aside Maybe I need to do more reading around semiotics?
Now, one of the most striking aspects of Saussure’s theory of language is his emphasis on the inability of any single individual to effect change within that language. The fixity of the linguistic community this serves as justification for Saussure’s fundamentally synchronic approach to language.
Synchronic The similarity of observations within the same time frame. Concerned with something, especially a language, as it exists at one point in time. It is not about the similarity of things observed, but the observations.
Unwilling to compromise their sytems by the historical notion of linguistic community, these theoreticians instead substituted the generic contextfor the linguistic community, as if the weight of numerous “similar” texts were sufficient to locate the meaning of a text independently of a specific audience.
Genre as audience specific, relying on the linguistic community reaching similar conclusions from a text/work, but not taking into account their context.
Instead of reflecting openly on the way in which Hollywood uses its genres to short-circuit the normal interpretive process, structuralist critics plunged headlong into the trap, taking Hollywood’s ideological effect for a natural ahistorical cause
as Platonic categories
Plato loved categories, I think this is referring to his theory of moral forms.
. By choosing the films it would patronize, the audience revealed its preferences and its beliefs, thus inducing Hollywood studios to produce films reflecting its desires. Participation in the genre film experience thus reinforces spectator expectations and desire
Religion and ritual - ritual approach accounts for the intensity of identification with fil, genre audiences. The question he then poses is, are studios presenting what consumers want, or are they molding the consumer identity through producing it? Did girl power birth the Spice girls, or did the Spice girls create girl power?
Whereas the ritual approach sees Hollywood as responding to societal pressure and thus expressing audience desires, the ideological approach claims that Hollywood takes advantage of spectator energy and psychic investment in order to lure the audience into Hollywood’s own positions.
Or take the development of the sciencefiction film. At first defined only by a relatively stable science-fiction semantics, the genre first began borrowing the syntactic relationships previously established by the horror film, only to move in recent years increasingly toward the syntax of the western.
This text outlines an alternative organisation of genre which combines semantic and syntactic approaches to genre. He posits that by keeping these approaches in opposition, three problems are caused: 1. there are opposing inclusive and exclusive cannons, one with set of semantic strict rules for a genre (films that take place in the american west in this time period are westerns) and one more syntatic approach which picks examples and revolves around that exclusive cannon. Altman’s formulation of semantic/syntactic argues that favouring one sort of definition over other creates the problem as these approaches are in fact complementary.
The second contradiction, which is the semiotic approach’s failure to address the historical foundations of a genre. Altman proposes two ways for how a given genre emerges: “either a relatively stable set of semantic givens is developed through syntactic experimentation into a coherent and durable syntax, or an already existing syntax adopts a new set of semantic elements” (558). In this sense, instead of treating genres as Platonic categories, Altman considers them historically and accounts for the industry’s impact.
This is where the third, and final, contradiction Altman discusses comes into play: two strands of genre criticism, the ritual and the ideological approaches.
This blog helped me understand it: https://u.osu.edu/english6778autumn2020/2020/11/30/altmans-genre-theory/