Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
declaration that 'I... claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's
minds without their being aware of the fact' ('les myths se pensent dans le hommes, et á leur insu')
(Lévi-Strauss 1970, 12). It is similarly evident in Althusser: 'Marx observes that what determines a
social formation in the last instance... is not the spirit of an essence or a human nature, not man, not
even "men", but a relation, the relation of production' - in other words, as Coward and Ellis put it, 'man
is not the origin of society, it is rather that society is the origin of man' (Coward & Ellis 1977, 82,
including this citation from Althusser). And the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan observed that 'man
speaks, but it is only that the symbol has made him man' (cited in Coward & Ellis 1977, 107). Whilst
providing the key framework from which much of structuralist (and post-structuralist) theory was
derived, Saussure did not himself advance the proposition that the subject is constructed by the
(language) system. In an astonishingly contemporary observation published in 1868, the co-founder
of what we now know as semiotics, the logician Charles Peirce, declared in a quasi-syllogistic form
that 'the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of
thought, proves that man is a sign... Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the
thought' (Peirce 1931-58, 5.314). He went on to note that 'it is hard for man to understand this,
because he persists in identifying himself with his will' (ibid., 5.315). As in several other instances,
Peirce's notions find their echoes in poststructuralist theory, albeit in more dramatic forms. One
hundred years later, the French historian of ideas Michel Foucault declared apocalyptically that 'as
the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps
nearing its end' (Foucault 1970, 387).
In a famous chapter of his book, The Order of Things, Foucault discusses Las Meninas (The Maids of
Honour) painted in 1656 by the Spanish artist Diego Velásquez. Whilst the ostensible subject of the
painting is the princess, surrounded by her maids of honour, this is an extraordinarily reflexive
painting about painting - or more broadly, about the business of representation. It can indeed be seen
as a meditation on the role of the artist, on the depiction of reality and perhaps above all on what
Ernst Gombrich refers to as 'the beholder's share' in making sense of the visual world. There is a
particular irony here in the fact that it is likely that the primary spectators for the Las Meninas were the
models whom the artist is here depicted as painting.
The painter is standing a little back from his
canvas. He is glancing at his model... He is
staring at a point to which, even though it is
invisible, we, the spectators, can easily
assign an object, since it is we, ourselves,
who are at that point... The spectacle he is
observing is thus doubly invisible: first,
because it is not represented within the
space of the painting, and, second, because
it is situated precisely in that blind point, in
that essential hiding-place into which our
gaze disappears from ourselves at the
moment of our actual looking... In
appearance, this locus in a simple one: a
matter of pure reciprocity: we are looking at
a picture in which the painter is in turn