Utility of Semiotcs

The idea of semiotics starts from the consideration that nothing referred to human experience can be considered as pure and im-mediated.

This thought, already supported by Hegel and the historics, due to the presence of our culture and historic sense which inevitably become filters for our experience, has been strengthened by Freud's studies on human psyche in the early 1900.

As a matter of fact if we consider how much powerful our subconscious is, when Barthes talks about “second order” of signs, this point appears as unavoidable.

The human being, in his experience, absorbs infinite informations in two ways: in a conscious way -first order- and in a subconscious way -second order-.

It's here, in this second order, that semiotics works: it makes explicit what is implicit in a certain language; semiotics studies both verbal and non-verbal language.

Barthes starts form Saussure's thoughts about verbal language and elaborate this considerations applying them in the analysis of visual language.

The most Saussure's influential idea in Barthes' theory is that language is not just representation of reality, it is not just a label, but it does expand reality.

Indeed the sign, composed of signifier and signified, is arbitrary: it depends on the signifier that is indissolubly linked to culture and society.

If we consider this photo of Avedon's father, a photo taken when the subject was sick and next to his death, we can notice that he's wearing a suit. This garment in western society is a sign of elegance, high society, respect and related to a certain type of iconography. If we take the same garment in a different society with a different story and a different culture, such as eastern society, the sign changes because the signifier has changed. It has lost its value and it's a normal garment, or better, it's a strange garment, without the old connotation: it's something foreign, that could also be understood as potentially dangerous or even ridiculous and debilitating.

Therefore, Avedon uses this iconography of elegance and presence to represent his father and his feeling about him: if we consider the photo in terms of denotation and connotation, what Barthes says is clear.

In the whole world what the viewer can see is a photo of an old man, sad and tired -denotation- but what we, as european, can see is a dominant figure, strong, monolithic and elegant also in his old age. This is the feeling Avedon had about his dad, a figure that he never understood very well, patriarchal, strong but weak; sweet as this human can be.

Denotation coincides with the studium, a “pure” vision of the image. This aim to hit viewer's emotivity, beyond his social belonging.

Connotation, on the other hand, coincides with the punctum, the consideration of implicit aspects of the image, a longer process that requires knowledge, intellectual struggle, interruption.

Barthes himself admits that the punctum can scandalize the studium and affirms that the physic effect, ad hedonistic pleasure, is dependent on the intellectual one.

Here becomes spontaneous to me to ask if intellectual pleasure born from the studium can effectively reach the same power of the hedonistic pleasure arisen from the punctum.

Indeed, if we consider the aim of art to make the human being to feel a transcendent experience, as it was since the first forms of human art, the studium, linking this experience to human condition, becomes a burden for the artistic experience, taking this transcendent and metaphysics emotion to the simple physicality and materiality of human expression.

Moreover, if we take as our defense Wittgenstein's ideas about language, can we consider language as a true expression of reality, taking as true what we percept as reality – a series of electric impulses, a mental and mechanical elaboration-? So, in this case, is it worth it to analyze a language to understand the truth if this could be a misleading tool?

With this, I want to say that, most of the time, I feel the studium as a impoverishment of art. It breaks the momentum, the magic of the second. From this point of view, it has to be considered as a second function, useful to study art and in order to understand how it works, but debilitating for the experience.

Can we, therefore, consider an ignorant view as more pure and powerful than a erudite one, wishing to be ignorant in a sense? -luckily I am-

I don't want to say that understanding things that for others are invisible doesn't give a strong pleasure, making us feel powerful and unique in a society going to a massification and homologation of the individual; but, despite that, I don't think this pleasure is as strong as the pure sensation: the real aim of art.

If we quickly consider the really famous picture by Rosenthal where a bunch of marines is putting up the American flag on Japanese soil, on a desert of destruction we can try to understand what I am talking about better.

In this case the uncontaminated experience is linked to a strong sensation of loneliness and power, an ancestral feeling that is similar to a feeling of impotence, the idea of how small is the man compared to life, how little he can do. These small people, while working on a desert, they look like small ants, doing something so small and insignificant compared to the huge and unfriendly world.

If we stop and start studying the semiotics of the image first we put it into a context, so that we know that those soldiers are marines, the flag is an American flag, the desert is the destruction the war caused in Japan, the time is at the end of the Second World Was. The pictures now starts to have a “meaning”, a value because of what this represents.

If than we go more in depth with the investigation we can see how the operator chose to give just 2/3 of the all space to the spectrum. In this way the spectator quickly wonder around with his eyes on the desolation of the landscape to than focus of the real subject.

Here it comes the flag as a symbol, central, sign of nationality and power, then there are the soldiers, but they don't have guns, a strangely quiet situation, the calm after the storm. The flag is put on rubble and it is not yet up, the viewer so can feel as part of the moment. We can then understand how with this picture USA appears as saviour from the disaster, strength in the weakness and destruction: an image of supremacy on his enemies and humanity at the same time. No one can stop them, there's no one else out of this bunch of soldiers. No one but USA.

Well, after this, can we honestly say that the photo has acquired more emotivity than before, so we can feel it more than a five-years-old kid who just feels the image without filters?

C.Sanders, The Cambridge Companion to Saussure. 

R.Barthes (1964), Elements of Semiology.

R.Barthes (1957), Mythologies.

R.Barthes (1982), Camera Lucida.

R.Barthes (1982), Empire of Signs.

D.Chandler (2002), Semiotics: The Basics.

D.Crow (2010), Visible Signs:An introduction to semiotics in the visual arts.

L.Wittgenstein (1986), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

G.W.F. Hegel (1998), The Phenomenology of Spirit.