Page 206 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

SIMULACRUM

The idea that scientific discourses about sex are constitutive of the meaning of
‘sex’ does not invalidate claims for the usefulness of genetic science to
understanding and predicting the actions and life choices of human bodies who
have taken on the cultural identities of male and female. In any case, cultural 183
diversity and the evidence for a genetic core to sexual difference are not
contradictory stances. Biochemical similarity is able to co-exist with cultural
divergence not least because similar genetic predispositions can have widely
different outcomes within divergent contexts.
Links Acculturation, constructionism, gender, identity, performativity, subjectivity

Signs Signs stand in for or represent concepts and can be understood as marks and
noises that generate or carry meaning through their relationship with other signs.
The study of signs and the way they work is the domain of semiotics wherein the
components of a sign are called the signifier and the signified. A signifier is taken
to be the form or medium of signs, for example a sound, an image, the marks that
form a word on the page, while the signified is to be understood in terms of
concepts and meanings. The activities that generate meaning through the ordering
of signs are signifying practices, for example writing or painting, while the totality
of signs that one can draw from to write or paint is a signifying system. The process
by which signs generate meaning is known as signification.
As understood by semiotics the relationship between the sounds and marks of
language, the signifiers, and what they are taken to mean, the signified, is not held
in any fixed eternal relationship. Rather, their arrangement is arbitrary in the sense
that the animal we call a ‘cat’ as it sits on the ‘mat’ could equally be signified by ‘tac’
and ‘tam’ or by ‘el gato’ and ‘la estera’. Because it is arbitrary, the combination of
signifiers and signifieds at any particular moment of time is contingent upon
cultural and historical processes. Indeed, signs are commonly organized into a
sequence or code that generates meaning through the cultural conventions of their
usage within a particular context.
The relationship between signifiers and signifieds may be arbitrary in the sense
of ‘could have been otherwise’ that is, conventional rather than universal and
essential. However, it is not arbitrary in the sense that, given the history of language
and culture, words do have temporarily fixed meanings and uses in the world. This
temporary ‘fixing’ is the consequence of the routine indissolubility of language,
practice and power.
Links Code, language, meaning, polysemy, representation, semiotics, structuralism

Simulacrum A simulacrum is an imitation or copy without an original (or referent) in
which the simulation becomes more real than the real, indeed, the apparent reality
of the simulation is the measure of the real. The widespread appearance of the
simulacrum as a central feature of contemporary culture is associated with the idea
of postmodern culture in the work of Baudrillard and Jameson in particular.
For Baudrillard, we live in a world where a series of modern distinctions – the real
and the unreal, the public and the private, art and reality – have broken down, or