Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

pouvait espérer sortir de la dénonciation pieuse et rendre compte en détail de la
mystification qui transforme la nature petite-bourgeoise en nature universelle. 72
(Barthes 1970:76)
As I mentioned in the introduction, the greatest immediate applications of these two
disciplines in film theory – structuralism and film semiotics – came in relation to genre
films, and their objective was to expose a then complex and hermetic system by means of a
symptomatic reading of American culture through a study of the elements and rules
structuring its cinema-reality.
Language in Saussurian terms does not reflect reality as the linguistic sign, he
would argue, and was not a term that could be attached to an object but rather to a
combination of signifier and signified. As a signifying system, language arbitrates reality
and therefore has an ideological function. “Le mythe est une parole”, Barthes would add,
linked to a communication system and to a certain society at a specific given time (as the
above quote shows). Both structuralism and semiotics derive from structural linguistics, a
master discipline which in the sixties tried to establish the communicative power of
language from its smallest elements to their meaningful combinations. But linguistics, seen
as the science whose object of studies is the structures of the language (langue), is no
longer sufficient, and it is here that semiotics arrives at a crucial point, especially in its
structuralist formation, says Saussure:
A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a
part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it
semiology (from Greek semeion “sign”). Semiology would show what constitutes
signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say
what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. (in
Wollen 1972:116)
Saussure uses the word “semiology” as opposed to “semiotic” (without the “s”)
used by Peirce. Both semioticians and semiologists have long debated this term and its
definition. For the former, of mainly Anglo-Saxon origin, semiology is understood as the
science of signs created by human beings and therefore not so encompassing as semiotics.
For the latter, from Romance countries, semiotics is a system of signs with hierarchical
72 There are here two main determinants: on the one hand, an ideological criticism based on the so-called
language of mass culture; on the other hand, a first semiologic deconstruction of this language: having read
Saussure, I came to the conclusion that on dealing with “collective representations” as sign systems, one
could move away from the pious denunciation and present in detail the mystification which transforms the
petty bourgeoisie into a universal nature. (my translation)
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