Structuralism and semiology

Structuralism and semiology

Rooted in early linguistics and the Russian Formalist school of aesthetics, structuralism and semiology represent a general theoretical reorientation which came to affect much work in humanistic and social- scientific disciplines in the twentieth century. Structuralism could be perceived, in certain periods, as offering the constituents of a unified science of the sign. Whereas structuralism may be said to characterize

a number of human, social, and natural sciences, assigning, according to Jean Piaget, attributes of wholeness, transformation, and self- regulation to the structures being studied (Hawkes, 1977:16), semiology is engaged more specifically in the analysis of signs and their functions, thus influencing both the humanities and the social sciences.

Semiology represents a break with humanistic tradition in several respects. First of all, the form of linguistics which Saussure outlined early in the century, and which became the foundation of a more general science of communication and culture—what he himself termed semiology, “a science that studies the life of signs within society” (Saussure, 1959:16)—moved toward a formal and systemic approach to language and away from inclusive and historical conceptions of philology and aesthetics. Russian Formalism, similarly, emphasized the structural analysis of literature and implied a final break with the Romantic understanding of literature as, in Wordsworth’s words, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (in Abrams et al., 1962:103). Semiology went beyond the New Criticism in its insistence on examining not just the literary work itself in order to account for aesthetic pleasure, but its underlying formal structure.

It can also be argued that the rise of a pervasive formalism was related to the crisis of representation in the arts which had been signaled by the rise of Impressionism in the 1870s, partly as a response to the spread of photography, and which continued in the formal experiments of the various twentieth-century -isms (see Hughes, 1981; also Pelfrey, 1985). Realizing that the status of art as the expression of an artistic sensitivity and as the representation of a commonly shared reality

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was called into question, scholarship may therefore have retreated to

a similar position inside language, studying art for form’s sake. The crisis of representation was further accentuated by the growth of factual, “objective” genres in the press from the middle of the nineteenth century, which served to thematize the definition of social reality. The representation of social conflict and change in the press, in particular, had to be negotiated by journalists and their readers. These new forms of verbal and visual representation came to pose important objects of analysis for twentieth-century textual research efforts.

If Saussure had laid the groundwork for these efforts in linguistics and semiology, it remained for two later developments to refine and apply his insights. First, in linguistics, formalization reached a climax in the models of language production advanced by transformational- generative grammar (Chomsky, 1965). A key assumption of this school has been that the human capacity for language can be attributed to an innate deep structure which, by complex transformations, produces the surface structures that we speak and write. While this research has tended to stay at the level of grammatical form in individual sentences, later linguistics has developed a contextual approach to language use—

a pragmatics which examines the variations of form and content with reference both to the social context of language and to the context made up of connected discourse, whether everyday conversation or other textual genres (Coulthard, 1977; Halliday, 1978). Such discourse analysis represents an important methodological contribution of the humanities to mass communication research, whose relevance is discussed further below.

It may be added that some linguistics relies on computers, increasingly so, for the analysis of language structures (Garside et al., 1987; Grishman, 1986). In some cases the purpose is the study of large quantities of linguistic data, for example a corpus of grammatical forms; in other cases the aim is to simulate general processes of language use and structuration, as in the growing field of artificial intelligence (for discussion of its potential and pitfalls, see Hofstadter and Dennett, 1982). The computer as a heuristic model may also be seen to underlie the influential transformational-generative grammar above. Mostly, however, the computer has not been central to the development of humanistic methodologies proper. This is, of course, in contrast to the social sciences, where also qualitative studies have

26 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

recently begun to employ computer software for the organization and categorization of data (see Chapter 2).

The second development of the Saussurean framework has elaborated his vision of a science of signs. Including complex modes of communication and culture among the objects of analysis, semiology of the 1960s and later has produced a rearticulation of disciplines such as anthropology and literary criticism (for a survey, see Culler, 1975). Much work over the last three decades has been devoted to interpreting societies and cultures as discourses, both in industrial (Barthes, 1973) and non-industrialized regions (Lévi-Strauss, 1963). The ambition of some studies has been to discover deep structures not just of language, but of social mythologies and, indeed, of human culture. This, further, led to the construction of models of the matrices which could be seen to underlie narratives—models which, while often based on standardized genres, appeared to be applicable to a range of textual forms (Greimas, 1966; Jakobson, 1960; Todorov, 1968). Studies in this tradition were also among the first to include popular culture in the area of inquiry, not least advertising and television (Barthes, 1973; Leymore, 1975; Silverstone, 1981; see also Chapter 6 in this volume).

A final extrapolation of structuralist principles has been made in studies of social institutions. Beyond noting the discursive structure of social life and historical change, these studies have explained capitalist social structures—their wholeness, transformation, and self- regulation—with reference to the constituent types of institutions and practices (Althusser, 1965). This approach is comparable, in some respects, to functionalism as developed in the social sciences. The conceptual points of contact between structuralism and traditional sociology have been noted, critiqued, and elaborated in recent work on the relationship between social structure and agency (Giddens, 1984).

The status and legacy of semiology are still uncertain. On the one hand, some textbooks, while recognizing certain distinctive features, tend to include semiology as one of the procedures in the toolbox of mass communication research (McQuail, 1987:185–90). On the other hand, it can be argued that the constructivist epistemology of semiology, along with an implicit hermeneutics of interpretation, is incompatible with the analytical framework of social-scientific communication research (Carey, 1989: Ch. 3).

For the further development of mass communication research,

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which requires a theory of signs and discourse, it is important to distinguish semiology from semiotics. Semiology grows out of the logos tradition in the West. While purporting to study formal, “objective” aspects of signs, semiological analyses frequently slide into an empathetic, introspective kind of understanding, which is similar to other hermeneutics. Indeed, the elementary sign, as defined by Saussure, consisting of signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept), recalls the classic dualisms from Greek philosophy through Christian metaphysics to the Cartesian worldview—the mind-matter, spirit-body, subject-object dyads. Truth and beauty, it is implied, may reside in the signified (the Word) as interpreted by a mind (the Spirit). By contrast, the material aspect of signs may be seen as a barrier or, at best, an indirect medium for the experience of “transcendental intimacy” (Heim, 1987:42) with reality, as noted also by the poststructuralist critique of the semiological and logos tradition. In the conclusion, I want to suggest that semiotics, as first articulated by Charles Sanders Peirce, represents an alternative to Saussurean semiology which avoids some of the latter’s epistemological pitfalls by categorizing signs as neither representation nor expression, but primarily as action, thus hinting at a social semiotics of the uses of signs in society.