Meaning is deferred

Saussure's 'theory of the sign' defined a sign as being made up of the matched pair of signifier and signified.

Signifier

The signifier is the pointing finger, the word, the sound-image.

A word is simply a jumble of letters. The pointing finger is not the star. It is in the interpretation of the signifier that meaning is created.

Signified

The signified is the concept, the meaning, the thing indicated by the signifier. It need not be a 'real object' but is some referent to which the signifier refers.

The thing signified is created in the perceiver and is internal to them. Whilst we share concepts, we do so via signifiers.

Whilst the signifier is more stable, the signified varies between people and contexts.

The signified does stabilize with habit, as the signifier cues thoughts and images.

The signifier and signified, whilst superficially simple, form a core element of semiotics.

Saussure's ideas are contrary to Plato's notion of ideas being eternally stable. Plato saw ideas as the root concept that was implemented in individual instances. A signifier without signified has no meaning, and the signified changes with person and context. For Saussure, even the root concept is malleable.

The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary (Saussure called this 'unmotivated'). A real object need not actually exist 'out there'. Whilst the letters 'c-a-t' spell cat, they do not embody 'catness'. The French 'chat' is not identical to the English 'cat' in the signified that it creates (to the French, 'chat' has differences of meaning). In French, 'mouton' means both 'mutton' and a living 'sheep', whilst the English does not differentiate.

Saussure inverts the usual reflectionist view that the signifier reflects the signified: the signifier createsthe signified in terms of the meaning it triggers for us. The meaning of a sign needs both the signifier and the signified as created by an interpreter. A signifier without a signified is noise. A signified without a signifier is impossible.

Language is a series of 'negative' values in that each sign marks a divergence of meaning betweens signs. Words have meaning in the difference and relationships with other words.

The language forms a 'conceptual grid', as defined by structural anthropologist Edmund Leach, which we impose on the world in order to make sense.

Lacan defined the unconscious as being structured like language and dealing with a shifting set of signifiers. When we think in words and images, these still signify: they are not the final signified, which appears as a more abstract sensation. In that we can never know the Real, the external signified can neither be truly known.

Jaques Derrida criticized the neat simplicity of signs. The signifier-signified is stable only if one term is final and incapable of referring beyond itself, which is not true. Meaning is deferred as you slide between signs.

See Mind.org

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Semiosis and production of meaning

Semiosis is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning.

Peirce was interested primarily in logic, while Saussure was interested primarily in linguistics, which examines the functions and structures of language.

But both of them recognised that there is more to significant representation than language in the narrow sense of speech and writing alone. So they developed the idea of semiosis to relate language to other sign systems both human and nonhuman. Today, there is disagreement as to the operating cause and effect. One school of thought argues that language is the semiotic prototype and its study illuminates principles that can be applied to other sign systems. The opposing school argues that there is a metasign system and that language is simply one of many codes for communicating meaning, citing the way in which human infants learn about their environment before they have acquired language.

Whichever may be right, a preliminary definition of semiosis is any action or influence for communicating meaning by establishing relationships between signs which are to be interpreted by an audience.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

What is a signification

A signification is indefinitely determinable (and the ‘indefinitely’ is obviously essential) without thereby being determined. It can always be marked out, provisionally assigned as an identitary element to an identitary relation with another identitary element […] and as such be ‘a something’ as the starting point for an open series of successive determinations. These determinations, however, in principle never exhaust it.

The ‘being of signification’, Castoriadis goes on, has been inadequately de-
scribed by «the distinctions between proper and figurative meaning, central
signification and semantic aura, denotation and connotation»
In fact there is no denotation opposed to connotations, there are only connotations or as
Castoriadis argues, «every expression is essentially tropic»
All language is essentially the ‘abuse of language’. Any formal rule of language, any structural
setting of language, is only applicable insofar as it allows for creation of significations in the sense of letting the creative organization of the magma prevail. Being in language means to accept that there is no final and in this sense determinate response to the issue of identity, that is, to ‘accepting to be in signification’s possibility of taking their bearings in and through what they say in order to move within it […] to use the code of designations in order to make other significations appear».

Guarantee of meaning

No meaning is given to us as a gift, any more than there is any guarantor or guarantee of meaning; it signifies that there is no other meaning than the one we create in and through history.And this amounts to saying that democracy, like philosophy, necessarily sets aside the sacred. In still other terms, democracy requires that human beings accept in their actual behavior what until now they almost never have truly wanted to accept (and what, in our utmost depths, we practically never accept), namely, that we are mortal.It is only starting from this unsurpassable--and almost impossible--conviction of the mortality of each one of us and of all that we do, that people can live as autonomous beings, see in others autonomous beings, and render possible an autonomous society.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/
See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts