Lecture 13 - Visual Communication

• 'The rhetoric of the image'
• Roland Barthes- Approaches and Theory
• A French literary theorist Roland Barthes, his ideas of communication explored a diverse range of areas within the subject and influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.
• He found semiotics, the study of signs, useful.
• His main influence was mainly found in the theoretical fields structuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism. However it is also felt in every field was concerned with the representation of information and models of communication, including computers, photography, music, and literature.

Semiotics for beginners book-Daniel Chandler:

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem06.html

• The study of language is applied to images
• Allowing you to use image as communication of words

• a 'signifier' (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes; and
• the 'signified' (signifié) - the concept it represents.
• The relationship between the signifier and the signified is referred to as 'signification'.
• Semiotics is the general study of signs or of whatever conveys meaning.
• The most important contribution from semiotics for the Web designer, is the idea of sign, signifierand signified offered by Saussure.

• Images are there to communicate themselves to communicate idea, the ideas can be applied to any images. 

A sign must have both a signifier and a signified. You cannot have a totally meaningless signifier or a completely formless signified (Saussure 1983, 101; Saussure 1974, 102-103). A sign is a recognizable combination of a signifier with a particular signified. The same signifier (the word 'open') could stand for a different signified (and thus be a different sign) if it were on a push-button inside a lift ('push to open door'). Similarly, many signifiers could stand for the concept 'open' (for instance, on top of a packing carton, a small outline of a box with an open flap for 'open this end') - again, with each unique pairing constituting a different sign. Nowadays, whilst the basic 'Saussurean' model is commonly adopted, it tends to be a more materialistic model than that of Saussure himself. The signifier is now commonly interpreted as the material (or physical) form of the sign - it is something which can be seen, heard, touched, smelt or tasted. For Saussure, both the signifier and the signified were purely 'psychological' (Saussure 1983, 12, 14-15, 66; Saussure 1974, 12, 15, 65-66). Both were form rather than substance:A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern. The sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical. A sound pattern is the hearer's psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the evidence of his senses. This sound pattern may be called a 'material' element only in that it is the representation of our sensory impressions. The sound pattern may thus be distinguished from the other element associated with it in a linguistic sign. This other element is generally of a more abstract kind: the concept. (Saussure 1983, 66; Saussure 1974, 66) 
 

Barack Obama
Denote- A man having his photo taken stood in front of a building
Connote - Shows power The building is represents democracy, Also, representing politic and democracy.

This common domain of the signifieds of connotation is that of Ideology, which cannot but be single for a given society and history, no matter what signifiers of connotation it may use.

To the general ideology, that is, correspond signifiers of connotation which are specified according to the chosen substance.

These signifiers will be called connotators and the set of connotators a rhetoric, rhetoric thus appearing as the signifying aspect of ideology.

Roland Barthes  ‘The Rhetoric of the Image ‘ in  Image, Music Text 1977 p.51