Source: Visual Methodologies An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual

Materials

A semiological analysis might be initiated. In summary, these are:

1 decide what the signs are.
2 decide what they signify `in themselves'.
3 think about how they relate to other signs both within the image (here
the vocabulary of section 3.2 is useful, and making a diagram of the
movement of signieds between the signiers of an image may also
help) and in other images.
4 then explore their connections (and the connections of the connections)
to wider systems of meaning, from codes to dominant codes, referent
systems or mythologies.

5. and then return to the signs via their codes to explore the precise
articulation of ideology and mythology.

Preferred meaning (ideologies) --------- preferred readings: There are two

ways in which semiologists explain the production of preferred readings. The
rst of these focuses on the visual and textual relation between an image and
its viewer, and the second emphasizes the social modalities of the reception of
an image. (p.92)

Logonomic system: production regimes // reception regimes

see Hodge and Kress, 1988: 68 for a useful discussion on the importance of
the setting of a visual image to its interpretation

Bal and Bryson (1991) make the same point in their discussion of visual art.
They suggest that there is probably always resistance to dominant scopic
regimes, which might `range from polite parody to outright defacement, from
the clandestine inversion of existing rules of viewing to the invention of
wholly new sets of rules, from subtle violations of propriety to blank refusal to
play the game' quite apart from the private languages of looking that are
evoked, for example, by Barthes's notion of the punctum (Bal and Bryson, 1991:
187). (p.96)

Semiology demands detailed analysis of images, and its reliance on case

studies and elaborate analytical terminology create careful and precise
accounts of how the meanings of particular images are made. Moreover,
semiology is centrally concerned with the construction of social difference
through signs. Its focus on ideology, ideological complexes and dominant
codes, and its recognition of resistance to those, means that it cannot avoid
considering the social effects of meaning.

Metonmia/Sindoque

Semiotics as visual methodology: It takes images seriously, providing a

number of tools for understanding exactly how a particular image is structured.
It considers the social conditions and effects of images, both in terms of how an
image may have its own effects and how the logonomic system shapes its
production and reception. And it is able to acknowledge that semiologists are
themselves working with signs, codes and referent systems and are thus
imbricated in nothing more, though certainly nothing less, than another series of
transfers of meaning in which a particular image participates. This allows a
certain reflexivity. (p.96)

Criticism:
o its preference for detailed readings of individual images raises
questions
about the representativeness and replicability of its analyses. This is a doubt
that Leiss, Kline and Jhally (1986: 165) have about Williamson's work.
They are unclear about how or why Williamson chose the adverts she
works with; are they representative of adverts in general? Would someone
else using those same adverts have come to the same conclusions about
them? Williamson would presumably respond that these questions are not
important since she was using the ads to construct a general theory that
could critique how adverts work; she was not trying to offer empirical
generalizations about what they are. Certainly her book's illustrations are
there to forward her argument about particular processes of meaningmaking,
not to exemplify particular types of adverts. (p.97)

o elaborate theoretical terminology. [] Often these terms are useful;

they have particular meanings that are clearly dened, and refer to
processes that are not easily described otherwise (this latter point is
crucial). These sorts of neologisms
are thus worth persevering with, no matter how clumsy their use
might feel initially. However, sometimes new terms are confusing or
unnecessary, and
sometimes they are used to give a veneer of sophistication to
something
that is actually not particularly interesting.

o there is another omission in much semiological work, which is

the empirical exploration of polysemy and logonomic systems.
Semiology
is very ready to admit to polysemy and to the contestation as well as
the
transfer and circulation of meaning in theory, but there are very few
semiological studies that really get to grips with diverse ways of
seeing.
Don Slater (1983) has addressed this absence and suggests that it is
not a
coincidence: semiology is simply not concerned with the social
practices,
institutions and relations within which visual images are produced and
interpreted.
Source: Introducing Social Semiotics

Social semiotics sees it a little differently. It suggests that rules, whether written
or unwritten, are made by people, and can therefore be changed by people. []
On the other hand, two provisions need to be made. First, not everybody can
change. the rules. To be able to change rules you need power, whether it is the
power of governments for example, in legislating spelling reforms, as has
recently been done in the Netherlands and Germany the symbolic power of
influential language users film and television script writers, song writers,
advertising copy writers, etc. or the more limited influence of opinion leaders
in groups of friends. Second, there are different kinds of rules, and different
ways of changing things. (p.47-48)

Architecture (p.69ss)
Discourse p.93ss
Social Semiotics