What is "signifier"

Usage examples of "signifier".

The analogon is a purely external sign, or index, that must somehow remain purely external in relation to what it signifies but nonetheless function as a signifier pointing to the absent object.

To keep a spatial metaphor, the approximative character of which I have already stressed, I shall say that the signification of the myth is constituted by a sort of constantly moving turnstile which presents alternately the meaning of the signifier and its form, a language-object and a metalanguage, a purely signifying and a purely imagining consciousness.

Let me therefore restate that any semiology postulates a relation between two terms, a signifier and a signified.

I am saying that specific experiences, themselves linguistically structured in many ways, are not captured in signifiers without a corresponding lifeworld signified.

Although unusual in language, this disproportion between signifier and signified is not specific to myth: in Freud, for instance, the parapraxis is a signifier whose thinness is out of proportion to the real meaning which it betrays.

Provided, of course, that it is not done as a merely academic endeavor, where a bunch of disengaged dunderheads attempt to analyze the signifiers without having a clue as to the actual referents.

Shared lifeworlds mean a shared set not just of structural signifiers but also of developmental signifieds.

All the social signifiers impinge on you, but none of the cultural signifieds come up.

Buddha and show you that, unless you have developed the requisite cognitions that will allow you to resonate with the signifier whose referent exists only in the spiritual worldspace and whose signified exists only in the interior heart of those who have awakened to that space.

But I can't run around and find Buddha and show you that, unless you have developed the requisite cognitions that will allow you to resonate with the signifier whose referent exists only in the spiritual worldspace and whose signified exists only in the interior heart of those who have awakened to that space.

Both the signifiers and the signifieds exist as holons, or whole/parts in a chain of whole/parts, and, as Saussure made clear, it is their relational standing that confers meaning on each (language is a meaningful system of meaningless elements: as always, the regime or structure of the superholon confers meaning on the subholons, meaning which the subholons do not and cannot possess on their own).

The Empire of Signs, 1982), focusing largely on the traditional aspects (chopsticks, sukiyaki, puppet theatre, Zen Buddhism, haiku) still remaining in the contemporary society, where he sees a propensity for decentering and the privileging of the signifier over the signified that tend to produce "silences" and to diffuse "meaning.

Hermeneutics focused on the signifieds (LH), which could only be grasped from within by empathic participation, and structuralism focused on the signifiers (RH), which can best be approached in a distancing stance of exterior study.

In postmodern culture, as Deleuze says explicating Foucault, "the forces in man enter into relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon replacing carbon, of genetic components replacing the organism, of agrammaticalities replacing the signifier.

Otherwise it's all Greek to me, even though I can see perfectly all the physical marks of the written or spoken signifiers.