69249454-chandler-semiotics

ANALYSING STRUCTURES 93
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It is a feature of culture that binary oppositions come to seem
natural to members of a culture. Many pairings of concepts (such
as male–female and mind–body) are familiar within a culture and
may seem commonsensical distinctions for everyday communicational
purposes even if some of them may be regarded as ‘false
dichotomies’ in critical contexts. The opposition of self–other (or
subject–object) is psychologically fundamental. The mind imposes
some degree of constancy on the dynamic flux of experience
by defining ‘the self’ in relation to ‘the other’. The neo-Freudian
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that initially, in the primal realm
of ‘the Real’ (where there is no absence, loss or lack), the infant has
no centre of identity and experiences no clear boundaries between
itself and the external world. The child emerges from the real and
enters ‘the Imaginary’ at the age of about 6 to 18 months, before
the acquisition of speech. This is a private psychic realm in which
the construction of the self as subject is initiated. In the realm of
visual images, we find our sense of self reflected back by an other
with whom we identify. Lacan describes a defining moment in the
imaginary which he calls ‘the mirror phase’, when seeing one’s
mirror image (and being told by one’s mother, ‘That’s you!’) induces
a strongly defined illusion of a coherent and self-governing personal
identity. This marks the child’s emergence from a matriarchal state
of ‘nature’ into the patriarchal order of culture. As the child gains
mastery within the pre-existing ‘symbolic order’ (the public domain
of verbal language), language (which can be mentally manipulated)
helps to foster the individual’s sense of a conscious self residing
in an ‘internal world’ which is distinct from ‘the world outside’.
However, a degree of individuality and autonomy is surrendered to
the constraints of linguistic conventions, and the self becomes a more
fluid and ambiguous relational signifier rather than a relatively fixed
entity. Subjectivity is dynamically constructed through discourse.
MARKEDNESS
Oppositions are rarely equally weighted. The Russian linguist and
semiotician Roman Jakobson introduced the theory of markedness:
‘Every single constituent of any linguistic system is built on an