Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

The implications of the signifier / signified distinction have come to touch many
areas of contemporary thought, including film theory. Although language has been an
object of analysis over the centuries, it is only recently that it has been accepted as a
fundamental paradigm for all scientific and non-scientific areas, notably in the artistic and
intellectual, and communicative areas. Major thinkers from the twentieth-century, such as
Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Heiddeger, Lévi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty, Nöth and Derrida have
tried to rework the concept of semiotics within a broader context of the human language
and thought. The notion still remains a rather difficult object of analysis in the
contemporary world. I believe, however, that semiotics must be seen as a comprehensive
and multidisciplinary paradigm, with its manifestations in different cultural forms, and
subject to critical inspection of its own definitions and procedures.
In his Cours de linguistique générale (published posthumously in 1916 and taught
by his disciples Charles Bally and Albert Séchehaye), Saussure not only elaborates on his
base paradigm of langue / parole but he also made the critical point that the conventions
that rule the sign system are very arbitrary, which means that there is not necessarily a
correlation between the word (the signifier) and the object or idea it represents (the
signified). This arbitrariness is present in all the various languages around the world, and it
is this arbitrary relationship between these two parts that make it possible to function as a
linguistic system.
Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies (1957) carried Saussure’s ideas into other
domains of cultural theory, creating with others a new theoretical system known as
“Structuralism”. Whether spontaneous or poetic, the aim of any structuralist activity is to
reconstitute an “object” so as to make clear in this reconstitution the rules of functioning
(the “functions”) of the object. There are other acts / activities other than language which
produce meanings, social and cultural ones, like in sports, for example, that show that there
are other sign systems. Hence, semiotics becomes a useful tool to analyse the process of
meaning production in all the arts (literature, cinema, television) and, ultimately, in other
forms of cultural production, as Barthes notes in his book about the myths of French
society of that time:
On trouvera ici deux déterminations: d’une part une critique idéologique portant sur
le langage de la culture dite de masse; d’autre part un premier démontage
sémiologique de ce langage: je venais de lire Saussure et j’en tirai la conviction
qu’en traitant les “représentations collectives” comme des systèmes de signes on
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