Signifier

The United States has a history of being known as a melting pot filled with multiple cultures in our society. Because of the racial and ethnic diversity prevalent in the country and since race has been a sensitive topic in light of our current political climate, companies are beginning to learn that their advertising has to become more inclusive to attract their audience. Although advertisements attempt to provide a sense of inclusivity, these ads can be more prone to unintentionally produce…

As the representative work of the 1985 Fine Arts New Wave, Xu Bing’s, Book from the Sky, aka. An Analyzed Reflection of the World: The Final Volume of the Century, made between 1987 and 1991, incorporates long scrolls and four volumes of books with 604 pages, filled with about 4000 entirely meaningless glyphs. Xu Bing designs them to make no sense, whereas in the form of Song and Ming style, representing the orthodoxy of Chinese culture. Since firstly publicly exhibited in 1988, the installation…

Many people have heard of the Great Depression, but what caused this economic downturn? One of the great signifiers of the beginning was the Stock Market Crash of 1929. With that came the disaster of thousands of banks collapsing through the 1930’s. With the failure of financial institutions came a reduction in personal spending. These three factors helped bring about this awful disaster. In the beginning came Black Tuesday 1929. That day the value of shares in the Stock Market plummeted,…

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills have been at the centre of Post Modernist and Post-Structuralist discourse since the 1980s. This paper will address the arguments made by Rosalind Krauss, Judith Williamson, Laura Mulvey and Jui-Ch’i Liu surrounding these film stills. The work at hand consists of a series of black and white photographs where Sherman plays the role of the director and the agent to construct an image and mise en scène that has an uncanny resemblance to 1950s snapshots of…

For he brings to a text the knowledge that the marks on a page are not random markings, but signs, and that a sign has a dual aspect as signifier and signified, signal and concept, or mark-with-meaning. But these meanings, when we look at a page, are not there, either as physical or mental presences. To account for significance, Derrida turns to a highly specialized and elaborated use of Saussure's notion that the identity cither of the sound or of the signification of a sign does not consist in…

Rob Janoff presented two designs to the company: a rainbow striped apple and that same apple with a bite taken out of it. This logo (the signifier) signified the hippie ideals and counterculture but also represented that Apple monitors were in colour, a first for personal computers. (Lusensky, 2014) There are also obvious religious comparisons able to be drawn from this sign, particularly in…

notices it at first but the audience use semiotics to see what is going to happen and what has happed. In general signs help us to decipher piece we use to decode meanings, for example the STOP sign background is the signifier and the word itself is the signified. In soap drams the signifier is the materiality the sign, which includes images, sounds and objects but on the other hand signified is the idea, which mean the metal…

In his article “The Naked Face,” Malcom Gladwell outlines Ekman’s psychological view of face reading. The well renowned psychologist believes that the face is the best evidence a person has to offer about their emotions because most facial expressions are not made consciously. The face can be unpacked by every separate expression that pertains to a universal meaning. On the other end of the spectrum, the semiotic view proposed by Wierzbicka’s sees the face as a network of signs. And while there…

Being said, many of the key themes in the show are “taboo” and drives away from the norms of television media. The orange colored uniform acts as a symbol (signifier that is constant) representing the inmates who engages in delinquent behaviour (signified that is subjective). This is a representation of the appearance in criminal stereotypes.…(ie. People who smoke weed are bad, dreads are worn by dirty people)…

signified-signifier dichotomy – is the cornerstone of the structuralist semiotic analysis. Saussure (1959, 66ff) claims that each linguistic sign is a unit of a concept and a sound-image. The former is referred to as the signified (orig. signifié), and the latter as the signifier (orig. significant). The relationship between the two is understood in terms of arbitrariness: the concept of ‘a cat’…