Signified and signifier

The idea was first proposed in the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the two founders of semiotics.

The concept of signs has been around for a long time, having been studied by many classic philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, William of Ockham, and Francis Bacon, among others.

[1] The term semiotics derives from the Greek root seme, as in semeiotikos (an 'interpreter of signs').

[2]: 4  It was not until the early part of the 20th century, however, that Saussure and American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce brought the term into more common use.

[3] While both Saussure and Peirce contributed greatly to the concept of signs, it is important to note that each differed in their approach to the study.

"[2]: 10  Moreover, while words are the most familiar form signs take, they stand for many things within life, such as advertisement, objects, body language, music, and so on.

The "face" in faciality is a system that "brings together a despotic wall of interconnected signifiers and passional black holes of subjective absorption".

[21] Black holes, fixed on white walls which antagonized flows bounce off of, are the active destruction, or deterritorialization, of signs.

Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection.