![Saussure Signifie-Signifiant](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Saussure_Signifie-Signifiant.png)
In
semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes ( semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something ...
, signified and signifier (
French: ''signifié'' and ''signifiant'') stand for the two main components of a
sign
A sign is an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm, or me ...
, where ''signified'' pertains to the "plane of content", while ''signifier'' is the "plane of expression". The idea was first proposed in the work of Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure (; ; 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widel ...
, one of the two founders of semiotics.
Concept of signs
The concept of signs has been around for a long time, having been studied by many classic philosophers such as
Plato
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
,
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of phil ...
,
Augustine
Augustine of Hippo ( , ; la, Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berbers, Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia (Roman pr ...
,
William of Ockham
William of Ockham, OFM (; also Occam, from la, Gulielmus Occamus; 1287 – 10 April 1347) was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, apologist, and Catholic theologian, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small vill ...
, and
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon led the advancement of both ...
, among others. The term ''semiotics'' derives from the Greek root ''seme'', as in ''semeiotikos'' (an 'interpreter of signs').
[ Berger, Arthur Asa. 2012. ''Media Analysis Techniques''. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.] It was not until the early part of the 20th century, however, that Saussure and American philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism".
Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for t ...
brought the term into more common use.
While both Saussure and Peirce contributed greatly to the concept of signs, it is important to note that each differed in their approach to the study. It was Saussure who created the terms ''signifier'' and ''signified'' in order to break down what a sign was. He diverged from the previous studies on language as he focused on the present in relation to the act of
communication
Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inquir ...
, rather than the history and development of words and language over time.
Succeeding these founders were numerous philosophers and linguists who defined themselves as semioticians. These semioticians have each brought their own concerns to the study of signs.
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel ''The Name of the ...
(1976), a distinguished Italian semiotician, came to the conclusion that "if signs can be used to tell the truth, they can also be used to lie."
Postmodernist social theorist
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard ( , , ; 27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as w ...
spoke of
hyperreality
Described by Jean Baudrillard, the concept of hyperreality captures the inability to distinguish "The Real" (a term borrowed from Jacques Lacan) from the signifier of it. This is more prominent in technologically advanced societies. Hyperreality ...
, referring to a copy becoming more real than reality. In other words, how the ''signifier'' becomes more important than the ''signified''. French semiotician
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes (; ; 12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular ...
used signs to explain the concept of ''
connotation
A connotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that any given word or phrase carries, in addition to its explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation.
A connotation is frequently described as either positive o ...
''—cultural meanings attached to words—and
denotation
In linguistics and philosophy, the denotation of an expression is its literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of being warm. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning including connotation. For inst ...
—literal or explicit meanings of words.
Without Saussure's breakdown of signs into signified and signifier, however, these semioticians would not have had anything to base their concepts on.
Relation between signifier and signified
Saussure, in his 1916 ''
Course in General Linguistics
''Course in General Linguistics'' (french: Cours de linguistique générale) is a book compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from notes on lectures given by historical-comparative linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at the University of Gene ...
'', divides the sign into two distinct components: the ''signifier'' ('sound-image') and the ''signified'' ('concept').
For Saussure, the signified and signifier are purely psychological: they are ''form'' rather than ''substance''.
Today, following
Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (; 3 October 189930 May 1965) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family (his father was the mathematician Johannes Hjelmslev), Hjelmslev studied ...
, the ''signifier'' is interpreted as the conceptual material form, i.e. something which can be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted; and the ''signified'' as the conceptual ideal form. In other words, "contemporary commentators tend to describe the signifier as the form that the sign takes and the signified as the concept to which it refers."
[Chandler, 2002, p.18.] The relationship between the signifier and signified is an arbitrary relationship: "there is no logical connection" between them.
This differs from a symbol, which is "never wholly arbitrary."
The idea that both the signifier and the signified are inseparable is explained by Saussure's diagram, which shows how both components coincide to create the sign.
In order to understand how the signifier and signified relate to each other, one must be able to interpret signs. "The only reason that the signifier does entail the signified is because there is a conventional relationship at play."
That is, a sign can only be understood when the relationship between the two components that make up the sign are agreed upon. Saussure argued that the meaning of a sign "depends on its relation to other words within the system;" for example, to understand an individual word such as "tree," one must also understand the word "bush" and how the two relate to each other.
It is this difference from other signs that allows the possibility of a speech community.
[Cobley, Paul, and Litza Jansz. 1997. ''Introducing Semiotics'', Maryland: National Bookworm Inc.] However, we need to remember that signifiers and their significance change all the time, becoming "dated." It is in this way that we are all "practicing semioticians who pay a great deal of attention to signs … even though we may never have heard them before."
Moreover, while words are the most familiar form signs take, they stand for many things within life, such as advertisement, objects, body language, music, and so on. Therefore, the use of signs, and the two components that make up a sign, can be and are—whether consciously or not—applied to everyday life.
Depth psychology and philosophy
Lacanianism
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, , ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and pu ...
presented formulas for the ideas of the signified and the signifier in his texts and seminars, specifically repurposing Freud's ideas to describe the roles that the signified and the signifier serve as follows:
Floating signifier
Originating in an idea from Lévi-Strauss, the concept of floating signifiers, or empty signifiers, has since been repurposed in Lacanian theory as the concept of signifiers that are not linked to tangible things by any specific reference for them, and are "floating" or "empty" because of this separation.
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek (, ; ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New Y ...
defines this in ''
The Sublime Object of Ideology
''The Sublime Object of Ideology'' is a 1989 book by the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek. The work is widely considered his masterpiece.
Summary
Žižek thematizes the Kantian notion of the sublime in order to liken i ...
'' as follows:
Signified
The ''signified'' is
untranslatable,_Atmosphere_(architecture_and_spatial_design).html" "title="Untranslatability.html" ;"title="n Untranslatability">untranslatable, Atmosphere (architecture and spatial design)">atmospheric
An atmosphere () is a layer of gas or layers of gases that envelop a planet, and is held in place by the gravity of the planetary body. A planet retains an atmosphere when the gravity is great and the temperature of the atmosphere is low. A s ...
irreducibility of the-chain-of-''signifiers''-Abstract and concrete, abstracted]; the World disclosure, disclosed barrier (between the-chain-of-signifiers ''qua'' signified) is a metaphor-Repression (psychoanalysis), repression-
.
made radical uses of the ideas of the signified and the signifier following Lacan. In ''
, they developed the idea of "faciality" to refer to the interplay of signifiers in the process of subjectification and the production of
. The "face" in faciality is a system that "brings together a despotic wall of interconnected signifiers and passional black holes of subjective absorption". Black holes, fixed on white walls which antagonized flows bounce off of, are the active destruction, or deterritorialization, of signs. What makes the power exerted by the face of a subject possible is that, creating an intense initial confusion of meaning, it continues to signify through its persistent ''refusal to'' signify.
What distinguishes this radical use and systemization of the signified and the signifier as interplaying in subjectivity from Lacan and
as well as their philosophical predecessors in general is that, beyond a resolution with the oppressive forces of faciality and the dominance of the face, Deleuze and Guattari reproach the preservation of the face as a system of a tight regulation of signifiers and destruction of signs, declaring that "if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations".
*Ferdinand de Saussure (1959). ''Course in General Linguistics''. New York: McGraw-Hill.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Signified and signifier