Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and
adjectives... It isn't only the synonyms: there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification
is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its
opposite in itself. Take 'good', for instance. If you have a word like 'good', what need is there
for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well - better, because it's an exact opposite, which
the other is not. (Orwell 1989, 54).
John Lyons suggests that the reason why we tend to use morphologically unrelated forms in
comparative oppositions is to emphasize the semantic distinction involved: '"good" and "bad" are
more obviously different lexemes than "friendly" and "unfriendly"' (Lyons 1977, 277). He adds that
'gradable opposites manifest the property of polarity more strikingly than do other opposites' (ibid.,
279). Furthermore, in everyday discourse we frequently treat comparative terms as if they were
discrete categories (ibid., 278). For whatever reasons we seem to favour categorization which is
'black and white'.
It is a feature of culture that binary oppositions come to seem 'natural' to members of a culture. Many
pairings of concepts (such as male/female and mind/body) are familiar to members of a culture and
may seem commonsensical distinctions for everyday communicational purposes even if they may be
regarded as 'false dichotomies' in critical contexts. Rudyard Kipling satirized the apparently universal
tendency to divide the people we know directly or indirectly into 'Us' and 'Them' ('We and They',
Kipling 1977, 289-290):
All nice people, like us, are We
And everyone else is They:
But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way,
You may end by (think of it!)
Looking on We
As only a sort of They!
The opposition of self/other (or subject/object) is psychologically fundamental. The neo-Freudian
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote in 1957 (in 'The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious') that
'the unconscious is structured like a language' (cf. Lacan 1977, 159, 298). The mind imposes some
degree of constancy on the dynamic flux of experience by defining 'the Self' in relation to 'the Other'.
Initially, in the primal realm of 'the Real' (where there is no absence, loss or lack), the infant has no
centre of identity and experiences no clear boundaries between itself and
the external world.
The child emerges from the Real and enters 'the Imaginary' at the age of
about six- to eighteen-months, before the acquisition of speech. This is a
private psychic realm in which the construction of the Self as subject is
initiated. In the realm of visual images, we find our sense of self reflected
back by an Other with whom we identify. For Lacan, this does not reflect a
dichotomy between Self and Other, because not only is Self always
defined in terms of Other, but paradoxically, Self is Other. He describes a
defining moment in the Imaginary which he calls 'the mirror phase', when
seeing one's mirror image (and being told by one's mother, 'That's you!')