Semiology’s arbitrary signifier-signified link underpins reductive explanation
Evidence
It is convenient to describe the reductionist model in terms of signs, in which the various series stand to each other as signifier to signified, and where the basic specification of semiology is maintained: namely, that the relationship between signifier and signified be an arbitrary one (which amounts, as we have already seen, to something like a hypothesis of an unconscious). The basic problem or task faced by such a model is therefore the choice of some ultimate explanatory series which can stand as the signified to the other more superficial signifiers: in Marxism, of course, this ultimate series is the socio-economic one, or the form of the mode of production; for the structuralists it is language itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 453
Categorization
- XREF: Parallels Jameson’s later critique of structuralism in The Prison-House of Language; the arbitrary sign posited as ‘hypothesis of an unconscious’ is vintage Jameson mediation vocabulary the reader will meet again. — connects to: All understanding is necessarily reductive abstraction; Binary schematization’s completeness claim masks the imposition behind any dichotomy; Barthes inverted Saussure to make linguistics a part of semiotics
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: All understanding is necessarily reductive abstraction; Binary schematization’s completeness claim masks the imposition behind any dichotomy; Barthes inverted Saussure to make linguistics a part of semiotics