A semiotic approach to analysis allows the researcher to discuss paradigms,
syntagms, codes and conventions, and enables a large number of generic texts to be compared, contrasted and related without the need to enter into questions of value and aesthetics. Semiotic analysis is concerned with relationships within and between sign vehicles, specifically relations of selection and connection. It differs in kind from quantitative methods of textual analysis such as content analysis, in which key words are identified and counted within a set or sets of texts which have been selected by the researcher. Semiotic analysis is more concerned with meaning and interpretation.
The theoretical foundation of the current study is the social semiotics of Robert Hodge and Günter Kress (1988). Their approach to semiotics originates in a critique of traditional structuralist semiotic practice. Social semiotics stresses the dialogic nature of communication and signifying practices. Hodge and Kress cite the work of Halliday as crucial to their reconstitution of semiotics as social semiotics.
Social semiotics asks questions about the nature of meaning within a socialised communication context and is concerned with questions of structure and form within the context of production and reception. Practitioners are concerned with related issues about the function of signifying practices and about power relationships within signifying systems. This approach is not concerned with aesthetic questions relating to the value and nature of “art” and “literariness”. This means that social semiotic analysis can be used to explore questions about the nature of meaning, about the structure and form of texts, about ideology within texts, about intertextual and
dialogic traces across and between texts, even when the texts in question are the products of different genres and different types of discourse.
Hodge and Kress argued that Ferdinand de Saussure managed to place the emphasis on all the wrong features of language in his deliberations on what
constitutes the proper object of study for semiotic analysis. For Saussure, the proper concerns of semiotics relate to langue, rather than parole, to synchrony rather than diachrony, to paradigms rather than syntagms, and signifiers rather than signified.
Hodge and Kress suggested that social semiotics should follow Volosinov’s lead and turn these elements on their head: social semiotics is interested in parole, diachrony, syntagms and the signified. Following Volosinov, language is theorised as dialogue rather than as the “abstract objectivism” of Saussurean structuralists or as the generative monologue issuing from the “individualistic subjectivity” of linguists following phenomenological traditions (Volosinov, 1986).
Social semiotics explores the construction of meaning as a social activity, acknowledging the role of the reader, located in specific material logonomic systems, in “making meaning”. Social semiotics, with its focus on diachronic transformation, acknowledges that the meaning of a text, formed from the interplay of polysemic signs and a range of reading positions, at the point of reception does not necessarily equate to the intended meaning of that text at the time of production. Meaning consists of specific interplays of a range of variables and is constituted by actualised, material reading subjects at different diachronic moments. Like Hodge and Kress, Simpkins (2000) acknowledges the charge that traditional semiotics is sometimes stifled by its structuralist focus, which can underplay issues relating to historicity,
human agency and the polysemic nature of signs. But for these writers,
acknowledging the potential weaknesses of semiotic method is not cause for the abandonment of semiotic analysis, but the starting point for the development of projects which address the weaknesses.
For the purposes of the current study, elements of social semiotics can be used to reveal diachronic changes - transformations - in the popular culture genre-spectrum of Troubles fiction. The methodology underpinning this study grows from the work done by Hodge and Kress in Social Semiotics (1988), and shares their view that:
1. All semiotic activity takes place in time: all semiotic phenomena are diachronic, whether on a small scale (the time to produce or interpret a single syntagm, the flow of syntagms in discourse) or a larger scale, including the history of human semiosis.
2. Every syntagm is a moment in a process of transformations, leading backwards in time (to earlier syntagms in the same exchange, to earlier discourses or semiotics acts) and forward (to later uses of the syntagm, by decoders or encoders); and this process, in its strict chronological order, is a key to the interpretation of that syntagm.
(Hodge and Kress, 1988, 35)
Where the semiotically derived theory of diachronic transformation differs from traditionally humanist approaches to “influence” and “tradition” is that the use of the term “diachronic transformation” is a coded indication that in the study which
follows, attitudes towards the question of human agency will differ from the attitudes common in humanist analyses of cultural production and consumption. Cultural products are the products of human agency, but a social semiotics approach would argue that human agency only operates within the parameters of the logonomic system of society at the given moment of production. Hodge and Kress define the logonomic system in the following terms:
A logonomic system is a set of rules which specify who can claim to initiate (produce, communicate) or know (receive, understand) meanings about what topics under what circumstances and with what modalities (how, when, why.) Logonomic systems prescribe social semiotic behaviours at points of production and reception, so that we can distinguish between production regimes (rules constraining production) and reception regimes (rules constraining reception).
(1988, 4)
For the traditional humanist, change is the product of human agency: for the social semiotician, change relative to the individual agent, operates within the boundaries of a logonomic system, which itself is driven by, and contained by, human agency. The logonomic system changes over time, and as a result, the available range of cultural responses for the individual agent will change. For the purposes of this study, it is important to acknowledge that the moment of reception may be a different moment than that of production, and the moment of reception, operating within its own
logonomic system, may become the logonomic system within which the production of a new text occurs. Logonomic systems are visible systems policed by concrete social agents and coercing other concrete social agents (Hodge and Kress, 1988, 4).
Changes within those systems may be related to material causes, or shifts in opinion, which are themselves the consequence of material causes.
If it is asserted that logonomic systems change, the next question might relate to the ways in which that change occurs. One answer lies in the work of Antonio Gramsci and the characterisation of democratic western societies as hegemonic sites in which dominant ideologies circulate in and through superstructural forms,
processes and institutions, to ensure that the codes, conventions and rules that operate in the interest of the dominant group are internalised by subjects within that society, regardless of whether the operation of society’s codes, conventions and rules are in their interests (Gramsci, 1975).
At the same time, oppositional ideologies within such a society circulate through a process known as counter-hegemony. The counter-hegemonic process, often licensed counter-hegemony, is considered essential to the maintenance of a hegemonic society. Counter-hegemony can operate as a critique or “feedback”
mechanism and as such provides the dominant group with information which can be used for self-regulation, enabling the dominant group (for example politicians, teachers, parents) to modify the rules. Logonomic systems also change as a result of economic and, as a consequence, technological shifts and changes. A consequence of this type of shift might be that the constitution of the dominant group shifts and that logonomic systems become the sites of struggle, because, as Hodge and Kress point
out that “where structures of domination are unchallenged, a logonomic system serves the dominant by ensuring that acts of semiosis ultimately assure their dominance.
Where structures of domination are under challenge, logonomic systems are likely areas of contestation” (1988, 4).
Logonomic systems, then, can be sites of conflict and contestation. In a society in which the structures of domination sustaining the distribution of power, economic and political, are not overly contested, counter-hegemony can ensure that the dominant group remains in a dominant position whilst allowing a modicum of licensed “carnival” or transgression through counter-hegemonic cultural production and reception. The licensing of counter-hegemony at a level which the logonomic system will bear provides useful information which can become a method of “self-regulation” for the logonomic system. Logonomic systems negotiate internal pressures emanating from the dominated counter-hegemonic groups. There are questions about what exactly is meant by “counter-hegemonic” groups and about whether these groups have similar or different agendas. There are also issues relating to the notion of the dynamic between the hegemony of the dominant group and the counter-hegemony of the “proletariat” in Gramscian thought because Gramsci, who was writing polemic, believed that the proletariat needed to move themselves into a position of hegemony in order to achieve power. The tradition of Marxian critical theory here is intertwined with political discourse, the function of which relates not only to analysis but also to action.