semiotics: saussure, barthes, derrida

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In the Saussurian tradition of semiotics, a "sign" is understood as that which generates meaning or "signification". This happens when a "signifier", part of a structure from the world like a sound pattern becomes linked to a "signified" within a categorical and conceptual model of the world. This is comprised of systems of associations or "texts".

As part of the Structuralist project, the above eludes to a "deep" structure which is systemic, self referential and recursive, and as such can be represented as a simple fractal.

Saussure argued that the relationship between signifier and signified was arbitrary, in that a particular signifier was a consequence of learning within a specific culture. From this notion of arbitrariness, Roland Barthes offered a specific analysis of how cultures have linked signifiers with signifieds to construct ideologies. He argued that mythologies were arbitrary texts constructed by bourgeois interests for maintaining a guise of being identical with "the natural order"; a way of setting boundaries around the array of possible associations people individually make when reading texts.

Like Barthes, Jaques Derrida was a post-structuralist, in that he sought to balance structuralism's emphasis on the deep structure of the "I" as a unified constructor of functions, with a differentially associated, constructed and functional "subject". Further modifying Saussure, Derrida held that systems of representation relied on difference to function. That is to say, in terms of contemporary cognitive psychology, the differential divisions between categories within "everything connected to everything" associative neural networks, the means through which our brains process new information in light of stored information in memory.

Contrary to how ideologies seek to simplify this system in binary terms for lending themselves an aura of "the natural order", it is instead a dynamic system of associated signifiers and signifieds. Literally, materially, "we are texts". We process information by constantly making new associations, re-stabilizing our self models with stored information in the face of destabilising new information, seeking out new information to this end. This may shed light on why binary oppositions can be persuasive, as they provide a shortcut to re-stabilization.

As part of the post-Structuralist project, the above also eludes to a "deep" structure which is systemic, self referential and recursive, and so it can be represented by adding to the fractal given above. This outlines the process of Signification, or how a sign generates meaning.

Under this analysis, communities construct myth/ideology by writing signifiers of a subject's signifiers, that is to say turning the subject's signifiers in to signifieds, which the subject then reads. In other words, subjects read themselves into what the community writes, and through this they are "captured" by it. Through induction, any new signifiers written by the subject, their own complexity, come to be read by themselves as associated with what the community writes, the ways in which they read themselves becoming "anchored" to a community's writings.

However, the subject can escape this fate by, in the same way, turning the community's complex set of signifiers in to signifieds, which the community then reads. In other words, a subject writes deconstructions of the ideology of the community, typically as analyses of the human subject that are more complex than the ideology describes - the role of a socially commentating intelligentsia, and a role for artists.

The community then attempts to absorb this deconstruction back into its ideology by using the text to re-simplify the human subject in terms of hierarchical binary oppositions -- which, completing the cycle, the subject then takes on as an experimental, playful means toward self understanding; constructing an identity through a personal ideology, and rejoining the community.

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