Illustrating "The Basics"

As I moved through the middle part of Chandler I found it necessary to build upon the visual structures we used for understanding Saussure and Peirce in chapter one. To avoid hostility the hostility of my classmates I will abandon the example of the banana for one of Barthes that Chandler picks up: an image of a child.

The image of a child denotes a literal meaning of 'child' (the ":" is intended to represent "the meaning of" but I forgot to include it in the later signs of the example) as understood by an existing knowledge of what 'childness' is.

Chapter four, "Challenging the Literal,"examines the rhetorical tropes of the deeper and different figurative meanings of metaphor, metonym, synecdoche and irony. I hope to get to irony next, but this is a beginning with Chandler's use of Barthes' cultural myth. The figurative figure is in red and represents a second level of the signification model. The signifier doesn't change but the connotative lens does and so thus does the signified. The sign is simultaneously the same and different: the sign is still the meaning of child and the image is the same signifier, but the cultural lens shifts the signified from literal to figurative and "functions ideologically to justify dominant assumptions about the status of children in society" (144).

This is an example of a signifier of multiple signs with multiple literal signifieds. The signified can be understood simultaneously as 'child' and 'boy' with separate signifieds. In the representation the signified 'boyness' is not on the plane with 'childness' and 'innocence' because 'boyness' can be more distinctly contrary to innocence than childness can (see "The Semiotic Square" (106-7)).

In trying to figure out what else about the signifier points to 'child' and 'boy' I identified the disproportionately large head and then the propeller hat. The hat is a single sign with multiple signified because it represents both 'childness' and 'boyness.'

Something else was helping me identify the image as a boy but it took some time to figure it out. Chandler points to Saussure and quotes William James as observing that "the absence of an item is a determinant of our representations quite as positive as its presence can ever be" (quoted 88). The fact that the figure is not wearing a dress (or skirt) is significant. This also fits into Greimas' semiotic square as a not S2, if boy=S1 and girl=S2.

This exercise can be performed again and again replacing Barthes' cultural ideology. The literal sign might remain the same, but the figurative signified will change. Through a 19th-century Industrialist lens it might be 'cheap labor' and through a 21st-century Technologist lens it could be 'simplicity of interface.' I don't mean to imply that there are limited figurative signifieds for any given signifier; in fact, Eco warns against the possibility of unlimited semiosis that can occur in over-interpretation.