CRITICAL TERMS
SIGN – SIGNIFIER /
SIGNIFIED
Concepts defined by
the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. According to Saussure, languageis a system of signs. The
sign is definedas the complete linguistic unit. It is the combination of a sound image, the signifier, and an idea or concept
which that sound denotes, the signified.
The central point of Saussure’s theory is that the relationship between
signifier and signified is arbitrary; it is neither natural nor inevitable. A
sign, for Saussure, is not the simple result of the combination of an object
and a name for it. There is no logical connection, for example, between the acoustic
image or written signifier ‘banana’, and the concept of the yellow fruit being described.
Similarly, there is no intrinsic or obvious reason why the signifier ‘duck’, and
not the signifier ‘cat’, should designate the species of bird. In other words,
there is nothing duck-like about the word ‘duck’. Equally, there is no
necessary or natural reason why the letters ‘q’, ‘c’ and ‘k’ should denote the
sound [ke]. The relationship between letters and their sounds, asserts Saussure,
is also arbitrary, a matter of social convention. Indeed the only requirement, in
order to ensure effective communication, is that the sign for ‘c’, for example,
is not confused in spoken or written language with other signs such as ‘p’, ‘t’
or ‘d’. Language, for Saussure, is in this respect a system of differences,
where signs can exist only in negative opposition to other signs. As he
explains further, signs can only be identified by contrast with other similar
signs, because their ‘most precise characteristic is in being what the others
are not’.
Despite its arbitrary
nature, language remains governed by certain rules and principles, according to
Saussure. As he puts it himself, ‘the arbitrary nature of the sign explains . .
. why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system’. This is enough for
Saussure to prove that language is not a natural or logical process, but a highly
constructed medium, a set of conventions designed by and for the community. One
such social convention is traffic lights. Traffic lights are a set of signifiers
or a ‘language’ which the community agrees upon and understands in order to
prevent chaos on the roads. However, the colours red, amber and green do not
intrinsically mean ‘stop’, ‘get ready’ and ‘go’. There is nothing inherently
‘dangerous’ about the colour red, nothing obvious about ‘amber’ which says ‘get
into a state of preparedness’, and nothing inevitably or naturally ‘go-like’
about green. This is merely a system of conventions between signifier and
signified drawn up by society. Language cannot, as Saussure maintains, be
reduced to a list of names attached to a series of objects. In fact the very existence
of different languages proves the highly unnatural relationship between signifier
and signified. Saussure explains it this way: ‘if words stood for pre-existing concepts,
they would all have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next;
but this is not true’. This point is best illustrated by two examples, one
being the seemingly paradoxical case of onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeic signifiers
such as ‘moo’ or ‘quack quack’ seem to imitate the concepts they refer to, in
this case the noises that cows or ducks make. But they are still, as Saussure
maintains, only ‘approximate and more or less conventional imitations of
certain sounds’. As with all language, onomatopoeic signs have been chosen
arbitrarily. How, otherwise, does one explain the fact that unlike their English
equivalents, French cows and ducks go ‘meuh’ and ‘coin coin’ respectively? Second,
despite the apparent spontaneity or naturalness of certain human sounds or exclamations,
these still do not imply any natural bond between signifier and signified. In
English, for example, the common interjection ‘ouch!’ is pronounced in French
as ‘aïe!’ Our responses, as this suggests, are conditioned by societal conventions.
For Saussure, all of our ideas and concepts are in fact constructed by language,
and not vice versa. He concludes that language is a system which pre-exists the
individual and creates our responses to a world in which ‘nothing is distinct before
the appearance of language’.
SIMULATION
A concept most
associated with Jean Baudrillard, who argues that the postmodern age is
characterized by a proliferation of simulations. The increasingly global reach
of mass media and advertising, and the development of information and
communication technologies that work in ‘real time’, has caused our society to
be dominated by reproductions and images. Baudrillard argues that history has advanced
through three stages: first, the counterfeit era, from the invention of the printing
press to the industrial revolution, in which signs were intended either as reflections
or ‘perversions’ of reality; second, the era of production, from the industrial
revolution onwards, in which signs masked ‘the absence of a basic
reality’ (Baudrillard 2001: 173); and finally the current era, in which signs
bear no relation to reality. In this postmodern world of simulation, where the
sign no longer corresponds to the real, reality ‘implodes’, generating what
Baudrillard terms hyperreality.
While many
commentators have found in this thesis cause for concern, Baudrillard celebrates
simulation. In a notorious essay, ‘The Year 2000 Will Not Take Place’, he argues
that the age of simulation signals the end of history, which also means the end
of Marx’s idea of alienation. Marx argues that under capitalism workers experience
a sense of extreme separation from each other, the products of their labour,
and even from themselves. Marxists have looked askance at Baudrillard’s easy
assumption that alienation will only come to an end along with history itself, rather
than by any material change. In common with Fukuyama, Baudrillard is criticized
for nihilism and vagueness in his ‘end of history’ thesis. Yet his description of
simulation is seen as perspicacious by many working in the fields of
cybernetics, virtual reality and hyperspace.
SUBJECT
A term used in both
psychoanalytic and cultural theory that refers to the rational, active mind of
the human individual. It is defined in opposition to the object – that which is
other than consciousness. This notion relates to the formulation of the
seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes, ‘I think, therefore I am’,
where objects can only be understood in relation to subjective knowledge.
Throughout the twentieth century this formulation has undergone re-evaluation
with the condition or conceptualization of the subject a heated area of
analysis and debate. The political philosophy derived from the work of Karl
Marx contended that the subject is constituted through material conditions.
Various European Marxists later refined this economic determinism. Antonio
Gramsci formulated a notion of hegemony where the subject was enmeshed in a
cultural network, which persuaded it to act in a certain way. The work of the Frankfurt
School explored how the culture industry had resulted in a standardization of
individual identity.
Another alternative
to economic determinism was to medicalize the formation of individual
subjectivity. At the beginning of the twentieth century Sigmund Freud had developed
psychoanalysis as a way of recuperating a coherent sense of self from the
pressures of modern existence. For him the civilizing process and culture had arisen
in response to the dangerous drives of the unconscious or id, which threatened to
erupt at any moment. Through careful analysis of unconscious expression such as
dreams and jokes he endeavoured to detail a clinical method for maintaining the
individual psyche. Many practising psychoanalysts adopted this notion, but
Jacques Lacan developed the way Freudian ideas were implemented. In Lacanian
psychoanalysis, the subject’s perception of the world is made up of three layers:
the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. The real exists completely outside
the reach of language and representation, which is the symbolic realm; the
imaginary is the fantasy zone where the subject and the world are presented as
undifferentiated. For Lacan the subject is barred or obstructed from surfacing
by the ego, which operates as an imaginary platform for the speaker and an
alternate site of identification. Lacan sought to revive the subject by
isolating its specific desires, representations and significations through systematic
clinical practice.
Crucially for
cultural theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis problematized the notion of an
essential subject, decentring the self as a locus for political contestation.
For Marxist Louis Althusser the subject is coordinated by manufactured social
structures operating through ideology. Following Lacan, individuals are
‘interpellated’, or have their identities configured, primarily through
Ideological State Apparatuses which induce an ‘imaginary’ perception of everyday
existence. Through this mechanism people’s sense of identity can be manipulated
and controlled.This notion of identity had particular implications for
marginalized subcultures that objected to the dominant cultural configuration.
The French cultural theorist Michel Foucault, himself tutored by Althusser,
explored how apparently objective structures in society censure certain groups
which they categorize as deviant. He outlined how identity was constructed through
the dominant discourse, and how power induced an internalization of its conventions
though surveillance and punishment. Subsequent theorists of race, sexuality,
gender and class have drawn on his ideas to emphasize repressive social structures
that arbitrarily exclude one group or another.
Alongside this
theoretical re-evaluation, poststructuralists such as the French deconstructionist
Jacques Derrida question the very basis of identity. For Derrida the subject is
only constructed though differance. Any signifier or series of signification –
for example, a text or identity – must continually defer its meaning because
the sign is itself made up of signifiers. This results in the infinite play of
possibilities and the ability to switch, or slip, through different identities.
Derrida’s notion that
everything is relational and unfixed became crucial to the development of
postmodernism. With no stable values or identities, culture was seen as
endlessly fluid and able to be shaped according to individual lifestyles and desires.
However, this was fiercely criticized by many analysts including Fredric Jameson,
who viewed it as the ultimate expression of multinational capitalism, amorphous
and impossible to combat. This argument has shaped the resistance to the economic
form of postmodernism, globalization, with a focus on cultural specificity in
an international context rather than corporate homogenization.
SUBLIME
Along with the
beautiful, the sublime is one of the key categories of aesthetics. While an
experience of beauty tends to work in terms of a perceived harmony between the
subject and the object, a sublime experience entails a mixture of exhilaration
and terror through the sense that one might be overwhelmed or even annihilated
by the magnitude or power of what is experienced. In classical aesthetics, the
stress generally falls upon the subject’s ability to resolve and be ennobled by
such an experience, whereas for more recent theorists its interest lies in the
ways in which sublimity is able to shatter the everyday flow of experience and reconfigure
identity. This latter idea of the sublime is a cornerstone of postmodern theory,
and is crucial to the work of thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard.
SUPEREGO
The superego is a
Freudian concept that refers to the first and most important identification
with a world beyond the confines of the ego. For Freud the object of this
identification is a father figure, a position of symbolic authority that represents
the foundational prohibition of access to the maternal body. The superego is
produced by the identification with the position of symbolic authority, a
process in which the act of identification with something outside the ego (‘I
am like that’) involves a part of the ego becoming detached. This process of
detachment produces the paradoxical agency of the superego, a process in which
the portion of the ego that has become detached is now set against the
narcissism of the ego because it represents both a limitation (‘you cannot have
that’) and a position from which the conduct and value of the ego can be
judged. The superego mediates between the defensive inwardness of the ego and
the social world beyond it by setting limits to its otherwise boundless drive
for self-gratification. As an agency of prohibition it is what permits the
provisional social co-existence of a multiplicity of egos and it is associated
with the law, custom, tradition and moral codes.
UNCONSCIOUS
The idea of the
unconscious is most closely associated with Sigmund Freud, although it was
given an influential reinterpretation in the work of Jacques Lacan. Freud
developed his theory of the unconscious as a way of explaining how human speech
and actions are distorted and influenced by the actions of a domain of the
psyche that is radically discontinuous with the subject’s conscious self-image,
the ego. The unconscious component of the subject’s psyche is individual and
pre-social; it is the domain where the biological drives are initially lodged,
not yet domesticated within language and culture, but registered as mental
impressions. Freud also developed the idea of the unconscious as a place in
which experiences and recollections that were unpalatable to the ego were
repressed. One of Freud’s clearest accounts of this is given in his 1915 essay,
‘The Unconscious’. While the unconscious was, for Freud, remote from the
primarily linguistic and symbolic functions of the conscious ego, this did not
mean that it had no influence on the ego. Whether as the repository of the
primal drives or repressed memories, the unconscious can, and frequently does, disturb
the operation of the ego. This was evident to Freud not only through the analysis
of dreams, a process in which the conscious censorship of the ego is partially suspended,
but also in the speech of the subject, such as the notorious ‘Freudian slip’ in
which the unconscious desire of the subject is held to be revealed. Lacan
produced a theory of the unconscious that drew heavily on structural linguistics.
He posited the idea that the unconscious was divided between signifiers and
signifieds in a way analogous to language. In one of his most famous pronouncements
Lacan stated that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ (Lacan 1994: 20), by which he means that a dream,
for example, can be studied in terms of the signifier or manifest recollected
content, and a signified or latent meaning which the process of analysis can
decode. While Freud’s initial conception of the unconscious called for a study
of the way in which this mute domain influences conscious speech, Lacan allowed
the unconscious to be studied as a place in which meaning can be generated in its
own right.
FURTHER READING:
- Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Boston: Thomson Heinle, 1999.
- Childs, Peter, and Roger Fowler. The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Routledge, 2006.
- Cuddon, J. A., and Preston C. E. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 5th ed. London: Penguin, 1999.
- Lane, Richard J. Fifty Key Literary Theorists. New York: Routledge, 2006.
- Lechte, John. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008.
- Macey, David. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. London: Penguin, 2000.
- Malpas, Simon, and Paul Wake, eds. The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory. New York: Routledge, 2006.
- Mikics, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007.
- Payne, Michael, and Jessica Rae Barbera, eds. A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
- Quinn, Edward. A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. 2nd ed. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
- Selden, Raman, Peter Widdowson, and Peter Brooker. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. 5th ed. Harlow: Pearson, 2005.
- Waugh, Patricia, ed. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.
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