Origin and Definition
Claude Lévi-Strauss originated this term, where he identifies terms like mana (magical mystical substance of which the magic is formed), or oomph (American slang term for flavor in the figurative sense) "to represent an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning". Daniel Chandler defines the term as "a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified." As such a "floating siginifier" may "mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any signifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean." Such a floating signifier - which is said to possess "symbolic value zero" - results necessary to "allow symbolic thought to operate despite the contradiction inherent in it".
Read more about this topic: Floating Signifier
Famous quotes containing the words origin and/or definition:
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“According to our social pyramid, all men who feel displaced racially, culturally, and/or because of economic hardships will turn on those whom they feel they can order and humiliate, usually women, children, and animals—just as they have been ordered and humiliated by those privileged few who are in power. However, this definition does not explain why there are privileged men who behave this way toward women.”
—Ana Castillo (b. 1953)