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Quote :Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organized it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness. Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered except in the esotericism of knowledge. Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream.
One thing that semiotics highlights is just how common signs are in everyday life, whether they come in the form of objects, gestures, texts…in short, anything that carries some sort of cultural meaning. Sometimes there’s a dominant meaning associated with a sign and a strong link between signifier and signified. However, Foucault emphasizes that it’s not always so simple.
As we’ve seen, people don’t always decode texts in the way the encoder intended. Not only this, but the link between signifier and signified can be unstable and cause us to make all sorts of other possible connections.
Because the signifier isn’t actually connected to a signified, sign systems can break down and cause our perception of meaning to get out of whack. This means that we don’t recognize meanings instantly anymore; instead, a gap starts to widen between things and their meanings.
What Foucault is discussing here is a crisis of signification: a scenario in which there are so many signs and so many different connections that the system goes bust (bra size? Top-half statue? Awry? Gahh!). It’s kind of like that final block in Jenga that causes the whole thing to come crashing down. As Foucault stresses, we can only weigh down a thing so much before it reaches breaking point (and if you’ve ever felt totally bogged down with schoolwork, chores or whatever, then you’ll be able to relate).
Foucault consequently makes us aware that signification can be complicated, disorganized, and ultimately, reach a point of excess. We may start out with a simple equation like signified + signified = sign, but things may not always be so straightforward in reality. If we can trust reality in the first place, right?