SIGNIFIER

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2009

Signifier is a term from semiology - the study of signs. For example the expression ‘a pig is coming’ is the signifier (or the signifier could be a gesture, clothing style, form of architecture, consumer good), while the content of this expression is the signified.

The signifier and the signified always exist in some relationship (called signification) and the hearer is always decoding this relationship. For example in one instance the hearer may ‘hear’ the signifier ‘pig’ and assume that an animal pig is in the area suitable for hunting.

Another time the hearer may ‘hear’ that a policeman is in the area, while at another time the hearer may ‘hear’ that the speaker's supervisor is arriving.

Security! What Do You Mean? 
From Concept to Thick Signifier 
JEF HUYSMANS, University of Kent 
European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 4, No. 2, 226-255 (1998) DOI: 10.1177/1354066198004002004
Abstract: This article starts from the following observation. Although the debate on expanding the security agenda to non-military sectors and non-state referent objects launched an interesting discussion about the security (studies) agenda, it has not really dealt with the meaning of security. It has concentrated on adding adjectives such as `societal', `environmental', `world', etc. to security but has largely neglected the meaning — or, more technically, the signifying work — of the noun `security' itself. This article wants to draw attention to the question of the meaning of security. First, it differentiates three ways of dealing with the meaning of the noun — a definition, a conceptual analysis and a thick signifier approach, which focuses on the wider order of meaning which `security' articulates. Two things are claimed — (a) an increasing degree of sophistication if one moves from the first to the third approach; and (b) a qualitative change in the security studies agenda if one uses a thick signifier approach. The second part of the article illustrates how this thick signifier approach contributes to a better and also different understanding of security. Here, the main argument is that security mediates the relation between life and death and that this articulates a double security problematic — a daily security and an ontological security problematic. - ejt.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/2/226

Denaturalizing the family: History at the level of the signifier 
Catherine Belsey 
Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, UK 
European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, 289-303 (2001) © 2001 SAGE Publications
Abstract: Family values are not derived from nature, but have a history in western culture, beginning in the 16th century. The sources of this history are cultural documents of all kinds, including fiction. But documents are not transparent. In order to read them attentively as a basis for interpreting the past, we need to define a relationship between the interpreting subject, the object of knowledge, and language in its broadest sense. Cultural history is history at the level of the signifier. - ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/3/289

Culture, Cognition and Jean Laplanche’s Enigmatic Signifier 
Allyson Stack 
Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 3, 63-80 (2005) DOI: 10.1177/0263276405053720 © 2005 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.
Abstract: Empathy is widely touted as a springboard for social change. Within the academy, ‘identification’ is often used to promote the social value of literary and cultural studies. But to what degree have scholars, in seeking to defend the value of literary and cultural studies, conceived the act of reading in problematic ways? ‘An Ethics of Reading’ argues that adopting a Lacanian paradigm of self (reader) and text (other) to discuss the act of textual interpretation reduces a complex event involving multiple actors to a simple dualism, while ineluctably consigning any act of interpretation to simple projection. Turning instead to psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s concept of the enigmatic signifier, this article rethinks the relation between reader and cultural text – reconceiving the act of interpretation by situating it within a dynamic of transference, as opposed to projection. When conceived via this Laplanchian framework, reading becomes not only an effective path to cognition and knowledge, but a radical means of subjective transformation. - tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/22/3/63

The Signifier and the Group 
Susan Long 
Swinburne Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 218, Hawthorn 3122, Australia. 
Human Relations, Vol. 44, No. 4, 389-401 (1991) DOI: 10.1177/001872679104400406 © 1991 The Tavistock Institute
Abstract: This paper is concerned with the idea of the group as a signifying chain. Group elements, e.g., roles, subgroups, group episodes, and social acts, are viewed as signifiers open to particular significations each of which may be represented within the imaginary history of the group, i.e., in particular people and events. This theoretical position is arrived at via an application of Lacan's ideas to implications drawn from an examination of Freud's works on narcissism and group psychology. To Freud, the group is bound together by narcissistic identifications among the members who have each incorporated important aspects of the leader into his/her ego-ideal. The myth of the primal horde exemplifies this basic group structure. Taking this myth as a basis for further hypotheses about groups, this paper argues for differential member identifications with the leader. These differential identifications seem to be the imaginary effects of the signifying chain (group structure) that is anchored by the central signifier of the group, i.e., the symbolic father/leader. A particular group is exampled. - hum.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/44/4/389

Gothic's Enigmatic Signifier: The Case of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's `Carmilla'
Michael Davis
Journal: Gothic Studies, ISSN: 1362-7937 Volume 6 Issue 2, November 2004, pp 223-235
Abstract: This article proposes a reading of Le Fanu's `Carmilla' in relation to the ideas of the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, particularly Laplanche's notion of the enigmatic signifier. Laplanche refigures the inauguration of human sexuality as a failure on the infant's behalf to meaningfully translate the enigmatic messages received from the adult world, which, Laplanche argues, are freighted with unconscious sexual meaning. Unable to fully metabolise these enigmatic signifiers, the infant is prone to trauma, as the un-translated residues of the adult's address sink into the unconscious to form powerful unconscious fantasies that continue to trouble the subject. A parallel is drawn here with Laura's relationship with the mysterious but alluring Carmilla, whose enigmatic desire both fascinates and repels Le Fanu's narrator from the moment of Laura's childhood trauma but whose enigmatic language remains indecipherable. Carmilla herself is finally seen as the allegorical figure of the Gothic itself: profoundly enigmatic and potentially traumatising. - journals.mup.man.ac.uk

Rhetoric, Projection, and the Authority of the Signifier. 
Alcorn, Marshall W., Jr. 
Source: College English, v49 n2 p137-57 Feb 1987 
Abstract: Clarifies some common misconceptions about the nature of narcissism and projection and employs recent developments in post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory to explain how projective activities are filtered and altered by a certain notion of textual objectivity: objectivity as defined by the text's material signifiers. - eric.ed.gov