Floating Signifier - Uses and Examples

Uses and Examples

The notion of floating signifiers can be applied to concepts such as race and gender, as a way of asserting that the word is more concrete than the concept it describes, where the concept may not be stable, but the word is. It is often commonly applied to non-linguistic signs, such as the example of the Rorschach inkblot test. Roland Barthes, while not using the term "floating signifier" explicitly, referred specifically to non-linguistic signs as being so open to interpretation that they constituted a "floating chain of signifieds." For example the American flag is at once a signifier of the geographical nation it represents, of patriotism to that nation, of the nation's set of governmental policies, and/or of the ideologies associated with it, such as liberty. Depending on the context, the flag can carry either positive or negative significance.

The concept is used in some more textual forms of postmodernism, which rejects the strict anchoring of particular signifiers to particular signifieds and argues against the concept that there are any ultimate determinable meanings to words or signs. For example, Jacques Derrida speaks of the "freeplay" of signifiers: arguing that they are not fixed to their signifieds but point beyond themselves to other signifiers in an "indefinite referral of signifier to signified."