Communication Theory - S. Jones

Four Candles : Two Ronnies

Meaning isn't guaranteed with everything that you say, it can be easily misunderstood or misinterpreted.

Defining Semitics- Ferdinand Saussure:

• A study of signs and systems
• Meaning isn't inherent within a sign
• He separated the act of speech from language
• Semiotics is a meta-language - a language about a language
• Signs mean what they do because there is an agreement about what they mean.

Could symbolise go, grass or cold/water

The colour along with a visual clue, the colour means something completely different.

• Meaning is established in differentiation
• Rather than establishing what it is we establish what it is not

Roland Barthes warns that denotation is NOT literal meaning but is naturalised through language

Structuralism is the term used for the broad application of semiotics/ semiology to a range of sign systems.

Barthes analyses a range of visual media in terms of their signifying structures: The Photographic Message, The Rhetoric of the image, The Third meaning.

Post structuralism: while structuralism focusses on the structures of meaning in any signifying system, post structuralism focusses on the precarious nature of meaning, it is cynical of meaning.

Post structuralists aim to deconstruct assumptions and emphasise the plurality of interpretation.

Part of post structuralism is Differance:

ART THOUGHTZ: Post-Structuralism from Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo.

Deconstruction

Where structuralism identified structures of signification, Deconstruction aims to dismantle the structures - identifying gaps and instabilities.

Intertextuality:

e.g, Scary Movie only exists due to all the things that it references that have gone before it.

Simulacra

Jean Baudrillard introduces the idea of hyperreality in representation: a copy with an original.

We have lost the ability to recognise the difference between nature and artificiality.