Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
an 'indefinite referral of signifier to signified' (Derrida 1978, 25). He championed the 'deconstruction'
of western semiotic systems, denying that there were any ultimate determinable meanings. Whilst 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 1978, 278-280; Derrida 1976, 20). These notions were anticipated by Peirce in his
version of 'unlimited semiosis', although he emphasized that in practice this potentially endless
process is inevitably cut short by the practical constraints of everyday life (Gallie 1952, 126). Unlike
Peirce, postmodernist theories grant no access to any reality outside signification. For Derrida, 'il n'y a
riens hors du texte' ('there is nothing outside the text') - although this assertion need not necessarily
be taken 'literally' (Derrida 1976, 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). Some theorists note that an emphasis
on the unavoidability of signification does not necessitate denying any external reality. David Sless
comments that 'I am not suggesting that the only things in the universe are signs or texts, or that
without signs nothing could exist. However, I am arguing that without signs nothing is conceivable'
(Sless 1986, 156). We may note in passing that since the phrase 'the empty (or free-floating) signifier'
has become something of an academic 'sound-bite' 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 &
Ruge 1981).
We might posit three key historical shifts in representational
paradigms in relation to Peirce's differential framing of the referential status of signs:
• an indexical phase - the signifier and the referent are regarded as directly connected;
• an iconic phase - the signifier is not regarded as part of the referent but as depicting it
transparently;
• a symbolic phase - the signifier is regarded as arbitrary and as referring only to other signs.
Such a schematization bears some similarity to that of the postmodernist Jean Baudrillard. 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:
These would be the successive phases of the image:
1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.