[Images are tba.]
Readers of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies shouldn't need convincing that there is a single enterprise that can be labelled "cultural studies" which has a fundamental coherence and importance, whether Australia is the object or only the unwary host of such a study. On the one hand the scope of this enterprise needs insisting on. "Culture", here, as in social anthropological uses of the term, refers to both material and intellectual forms, habits and actions as well as artefacts. Included within the ambit of such a study is a concern stemming from Marx with the social basis and functions of cultural forms, their roots in a material existence characterized by work and struggle, so that cultural studies is basically a critical enterprise that connects with the efforts of many people, from many walks of life, from many academic domains, to understand and change the society they live in: including Australia, the so-called Lucky Country. But what gives the hope of coherence to this enterprise is not a critical orientation to society, (though that helps). The common ground, the indispensible basis for declaring that "culture" in its various forms is a single object of study, is the conception of cultural forms as structures of meaning with specific functions in the social process. Another way of putting it is to see culture as a set of texts of different kinds — verbal and nonverbal texts, lived texts and texts for consumption — and to see cultural studies as a powerful discipline for reading such texts, defining the codes, articulating and critiquing meanings and functions. Cultural studies is semiotics. (cf Hodge, 1983).
In this article we want to sketch out the form of a semiotics which can carry out such a task. We call it functional semiotics in two senses: one, that it does do work, the other that it takes account of functions as well as structures of meaning. Saussure projected semiotics/semiology as the science that studies "the life of signs within society", a definition which places processes at the centre, but he bequeathed his successors a narrow and exclusive concern with structure. Structuralist semiotics has some notable achievements which have given the whole enterprise credibility, but it has also been one-sided, unable to cope equally well with functions, with processes, with change and interaction and struggle. Our task is to see those achievements in a more abstract and powerful way, to establish a science as simple and systematic as structuralist semiotics but without the limitations, with a wider scope adequate to the task that it is called upon to perform. The following summary form will draw on one main example for illustrative purposes: the attached front page story from The Australian (24 September 1982).
II
We start with a number of axioms. First, all meaning is expressed in syn-tagmatic forms consisting of at least two elements chained in space and/or time.
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[image]
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Outside syntagms, there is no meaning. Second, the elements brought together in syntagms gain their value from paradigmatic structures that assign them at least one meaning. Relations in the paradigmatic plane exist outside space and time, although they organize texts or discourse. All meaning comes into existence through the interaction of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic planes. Semiotic structures are syntagmatic or paradigmatic, or both, though meaning finds expression only in syntagmatic structures.
To illustrate, we will take the picture plus its caption "Lee Perry...$1-million suit". These two together form a syntagmatic unit, consisting of those two elements, picture plus caption. Each of the two elements refers to a different code — one is visual, the other verbal. It is clear that functional semiotics can't accept the conventional wisdom that divides the semiotic realm into distinct relatively autonomous codes that can be analysed essentially in their own terms. Indeed the conjunction of pictures and verbal text as in this case is a feature of texts for young children and not only for advanced semioticians. The theory then must project such a form as quite basic, and not as a late stage in the semiotic process. In other words communication in practice is normally polyhodic: it proceeds via more than one channel.
Essentially the syntagm asserts a relation between the picture and the caption. This is like one of the two primary categories of syntagm we projected in Language as Ideology, the "relational" (Kress and Hodge, 1979; Chapters 1 and 3). The other major type we labelled "actional", since it refers to entities acting in space or time. These two syntagmatic types realize on the syntagmatic plane the two basic kinds of relationship which as we have said above are the basis of all meaning and thought: relations in time and space, and relations of categories. It is important to insist, at this point, that relationships between categories should not be privileged as "thought", or that relations in time and space seen as "reality" in any unmediated sense. Both the categories and the relationships posited between them are products of "thought", not simply of "reality" itself.
The picture plus the caption can be taken in at a single glance. It can also be read serially, picture then caption. If it is perceived at a single glance, we can term it a synchronic syntagm. If it is decoded serially, we can call it a diachronic syntagm. These two primary modes of existence of syntagms, in space and in time, may seem irrelevant for decoding purposes, since the syntagmatic structure itself, and hence the meaning, seems to be equivalent. In this case, the synchronic "Lee Perry...$1-million suit" does seem to be exactly equivalent to the diachronic form of that text as spoken. The written text that follows cannot be decoded as a synchronic syntagm, though for a reader it is more synchronic than it would be for a hearer. The distinction can be a relative one, which may be different for different decoders. Why mention it then?
The major reason is that the distinction foregrounds different kinds of acts of reading, different decoding strategies which have different performance constraints and different consequences in practice which a functional semiotics will not want to ignore. Synchronic syntagms fuse: diachronic syntagms are analytic. But diachronic syntagms depend on memory, so that these relationships are
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always abstract and more easily dissoluble. Synchronic syntagms release the burden of memory, especially extended synchronic syntagms (those which remain available for inspection). To offer a content in one of these types of syntagm, then, is itself a complex declaration about readers and their relationship to both text and action. Barthes contrasted writing and speech, one outside time, the other as process, inside time. To write, then, is to situate the reader — not absolutely but coercively. The same is true of the use of pictures, as here. In this page of The Australian, the story about Lee Perry carries a picture, while the story alongside it, under the headline "Israel tense as row over killings rages", has no picture. The fact that the story is in a more diachronic mode is a classification of the subject matter and of the status of its reading and hence, of the reader, or more precisely, the projected reader, who may be a kind of reader or an aspect of a kind of reader. But even within the written mode there are differences in this dimension. The headline, for instance, transforms the content of the article from an extended diachronic mode to almost a synchronic syntagm. (Popular newspapers, typically, tend more towards the synchronic mode: the headlines are shorter, pictures are used more frequently and are a larger part of the text, and paragraphs tend to consist of single — though complex — sentences.)
III
In considering structures qualitatively, there are two determining dimensions: degree of cohesion, and degree of order. In sociology, Durkheim posited these as the crucial dimensions of social structure. The same criteria apply to semiotic structures, which means that social and semiotic structures are not only commensurate, but one can express the other, i.e., the form of a semiotic structure can signify a form of social structure.
"Cohesion" is a relative quality. It is about the nature of the syntagmatic bond. A syntagmatic structure is typically composed of a number of syntagms, with different bond-strengths, ranging from a high degree of cohesion to high degree of boundary-maintenance. For verbal language, Halliday and Hasan have given the fullest account of cohesion in English, and Bernstein and Douglas have studied different codes in terms of this dimension.
Different parts of this text are bonded to different degrees. "Lee Perry", for instance, is closely conjoined, fusing into a single unit, a name. But this picture plus the accompanying story is next to the story about Israel, and immediately below an article entitled "No plan to stop tax cheats leaving, says Howard". The stories refer to events in three different countries, and two different domains of life, public and private. The juxtaposition of the three signifies compatibility, a kind of cohesion. There is one marker of difference — each is in a different type-face. There is also a line drawn round each story. So boundaries are signified, but not strongly. Yet this is not a cohesive text. The content of each story is not related, and it is separated by powerful syntagmatic and paradigmatic divisions: the oppositions between Australian and foreign, and between public and private (and "news" and "human interest" stories). That is, the text is both low on cohesion and has relatively low boundaries. The discohesion can be seen in the surface syntagmatic structure, but it is important to insist that it does not exist only there. The major evidence of discohesion comes from a recognition
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of the paradigmatic categories at issue. These categories are not in the text, so the text can not demonstrate their existence. They exist only in minds that produce and consume the text, and the kind of evidence we need for them is therefore quite different.
Order is the other dimension of structures: that is the degree of subordination of elements to other elements in structures. Here the two extremes of structures displaying order are hypotactic structures (involving subordination) and paratactic structures (parallel structures about subordination). Durkheim's "organic solidarity" refers to hypotactic social structures, and "mechanical solidarity" refers to more paratactic structures. In linguistics, tree-diagrams are a common way of representing hypotactic structures. To illustrate, we can take "Dr Lee Perry", which has the structure:
[image]
This is a minimal hypotactic structure, but a hypotactic structure nonetheless, in contrast to the name that appears under the photograph: "Lee Perry" (or the relationship between picture and caption). The picture itself, however, is a hypotactic structure, with subject, foreground (a blurred head) and background (a blackboard, on which can be read parts of some words). Quality papers (such as The Australian aspires to be) tend to have photographs with more content, more hypotactically organized, compared to popular newspapers. They also use a verbal code which is more strongly hypotactic at the level of the text with paragraphs typically of more than one sentence. (Interestingly this distinction does not operate at or below the level of the sentence). (cf Kress, 1983.) Hypotactic structure is one of the features of what Bernstein calls "elaborated code", which he claims is correlated with people of high status, and high status occasions1. In spite of the controversy that has been generated about Bernstein's terms, it is abundantly clear that in English and many other cultures, strongly hypotactic verbal structures signify power and status. The same has been found with structures of song by Lomax (1978). That is, forms of code which utilize strongly hypotactic textual structures often signify strongly hypotactic social structures (in which the dominant are especially privileged) and are normally used to express complicity with those structures. This feature is a precise and subtle signifier, capable of expressing fine distinctions of content, as here with the distinction between the picture (and the "human interest" story) and the rest of the front page; at the same time it is capable of giving an overall impression of quality to the paper as a whole.
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Paradigmatic structures have the same qualities as syntagmatic structures, and can have strong or weak boundaries, and be cohesive or not, hypotactic or paratactic. In their role as paradigmatic structures assigning meaning to syn-tagms, they will be implicit and invisible, but they are accessible to consciousness and can be transformed into syntagms — or reflected In syntagmatic structures The categories of item that were implicit in the front page — "Australia", "the world" and "features" - are explicit, along with others, in the rest of the paper where they are kept distinct and given labels. Other classes of news that are signalled prominently are the Editorial, "the arts", the "financial" section and the "sports" section. But a list of items does not give a structure, and paradigmatic structures usually have to be reconstructed. In this case, the underlying structure we project has the following form:
[image]
This is a strongly hypotactic structure, with low boundaries (not only can the front page include different classes of item, but an item can have more than one such feature) but weak cohesion. These, of course, are only relative judgments, with the basis of the comparison left unstated. All that we have here is a signifier of social relations which is, however, a strongly motivated one, which is therefore very revealing about the defining social and cognitive structures of the qrouD concerned.
IV
Along with "syntagmatic" and "paradigmatic", the third basic term for functional semiotics is "transformation2. A transformation is an alteration of a structure. Since there are syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures there are two classes of transformation, syntagmatic and paradigmatic transformations The full range of semiotic forms is produced by transformations of syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures, transformations which modify in a small number of ways: adding, subtracting, or displacing elements or structures. Chomskyan linguistics has looked essentially at syntagmatic transformations in verbal
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language, (1957, 1965) Freud's account of dreamwork, though earlier, was semiotically more comprehensive, more powerful, and it included paradigmatic as well as syntagmatic transformations3. Transformation of either type of structure is the precondition for "overdetermination" a concept which Freud developed to describe the situation which is as common in waking life as in dreams, where a surface form is the point of intersection of more than one structure. This situation often gives rise to ambiguity, but a more precise term is polytaxis, multiple structuration. Generally, the structure will be dominant or one privileged, by context or by its intended readership, and hence one meaning will be obvious.
In the illustrative text there is one clear example of polytaxis. The caption "Lee Perry...$1-million suit", underneath the picture of a woman wearing what could be a kind of suit, invites us to identify that suit as worth $1 million, appearances to the contrary. The headline below, which explains that she will "drop" this suit in exchange for a Chancellor's sperm, confirms this lewd reading (also suggesting that a "swap" will be made — he'll get this very desirable garment in exchange for his sperm). Of course the facilitated reading is that this is a law-suit, as the article explains.ln other contexts and with a different readership, the "nudge-nudge, say-no-more" meaning would be the most facilitated, as for instance in many tabloids, such as page 3 of the English Sun, or some of its Australian counterparts. Here the joke works through a pun on two meanings of "suit", but it is an example of polytaxis. The two dots in the caption mark the site of a deletion: either "wears" or "files". In fact, of course, it's probably both terms in this instance: and there may have been more (e.g. "drops"; "swaps", and some others that we don't have reason for guessing at). The polytactic structure of the surface form is, we project, determined by at least two and possibly more structures.
A number of general propositions about such transformations are as follows:
(i) The general formula for a transformation is given in terms of at least two structures: structure A => structure B
(ii) Where structure B is a surface form, structure A is a hypothetical construct, or set of constructs
(iii) The full meaning of structure B is an attempted reconstruction of the transformational process, i.e., it includes both structure A and the hypothesis that it has been transformed
(iv) Every transformation is itself a kind of syntagmatic structure, either a syn-chronic syntagm or a diachronic syntagm
(v) Insofar as a syntagm is read as the product of a transformation, then as a syntagmatic form it is a type of actional. A full interpretation of it reconstructs a hypothetical agent. The full formula, then, is
X transforms (structure A ^ structure B)
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This is true even though in many instances it is difficult to assign or identify the agent who might be responsible for the process. In the present example, we don't know whether the agent of the deletion is on the staff of The Australian, or is someone in Boston, or anywhere! This is part of the process of deletion and mystification of structures of agency that is characteristic of the mass media (as indeed of much human interaction), in Australia or elsewhere.
Paradigmatic transformations follow the same rules, but there are some differences. One is the generative power of paradigmatic transformations. The schema of categories of items we looked at earlier, for instance, can be seen as generated by a series of transformations, as follows:
[image]
Following the principles for decoding transformations, we can assert that the meaning of many categories is a set of transformations, with their transformational history. So the single category "world(news"), for instance, is understood as distinguishing "the world" from Australia, and therefore establishing Australia as a discrete entity: as opposing "news" (short-term syntagms) from anything like history (longer term syntagms): and as opposing the sphere of public life, where decisions and events that matter occur, from private life, which is barely distinguishable from fiction. This transformational sequence, with the assumptions it is making about social life, is part of the meaning of each classification category, whether explicit (a label) or implicit (activated in the decoding process). The structure, and the meaning of the structure (the principles which generate it) are part of the content of the newspaper, part of the ideology it transmits. The question of agency then arises. Whose transformations are these? One editor's? A committee's? Australian society's? The English language's? The human race? The mystification of agency allows a blurring of claims, and the possibility of attributing what may be a fairly specific agency to an authority so nebulous and powerful as to be beyond challenge. That final piece of ideological work is, of course, as attractive to ideologues as it is common in most human interaction.
V
The theory so far has been largely structuralist (though we have treated transformations as processes). How do we account for processes, functions, contexts, signification as a process, semiosis as action? What we propose to do is to integrate all these by translating them into the basic terms of the general theory. Semiosis can be described entirely in terms of syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures, plus transformational operations. Jakobson's model (1960) for the components of communication, slightly adapted, can be used as a starting point.
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[image]
This diagram does not include "code", which will be dealt with in the next section.
We will start with two sets of relationship: message-referent, and sender-receiver. The first is termed modality in traditional linguistic discussions (Halli-day, 1976; Kress and Hodge 1979). In verbal language, there are markers of this relationship in sentences, e.g. the auxiliary "may" affects the modality (orientation to referent) of the sentence "I fight tonight". Tense is another dimension of modality in English (Kress and Hodge, 1979, chapter 7.). Although such markers may appear as single elements in the message itself, in fact they are part of a relational syntagm which includes the rest of the message, and which signifies a relation between the two syntagms, the message and the referent. But semiotic forms can have a clearly understood modality even without markers.'The moon is made of green cheese", for instance, would be regarded as a joke statement without any overt modality markers, especially if the speaker was known to be a "rational person", a full member of the community, who couldn't possibly believe such nonsense and remain in touch with the community. Similarly, Dr Perry must be mad if she thinks she can get away with this law suit — or so a normal member of The Australian community can be expected to judge.
This link between modality and systems of organizing social relations turns out to be a general one in semiotic systems. Relations of power or of solidarity can be expressed as relations of modality, and vice versa. So a cohesive modality-syntagm can (ambiguously) express intimacy between sender and receiver. By cultural agreement, in contemporary society, pictures signify a closer relation between message and reality than words do. So it is a part of the effect of the Perry story that it is accompanied by the large picture, though this establishes only the reality of someone called Lee Perry, not her bizarre suit. This is The Australian relaxing, allowing itself a nudge-nudge wink-wink with its otherwise upright and public-minded readership. A kind of modality, then, coercively, ambiguously and misleadingly carries powerful images of social relations. Popular papers use more pictorial forms, and higher modalities generally, than "serious" papers, even though there is a less genuinely close relationship between the readership of a mass circulation paper and its editorial staff. The ultimate overt modality is negation, and to deny statements — as Dr Atkinson is reported as doing — is at the same time to deny Dr Perry's social importance. The Australian uses modality very effectively to endorse this, by adding a "suitnote". The game
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with "footnote", the expected term, distances the paper from what follows. The reader knows that the statement that follows — that Dr Perry is an instructor in interpersonal relations — is a joke, and Dr Perry herself is a joke, so natural is the transfer from modality as judgements about the truth of messages to modality as judgement about people.
The context of this story constitutes a large set of syntagmatic structures, which are synchronic and diachronic relational syntagms. Above and beside this story are other stories about public life. This story plus these others constitutes a single syntagm, the juxtaposition of public and private. The context of the whole is the front page of The Australian, which is part of a larger structure, organizing the paper as a whole. The page, displayed with a set of other papers in a newsagent, constitutes another syntagm which declares larger paradigmatic structures more or less transparently. Each of these structures not only carries a meaning of itself, but also affects the meanings assigned to the individual items. For Lee Perry to be causing trouble to a Chancellor on the front page of The Australian with her trivial suit, makes her seem more ridiculous, especially alongside the "row" in Israel. But there's a similar effect the other way, because each is part of the context of the other, and the word "row", plus the presence of the Perry story, carry a pejorative judgment on the Israelis (whose action in Beirut has been disapproved of by The Australian's editorial)4. Similarly, the headline to the left of the story, "Hayden links PS investigator with tax cheats", controversially asserting another indecent liaison, colours and is coloured by the Perry story.
As well as spatial syntagms, there are temporal ones. This story appeared on Friday 24th September 1982, connected to a void before, and a void afterwards. No reader is expected to have heard of Dr Perry or her Chancellor, and no one expects to hear any more afterwards — unlike Israel, and Hayden, and "tax cheats", who have a history, and a future, which is part of their meaning.
Lastly, the meaning of the piece is also determined by the syntagm which relates sender, message and received in an actional syntagm which is its functional meaning: namely what this message is doing in a transaction between sender and receiver. "Speech act" theory and "functional theories" deal with essentially the same phenomena, and have been valuable for semiotics precisely because they insist on the importance of these dimensions of communication. But to consider these exchanges as syntagmatic structures is inherently a more powerful way of looking at this aspect of communication, since it allows the meanings at issue to be described precisely and subtly in terms that are commensurable with other meanings. The actional syntagms can be described purely in terms of the relevant paradigmatic categories that assign meaning to components of the syntagmatic form. Typologies of functions (for instance, those of Buhler, 1936, or Halliday, 1976) are a second order reduction of the range of types projected by syntagmatic and paradigmatic rules. Speech act theory concentrates on the conditions which govern those of utterances so that they can function as speech acts, without being able to see those conditions as themselves meanings, part of a general meaning process.
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Situating the Perry article in a speech exchange, we can see it function in at least two directions: with the Sender as agent acting on the reader in some way and with the Receiver as agent able to read or not, buy or not and most significantly, actively engaged in the process of reconstructuring the text in terms quite specific to a given reader. That is, the message is the site of a process of struggle, of negotiation, each side of which needs to be seen as a syntagmatic form, or set of forms.
A functional syntagm is normally implicit. It exists as a hypothesis about the whole transaction, which senders or receivers have and which they may not agree on. This may make the concept seem unuseable for analytic purposes, but in fact the case is exactly the same as for the source structure in transformed structures, which is simply a hypothesis about what is meant by a message's overt form, a hypothesis governed by presumed shared knowledge of syntagmatic and paradigmatic rules and structures (including context as part of such structures). To illustrate the decoding process, we can take the Perry story. Part of the meaning of this story, we have suggested, is the implicit relational syntagm "Dr Perry is ridiculous". Knocking Lee Perry, however, is small game. That element in the syntagm is projected by a number of paradigmatic categories: female/male; academic/non-academic; American (foreign)/Australian to specify three pairs. The implicit relational syntagm can come to be about any or all of these by the relevant paradigmatic transformation of Lee Perry into the type itself. A further transformation can occur, whereby each category becomes equivalent to the other: so the conjunction of female, academic and American, as a relational syntagm itself, is part of what is ridiculous.
The ideological function of messages draws on this kind of transformational work. It also requires a complementary activity by the receiver. Althusser has called the process of the insertion of individuals into ideological schemata the "interpellation of the subject". The process of "interpellation" involves a paradigmatic transformation which moves in the opposite direction to the generalization of Dr Perry. It involves the recognition of how the schema applies to individuals known to oneself — including, of course, the self. "Interpellation of the self" is only one such transformation. A story such as the Perry story, sexist, anti-academic, xenophobic, invites the insertion precisely of others into the schema, and also a relationship of categories that specify the self to the categories that determine the original syntagm. The ridiculousness of a person who is female, academic and American affirms the superiority of someone who is male, non-academic and Australian. But there are different transformational options available: for instance, a female reader can ignore the category "female" (Dr Atkinson is both academic and American) and give the episode an anti-intellectual, xenophobic but not sexist reading. An American might not categorise the element as American. It's important to insist that "ideological content" is not a simple absolute, for any message, and the ideological effect is not an inexorable external force acting on helpless individuals. Messages can be constructed to facilitate certain ideological effects, and they can be analysed to project the kinds of content they are likely to acquire with individuals of different categories. But this content will only have force if the targets perform their own part, carrying out paradigmatic transformations that slot them in to the given structure. To be conditioned by ideology requires work, by the victim as well as
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the ideologue. We might then ask: why should they do this work unless they get paid for it? If so, how are they paid? But such questions take us too far afield for a simple introductory essay such as this.
VI
Thus far, the explication has taken no account of different levels of structure. The main example has been one story in one newspaper. But for the enterprise of cultural studies, it is essential to have a theory of levels, a theory of how structures at different levels relate to each other and how decoding should proceed. Without such theory, it becomes illegitimate to look for connections between individual and mass communication, between the meanings and behaviours of individuals and small groups and those of classes or nations, between semiotic microstructures (e.g. sentences, words, pictures) and macrostructures (e.g. texts, displays, discourse genres).
We take as a starting point the fact that levels are a function of hypotactic structures. A "level" is situated in relation to a hypotactic structure. Second, we then take it as axiomatic that every level can be described in terms of structures at that level: that is, in terms of relevant syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures. Both these structures are relevant to a structural description. We can call them vertical and horizontal structures respectively.
We will illustrate these with a linguistic example first. The sentence "Lee Perry....$1-million suit" can be analysed as follows:
[image]
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In this schema, we seem to go down or up along similar lines, but the bonds between different levels (or bands of level) are different. The boundary between "word" and "syllable", for instance, seems different in kind from, say, word and phrase. In Saussurian terms, "word" is part of the signified, while "syllable" part of the signifier, a relationship he declared to be arbitrary. That may not be totally true, but even so it reminds us to look for vertical ruptures or boundaries as well as vertical continuities.
Jakobson in a famous article (1960) talked of the poetic function as projection from the plane of selection to the plane of combination which in terms of the present theory would simply be the realization of paradigmatic structures in syntagmatic structures, the function of relational syntagms, which are not especially associated with poetry. But from what we can deduce from his examples, he was thinking of a rather different phenomenon. A good example would be alliteration in poetry — repetition of a phoneme or class of phonemes. Alliteration occurs in the texts we are looking at: e.g. "Woman will drop $1m suit in swap for Chancellor's sperm". We also have, here, an internal rhyme, "drop/swap". One thing that is happening here is that the text is being organized at a higher level (the sentence) by structures at a lower level (phonemic). This constitutes a disruption from below, across a major vertical boundary. We can label the process "diving". Not only organization but also (and inevitably) meaning is at issue. As Jakob-son has argued, phonemes have meaning at their own level, even though the meanings of words may ignore these lower-level meanings. In this case, the pattern of sibilants, plosives and semi-vowels, concentrated in the pivotal word "swap", carries its own crude, elemental and derogatory meaning.
When this occurs in poetry, it is regarded as a legitimate source of pleasure. In painting, the use of colour (e.g. Kandinsky), or in sculpture, shape and texture (e.g. Henry Moore) to express meaning, can be regarded as highly sophisticated. On the other hand, mimicry of accents — especially those of public figures — is normally derisive, and this is due to foregrounding the meanings carried by phonological substance (usually class attitudes) at the expense of the verbal, or higher-level meanings. Puns, which also exploit and focus on sound-qualities, to interfere with a well-formed autonomous verbal meaning, are "the lowest form of wit", childish; and dreams and symptoms are especially rich in them. This phenomenon is what Lacan calls "slippage" (the movement of signifiers to subvert signifieds). The notion of subversion is what is crucial. However, it doesn't happen only between signifieds and signifiers: it can happen between any two levels. For instance, the headline "Israel tense as row over killings rages" uses an adjective ("tense") and a noun ("row") appropriate to microstructural entities (individual people, small groups) in describing events at a macrolevel within a nation. Level-diving like this (use of concrete for abstract, personification, metonymy) is also common in poetry and other forms of art, and is similarly subversive in significance. The opposite movement can also occur: we label it "stretching". "Israel tense" is one example: it is not "Israel" which is tense, but sections of Israel, especially its law enforcement agencies and government. This is a common form: "The Government decides", "Australia acts".... where a category from a higher level is used for a component, employing a figure of speech that is the opposite of synechdoche. A similar form occurs with "A 36-year old Harvard University instructor, Dr Lee Perry, has filed a $1-million suit against a University
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Chancellor", where the individuals are subordinated to their role-descriptions which are terms in higher level structures. The story itself, as we showed, carries a shadow-narrative, which replaces the individuals with paradigmatic categories of a high degree of abstraction. Just as irruption from below is inherently subversive, so determination from above is inherently conformist, replicating and exaggerating the control of dominant macro-structures over micro-structures. A form of discourse (in any medium), a form of culture, which is characterized by "diving", is to that degree subversive: and cultural forms which "stretch" are complicit with ideologies of dominance.
Another way in which different levels can relate to each other is through homology. A hypotactic structure is generated by paradigmatic transformations, each further subdivision the result of the application of the same principle, or a transformation of it. So lower distinctions can express higher ones, by in effect reversing this transformational process. For instance, the categories male/female, academic/non-academic can be organized as follows:
[image]
Dr Perry is female, which can express a higher level category animal (irrational). But she is also an academic, which can be converted into the category intellect (= mind). That makes her anomalous, in terms that are commensurable. She is both strongly female (claiming to have seduced a Chancellor, no less, and so dedicated to the biological role of mother that she will go to any lengths to become one) and highly intellectual (both as academic, and as initiator of a complex law-suit). It is only at this higher level that she becomes a contradiction, rather than an aberration. The same process works with syntagmatic structures. If we take the same diagram of the caption-sentence, we can see that it is built on a single principle. Gestalt psychology sees a division between focus and field as primary for human perception. According to some linguists, the "information structure" of simple sentences falls into the two primary divisions, "theme" and "rheme", or "given" and "new", which are analogous, as is the traditional grammatical division into "subject" and "predicate". We can set out the structure of the article as follows:
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[image]
As a result of this kind of homology, either picture and caption or the headline on its own, can express the content of the whole. The front page stands in a similar relation to the rest of the paper, so that the same essential content can be read at very different levels. A better way of putting it is that a reader can have the sense that the same kind of content can be read at the different levels. Homology is always only a possibility, sometimes a desultory one; it is not a binding compact.
These considerations lead to the final problem for a functional semiotics: how to decide which level(s) to analyze, and how to aggregate analyses in such a way as to say something general and illuminating about media, culture and society. An essential basis for such judgments is a causal framework on the requisite scale. Various forms of Marxism have worked with a model of base (conditions of material life, economic and social forms) and superstructure (political, legal, cultural and ideological forms determined in some respects by the base). This model has been interpreted, by so-called "vulgar (materialistic) Marxism", as proposing the determination of thought by material life devoid of thought. A lot of the problems of this formulation disappear if we can rephrase the relationship in the terms argued in this essay. Structures of the base will be organized in space and time (syntagmatically) and in classes (paradigmatically) and other structures will be derived transformationally (as reflections, displacements, negations, inversions) from structures in the base (not necessarily the base as a monolith).
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The full meaning of cultural, ideological and even political forms, then, will be their derivation from prior forms, which far from being devoid of meaning (socially ascribed meanings) are their primary site. This structure, then, gives a set of levels of explanation (though not all explanations will aspire to the deepest level).
Indispensable, though, to a read-off of the social significance of cultural forms is a hypotactic structure in both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Diachronically for contemporary Western society we might have the categories history; epoch; generation; phase; year; season; week; day; event; minute; instant; subtemporal. In terms of this schema, the society projected by The Australian exists only for a day, and there is a radical temporal dis-continuity at this level: the Perry story being a case in point. But this is simply a cultural form, a media product, whose significance is as a transformation of the complex structures of temporality into the illusion of a semi-autonomous moment: the illusion that history, the diachronic, doesn't exist or is completely under control.
The relevant synchronic structures of society proceed from species (human v. non-human, or man v. nature) through racial or other supra-national blocs, to nations, to classes, to regions, to centres, to work-places, to kinship groups, to nuclear families, to individuals, to sub-individual psychic structures. The Australian declares its level in its title, but declarations are always to be scrutinized. The structure of the front page declares the lack of autonomy of this level, the penetration from above (world affairs — especially events in the Western bloc) and below (male-female relations that parody husband-wife relationships). Accidents, or crimes, are other events from lower levels that can appear on the front page of a paper like The Australian. So from an analysis of The Australian we can begin to project specific continuities and discontinuities in Australian society, and between Australia and the world. But the analysis only projects these as hypothetical structures that underly the surface forms and give them meaning, and explain their function. A functional semiotics will not ignore or defer consideration of these primary structures. On the contrary, it can only be functional insofar as it posits them as the key to the semiotic analysis of cultural forms, on every scale.
Bob Hodge is Associate Professor in the School of Human Communication at Murdoch University.
Gunther Kress is Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the New South Wales Institute of Technology.
FOOTNOTES
1. See Kress and Hodge, (1979) chapter 4; and Kress (1982), chapters 1, 2 & 5.
2. For understanding of the scope of this term see Kress and Hodge, 1979; 1981.
3. See Hodge, 1976.
4. For a similar discussion, see Kress, 1983, (a).
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New: 20 May, 1997 | Now: 13 November, 2019