SIGNS Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

SIGNS - Essay Example 10). While the signifier referred to the material aspect and sound image of the sign, the signified denoted the mental concept (pp. 10-12). However, for Peirce, the sign consisted of three elements not just two. According to Peirce, the sign â€Å"has a relation to an Object, which relation entails an interpretant† (pp.21). Although Peirce linked the sign to the external world, Saussure and Peirce's accounts were rather structural and linguistic. However, their successors like Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva placed the systems of signs into their contexts, made the necessary correlations between the signs and contemporary culture and incorporated the semiotics into the cultural studies. Roland Barthes scrutinized the role of signs in creating modern myths in his seminal work, Mythologies (1957). Jean Baudrillard, examined the system of signs with respect to the consumer culture. The aim of this brief is to explore how signs describe the commodity fetishism and consumer culture of the contemporary society. Roland Barthes regarded myth as semiological system. He analyzed the picture of young black guy in Paris-Match as an example of mythical system (see the appendix, Figure 1). Barthes noted that although the signifier is a man giving the French salute, the signified is Frenchness itself: What he saw in this picture is â€Å"that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors.† (pp. 115). Barthes' analysis highlights the mythical and also the ideological system that sings are produced. Indeed, for Barthes, myths are the ideological systems.For Barthes, myth reflects the dominant values of the ruling classes. He (1977, pp. 165) defined myth as the socially determined reflection, â€Å"however, in accordance with a famo us image used by Marx, is inverted: myth consists in overturning culture into nature or, at least, the social, the cultural, the deological, the historical into the 'natural'†. . Advertising is the medium of the contemporary society's myths. As Baudrillard (1996, pp. 10) stated in The System of Objects â€Å"Advertising†¦ is pure connotation’ and connotation is the domain of myth. Advertising adds mystical qualities to the objects and produces signs as commodities to be consumed. In fact, Baudrillard (1996, pp. 218) noted that â€Å"to become an object of consumption, an object must first become a sign and this conversion of objects to the signs â€Å"implies the simultaneous transformation of the human relationship into a relationship of consumption†. Baudrillard's views echo the Marxist notion of commodity fetishism, in which human relations took the form of relationship between things. Indeed, advertising is often full with the fetish objects. Baudrilla rd (pp. 203) stresses that the notion of idealized consumption is base on the substitution of human relationships by â€Å"personalized† relationships to objects and the personality of the subject and the so-called â€Å"personality† of the object merge in the buying process. Here, Baudrillard (pp. 219) find the logic of commodity as analyzed by Karl Marx: â€Å"just as needs, feelings, culture, knowledge —in short, all the properly human faculties—