69249454-chandler-semiotics

SIGNS AND THINGS 79
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play of the signifier still requires and works through the positing of
signifieds’ (Culler 1985, 115). Shakespeare famously referred to ‘a
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’
(Macbeth V, iii). As early as 1939 Jakobson referred to the ‘zerosign’
in linguistics – the ‘unmarked’ form of a word (such as the
singular form of words in which the plural involves the addition of
the terminal marker -s) (Jakobson 1939). We will return to the notion
of unmarked terms in Chapter 3. The concept of an ‘empty signifier’
also has some similarities with other linguistic concepts – with
the notion of an ‘empty category’ and with Hjelmslev’s figurae or
non-signifying sign elements. The ‘floating signifier’ is referred to
in the year 1950 in Lévi-Strauss’s Introduction to the Work of Marcel
Mauss (Lévi-Strauss 1950). For Lévi-Strauss such a signifier is like
an algebraic symbol which has no immanent symbolic value but
which can represent anything. Roland Barthes referred to nonlinguistic
signs specifically as being so open to interpretation that
they constituted a ‘floating chain of signifieds’ (Barthes 1964, 39).
The first explicit reference to an ‘empty signifier’ of which I am
aware is that of Barthes in his essay ‘Myth today’ (Barthes 1957).
Barthes defines an empty signifier as one with no definite signified
(cf. Barthes 1982, 108).
Whereas Saussure saw the signifier and the signified (however
arbitrary their relationship) as being as inseparable as the two sides
of a piece of paper, poststructuralists have rejected the apparently
stable and predictable relationship embedded in his model. The
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote of ‘the incessant sliding
of the signified under the signifier’ (Lacan 1977, 154) – he argued
that there could be no anchoring of particular signifiers to particular
signifieds – although this in itself is hardly contentious in the context
of psychoanalysis. Jacques Derrida refers (originally in the 1960s)
to the ‘play’ or ‘freeplay’ of signifiers: they are not fixed to their
signifieds but point beyond themselves to other signifiers in an ‘indefinite
referral of signifier to signified’ (Derrida 1967b, 25; ‘freeplay’
has become the dominant English rendering of Derrida’s use of the
term jeu – see, for instance, Derrida 1967a, xix). Signs thus always
refer to other signs, and there is no final sign referring only to itself.
Derrida championed the ‘deconstruction’ of Western semiotic