Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.'
(Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Chapter 11)
In the sense that there is always an unavoidable difference between the represented and its
representation, 'the camera always lies'. We do not need to adopt the 'scientific' realism of the socalled
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.
Whilst 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 nonexistent
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' (Goldman & Papson 1994, 50). 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 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). The notion
of the 'floating signifier' can be found around the year 1950 in Lévi-Strauss (see Lechte 1994, 26-7,
64, 73). Roland Barthes referred specifically to non-linguistic signs as being so open to interpretation
that they constituted a 'floating chain of signifieds' (Barthes 1977, 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; cf.
Culler 1975, 19). Barthes defines an empty signifier as one with no definite signified. There are some
similarities with the linguistic concept of an 'empty category' (Lechte 1994, 64) and with Hjelmslev's
figurae or non-signifying sign elements (ibid., 137; see Articulation).
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 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 also to the 'freeplay' of signifiers: they
are not fixed to their signifieds but point beyond themselves to other signifiers in