Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
induces a strongly-defined illusion of a coherent and self-governing personal identity. This marks the
child's emergence from a matriarchal state of 'nature' into the patriarchal order of culture.
As the child gains mastery within the pre-existing 'Symbolic order' (the public domain of verbal
language), language (which can be mentally manipulated) helps to foster the individual's sense of a
conscious Self residing in an 'internal world' which is distinct from 'the world outside'. However, a
degree of individuality and autonomy is surrendered to the constraints of linguistic conventions, and
the Self becomes a more fluid and ambiguous relational signifier rather than a relatively fixed entity.
Subjectivity is dynamically constructed through discourse. Emile Benveniste argued that 'language is
possible only because each speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to himself as "I" in his
discourse. Because of this, "I" posits another person, the one who, being as he is completely exterior
to "me", becomes my echo to whom I say "you" and who says "you" to me'... Neither of these terms
can be considered without the other; they are complementary... and at the same time they are
reversible' (Benveniste 1971, 225).
The entry into the Symbolic order may be illustrated with Freud's description (in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, 1920) of the fort-da game played by his grandson at the age of about eighteen months. The
child was alternately throwing away and pulling back a cotton-reel, whilst attempting to say the words
'fort!' (gone away!) and 'da!' (there it is!) - thus creating the shortest possible narrative form. According
to Freud this represented a symbolization of the mother leaving and returning. It turns a paradigmatic
substitution into an elementary syntagm and demonstrates the lure of repetition and difference. Its
focus on absence/presence has made it a favourite of post-structuralist theorists such as Lacan and
Derrida. It can stand for anything which we have lost or fear losing, and for the pleasure or hope of its
recovery. It is thus symbolic of the loss of (amongst other things) the imagined oneness of being in
the Imaginary.
Romantics may (at least retrospectively) identify with a childhood sense of growing separation from
that which can be described. They tend to echo the poet Shelley (1815) in a vision of primal
experience as a mystical sense of oneness, of being within a universal continuum: 'Let us recollect
our senses as children. What a distinct and intense apprehension we had of the world and of
ourselves... We less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed as
it were to constitute one mass' (Forman 1880, 261). The Romantic sense of loss in mediation is
perhaps most powerfully represented in Rousseau's interpretation of our use of tools as involving the
loss of a primal unity with the world. Such Romantic visions emphasize the unity of the knower and
the known. Childhood or primal experience is portrayed by Romantics as virtually 'unmediated'. And
yet all but the most naive epistemology suggests that our experience of the world is unavoidably
mediated. Indeed, without the separation of Self from Other there would be no 'me' who could hark
back to a pre-lapsarian myth of oneness.
'Male' and 'female' are not 'opposites', and yet cultural myths routinely encourage us to treat them as
such. Guy Cook offers a simple example of how images of masculinity and femininity can be
generated through a series of binary oppositions in a literary text (Cook 1992, 115). He instances two
consecutive speeches from the beginning of a scene in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet:
JULIET: Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day;
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear;