Revision Lesson: Component Two

• Component 2 is worth 90 marks
• 30 marks per industry
• 4 questions: 2 30 mark questions and 2 15 mark questions
• One random is split between 2 questions
• This paper is synoptic: it combines everything from everywhere across the course

Roland Barthes argued that meaning is constructed through a symphony of codes. Evaluate this semiotic theory. Make reference to the magazines you have studied to support your answers (30 marks)

Kneejerk reaction: Barthes theory is extremely useful at understanding the complex meanings constructed by magazines, providing the audience a range of opportunities to decode the often subtle ideologies of the producer

Roland Barthes argued that a symphony of codes construct meaning in every media product. Barthes theory is extremely useful at understanding the complex meanings constructed by magazines, providing the audience a range of opportunities to decode the often subtle ideologies of the producer. In order to explore the wildly different ways which codes can construct meanings, I shall be exploring the examples of Woman magazine, the edition here published in 1964 and appealing to a mass, female, heterosexual white conservative UK audience. I shall contrast the meanings constructed in Woman with a 2016 edition of Adbusters, a Canadian anti-capitalist magazine that presents a rather more complex and even inscrutable set of ideological perspectives to a diverse, yet predominantly radical worldwide audience.

An excellent example as to how ideological perspectives can be encoded through codes can be found in the front cover of both magazines.

Adbusters

• extensive use of hermeneutic codes, especially the screaming man that occupies the main image, constructs a distressing, violent and confusing mode of address
• this highly unconventional utilisation of codes here constructs an address to a certain niche and radical audience, while at the same time distancing a mainstream mass audience
• this use of unconventional codification is fairly typical for non-mainstream and anti-capitalist magazine
• the deliberately low production values encoded through the MES of a brown splatter that covers both the masthead and the 'cover model' resembles nothing less than a printing error
• this is highly unconventional because this rejection of perfect production standards does not typically appeal to a mainstream mass audience
• however, this highly unconventional mode of address can attract a certain radical niche audience who reject both ideologies of capitalism and commodity fetishism
• by rejecting hegemonic traditional values, Adbusters' demonstrates a symphony of codes which reject the standard codes and conventions

Woman

• symbolic code of the makeup of the model constructs an ideological perspective that from a hegemonic perspective, the function of women is to look good

Hermeneutic code - enigma code

• snow capped volcanoes
• woman magazine - 

Proairetic code - action code

Symbolic code - symbols

Binary opposition

Hermeneutic codes

Symbolic codes

Proairetic codes

Referential codes

Low production values

Mise-en-scene

Anchorage

Main image

Unconventional Adbusters

Conventional magazine - Woman

Close-up

Headline

Mid shot

Hair and make up

Symbolic annihilation

Subheadings

Commodity fetishization

Stuart Hall

Liesbet Van Zoonen

Cover lines

Collage

Mixed media

Lexis

Colour scheme

Polysemic meaning

Detourment

Jean Baudrillard

Audience positioning

Conservativism vs nihilism

Capitalism vs anticapitalism

Men vs women

Rich vs poor