Meaning Making What is the Rhetoric of an Image?

Lecture

Week 3

Andy Warhol

Documentary (10:32) Quotes & Work (2:52)

Art Babble (4:05) / Smart History (3:15)

Semiotics & the Rhetoric of Images

Rhetoric of the Image

• How an image (and its linguistic elements) produce signification – or meaning

• How an image provides particular arguments, discourses and ideologies

• How images are constructed toward a particular reading (encoding to decoding)

Semiotics of Advertising (6:32)

Ferdinand de Saussure

• Studies the signs and types of representation used by humans to express feelings, ideas, thoughts and ideologies.

Signified: a mental concept

Signifier: the verbal or image manifestation of the idea

Ferdinand de Saussure

• Signs are arbitrary

• Signs are relational

• Signs constitute our world

• Meaning lies in the interpretation of signs

• Meaning changes according to the context and the rules of language

Roland Barthes

• French Literary Theorist, Sociologist, Philosopher and Social Critic (1915-1980)

Semiotics

• Studies the signs and types of representation used by humans to express feelings, ideas, thoughts and ideologies.

• Study “texts” (can be images, words, or both)

• Text is an assemblage of signs (words, images, sounds) constructed and interpreted with reference to conventions of a genre and in particular medium.

Semiotics

Way to study (“read”) images …

• Denotation & Connotation

• Sign = signifier & signified

– Depends on social, historical and cultural context

– Depends on context of presentation

– Depends on viewers reception

Logos (2:03)

Barthes

Myths

Hidden set of rules and conventions through which meanings, which are specific to certain groups, are made to seem universal and given for a whole society. Second order or connotative signs that serve “Bourgeois Society”

Myth

• A form of language

• How language forms an alternative reality

• “Language object outside of reality”

• Using failure of language as tool in this process – excess of reality

Myth Construction

1. The Innoculation: disarming language used to advertise something. Acknowledge a small or accidental detail to mask larger problem (e.g., Army may be flawed, but …, Church)

2. Privation of History: remove an object from its place in history and reality, and thus remove its freedom. (Kitsch, Eternal)

3. Identification: sameness and the destruction of difference. (“Real American,” All men …)

Myth Construction

4. Tautology: defining like by like; meaningless argument that creates closure (e.g., “it is what it is”)

5. Neither-Norism: balance created by weighing two sides against each other. (nihilism)

6. Quantification of Quality: scientism, “cost of ticket and tears of actor”

7. The Statement of Fact: generalization and simplification (takes out of material reality)

Three Levels of Interpretation

• semantic: relationship between signs and the things to which they refer. Based on cultural ties and shared meaning. (meaning)

• syntactic: relation among signs in formal structures (rituals, occasions, trends)

• pragmatic: relation between signs and the effects they have on different people that use them (differential connotations)

Semiotics of Chocolate (3:18)

Rhetoric of the Image

1) Linguistic Messages: denotation & connotation

2) Signs of an image:

a) Linear or Discontinuous

b) Signifiers/Signifieds

c) Iconic Signs?

3) Necessary cultural knowledge

4) Codes

Presentation: reading the image

“Death of the Author”

• Meaning exists not only in production but reception of images

• “Author” & “Producer” Function

Presentation

Four Ways to Explore Images & Ideas

1. Representation

• “The signs that stand in for and take the place of something else”

• “To stand for; symbolize. To depict or portray subjects a viewer might recognize as a likeness.”

• How advertising, television and movies help define or reinforce stereotypes along the lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.

2. Ideology

A set of doctrines, beliefs, or ideals that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system which attempts to put experience of the world into some order. The result, particularly in Marxist thought, is a distortion of reality to maintain authority over it. Various applications of this sense of the word can be found in feminism and other types of critical activity, often very politically oriented.

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling idea: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling

intellectual force.”

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas

3. Interpellation

Louis Althusser (French Philosopher)

• Images “interpellate” users

– Images & media texts “hail” us

– Ideologies “hail” subjects and enlist them as their authors; hail views as individuals: “just for me”

• Paradox: member of social groups that shares codes & conventions that make image meaningful but also touches person individually

• Process by which ideology pre-defines individuals (constructs before they exist)

Interpellation: Group Activity

Way an ad/text draws you in as if it’s just for you

Watch: AT&T “You Will” Ads

Questions (for group)

What interpellation strategies are used here?

Are they effective?

Can you think of other strategies in ads/movies?

Think of three other examples

Interpellation

• How is the image personalized?

– Construct within the “You” of ad

– Questions

– Idealized future (or shared aspirations)

– Identifiable characters and situations

– Photographic/Filmic codes and conventions (close-up, point-of-view, over shoulder)

– Romantic fantasies of intimacy

4. Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

• “The political, economic, ideological and cultural power exerted by a dominant group over other groups”

• The creation of a “common sense” that supports the interests of the dominant class while seeming to benefit all

• Through “civil society” (media, schools, etc.)

Bell Hooks Part 1 Rap Music Madonna

Clip: "I'll Kill You"

How TV Ruined Your Life

Love: Part 1 (14:50)

Love: Part 2 (13:49)

Audience Agency

Negotiated Meaning

• Meaning is not inherent in images

• Product of a complex social interaction among image, views and context

• Decoding varies from one group and individual to the next

Viewer

• Different from the “audience” – a collection of lookers that are grouped together

• Treats individual as social category that emerges through practices of looking (agency)

• Looking is a multimodal activity

– Relational

– Social

Stuart Hall: Encoding/Decoding

“The ultimate Wall Street Occupier, calling on the 99% to band together and overthrow societal elites.”

Appropriation

• The use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work.

• Re-vision, re-interpret, variation, version, interpretation, proximation, supplement, increment, improvise, prequel, pastiche, parody, satire, etc.

• “cultural borrowing”

Forms of CounterHegemony

• Transcoding: e.g., queer, black is beautiful

• Bricolage: mode of adaption where commodities are put to a uses not intended or in ways that dislocate them normal context.

• Textual Poaching “Fan Culture”

• Appropriation: subcultures

– Signifying Practices: giving new meaning to commodities (create new sign)

Not Always Oppositional

• Fan Culture

• Hip Hop

• “Cool Chasers”

• Urban Outfitters

Art in Advertising: Worth 1000 Contest