A “language map” is a holistic view of a representation which connects small signs to large signs. When we describe speech or writing as a col- lection of signs, or semiotic modes, or resources, we are perceiving signs as small elements, perhaps as “building blocks” which become invested with meaning only through the ways in which we put them together, our agreement about what this “code” or system means, our recollection
of the ways in which words have been used before and our knowledge that alternative words might have been used in their place but were not.
Individual words are signs in that they have a signifi er (the written word or spoken sound pattern) and a signifi ed (their “meaning” or mental con- cept in context). Th is is the defi nition of de Saussure’s “isolated sign”
(1959: 128) and it is one I will use as I develop my argument. However, there is also a broader interpretation of language-as-sign that I would like to introduce here. De Saussure suggests that larger stretches of language can also be signs:
As a rule we do not communicate through isolated signs but rather through groups of signs, through organized masses that are themselves signs. In lan- guage everything boils down to diff erences but also to groupings. Th e mechanism of language, which consists of the interplay of successive terms, resembles the operation of a machine in which the parts have a recipro- cating function even though they are arranged in a single dimension.
(de Saussure, 1959: 128, my emphasis)
Th e implication of de Saussure’s assertion above is that language can func- tion as a sign at diff erent levels—that individual words, groups of words and individual texts are all signs, and, by extension, that sets of texts may be considered as signs. De Saussure uses the metaphor of a machine with its various interconnected parts, each essential to the effi cacy of the whole. I imagine a landscape or a map, where individual features appear in varying quantity, confi guration and distribution to give a distinctive yet recognisable landscape. Th e concept of a map sits well with the notion of “representation”. Th e question I address in this book is not “what does the BP crisis ‘look like’” but “what does the representation of the BP crisis
‘look like’”.
Th e idea of representation as map is one explored by Baudrillard (1994) in Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard posits that society has moved through successive periods in which representations have become increasingly disconnected from the reality they depict. Writing of the
“image” (which covers a broad range of representation types) he identifi es four successive phases (1994: 6):
1. It is the refl ection of a profound reality.
2. It masks and denatures a profound reality (art imitates life).
3. It masks the absence of a profound reality.
4. It has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Baudrillard here presents progressive stages from signs that off er some refl ection of reality to signs that refer only to other signs and have no relation to reality at all. In discussing relationships between simulacra (loosely, “signs”) and “reality”, he draws on concepts of both physical resemblance and authenticity. He alludes in his work to the premodern and modern periods which he identifi es as having at least some relation- ship, however distorted, with the real and original, but his main argu- ments deal with the nature of late twentieth-century society, where he suggests that not only are the real and original unrecognisable, but that they have evaporated. To illustrate this argument, Baudrillard draws on a fable told by Borges (1999: 325) in which, in an ancient Empire, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it”. Eventually the map rotted away, leaving only a few remaining shards in remote places.
Baudrillard claims that society has reached a stage where it is the territory itself that has crumbled away, leaving only the map as a representation of a reality that no longer exists. Baudrillard denies in his work the exis- tence of any material reality, and this is an extreme view. However, this notion of signs being the outward representation of a shifting, unstable and ungraspable reality is one that is fundamental to semiotic thinking.
Th e discourse analysis approach I off er is one way of describing these outward representations.
In the case of the BP data, I have sought to map three sets of texts, each at a time point a year apart. I propose that, although each set will comprise texts which are very disparate, it will, nevertheless, have important things in common which make it diff erent from the others in the way it makes meaning. I discussed in Chap. 1 that news media texts are highly dispa- rate , yet also in some ways relatively circumscribed in terms of their rep- resentation: by external technical, political and fi nancial considerations, by space and time constraints, by a strong set of generic expectations and
by the demands of collaborative processes. It is this sense of what news representations of a story have in common rather than their diff erences which leads me to propose the idea of language landscapes or maps. By this I mean that a synchronic representation of a news story can be inves- tigated by considering a range of texts about the story at a certain point in time. Although the publications, the writers and the genre of the text may be diff erent, nevertheless, a description of the language will show that the combined representation has certain characteristics which make the representation describable as an entity. Th is is a language map or a larger sign. It is by drawing up a set of language maps of the coverage of the BP events that I hoped to understand how the media were construct- ing our shared meaning of these events over time.