A genuine question

[adrienmundi]

How can you divorce signifier and signified if everyone else conflates the two? Assuming you can do this, does it really matter if you're statistically isolated in so doing?

This isn't whining/moaning disguised as a question, but a serious and confusing question to which I, as of yet, have no answer.

Comments

[redteufel.livejournal.com]

is that like a math question?

[adrienmundi]

Nah, it's a semiotics question.

[redteufel.livejournal.com]

or ya mean like seeing this: BLUE and having to say it really fast and ya say what you see and not what you read?

[skiadaimonos.livejournal.com]

I am not really sure i understand the question. One may be perfectly able to distinguish between the two. That does not mean that one will become signless.

[adrienmundi]

Signlessness was not quite the direction I was intending. I think I was aiming more towards the difference between 'necessary' and 'volitional' connections in the signifier/signified relationship.

a thought or two

[fourounces.livejournal.com]

I don't think a "conflation" of gender (signifier) and sex (signified) - I assume gender is the focus of your question - is the same thing as the link that consitutes a sign in opposition to another sign. (Here, complex social signs rather than strictly linguistic ones.) So I'm not sure the goal is really to divorce them. Slippage occurs on each level independently, and that's how the sign might weaken. E.g., if we stopped surgically "correcting" intergendered infants, or if everyone freely modified their bodies with cross-gender hormones, or at least stopped polarizing themselves physically (working out or dieting, etc.), then the signified thought "sex/body morphology" would slip. And if enough people begin mixing their gender presentation (dress, manner, role, voice, etc.), then the signifier might also slip. Thus the sign weakens - it's not the link so much as the thought-slices themselves. The question is better posed from the other side: how is it that this sign (gender->sex like "man" versus oppositional "woman") is maintained? How is it that the inherent slippage that exists at both the signifier and signified levels doesn't naturally erode the sign? (as poststructuralists like Derrida demonstrate is the tendency). The answer is that it takes a lot of constant, almost obsessive work. Looking closely at that work and how people do it is, I think, liberating.

Does it matter? Short answer: yes. If you don't participate in the repetitive maintenance and production of gender signs, then you risk becoming unintelligible in many ways: erotically seems to be the most punishing way for transgender people. Power is productive as well as constraining, and so one consequence of violating the gender regime is that your body and gender might therefore become effectively invisible or even monstrous to others. On the other hand, narrow identities are a force trap for suffering, and throwing them off is liberation. So I'm back to the Zen mystery, again: how to have identity without having it. :) Let me know if you figure that out.