Quotes About Signifier

Votes for president have long been a kind of social signifier. People will proudly boast that they voted for JFK; while it's harder to find those eager to claim having supported Richard Nixon.

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

The experience of time translates itself into language, and language translates itself into distance, which translates itself into longing, which is the realization of time. (…) how sad and strange that I, Jenny Boully, should be the sign of a signifier or the signifier of a sign, moreover, the sign of a signifier searching for the signifies.

The photographic image is a message without a code.

Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

The difference between structuralism and existentialism is simple: the world-constituting 'I' of existentialism is displaced by the linguistic relation between signifier and signified.

A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately.

Er is niets buiten de tekst.

Jacques Derrida

As my family story shows, Latinos have been a blessing for USA for many generations. The future of America depends in part on the success of the Latino community, and this opportunity is just one more signifier of that.

Unlike all the other signifiers, the Master Signifier does not fluctuate, providing a ground for the system of signification. Whereas all other signifiers acquire meaning through their relationship to other signifiers - we can identify a table because it isn't a chair, which isn't a couch, and so on - the Master Signifier refers only to itself.

Cigarettes are an instant signifier in culture. It punctuates a joke, or puts that extra zing on a punch line. I like them as a prop. I think it can be really useful for character and texture and contrast and all of that.

Beaubourg illustrates very well that an order of simulacra only establishes itself on the alibi of the previous order. Here, a cadaver all in flux and surface connections gives itself as content a traditional culture of depth. An order of prior simulacra (that of meaning) furnishes the empty substance of a subsequent order, which, itself, no longer even knows the distinction between signifier and signified, nor between form and content.

gifts — that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands.

but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play." And this joker is the inventor of play, of games of draughts, dice

There is nothing outside of the text.

Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.

Many people talk about messages everywhere, inside the organism a hormone is a message, a beam of light to obtain teleguidance to a plane or from a satellite is a message, and so on; but the message in language is absolutely different. The message. Our message, in all cases comes from the Other by which I understand "from the place of the Other.

Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.