Nelson Mandela's funeral featured an important event for semiotic analysis. Barack Obama was on stage with a sign language interpreter whose signs indicate he's a schizophrenic. It illustrates a communications breakdown, therefore produced meaninglessness, but is extraordinarily maningful semiotically. Paranoid Semiotics then is the study of the meaning of meaningless signs.
To do a full semiotic analysis of the medium, or the event, would be overly complex to the uninitiated however a brief summary of the semiotic considerations follow.
#The event took place in South Africa where Calvinist semiotics contributed to segregationist racism (Apartheid). #Segregationists viewed racial differences as signs of the quality and nature of people. #Segregationists used signs (traffic signs) to legalistically segregate society. #Nelson Mandela campaigned to render these signs meaningless. He came to signify racial desegregation. #Barack Obama is the new signifier of the signified desegregation. #The sign language interpreter's signs were meaningless. #The sign language interpreter's signs indicate he is a schizophrenic. #The sign language interpreter should have been segregated from the president.
In this example meaningless, the meaningless of the racial signs, and the meaningless of the interpreters signs, produce a segregation problem. As the racial signs signify nothing balcks and whites should not segregated. However as the interpreters signs are meaningless, they signify psychosis, and that he, should be segregated from the president based on a similar semiotic. Ultimately Paranoid Semiotics finds semiotic meaning inside semiotic meaninglessness.-- rcarty, Dec 19 2013 Hashtags are overrated... That is really the pound sign for schi#zos.-- xandram, Dec 19 2013 Most schizophrenics that I know (possibly not an accurate demographic) are repulsed/terrified by social media. The 'hashtag' is an ingeniously sneaky marketing tool disguised as yet another digital 'me too!' for the ADD generation.-- Alterother, Dec 19 2013 I always thought it was provided so you could play noughts and crosses as an alternative to trading and engaging with the text beside it.-- pocmloc, Dec 19 2013 Yes, well, schizophrenics. You can contrast mental disorder with the desired social-psyche that institutions inculcate - mental order. Basically establishment of mental order is a basic function of communication, as subjectivities become intersubjective through common objects.
The idea here is only half an idea. The semiotics are very interesting. To 95% of the population the signs of the interpreter are meaningless if sound. Unsound as they were, they were additionally meaningless to 5% of the population. Either way he added noise to the proceedings. He ended up signifying the most contemporary powerful manifestation of semiotics, whereas the event signified the destruction of the positivist semiotics adored by the old modern world social system of Lembroso, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and allied and axis friends, in their racist characatures. The event juxtaposes this still emergent new semiology with the old semiology (that survives in the new), and dare I say IMPLODES the meaning in an ironic segregationist impetus to seperate the functional racially desegregated person with the dysfunctional psychically segregated schizophrenic. (schizo=divided).-- rcarty, Dec 19 2013 #fnord-- st3f, Dec 19 2013 #narf-- RayfordSteele, Dec 19 2013 #mypointexactly-- Alterother, Dec 20 2013 Surely paranoid semiotics is tautological, as paranoia is a branch of applied semiotics (applied through a mixture of self-obsession and questionable logic): the paranoid applies meaning to signs, such meaning unconsciously designed to support whatever persecution complex the paranoid is flexing that day / week / month / year.-- calum, Dec 20 2013 // a mixture of self-obsession and questionable logic //
Paranoia isn't always conditional. It can be a symptom of psychological disorders that have nothing to do with extrapersonal factors. Every two or three months I spend a day wandering around my house and peering suspiciously out of windows in a Hughesian fugue, and it has nothing at all to do with my shameless megalomania or my inclination to spin implausible scenarios to explain perfectly mundane issues.-- Alterother, Dec 20 2013 It's a difficult thing to discuss, semiotics. We engage in semiotics constantly through communication. For example [calum] uses a bunch of words that indicate ideas that are structured to form an argument that is supposed to point to some truth. He appeals to the definition of paranoid which leads me to indicate my agreement in an affirmative sign.
Basically if my arguments proceeded I would say paranoid semiotics as outlined here would suggest the schizophrenic is persecuted by a system of social order that he is not fully willing or able to participate in. The semiotics reduces the event down to signifieds functionalism and desegregation in duality with dysfunction and segregation. In a hegelian sense the event incorporates these essences in an implosive irony that exists in a realm of idea beyond appearances. That's basically the idea of paranoid semiotics, that the semiotician or paranoiac, uses the crazy look in his eye to read beyond appearances and conceives the event in an interrelation of essences, or his persecution complex.
[alterother] also points to a truth that a schizophrenic has an organic problem. I'm not arguing schizophrenia is caused by willing resistance to social orders, and that the segregated subject was performing an implosive spectacle. However, I would argue that the increasing polarity of the dualism between functionalism and dysfunctionalism sets up the implosive spectacle. For example the integration of more and more people into functionalist agents, the medicalization of deviance, and the transition from racialized criminological positivism to diagnositical statistical disorders sets schizophrenia up in medico-legalistic complex of persecution.
For a schizophrenic to be paranoid when a quality of his being is antithetical to the function of the leviathan, and himself, is the reification of paranoia I mentioned in another idea. There might be a function in schizophrenia that the social order 'persecutes' and I'm tongue-in -cheek proposing that 'paranoia' or 'paranoid semiotics' is the absurd function and the dysfunction. The idea is that the schizophrenic, as a sociological observer and object, can immerse himself in the world beyond appearances in the complex of essences. This is dysfunctional because social structures are reifications that functional actors act towards construction and not deconstruction through critique.-- rcarty, Dec 20 2013 Baudrillardian implosion is when the mass interpretation of the medium produces hermeneutic meaninglessness, the discoursive regime's evaluation parameters place the act of liberty inside a discoursive framework resulting in mass evaluation of the subject and interpretation exists on an ironic continuum between the most meaningful symbolic event and meaningless punishable deviance.
Like the acts of September 11 2001 that Baudrillard was directly commenting on mass subjectivities were oriented towards the medium and discoursive contextualization and regimes of producing truth places the evaluation between meaningful symbolic event and meaningless punishable deviance and the discoursive subjective control structures of institutional social technology.
Ultimately the way society is mediated is through mass consensus to sets of rules established by their own evaluations of certain mediums, or events. So for example, hightened security and social control reforms instituted to constrain acts of liberty are placed on an ironic continuum of meaning interpretation that regulates mass intersubjective consensus towards deviance which relates to social controls on each individuated interpreting subject. The final repercussion of the implosion resounds by the mass effect of the meaningless interpretation of the semiotic materiele and the agreement to constrain their won liberties within a legal-medico institutional order.-- rcarty, Dec 23 2013 Not just schizophrenia, my friend, though my mental illness is closely linked to that disorder (and I have schizophrenic relatives). Paranoia can spring from a number of mental/emotional or personality disorders.
Or it may just mean that They're out to get you.-- Alterother, Dec 23 2013 Yes I know. That's why I always make sure to prepare mass implosions of social structures. Can't get by without mass implosion these days.-- rcarty, Dec 23 2013 I didn't mean to imply that paranoia is a consciously / independently adopted mind-state, just that one manifestation of paranoia is a semiotics based in non-normative semiotic analysis. Paranoia might in some cases spring solely from within and describe a wholly imagined conspiracy against the paranoiac, but I would hazard that paranoid frameworks are more often than not hitched to at least one external sign. tl;dr paranoia interacts with the external world through non-normative semiotics, irrespective of how the paranoia comes to be.-- calum, Dec 23 2013 I was thinking about the simultaneous appeal to semiotics and paranoia and there is some similarity. In any sort of meaningful analysis of text 'paranoia' or rhyzomic ontology has to be employed with 'a paranoia' towards what the signs mean.
Dialectical material causes implosion, like Socrates. In this sense, socrates is dialectical materiel to social order and its regime of truths and truth behaviours.-- rcarty, Dec 23 2013 Semiotics really is out to get you, you will die of a terrible dialectic. Best make double-triple sure you never utter a tautology, as that will be it.-- pocmloc, Dec 23 2013 Yes that's the level of meaning I live in. Tautology is tautology. Dialectical material is literal destruction to social order. It can range from a spelling or grammatical error to Socrates winning an argument against god to industrial capital to _________ to a work of satire.-- rcarty, Dec 23 2013 random, halfbakery