signs and things

7/31/2019 Signs and Things

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M. Andhy Nurmansyah


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Introduction Semiotics encounters more than just textual analysis.

One cannot engage in the semiotic study of how

meanings are made in texts and cultural practiceswithout adopting a philosophical stance in relation tothe nature of signs, representation and reality.

For those who adopt the stance that reality always

involves representation and that signs are involved inthe construction of reality, semiotics is unavoidably aform of philosophy.


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NAMING THINGS To semioticians, a defining feature of signs is that

they are treated by their users as standing for orrepresenting other things.

The academicians adopted the philosophical stance ofnave realism in assuming that words simply mirrorobjects in an external world.

They believed that words are only names for things, astance involving the assumption that thingsnecessarily exist independently of language prior tothem being labelled with words.


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As Saussure noted, the notion of words as labels forconcepts assumes that ideas exist independently ofwords (Saussure 1983, 65), and for him, no ideas areestablished in advance . . . before theintroduction of linguistic structure.

The concept that placing the words as labels of

concepts is still nomenclaturist and rationalist.


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Between Nave Realism and

Semioticians

NaveRealism

languageworldisomorphism

language issimply a

nomenclature

Semioticians

language as asystem of sign

languagedenotes a kind

of thing notindicates


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Between Reductionists and

Semioticians: Referentiality

Reductionists

reducing languageto the purely

referential functionof naming things

language issimply a

nomenclature

Semioticians

language function as asystem of sign to be

transferred incommunication

languagedifferentiates

things


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A radical response to realists:

is that things do not exist independently of the sign-

systems that we use; reality is created by the media

which seem simply to represent it.Languagedoes not simply name pre-existing

categories; categories do not exist in the world.

Linguistic structures (or simply LANGUAGES) arethe media to represent reality which is previously

unstructured and non-categorical. Before the mediawork, reality is one and whole.


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The primacy of the signifier

As Saussure noted, if words were simply anomenclature for a pre-existing set of things in theworld, translation from one language to another wouldbe easy. The fact is not.

In fact languages differ in how they categorize theworld the signifieds in one language do not neatly

correspond to those in another.Within a language, many words may refer to the same

thing but reflect different evaluations of it.


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Furthermore, what is signified by a word is subject tohistorical change. In this sense, reality or the world iscreated by the language we use.

HISTORY depends on WHO WRITES IT

history

history

history

history

history

history


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Even if we do not adopt the radical stance that the realworld is a product of our sign-systems, we must stillacknowledge that there are many things in theexperiential world for which we have no words andthat most words do not correspond to objects inthe known world at all.

Thus, all words are abstractions, and there is no directcorrespondence between words and things in theworld.


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REFERENTIALITY Saussures model of the sign involves no direct

reference to reality outside the sign.

Furthermore, Saussure accepted that in most scientificdisciplines the objects of study were given in advanceand existed independently of the observers point ofview.

However, he stressed that in linguistics, by contrast, itis the viewpoint adopted which creates the object.


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Saussurean semiotics asserts the nonessential nature ofobjects. Just like signifiers, signifieds are part of the sign-

system; signifieds are socially constructed.

According to the Whorfian stance, the signified is anarbitrary product of our cultures way of seeing.

The Saussurean perspective tends to reverse the

precedence which a nomenclaturist accords to the worldoutside language, by proposing that far from the worlddetermining the order of our language, our languagedetermines the order of the world.

Meanwhile in Peirces model of the sign, it explicitlyfeatures the referent something beyond the sign to whichthe sign vehicle refers (though not necessarily a materialthing).


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Therefore, in any event, for Peirce, reality can only beknown via signs.

If representations are our only access to reality,determining their accuracy is a critical issue.

Peirce adopted from logic the notion of modality torefer to the truth value of a sign, acknowledging

three kinds: actuality, (logical) necessity and(hypothetical) possibility.

Furthermore, his classification of signs in terms of themode of relationship of the sign vehicle to its referent

reflects their modality their apparent transparencyin relation to reality (the symbolic mode, for instance,having low modality).

Peirce asserted that, logically, signification could only ever be partial;otherwise it would destroy itself by becoming identical with its object.


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MODALITY and realities

Realities are contested, and textualrepresentations are thus sites of struggle.

Here We are concerned with MODALITYwithin the sign system


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Modality refers to the reality status accorded to orclaimed by a sign, text or genre.

More formally, Robert Hodge and Gunther Kressdeclare that modality refers to the status, authorityand reliability of a message, to its ontological status, orto its value as truth or fact.

In making sense of a text, its interpreters makemodality judgements about it, drawing on theirknowledge of the world and of the medium.


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Modality markers are cues refer to what are variouslydescribed as the plausibility, reliability, credibility,truth, accuracy or facticity of texts within a given genre

as representations of some recognizable reality.Among Peirces three modes of sign, symbol has the

lowest modality compared to other two.

Modality judgements involve comparisons of textual

representations with models drawn from the everydayworld and with models based on the genre;

They are therefore obviously dependent on relevantexperience of both the world and the medium.


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THE WORD IS NOT THE THINGAny representation is more than merely a

reproduction of that which it represents: it alsocontributes to the construction of reality.

Even photorealism does not depict unmediated reality.The most realistic representation may alsosymbolically or metaphorically stand for somethingelse entirely.

Alfred Korzybski, the founder of a movement knownas general semantics, declared that the map is not theterritory and that the word is not the thing.


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The general semanticists sought to avoid the confusionofhigher logical types with lower logical types.

A map is of a higher (more general) logical type thanthe territory, and linguistic representation inparticular lends itself to this process of abstraction.

Translation from lower levels to higher levels involves

an inevitable loss of specificity.


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In most acts of communication some slippage occursroutinely, although we are normally capable ofidentifying what kind of messages we are dealing with,assigning them to appropriate levels ofabstraction.

Semioticians observe that some kind oftranslationis unavoidable in human communication.

Claude Lvi-Strauss declared that understandingconsists in the reduction of one type of reality toanother.


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Similarly, Algirdas Greimas observed that significationis . . . nothing but . . . Transposition from one level oflanguage to another, from one language to a differentlanguage, and meaning is nothing but the possibilityof such transcoding.

Furthermore, knowing the appropriate level ofabstraction in relation to interpreting such an imagewould depend primarily on familiarity with therelevant cultural codes.


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The anthropologist Lucien Lvy-Bruhl claimed that peoplein primitive cultures had difficulty in distinguishingbetween names and the things to which they referred,regarding such signifiers as an intrinsic part of their

signifieds. In the Middle Ages words and images were still seen as

having a natural connection to things (which had truenames given by Adam at the Creation). Words were seenas the names of things rather than as representations.

As Michel Foucault has shown, onlyin the early modernperiod did scholars come to see words and other signifiersas representations which were subject to conventionsrather than as copies.


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EMPTY SIGNIFIERSAn empty or floating signifier is variously defined as

a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiableor non-existent signified.

Such signifiers mean different things to differentpeople: they may stand for many or even anysignifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreterswant them to mean. In such a state of radicaldisconnection between signifier and signified, a signonly means that it means.


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The concept of an empty signifier also has somesimilarities with other linguistic concepts with

the notion of an empty category and with Hjelmslevsfigurae ornon-signifying sign elements.

As early as 1939 Jakobson referred to the zero sign inlinguistics the unmarked form of a word.

For Lvi-Strauss such a signifier is like an algebraicsymbol which has no immanent symbolic value butwhich can represent anything.


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Roland Barthes referred to nonlinguistic signsspecifically as being so open to interpretation that theyconstituted a floating chain of signifieds.

Whereas Saussure saw the signifier and the signified(however arbitrary their relationship) as being asinseparable as the two sides of a piece of paper,poststructuralists have rejected the apparently stableand predictable relationship embedded in his model.


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French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote of theincessant sliding of the signified under the signifier.

Jacques Derrida refers (originally in the 1960s) to theplay or freeplay of signifiers. Thereforeto Derrida

Signs thus always refer to other signs, and there is nofinal sign referring only to itself. (INGAT Peirces

concept) Derrida championed the deconstruction of Western

semiotic systems, denying that there were any ultimatedeterminable meanings.


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While for Saussure the meaning of signs derives fromhow theydiffer from each other, Derrida coined theterm diffrance to allude also to the way in which

meaning is endlesslydeferred. There is notranscendent signified.

What Poststructuralists (or postmodernists) agree onis also different from Materialist Marxists or realists.For materialist Marxists and realists, postmodernistidealism is intolerable.


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Materialist Marxists and Realists argue that Signscannot be permitted to swallow up their referents in anever-ending chain of signification, in which one sign

always points on to another, and the circle is neverbroken by the intrusion of that to which the signrefers. HOWEVER.

The postmodernist Jean Baudrillard interprets manyrepresentations as a means of concealing the absenceof reality; he calls such representations simulacra (orcopies without originals).


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Baudrillards view on the Existence of Sign 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.

3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own

pure simulacrum.

Baudrillard argues that when speech and writing werecreated, signs were invented to point to material orsocial reality, but the bond between signifier andsignified became eroded.


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Baudrillards SIMULACRA Counterfeit (imitation) when there was stilla directlink between signifiers and their signifieds;

production (illusion) when there was an indirect linkbetween signifier and signified; and

simulation (fake) when signifiers came to stand inrelation only to other signifiers and not in relation to

any fixed external reality.The Highlighted Ideas are


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representations cannot be identical copies of what theyrepresent.

Representations can never be neutral and transparent

but are instead constitutive of reality.

As Judith Butler ( a feminist) asked ask, What doestransparency keep obscure?

Semiotics helps us to not to take representations forgranted as reflections of reality, enabling us to takethem apart and consider whose realities theyrepresent, to gain the whole truth.

signs and things

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