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.
1 Aust J. Cultural Studies I: May 83
2 Aust J. Cultural Studies I: May 83
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
3 Aust J. Cultural Studies I: May 83
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 "
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
4 Aust J. Cultural Studies I: May 83
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:
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.
5 Aust J. Cultural Studies I: May 83
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:
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
6 Aust J. Cultural Studies I: May 83
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)
7
Aust J. Cultural Studies I: May 83
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:
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.
8
Aust J. Cultural Studies I: May 83
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
9
Aust J. Cultural Studies I: May 83
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.
10
Aust J. Cultural Studies I: May 83
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
