VCC101H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Roland Barthes, Mass Media, Jacques Lacan
8 May 2020
School
Department
Course
Professor
VCC101 – Visual Culture
Week 2– Jan 9
Ideology (Sturken and Cartwright)
• Implicit or subconscious ideas
o Shared set of values and beliefs that exist within a given society and through
which individuals live out their relations to social institutions and structures
• Like Myth; no basis is scientific theory or fact; not true but powerful
o The way certain concepts and values are made to seem like natural, inevitable
aspects of everyday life
• What seems normal becomes invisible (desensitized)
Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
• Literary/cultural critic, philosopher, semiotician
o *rhetoric = argumentative strategy (similar to connotations/secondary
layer/subtext of meaning; subtle strategies of persuasion)
▪ *connotation; background knowledge required; assumes shared set of
codes/values; easily recognizable associations/stereotypes
▪ *denotation; literal/obvious; before cultural convention; basic facts
• Associated with structuralism
o Used methods of structuralism, semiotics/linguistics
▪ Later revised these because images aren’t reducible to language –
stadium vs. punctum
o looked at the structure of myths in his own culture (1950-80s, France)
o Structuralist Analysis: breaks up object into its underlying structure – its
elements and the relations between them
▪ photograph as image without a code – photo is indexical sign, not
mediated via code of language
▪ photograph seen as transparent window into reality (objective
photography vs. subjective painting)
• no longer true; digital code allows more manipulation of image
o Paradox of photography (natural vs cultural)
▪ Natural
• Scientific, ‘objective’ image of reality
• Made by light on emulsion
• Depicts a specific set of things
▪ Cultural
• Cultural, ‘subjective’ image of reality
• Made by human choices
Document Summary
Images construct reality by being deployed in structures of meaning (what"s important is their relationship to other images/meaning) Women participate in hegemony of patriarchal society in obsession with beauty. Ideology = in the service of power: *don"t use word bias ; everything is biased, explain how (in essays, marxists/feminists used semiotics (structuralism) to critique symbolic structures of capitalism/patriarchalism. Influenced lacan (psychoanalysis), levi-strauss (anthropology), barthes (literary/cultural theory) Images are also culturally significant: 2 dominant models of what constitutes a sign, ferdinand de saussure (swiss linguist, dyadic / 2 part model of sign, signifier, form (ex. Picture of tree: charles sanders peirce (american philosopher, a sign signifies only in being interpreted, triadic, sign, meaning is determined by interpretation it generates, object. Interpretant: central to the meaning of the sign, 3 types of signs, symbol, signifier is arbitrary/conventional, relationship between signifier and signified is not obvious/must be learnt.
