11 Quotes by Francesco Proto

A second way of interpreting Baudrillard’s hyperreality can therefore be found in his critique of the sign where consumer society, in its unstoppable process of deterritorialization, reduces objects to signs and the latter to empty signifiers. Hyperreality can eventually be understood as the pathway leading from a condition where the sign bears some semblance to reality to one where the sign becomes self-referential.

Barthes referred to semiology, the science of signs, in pursuing this task. He followed Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that a sign is merely the outcome of an arbitrary relationship between a signifier (a word, picture, utterance) and a signified (a concept or mental image to which the signifier gives rise) – implying that the words we use have no fixed meanings in themselves. De Saussure called this ability of the sign to represent or convey meaning signification.