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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
systems, denying that there were any ultimate determinable meanings.
While for Saussure the meaning of signs derives from how they
differ from each other, Derrida coined the term différance to allude
also to the way in which meaning is endlessly deferred. There is no
‘transcendent signified’ (Derrida 1967b, 278–80; Derrida 1967a, 20).
Endless deferral is only superficially similar to Peirce’s ‘unlimited
semiosis’: Peirce was a realist who emphasized that in practice this
potentially endless process is inevitably cut short by the practical
constraints of everyday life (Gallie 1952, 126), and the object is
graspable at the end of such a process. Unlike Peirce, postmodernist
theories grant no access to any reality outside signification. For
Derrida, ‘il n’y a rien hors du texte’ (‘there is nothing outside the
text’) – although this assertion need not necessarily be taken ‘literally’
(Derrida 1967a, 158, 163). For materialist Marxists and realists,
postmodernist idealism is intolerable: ‘signs cannot be permitted to
swallow up their referents in a never-ending chain of signification,
in which one sign always points on to another, and the circle is never
broken by the intrusion of that to which the sign refers’ (Lovell 1983,
16). However, an emphasis on the unavoidability of signification need
not necessitate denying any external reality. Readers may be tempted
to conclude from this brief review of the notion of ‘the empty (or
free-floating) signifier’ that it has become something of an academic
‘soundbite’ and that the term itself is ironically in danger of being
an empty signifier.
The notion of reality as degenerative is found in the Romantic
mythology of a primal state of unmediatedness (referring to children
before language or human beings before The Fall) (Chandler 1995,
31–2). In his book The Image, Daniel Boorstin charted the rise of
what he called ‘pseudo-events’ – events which are staged for the mass
media to report (Boorstin 1961). However, any ‘event’ is a social construction
– bounded ‘events’ have no objective existence, and all news
items are ‘stories’ (Galtung and Ruge 1981).
The postmodernist Jean Baudrillard interprets many representations
as a means of concealing the absence of reality; he calls such
representations ‘simulacra’ (or copies without originals) (Baudrillard
1984). He sees a degenerative evolution in modes of representation
in which signs are increasingly empty of meaning: