Post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-semiotics? Sign theory at the fin de siècle
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Roland Posner
Abstract
The contribution describes the differences between modernism and postmodernism as historical periods of the twentieth century and establishes comparable differences between structuralism and post-structuralism as semiotic approaches. Like modernism, structuralism rejects traditional modes of thought, attempts to reconstruct academic disciplines on the basis of a few fundamental principles and strives to work with reconstructed terminologies and axioms. Like post-modernism, post-structuralism is characterized by the necessity of finding ways to continue research based on the fragmentary results left by structuralist projects. In the beginning of the twentieth century, structuralism itself had responded to materialism, atomism, historicism, and naturalism by introducing its own methodology built around the dichotomies of signified and signifier, paradigm and syntagm, synchrony and diachrony, langue and parole. Rather than rejecting this apparatus, post-structuralism explicated the paradoxes behind these dichotomies and tried to overcome them by under-mining the first concept of each pair. This change of perspective foregrounded the material, processual, and intertextual character of signs as well as the sense-producing function of interpretation. Rejecting rigidly fixed methods as well as general theories, and waiving the distinction between object-signs and meta-signs in favor of their joint reflection, post-structuralist semiotics became an alternative to conventional practices of academic sign analysis and now approaches the status of an art.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-semiotics? Sign theory at the fin de siècle
- Postmodernity as the unmasking of objectivity: Identifying the positive essence of postmodernity as a distinct new era in the history of philosophy
- Signs of the times: Mind, evolution, and the twilight of postmodernity
- Conformity and resistance as cultural process in postmodern globalizing times
- Tourism as a postmodern semiotic activity
- Socio-semiotics and the new mega spaces of tourism: Some comments on Las Vegas and Dubai
- Subjectivism, postmodernism, and social space
- The laboring birth of doors
- Self-referential postmodernity
- Semiotics of art, life, and thought: Three scenarios for (post)modernity
- Semiotic approaches to advertising texts and strategies: Narrative, passion, marketing
- Return of the referent: Italian cinema for the new millennium
- The postmodern in music
- Strauss's Capriccio and the terror of time
- Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: the strange destiny of a singing mystic. When music travels . . .
- Postmodern (applied) linguistics
- Bi-paradigmatic irony as a postmodern sign
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction
- Post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-semiotics? Sign theory at the fin de siècle
- Postmodernity as the unmasking of objectivity: Identifying the positive essence of postmodernity as a distinct new era in the history of philosophy
- Signs of the times: Mind, evolution, and the twilight of postmodernity
- Conformity and resistance as cultural process in postmodern globalizing times
- Tourism as a postmodern semiotic activity
- Socio-semiotics and the new mega spaces of tourism: Some comments on Las Vegas and Dubai
- Subjectivism, postmodernism, and social space
- The laboring birth of doors
- Self-referential postmodernity
- Semiotics of art, life, and thought: Three scenarios for (post)modernity
- Semiotic approaches to advertising texts and strategies: Narrative, passion, marketing
- Return of the referent: Italian cinema for the new millennium
- The postmodern in music
- Strauss's Capriccio and the terror of time
- Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: the strange destiny of a singing mystic. When music travels . . .
- Postmodern (applied) linguistics
- Bi-paradigmatic irony as a postmodern sign
