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Daniel Chandler defines the term as "a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified". [4] The concept of floating signifiers originates with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who identified cultural ideas like mana as "represent[ing] an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning".
In critical theory, the notion of sign is used variously. As Daniel Chandler has said: Many postmodernist theorists postulate a complete disconnection of the signifier and the signified. An 'empty' or 'floating signifier' is variously defined as a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified. Such signifiers ...
Building on his earlier work, Laclau argued that the basis of populism lies in the creation of "empty signifiers": words and ideas that express a universal idea of justice, and symbolically structure the political environment. Against those who see populism as a threat to democracy, Laclau argued that it is an essential component of it.
In their theory of schizoanalysis, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari made radical uses of the ideas of the signified and the signifier following Lacan. In A Thousand Plateaus , extending from their ideas of deterritorialization and reterritorialization , they developed the idea of "faciality" to refer to the interplay of signifiers in the ...
The analyst then compares and contrasts the set with absent signifiers, i.e. with other signifiers that might have been chosen. This reveals the significance of the choices made which might have been required because of technical production constraints or the limitations of the individual's own technique, or because of the tropes , generic ...
(Peirce's sign theory concerns meaning in the broadest sense, including logical implication, not just the meanings of words as properly clarified by a dictionary.) The interpretant is a sign (a) of the object and (b) of the interpretant's "predecessor" (the interpreted sign) as being a sign of the same object.
Lacan uses a French double entendre of nom (name) vs. non (no-no) to contextualize Freudian incest prohibition into a figurative, linguistic framework; the name-of-the-father (no-of-the-father) signifier quilts the lattice of signifiers with a "paternal metaphor", a master signifier that "double stitches" the meaning of the Symbolic Order over the Imaginary Order by establishing the Law, a ...
The networks of signifiers to which so much weight is given in Lacanianism are structures created by desiring-machines, above the level of the unconscious. Hence Lacanian analysis works to solve neurosis, but it fails to see that neuroses are a second-order problem that reveal nothing about the unconscious—as does Freud's classical ...