A Quote by Jacques Lacan

Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.

Jacques Lacan

Quote Topics

Also Between Meaning Only Other Position Produced Relation Relationship

Quote Author

Jacques Lacan
French - Psychologist
April 13, 1901 - September 9, 1981

The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.

Roman Jakobson

Art has to be incredibly layered. Symbols, signifiers... layers that relate. Combine signifiers with more abstract notions. Push! Vary lines.

Kay WalkingStick

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

Jonathan Culler

Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves. This is why it clouds the language, increases as much as it can the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign and stretches to the limit the link between signifier and signified.

Roland Barthes

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Clothes are signifiers and symbols of how people communicate with each other.

Kim Gordon

Language is a signifier - it points to something. But those somethings change sometimes. Where the line comes down is that change is not in the dictionary first, it's not: change the signifier and the signified will go away.

Kory Stamper

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

John Updike

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

John Updike

War is then not a relationship between one man and another, but a relationship between one State and another, in which individuals are enemies only by accident, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders. Finally, any State can only have other States, and not men, as enemies, inasmuch as it is impossible to fix a true relation between things of different natures.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Even a cow creates ambiguous signifiers. The moo of mystery.

Mason Cooley

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

John Berger

I understand signifiers. We're social creatures and we have a physical language of communicating with each other. But it would be a really beautiful thing if we could all just wear what we wanted, without it meaning something… it would be a lovely place if we didn't necessarily judge or jump to conclusions because someone wants to wear a dress or because someone wants to wear pants.

Casey Legler

The truly monumental can only come about by means of the most exact and refined relation between parts. Since each thing carries both a meaning of its own and an associated meaning in relation to something else - its essential value is relative. We speak of the mood we experience when looking at a landscape. This mood results from the relation of certain things rather than from their separate actualities. This is because objects do not in themselves possess the total effect they give when interrelated.