engl 6310/7310 popular culture studies fall 2011 ph 300 m 240-540 dr. david lavery

ENGL 6310/7310 Popular Culture

Studies

Fall 2011PH 300

M 240-540Dr. David Lavery

ENGL 6310/7310 Popular Culture

Studies

Fall 2011PH 300

M 240-540Dr. David Lavery

Popular Culture StudiesPopular Culture Studies

Two Moments from the Secret History of Semiotics . . .


Semiotics

Semiotics

http://davidlavery.net/Writings/Meme_and_the_Seme.pdf


Semiotics“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”

(1.1; 13:13-15:40)


SemioticsPopular Culture StudiesPopular Culture Studies

Semiotics

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Swiss Linguist

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). American Philosopher

The Co-Inventors/Discoverers of Semiology/Semiotics


Semiotics

“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

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.


Semiotics

DENOTATION. The literal meaning of an expression. The first order of signification. A photograph of Barack Obama denotes (is) Barack Obama.


Semiotics

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.


Semiotics

DISCOURSE. 1) How a STORY is told; an aspect of NARRATIVE distinguishable from STORY; the expression plane of narrative as opposed to its content plane; the narrating as opposed to the narrated. 2) Sometimes used as roughly equivalent synonym for text, to refer to any sampling of verbal/non-verbal exchange/conversation singled out for critical study; for example: feminist discourse, academic discourse, sports discourse, cinematic discourse, etc.


Semiotics

FORMULA. A customary, prefabricated, conventional style of plot / imagery / setting, etc. routinely/conventionally followed by an author/artist. Most genre films follow formulae.


Semiotics

ICON. In Peirce’s semiotics, a sign which represents through resemblance to the signified.


Semiotics

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.


Semiotics

IDEOLOGY. A relatively coherent system of values, beliefs, or ideas shared by a social group and often taken for granted as natural or inherently true.


Semiotics

INDEX. In Peirce's semiotics identifies a sign which has been acted upon by the signifier: symptoms of diseases, weathervanes, barometers, photographs.


Semiotics

INTERTEXTUALITY. The tendency–typical of postmodernism–of texts not merely to allude to other texts but to depend upon the similarities, differences, and contrasts between texts in order to establish their own signification.


Semiotics

MOTIF. An element–incident, device, reference, formula–which recurs frequently in a work or works.


Semiotics

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

PARADIGM/PARADIGMATIC. When the significance of a sign depends upon its relationship with potential, as opposed to actual, similar signs.


Semiotics

SYNTAGM/SYNTAGMATIC. When the significance of a sign depends the signs that precede or follow it. An "ordering of signs, a rule-governed combination of signs in sequence" (Seiter).


Semiotics

PASTICHE. Describes a work of art made up almost entirely of assembled bits and pieces from other works. (According to Frederic Jamieson, the characteristic form of expression in postmodernism.)


Semiotics

SELF-REFERENTIALITY. The tendency of a work of art to become self-conscious, to call attention to itself–its conventions, structure, signification–as part of its own discourse.


Semiotics

SEMIOCLASM. The sudden destruction—implosion/explosion—of a sign, sometimes resulting in its complete rewriting.


Semiotics

SEMIOSIS. The ungoing development over time of the meaning of a sign.


Semiotics

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.


Semiotics

SYMBOL. In Peirce’s semiotics, a sign whose relationship with the signified is established through convention.


Semiotics

TEXT. Any division of discourse–a poem, a painting, an advertisement, a music video, a television program or all the episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.


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.


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)


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.


Semiotics

More than just seven brave men and women and a billion-dollar 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).


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 post-Challenger 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.


Semiotics

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.


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.


SemioticsSemiotics

“The scheme of things [Wheelis writes] is a system of order. Beginning as our view of the world, it finally becomes our world. We live within the space defined by its coordinates. It is self-evidently true, is accepted so naturally and automatically that one is not aware of an act of acceptance having taken place. It comes with one's mother's milk, is chanted in school, proclaimed from the White House, insinuated by television, validated at Harvard. Like the air we breathe, the scheme of things disappears, becomes simply reality, the way things are. It is the lie necessary to life. The world as it exists beyond that scheme becomes vague, irrelevant, largely unperceived, finally nonexistent. . . .”Allen Wheelis, The Scheme of Things


engl 6310/7310 popular culture studies fall 2011 ph 300 m 240-540 dr. david lavery

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