Charles Sanders Pierce’s Semiotic Theory
1. Charles Sanders Pierce’s Semiotic Theory
Music video communicates messages and ideologies conveyed by the performers through audio and visual representation instead of becoming one of the musician‟s effective promotional tools. Similar like movie, music video also gives the artistic side behind its ideological and commercial force. MTV as the greatest and earliest media bringing various music videos to audiences has proven it, as Peeters also points out:
The fact that MTV has become the ultimate forum on which youth culture is both expressed and constructed has transformed the music video not only into the most effective tool for promotion within the music industry, but also into a powerful ideological force.(Peeters, 2004: 2)
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To understand the meaning of the medium, it is important to study and interpret the various signs within it. Generally, the signs can be taken form of words, images, sounds, odors, flavors, acts or objects, et cetera. Charles Sanders Peirce, an American philosopher, states that a sign is something that represents something else (Peirce in Chandler, 2009: 3). The assemblage of signs, which are constructed and interpreted with reference to the conventions associated with a genre and in a particular medium of communication, often forms a text which is employed in semiotics analysis.
Peirce creates a triadic model of sign creating which consists of three major elements correlating each other: Representamen (the form which the sign is taken which usually comes from unnecessary material), Interpretant (not an interpreter but rather the sense made of the sign) and Object (to which the sign refers). As he also has pointed out:
'A sign... [in the form of a representamen] is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen' (ibid: 27).
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According to him, the object is considered as an instance of „firstness‟, the representamen as an instance of „secondness‟ and the interpretant as an instance of „thirdness‟ (ibid: 28). It is clearly noted that Peirce‟s representamen also functions as signifier while interpretant functions as signified. However, as the „firstness‟ the object or interpreter can determine the signs mode. Therefore, the interpretant is often influenced by the object as the interpreter. According to Peirce, the presence of the object between representamen and interpretant will create three modes of sign:
a. Symbol is a mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified but which is fundamentally arbitrary or purely conventional - so that the relationship must be learnt.
b. Icon is a mode in which the signifier is perceived as resembling or imitating the signified (recognizably looking, sounding, feeling, tasting or smelling like it) - being similar in possessing some of its qualities.
c. Index is a mode in which the signifier is not arbitrary but is directly connected in some way (physically or causally) to the signified.