Disciplines-tools of Cultural Studies: semiology

and anthropology

We are going to examine in a brief way, some aspects that define the two
disciplines that the Cultural Studies use: Semiology and Anthropology.

What is Semiology? It is the science that studies signs in connection

with society. Based on linguistics, this discipline acknowledges different
systems of signs as languages and it analyzes them as such. These languages
can be photography, cinema, arts in general, fashion, pedagogical or political
texts, etc. Everything can be read and interpreted and also everything can be
connected.
We live in a world of signs, surrounded and traversed by discourses that
refer to one another. It would be impossible, in modern life, “to talk about
something” or find that something outside of any given discourse. What’s more,
we find what is said about things before we find the thing itself. A sunny day at
the beach or a full moon have a positive significance that has little to do with
the event in itself, but rather with the long tradition that has given them value.
It would be very difficult to find an object or live an experience of which we
know absolutely nothing about. There is always some information we have (for
as little as it may be) that orients us or defines the meaning that things or
events have for us.
In this respect, words such as “meaning”, “significance”, “reference” and
“representation” are perfect examples of how this net is constructed: one thing
in the place of another and all of them connected.
Roland Barthes, who is also an extraordinary literary critic, published a
number of semiology texts in a volume called Mythologies (1957), in which he
presented the analysis of objects and practices so diverse that included, for
example, the meaning of vacations, the use of soup and detergents, cars and
toys. That project was aligned with what Cultural Studies would later become.
What follows is an interview that the French magazine L’Express made to
Barthes in 1970. Here, he defined what he believed to be the goal of critical
discourse in general and what his proposal was in Mythologies:
This decipherment you ascribe to criticism, what does it do?

I think that criticism can participate in a kind of collective gesture, a collective action, taken
up by others beside myself, for whom a good slogan would be those extraordinarily simple and
infinitely subversive words of Nietzsche: "A new way of feeling, a new way of thinking.

(…)

I remember that one of my first Mythologies dealt with "the writer on vacation": the better to
sanctify this figure, we were shown that this person who is so different from everyone else
goes on vacation just like an ordinary worker. It's exactly the same conjuring trick as the one
which presents royalty in a "human" light, posing with the family, at home. Here discourse is
faked, because it says they are like everyone else-in order to say, in reality, that they are not.
The banality of these people affirms and confirms their singularity. That is one of the
mechanisms I tried to bring to light. I wanted not only to reestablish the process, by which
society elaborates meaning, but also to show how society tries, in fact, to impose this
meaning in the guise of naturalness.

You also took on detergents, tourist guidebooks, plastic toys, and the star athletes of the Tour
de France.

Yes, I think I wrote about fifty "mythologies" in all. But one of the themes that has held my
interest for a long time is fashion. There is a fundamental difference between actual fashion
and its description in fashion magazines. Everyone understands that clothing has meaning, and
that it's important, because it's connected with erotism, social life, all sorts of things. However,
fashion itself doesn't exist without a system of transmission-images, photos, drawings,
written texts, or even dresses worn in the street. And fashion is very difficult to get a grip
on once you start trying to reconstruct the grammar of a substance which turns out to be poorly
understood.

Then fashion doesn't exist, except as a system of meaning.

Exactly, but at the same time it's a rather impoverished system of meaning, which is to say that
the many differentiations in clothing correspond to only a small list of differentiations in
situations. But the fashion system is very meaningful for women. It is rich in meaning only on
the level of the fashion magazine, which distinguishes between five in the afternoon, eight in
the evening, eleven o'clock, and noon, cocktail time, an evening at the theater, etc. In reality,
there is no five in the afternoon. From a sociological and statistical point of view, not long ago,
in our country, there were only two outfits, working clothes and Sunday dress.
And today?

Nowadays, in our societies, things have become quite complicated, because mass culture
mixes up ideologies, superstructures. Mass culture offers for consumption, to classes without
the economic means to consume them, products which are often consumed only as images. I
don't want to belabor the obvious, but the subtle wealth of the semantic world of fashion as it
appears in fashion magazines is completely unreal.

Can we do without mythologies?

No, of course not. No more than we can do without symbolic functions. The only language
that doesn't develop secondary meanings is mathematics, because this language is
entirely formalized. An algebraic equation contains no associated meaning.

(…)

In that case, why do you reproach our society for its mythologies?

Because, even though we are inevitably surrounded by signs, we do not accept these signs as
signs. What I don't like about the West is that it creates signs and denies them at the same
time.

Why is this?

Doubtless for historical reasons, which have to do largely with the development of the
bourgeoisie. It is obvious that the bourgeoisie has elaborated a universalist ideology
guaranteed by God, or by nature, or last of all by science, and all these alibis function as
disguises, as masks covering up signs.

Barthes, Rolland (1985) The Grain of the voice. Interviews 1962-1980. Hill and Wang: New York. Pp.
92-99

Working on it:

- Let’s do a little experiment. I will say a few words and you will write down what comes
to your mind. Then we will compare what everyone got.
o How could you explain the results based on what you read?
- What can we tell about people in the following images: