help me i am a stupid geranium

Fine, don't help me then.

bah bah bah oh OK i think i remember. the SIGN is yer actual WORD. the signified is the thing it denoted, ie. if you are thinking of a kitten then the word "kitten" is itself the sign whereas your ACTUAL cute fluffy flesh and blood kitten is the signified. i think that Barthes's argunent was that the sign can never call into being or fully hope to describe or invoke yer actual signified, so there is always a significant gap or slippage between the two. so eg, in Paradise Lost when you get things like Adam naming the animals and SIMULATANEOUSLY CALLING THEM INTO ACTUAL BEING that goes against what Barthes says, because words and language and signs are insufficient to invoke things like this.

this is probably totally wrong, i haven't studied this for years.

No, no, sounds good. I know about the sign, that is not my problem. Mine is summing up Barthes so I look good and then relating him to Jakobsen's theory (which is: sometimes the meaning derives from the signifier, and the whole relation between the saussure's set of 3 doesn't matter) I should give up now, as I am truly stuffed and don't stand a chance of getting this done in time, let alone to a decent standard. Sarah, are you in tonight? can i direct ian to the house and you let him in and, i dunno, pacify him. ? I really really should stay here for longer.

Alix - probably too late and not near enough your needs to be of any use, but it's only a cut and paste job so here you go. Presumably it's _Mythologies_-period Barthes that's relevant to your work on the advertising system, thus the notion of the two levels of denotation (signifier-sign-referent) and connotation (in which the threesome of the denotative system become the signifier of the connotative system) most useful. These are my words so borrow at will, tho' will post them anonymously to avoid embarrassment on either part.

"The Barthes of 'Elements of Semiology' (1967) and 'Mythologies' (1973) comes closest to elaborating the semiology anticipated by de Saussure, taking his linguistic paradigm and applying it to non-linguistic signifying structures such as the garment and food systems (Barthes, 1967). Barthes' work reiterates language's centrality to an understanding of culture, not simply as an analytical model, but as a component of all other signifying systmes; the "science of signs" forms part of linguistics rather than vice versa. What Barthes' work also does, however, is consider the relationship between different levels of signifying system and how they are articulated within (in 'Mythologies', 1967) a culture dominated by bourgeois interests. He introduces the concept of a second order signifying system - the connotative - which takes the whole of the first order (denotative) sign as its signifier. The sign thus constructed is a kind of "contantly moving turnstile" which in the same moment produces both a meaning in itself and a rhetorical or mythical meaning which is "received by not read" (Larrain, 1979, p134). It is at this mythical level tht bourgeois society naturalises its self-interested representations and replaces social contradictions and the conventional and contingent meanings of the denotative order with eternal, essential ones. Coward and Ellis describe this process as an ideal form of domination under which "everybody lives the bourgeois ideology as the natural, unacknowledge limits of the universe" (1977, p27). For Barthes, ideology underlies every discursive formation; it is a level of meaning produced by the relationshipss within texts (although in 'Elements...' and 'Mythologies' the denotative order is assumed to be a neutral, non-ideological system). Moreover, Coward and Ellis' analysis maintains that semiology, conceived in the Barthesian sense and taking as its object a deconstruction of the process of naturalisation at the mythical level, takes up of necessity a position with regard to ideology."

The semiotic development of (Saussurian) structuralism provides a methodology, framework and terminology that enables a whole range of cultural products* to be understood 'as texts'. The linguistic metaphor is apparently infinitely applicable; all cultural objects work 'like a lnaguage'. 'The text' after semiotic structuralism is no longer a privileged object of itself, the bearer of what is best in culture, but a *site* for examining the signifying practices which produce it."

*ie including advertising.

Campbell you are a waste of time.

Shag I'm sorry, I didn't see this thread before I left for two for one Bacardi breezers. Arses.

Why am I a waste of time, Lilly? Thankyou whoever that was who answered lots. I am getting the final stuff done to the essay. Its really crap. I figure if I include anything not on the reading list it will help. I am deluded.

I thought you really were a stupid geranium. That would have been cute. Turns out you're only writing some bluddy essay. Keep running, puppet girl.