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Social Semiotics
Semiotics was defined by Ferdinand de Saussure as "the science of the life of signs in society." Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress here confront the conceptual difficulties that have limited its growth as a field of inquiry and demonstrate how it can be integrated with the social analysis of power, ideology, gender, and class.Social Semiotics explores the many possibilities for semiotic analysis that are created by the assumption that signs and messages must always be situated within the context of social relations and processes. Approaching semiotics as an evolving theory, Hodge and Kress first review the work of theoretical founders, including Saussure, C. S. Peirce, I. Voloshinov, and Freud. They build on the legacy of Voloshinov, who linked semiotics with the study of ideology, and develop the implications of his assertion that the form of signs is determined not only by the social organization of the participants but also by the immediate conditions of their interaction. Showing how such an approach can illuminate key issues is literary theory and communications, the authors analyze messages ranging from literary texts, television, and billboards to social interactions at home and school.
280 pages, Paperback
First published September 27, 1988
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 9, 2012
I really enjoyed this book. The more I learn about sociolinguistics, the more I wish I had known more about it years ago. It really would have saved me so much time. If you are thinking of reading this one, my advice would be turn to page 261 first and read the last ten pages – this isn’t a mystery novel, they don’t give the story away, so reading the end first won’t kill you. Rather, it gives a nice overview of the main ideas in the book and also excellent definitions of some of the key terms used throughout – how can that be a bad thing?
This is, in so many ways, a cross-fertilisation of Saussure’s semiotics with Marx’s historical materialism. Saussure starts with the arbitrary nature of the sign and then focuses nearly exclusively on the relationship between the signifier and the signified – and these often in isolation from both their historical and cultural contexts. However, the authors say that signs really only make sense in their historical and cultural contexts. Furthermore, that different groups in society have very different interpretations of what particular signs mean – that is, signs are often signs of power relationships within society and the rejection of those relationships and understandings by certain groups.
The first part of this book is a recapitulation of the history of semiotics – this is probably worth the price of the book alone, but I think it could perhaps have been a little longer and therefore also a little easier to read. Still, it was fascinating to have such a thumbnail presented of what is all too often just assumed knowledge that the reader is expected to have.
The book begins with the nation, borrowed from Marx, that the ruling ideology of any society is the ideology of the ruling class. But that there is always a tension created by those ruled over, and so those ruled also seek to undermine the interpreting of signs. Again, signs and how they are read are inevitably signs of power.
Signs are general in our society – and not just limited to linguistic forms, but also images and even social ways of being – the family is a sign system that is extensively studied in this book (long and fascinating discussions on Oedipus and Electra, for example). Signs are ways of structuring society but as they say “Every classification scheme is tidier than the reality it classifies”. That is, the messiness in the detail is where the interest is as this ‘outside of the classification system’ is where we learn about the power structures in our society.
This book gets incredibly interesting when it starts talking about modality. Now, modal verbs – or modal auxiliary verbs – are words like could, would, should, might, may etc. We add these to verbs to show the level of the possibility of action. Bernstein showed that the use of such verbs is much more likely with upper middle class people than it is with working class kids. He referred to this as working class kids using a restricted code and middle class kids using an elaborated code. The elaborated code is one where the person using it effaces themselves – they erase their own personality and instead present a ‘universal’ version of what they are describing. But this effacing not only makes what you are saying understandable to anybody, but, paradoxically, it also distances you from them at the same time. To make this clear they quote someone from the radio in England who is asking people about a general question about language. The interviewer is wondering about the streets with a tape recorder and stops a woman to ask her his question. But he doesn’t ask her directly, as they are both of the same social class and that would seem rude. So, he buffers his questions with lots of modal verbs and this both softens his enquiries and creates a distance between him and the woman he is interviewing, she responds in kind and hence exaggerates that distance even further.
But what is really interesting is that they say there is a very similar thing that happens with images. There is a kind of ‘modality’ to images too. And this is shown in how ‘realistically’ people are represented in images. They describe a series of cartoons, some that are very realistically drawn (low modality) and some highly stylised (high modality) and discuss the effects of these. In some cowboy cartoons they describe the fact the American Indians are highly stylised and always depicted as being in the far distance allows the cowboys to kill them with impunity. There is also a lovely discussion of a boy’s cartoon where the hero is drawn in a highly stylised fashion and this is explained as a way of confirming that the reader (a young boy) as someone who feels alienated from ‘real’ society and so is very likely to identify with someone clearly alien from that ‘normality’ – that is, someone clearly drawn to be different from ‘normal’.
Social semiotics really isn’t presented as a science – as they make clear, an interpretation of social signs is as much about guesses than it is about facts, “but some guesses are richer and / or more plausible than others.”
There is a lovely analysis of a rather short scene from an Australian play. This is where they explain how signs need to be understood as standing within history best. And not just a history – but a series of histories of all of the characters and the society in which the action is taking place. An Aboriginal girl responds to a question from her brother about the capital of England. As he does not know the answer to this, he is scoffed at by her and then she tries to bring her mother into this as well. They show that a lot of this is shown through the use of pronouns – people move from being you to being him (objectified) and therefore talked about rather than to. However, the knowledge he is asking assistance with is clearly ‘white’ knowledge – the knowledge associated with those in power in Australia. The Aboriginal girl is seeking to gain that kind of power – and to gain it she has assimilated white knowledge – but in doing so she has alienated herself from both her mother and brother. It is a heavy price to demand. The authors here explain all of the relationships involved, how such a scene could not have occurred 200 years ago, how it will also be different in 100 years time. How this would be quite a different scene if the girl and boy in the scene weren’t ‘coming of age’ but where at some other age. Understanding how each of these makes a difference tells us something incredibly important about what is being said in this scene.
I want to end with their discussion of narrative and its relationship to story. To the authors narrative is socially normative – that is, it is conservative and forms the overarching story that is used in society to justify the status quo. They explain this by talking of Aristotle’s idea of a narrative having a beginning, middle and end. The beginning is comfortable normality, then, in the middle, there is a complication that drives towards a climax and ultimately to a resolution. But this structure essentially says, whatever complications there are in life are aberrations that will eventually return to what there was in the beginning, that is, what is normal and natural.
Stories generally have to fit within this narrative structure, but because stories also deal in particulars there is much more possibility to overcome the conservative limitations that exist in the acceptable narrative structures that society endorses.
Look, I’ve only scratched the surface of this fascinating book. It really is an interesting read.
This is, in so many ways, a cross-fertilisation of Saussure’s semiotics with Marx’s historical materialism. Saussure starts with the arbitrary nature of the sign and then focuses nearly exclusively on the relationship between the signifier and the signified – and these often in isolation from both their historical and cultural contexts. However, the authors say that signs really only make sense in their historical and cultural contexts. Furthermore, that different groups in society have very different interpretations of what particular signs mean – that is, signs are often signs of power relationships within society and the rejection of those relationships and understandings by certain groups.
The first part of this book is a recapitulation of the history of semiotics – this is probably worth the price of the book alone, but I think it could perhaps have been a little longer and therefore also a little easier to read. Still, it was fascinating to have such a thumbnail presented of what is all too often just assumed knowledge that the reader is expected to have.
The book begins with the nation, borrowed from Marx, that the ruling ideology of any society is the ideology of the ruling class. But that there is always a tension created by those ruled over, and so those ruled also seek to undermine the interpreting of signs. Again, signs and how they are read are inevitably signs of power.
Signs are general in our society – and not just limited to linguistic forms, but also images and even social ways of being – the family is a sign system that is extensively studied in this book (long and fascinating discussions on Oedipus and Electra, for example). Signs are ways of structuring society but as they say “Every classification scheme is tidier than the reality it classifies”. That is, the messiness in the detail is where the interest is as this ‘outside of the classification system’ is where we learn about the power structures in our society.
This book gets incredibly interesting when it starts talking about modality. Now, modal verbs – or modal auxiliary verbs – are words like could, would, should, might, may etc. We add these to verbs to show the level of the possibility of action. Bernstein showed that the use of such verbs is much more likely with upper middle class people than it is with working class kids. He referred to this as working class kids using a restricted code and middle class kids using an elaborated code. The elaborated code is one where the person using it effaces themselves – they erase their own personality and instead present a ‘universal’ version of what they are describing. But this effacing not only makes what you are saying understandable to anybody, but, paradoxically, it also distances you from them at the same time. To make this clear they quote someone from the radio in England who is asking people about a general question about language. The interviewer is wondering about the streets with a tape recorder and stops a woman to ask her his question. But he doesn’t ask her directly, as they are both of the same social class and that would seem rude. So, he buffers his questions with lots of modal verbs and this both softens his enquiries and creates a distance between him and the woman he is interviewing, she responds in kind and hence exaggerates that distance even further.
But what is really interesting is that they say there is a very similar thing that happens with images. There is a kind of ‘modality’ to images too. And this is shown in how ‘realistically’ people are represented in images. They describe a series of cartoons, some that are very realistically drawn (low modality) and some highly stylised (high modality) and discuss the effects of these. In some cowboy cartoons they describe the fact the American Indians are highly stylised and always depicted as being in the far distance allows the cowboys to kill them with impunity. There is also a lovely discussion of a boy’s cartoon where the hero is drawn in a highly stylised fashion and this is explained as a way of confirming that the reader (a young boy) as someone who feels alienated from ‘real’ society and so is very likely to identify with someone clearly alien from that ‘normality’ – that is, someone clearly drawn to be different from ‘normal’.
Social semiotics really isn’t presented as a science – as they make clear, an interpretation of social signs is as much about guesses than it is about facts, “but some guesses are richer and / or more plausible than others.”
There is a lovely analysis of a rather short scene from an Australian play. This is where they explain how signs need to be understood as standing within history best. And not just a history – but a series of histories of all of the characters and the society in which the action is taking place. An Aboriginal girl responds to a question from her brother about the capital of England. As he does not know the answer to this, he is scoffed at by her and then she tries to bring her mother into this as well. They show that a lot of this is shown through the use of pronouns – people move from being you to being him (objectified) and therefore talked about rather than to. However, the knowledge he is asking assistance with is clearly ‘white’ knowledge – the knowledge associated with those in power in Australia. The Aboriginal girl is seeking to gain that kind of power – and to gain it she has assimilated white knowledge – but in doing so she has alienated herself from both her mother and brother. It is a heavy price to demand. The authors here explain all of the relationships involved, how such a scene could not have occurred 200 years ago, how it will also be different in 100 years time. How this would be quite a different scene if the girl and boy in the scene weren’t ‘coming of age’ but where at some other age. Understanding how each of these makes a difference tells us something incredibly important about what is being said in this scene.
I want to end with their discussion of narrative and its relationship to story. To the authors narrative is socially normative – that is, it is conservative and forms the overarching story that is used in society to justify the status quo. They explain this by talking of Aristotle’s idea of a narrative having a beginning, middle and end. The beginning is comfortable normality, then, in the middle, there is a complication that drives towards a climax and ultimately to a resolution. But this structure essentially says, whatever complications there are in life are aberrations that will eventually return to what there was in the beginning, that is, what is normal and natural.
Stories generally have to fit within this narrative structure, but because stories also deal in particulars there is much more possibility to overcome the conservative limitations that exist in the acceptable narrative structures that society endorses.
Look, I’ve only scratched the surface of this fascinating book. It really is an interesting read.
August 5, 2011
A fellow academic that I work with at UOIT asked me last week what were the three books that changed my life. I replied, E.P. Thompson's _The Making of the English Working Class_, Greil Marcus's _Lipstick Traces_ and Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress's _Social Semiotics_.
In preparation to teach social semiotics and multimodality properly (rather than as an 'addition' or 'extension' to a basic semiotics lecture), I returned to re-read this book that changed my life.
I remember the first time I read it, soon after it was published in 1988. It was very important for me in finding connections between history and cultural, communication and media studies. It was revelatory and it provided a pathway to an alternative way of thinking, doing and being.
This new reading has confirmed the views of my earlier self. While many books have extended and applied their innovations, the courage and method that Hodge and Kress offered, in thinking about how texts operate in social systems, is still fresh and powerful. I see why I loved the book in my late teens and early twenties. In my early forties, it is still a book of power, light, disquiet, argument and - deep and engaging - analysis.
In preparation to teach social semiotics and multimodality properly (rather than as an 'addition' or 'extension' to a basic semiotics lecture), I returned to re-read this book that changed my life.
I remember the first time I read it, soon after it was published in 1988. It was very important for me in finding connections between history and cultural, communication and media studies. It was revelatory and it provided a pathway to an alternative way of thinking, doing and being.
This new reading has confirmed the views of my earlier self. While many books have extended and applied their innovations, the courage and method that Hodge and Kress offered, in thinking about how texts operate in social systems, is still fresh and powerful. I see why I loved the book in my late teens and early twenties. In my early forties, it is still a book of power, light, disquiet, argument and - deep and engaging - analysis.
February 28, 2024
Much useful theory in semiotics, though required slogging through some bizarre and totally unqualified Freudian analysis. My guess is that the former came from Kress and the latter Hodge.
April 14, 2019
El tránsito entre la semiótica de corte estructural a la semiótica como ciencia social está muy cerca al interés actual de indagar por el texto y el contexto más que por la oración como unidad mínima de significado. El recorrido que realiza Hodge es realmente sustantivo para comprender los virajes que ha tenido a semiótica como disciplina y su posición actual dentro de los estudios culturales. Más allá de un ejercicio de sobreinterpretación, lo que propone el autor, es entender los signos en tanto armazón y contexto. Analizar tanto las propiedades materiales del signo, en tanto signo, como su repercusión al momento de difusión y a la par su contexto posibilita lecturas más amplias, menos sesgadas y que permitan la comprensión global del signo y no total.
April 5, 2022
Classic text on a subject most people aren't familiar with; in short, it's about understanding the hidden meaning or subtext of things in their social contexts.
April 4, 2017
One of my favorite books on semiotics, and accessibly written. Its survey of the history of the ideas is a great introduction - I've taught it several times.
January 22, 2015
Brilliant book. Fills the gaps in a discipline that has traditionally sought to understood human meaning making outside of the flow of time. I plan to start reading it again immediately.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews