Second-generation semiology and detotalization

Abstract

The fashionable disavowal of structural semiology as logocentric is easily countered by a review of the important innovations of second-generation semiology, spearheaded by Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. The scope of Saussurean semiology is hampered only by its reliance upon alphabetic language and presence grounded in the voice; the assertion that semiology is a part of linguistics, rather than the reverse, does not reject the existence of nonlinguistic meaning; wordplay and textual experimentation are no mere stylistic ornamentation, but are on the contrary the key strategy of second-generation semiology for exposing the limitations of language. All three of these writers rely upon the glossematics of Louis Hjelmslev for the articulation of the concrete, non-logocentric object of general linguistics – his stratification of the Saussurean sign provides the centerpiece for the synthetic theoretical model introduced here.