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US-China Foreign Language, ISSN 1539-8080 December 2011, Vol. 9, No. 12, 807-811

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The Pleasure of Meaning—Illustrating Roland Barthes’ Cultural Semiotics With Ads Analysis ZHANG Shu-ping, AI Li Lanzhou City University, Lanzhou, China

Roland Barthes’ cultural semiotics emphasizes not only the meaning-making process but also what the final meaning is, which paved the way for the development of mass media studies. The paper focuses on advertising and finds that advertisements try to create myth today to influence readers’ value and consumption viewpoints, which confirms Barthes’ claim that the creation of myth or final meaning is the essence in mass media. Keywords: Roland Barthes, cultural semiotics, meaning, myth today

Introduction Roland Barthes’ productive career ranged from the early days of structuralism linguistics up to the peak of poststructuralism. His works covered many fields and were considered key texts of both structuralism and poststructuralism and have exerted great influences until nowadays. As a semiotician, Barthes extended Saussure’s sign system into mass media and literature analysis, so his semiotic thoughts were composed of two branches, cultural semiotics and literary semiotics. He stressed structural analysis in his literary semiotics, and his main interest was not so much in what things mean as in how things mean. That is, he explored the way of meaning producing in the course of structure analysis of literary texts. However, he valued meaning and the way of meaning-making in his cultural semiotics, and demonstrated the notion thoroughly in his mass media analysis. He tried to search the deep meaning hiding behind the surface meaning in mass media and found that the deep meaning was historical or cultural, which had close relationship with ideology of the dominant class. Barthes claimed that the seemingly innocent poster, ads and even all mass cultural materials were not really innocent for they were intended to shape and reshape readers’ ideology, to persuade the audiences to accept the ideology of middle class. Barthes’ demystification on mass culture and their manipulating process are to find out the hidden meaning or myth implied in mass media so as to remind people from following myth and myth-effect blindly, which also proved that he was meaning-oriented or meaning centered in his cultural semiotic thoughts.

Myth Today in Ads The term “advertising” derived from the Medieval Latin verb advertere referring to “direct one’s attention

ZHANG Shu-ping, lecturer at School of Foreign Languages, Lanzhou City University. AI Li, lecturer at School of Foreign Languages, Lanzhou City University.

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to”, which aimed at swaying and influencing opinions, attitudes, behaviors such as propaganda, publicity, and public relations. This influencing nature of ads became severer in the late 20th century, which “evolves into a form of persuasive social discourse intended primarily to influence how we perceive the buying and consumption of goods” (Danesi, 2002, p. 179). Ads exalt Epicurean values by spreading messages constantly through numerous and varied media—newspaper, television, mail, radio, magazines, business, publications, calendars, Internet sites, even on clothes, hats, shoes, and articles of every use. Therefore, it does not exaggerate to say that ads surround us, influence us, and have already become one necessary part in our daily life. The aim of ads campaigns is to saturate the signifying order with advertising messages. This creates the illusion that there is a correlation between the products advertised and social processes and trends, and mythic meaning (Barthes addressed it as myth) emerges accordingly. Ads are filled with myth that functions as the soul of the ads. The colorful signifiers or forms of ads are exclusively to express myth so that the function of ads is supposed to produce myth and convey myth. Ads are never innocent, purely introducing the goods objectively and persuading readers to buy the products that it tries to promote, but persuade them to accept the values and consumption view that buying is the biggest pleasure and one’s social position is determined by the goods that he consumes. For example, a photographic advertising for shoes in which a foot stepping out of a Rolls-Royce not only persuades the readers to buy the x-brand shoes but also advises a privileged way of life and a luxury consumption view. In short, ads take advantage of existing signs and create myth out of them, which is never innocent but to shape the readers’ ideology purposefully. Meanwhile, forms in ads are conspicuous whilst myth is obscure and always presents itself in the way of metaphor, which is to tempt the readers’ reverie, so ads shape people’s thoughts and attitudes imperceptibly.

Structure Analysis of Ads—Meaning’s Veiled Charming It is well known that “baby, beauty, and beast” are the lasting popular topics in ads design, and many advertisers resort to one of the three “B”s to promote the advertising effect. The ads of such topics are so abundant that a beauty ad, KONKA mobile phone poster, is adopted as the illustrating example (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. KONKA mobile phone ad (leaflet from China Mobile, 2007).

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Surface Structure Analysis of the Ad The centre of the image is a lithe woman, half-opened lips and eyes, intoxicated expression, surrounded by soap bubbles, in some of which are mobile phones except those on the top left. The woman is stretching out her two arms stroking gently the soap bubbles and the soap bubble near her right hand is shining gloriously. At the bottom are two slogans in Chinese: “chaobaodianfeng” (超薄颠峰) which means the mobile phone is super thin and exquisite, and “shenglijvxian” (盛礼巨献) means it is not expensive, just like a present that the KONKA company “gives” to consumers freely. All of the elements are on a rosy background. Let us explore the messages it contains. The first step is to deal with the syntagm of the linguistic signs: label KONKA which gives the name of the firm, model D263, caption “jingbao” (精薄) appearing on the screen which refers to exquisite and thin, and the two slogans mentioned above in which “bao” (thin) and “li” (present) are much bigger than the other characters. These are the overall syntagmatic messages or denotation we get from the first glance, but the meanings conveyed in the ad does not exhaust. Most viewers of the ad must associate the elements with other cultural things, and hence connotative meaning generates from paradigmatic plane. Here Chinese characters indicate that the firm is in China and the ad is designed towards Chinese readers. Furthermore, the slogans, together with the two big words, stress the exquisiteness and worthiness of the mobile phone. Then the visual signs in this ad should be focused in order to explore associated meaning. Rose color indicates emotion and romantics, and the viewers of this ad will associate the rosy background with romantic sentiment, soap bubbles with dream and mobile phones in soap bubbles with realization of dream, and the shining color strengthens the romantic connotation. Of course, the romantic connotations are strengthened even further by the image of the woman who is slim, young, healthy, and charming, whose facial expression and pose allude to sexual desirability, which are to invoke a paradigm that owning the mobile phone enable a female realize her dream of possessing the equal sexual glamour as the woman in ad has. If interpreting the ad from the standpoint of male, the mobile phone is a desirable object because its owner—the charming woman, is desirable. Together, all these signs that suggest romantics compose a cultural paradigm. Deep Structure Analysis of the Ad Actually, a chain or series of signs that coexist on a syntagmatic plane are also a collection of related associations because they are culturally or paradigmatically related and invoke each other. In fact, ads designers know well that human beings always associate things that they see for the first time with what they are familiar, and hence endow with them connotations that they value, so ads viewers are generally invited to add the product to their association—plugging a product into culturally desirable paradigms, encouraging viewers to connotatively associate a product with other things they value so as to understand the final meaning or myth that ads aim to produce. But usually there are several paradigms at work simultaneously, and different readers also have varied associations when they face the same syntagmatic composition because of their different educational and cultural background. Then the advantages of the linguistic signs appear. According to Barthes (1977), the function of the linguistic signs is to “anchor” the various meanings of the image down, and to selectively control the ways in which the image is possibly to be decoded by the ad readers (p. 39). So the joint efforts of visual signs and

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linguistic signs engender the production of the final meaning: Possessing KONKA mobile phone implies possessing romantic and worthy life. Thusly, the advertiser’s goal has been achieved. If we replace the young, slim, and charming lady in KONKA ad with a fat and wrinkled woman, the romantic dream will never be associated and the desired ad effect will never be achieved either. The phenomenon indicates that replacing one element of the syntagmatic composition results in exclusively the output of different paradigmatic association, and hence, the different connotation, which means that syntagmatic composition determines the paradigmatic associations or form determines meaning. But this is superficial phenomenon that masks the essence of ads and distorts the relationship between form and meaning in ads. In fact, if we consider three levels of meaning, denotation, connotation, and myth in ads carefully, we will understand it. Denotation is the product of the surface structure, which agrees with the proclamation of traditional structuralism that form determines meaning. Whilst connotation and myth, which are the gist that ads try to express and encourage ads viewers to associate, are formed in advance in ads designers’ mind and what they have to do is trying their best to find suitable forms to express it in order to attract the viewers’ attention as possible as they can, and hence to invite ads readers to participate in association positively and accept the notion that they are promoting eventually. So it is evident that the meaning (connotation and myth) determines form in ads, though it is veiled and hidden behind the structure of the form. It functions as chief-in-command inwardly not passively but positively. It makes effort to display itself to ads viewers, “It points out and it notifies; it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us” (Barthes, 1987). In the mobile phone ad, meaning makes use of colorful forms to demonstrate itself so as to allow the ad viewers to recognize the hidden meaning easily—KONKA mobile phone equals to romantic and worthy life.

Conclusions In summary, ads are to produce myth and to persuade the ads viewers to accept myth, so it is evident that myth is the forever gist of ads though it is veiled, and the demystification of ads reflects a fact that rich forms in ads are to present mythic meaning, and the reveling of forms is just for meaning’s sake. In ads, even in all mass media, forms are plentiful, even overflowing, whilst mythic meaning is relatively simple, but is the real and unique gist though it manipulates forms in an implicated way. The process of demystification in ads coincides with the meaning-oriented gist of Barthes and it still strengthens his standpoint of myth’s overwhelming position in mass culture. As a matter of fact, Barthes not only held that myth is the soul of form and it is myth that manipulates the arrangement of signs, but also criticized the ideological nature of myth. He exposed that myth created in mass culture is a loudspeaker of middle class ideology. Both the deep ideology and the colorful surface ideology generated from deep ideology advocate the values, life style and surviving philosophy of middle class simultaneously. Meanwhile, myth is presented obscurely so that it is difficult for common readers to recognize the existence of myth and its powerful effect, and thusly the values and world views of middle class are infiltrated into unsuspecting readers’ mind and make them believe that middle class ideology is the standard one for all people to follow without any doubts and exception.

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