popular Culture
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.
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
Survey of Popular Culture
Greta Garbo
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“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"
Survey of Popular Culture
The New Citroën
Survey of Popular Culture
The New Citroën
Giles Drives a Citroën
The New Citroën
Survey of Popular Culture
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
Survey of Popular Culture
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 cakeicing, 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
Survey of Popular Culture
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
Survey of Popular Culture
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
Survey of Popular Culture
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.
Survey of Popular Culture
Survey of Popular Culture
A Basic
Semiotics
Lexicon
Survey of Popular Culture
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.
A Basic Semiotics Lexicon
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
DENOTATION. The literal meaning of an expression. The first
order of signification. A photograph of Barack Obama denotes
(is) Barack Obama.
A Basic Semiotics Lexicon
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
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.
A Basic Semiotics Lexicon
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
ICON. In Peirce’s semiotics, a sign which represents through
resemblance to the signified.
A Basic Semiotics Lexicon
Peirce
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
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.
A Basic Semiotics Lexicon
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
INDEX. In Peirce's semiotics identifies a sign which has been
acted upon by the signifier: symptoms of diseases,
weathervanes, barometers, photographs.
A Basic Semiotics Lexicon
Peirce
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
SEMIOCLASM. The sudden destruction—implosion/explosion—of a sign,
sometimes resulting in its complete rewriting.
A Basic Semiotics Lexicon
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
SEMIOSIS. The ungoing development over time of the
meaning of a sign.
A Basic Semiotics Lexicon
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
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.
A Basic Semiotics Lexicon
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
SYMBOL. In Peirce’s semiotics, a sign whose relationship with
the signified is established through convention.
A Basic Semiotics Lexicon
Peirce
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.
Survey of Popular Culture
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)
Survey of Popular Culture
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?
Survey of Popular Culture
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.
Survey of Popular Culture
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.
Survey of Popular Culture
Semiotics
More than just seven brave men and women and a billiondollar 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).
Survey of Popular Culture
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 postChallenger 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.
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Semiotics
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The
Meme
and the
Seme
Survey of Popular Culture
Semiotics
Survey of Popular Culture
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.
Survey of Popular Culture
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.”
Survey of Popular Culture
Semiotics