Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
The strategy of 'deconstruction' which was adopted by the post-structuralist philosopher Jacques
Derrida (1976) sought to challenge the phonocentric privileging of speech over writing in western
culture and to demonstrate the instability of this opposition (Derrida 1976; Derrida 1978). Derrida also
challenged the privileging of the signified over the signifier, seeing it as a perpetuation of the
traditional opposition of matter and spirit or substance and thought. He noted that within such
discourse the material form is always subordinated to the less material form. Derrida sought to blur
the distinction between signifier and signified, insisting that 'the signified always already functions as
a signifier' (Derrida 1976, 7). He similarly challenged other loaded oppositions such as presence over
absence, nature over culture, masculine over feminine and literal over metaphorical. Other 'critical
theorists' have similarly sought to 'valorize term B' in the semiotic analysis of textual representations,
though most are content with simply reversing the valorization rather than more radically seeking to
destabilize the oppositional framework. This strategy is reflected in the way in which some activists in
minority groups have hijacked the dominant language of the majority - as in the case of a campaign
against homophobia which was launched by the Terrence Higgins Trust in the UK in September 1999
under the slogan 'It's prejudice that's queer'. The posters used neatly inverted heterosexist notions by
substituting homophobia for homosexuality: 'I can't stand homophobes, especially when they flaunt it';
'My son is homophobic, but I hope it's just a phase'; and 'homophobes shouldn't be left alone with
kids'. This strategy of ironic reversal had been foreshadowed in the wittily subversive formulation that
'we don't yet know what causes heterosexuality' (found in gay webpages).
Following on from Derrida's deconstruction of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, Robert
Hodge and Gunther Kress have offered a useful visual mapping of Saussure's model of semiotics in
terms of its own explicit oppositions. The diagram shown below is based on theirs. The leftmost terms
represent those which were privileged by Saussure whilst those on the right represent those which he
marginalizes in the Course. Seeking to revalorize those terms which Saussure had devalorized,
Hodge and Kress build their own more explicitly social and materialist framework for semiotics on 'the
contents of Saussure's rubbish bin'. Their agenda for an 'alternative semiotics' is based on:
1. culture, society and politics as intrinsic to semiotics;
2. other semiotic systems alongside verbal language;
3. parole, the act of speaking, and concrete signifying
practices in other codes;
4. diachrony, time, history, process and change;
5. the processes of signification, the transactions
between signifying systems and structures of
reference;
6. structures of the signified;
7. the material nature of signs.
(Hodge & Kress 1988, 17)