Methods
The commutation test can be used to identify which signifiers are significant. The test depends on substitution: a particular signifier is chosen, then the effect of substituting alternatives is considered to determine the extent to which the value of the sign is changed. This both illuminates the meaning of the original choice and identifies the paradigms and code to which the signifiers used belong.
Paradigmatic analysis compiles a list of the signifiers present in the text. This set comprises the paradigm. The analyst then compares and contrasts the set with absent signifiers, i.e. with other signifiers that might have been chosen. This reveals the significance of the choices made which might have been required because of technical production constraints or the limitations of the individual’s own technique, or because of the tropes, generic conventions, style and rhetorical purpose of the work. The analysis of paradigmatic relations helps to define the ‘value’ of specific items in a system.
Read more about this topic: Value (semiotics)
Famous quotes containing the word methods:
“There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a “dictator” substitutes himself for the central committee.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“A woman might claim to retain some of the child’s faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)