August 3, 2009
Saussurean semiotics is based on a linguistic model but not everyone agrees that it is productive to treat photography and film, for instance, as 'languages'. However, it suggests that we need to learn to 'read' (interpret) the formal codes of photographic and audio-visual media as well as the resemblance of their images to observable reality which is not merely a matter of cultural convention.
It introduces the idea that we can interpret pictures in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a picture, and a vertical axis, which connects the picture to other pictures. This counters the deeply entrenched view in literary and aesthetic thought which emphasized the uniqueness of both texts/art works and authors. The ideology of individualism (with its associated concepts of authorial 'originality', 'creativity' and 'expressiveness') reached its peak in Romanticism but it still dominates popular discourse.
The flaw here from the perspective of structuralists and poststructuralists alike is that we are ('always already' positioned by semiotic systems - and most clearly by language and the world of visual signs.To communicate or express ourselves as photographers or writers we must utilize existing concepts and literary or visual conventions. Consequently, whilst our intention to communicate and what we intend to communicate are both important to us as individuals, meaning cannot be reduced to authorial 'intention'.
Writing or photography does not involve an instrumental process of recording pre-formed thoughts and feelings (working from signified to signifier) but is a matter of working with the signifiers ; working, as it were, to mix photos or to counter the ones with the others. Texts and photos come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through the sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or - if the text or photo is brand-new - through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions.
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