69249454-chandler-semiotics

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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
to accept ‘the evidence of our own eyes’ even when events are mediated
by the cameras of journalists.
Highly realistic representations in any medium always involve
a point of view. Representations which claim to be real deny the
unavoidable difference between map and territory. In the sense that
there is always a difference between the represented and its representation,
‘the camera always lies’. We do not need to adopt the
‘scientific’ realism of the so-called general semanticists concerning
the ‘distortion of reality’ by our signifying systems, but may acknowledge
instead that reality does not exist independently of signs,
turning our critical attention to the issue of whose realities are privileged
in particular representations – a perspective which, avoiding
a retreat to subjectivism, pays due tribute to the unequal distribution
of power in the social world.
EMPTY SIGNIFIERS
While Saussurean semioticians (with language as their model) have
emphasized the arbitrary relationship of the signifier to the signified,
some subsequent theorists have stressed ‘the primacy of the signifier’
– Jacques Lacan even praised Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty
as ‘the master of the signifier’ for his declaration that ‘when I use
a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor
less’. Many postmodernist theorists postulate a complete disconnection
of the signifier and the signified. An ‘empty’ or ‘floating
signifier’ is variously defined as a signifier with a vague, highly variable,
unspecifiable or non-existent signified. Such signifiers mean
different things to different people: they may stand for many or even
any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them
to mean. In such a state of radical disconnection between signifier
and signified, a sign only means that it means. Such a disconnection
is perhaps clearest in literary and aesthetic texts which foreground
the act and form of expression and undermine any sense of a natural
or transparent connection between a signifier and a referent. However,
Jonathan Culler suggests that to refer to an ‘empty signifier’ is an
implicit acceptance of its status as a signifier and is thus ‘to correlate
it with a signified’ even if this is not known; ‘the most radical