Simulation, A-signification and Embodied Semiotics in I, Robot

David U. Garfinkle
2019 Athens Journal of Mass Media and Communications  
Within the post-industrialized worldview, conventional correlations between a text and its linguistic determinations no longer hold as absolute, challenging the limits of a linguistic measure by semiotic analysis. Yet, even in the postmodern condition of a hyperreal realm where the visual image has replaced the literary sign as the predominant mode of global information and mass communication, the structuralist binary model of signifying semiotics comes under erasure. Taking Baudrillard's three
more » ... orders of simulations as a ground, this study explores how the nature of his a-signifying model of semiosis confronts its own event horizon on the cinematic screen. Yet, where semiotics functions appropriately for the exegesis of text and image, those traces of human embodiment that remain discernable in film also appear to be under erasure. As a case study in the use of science fiction film for the examination of post-structuralist tools of cultural analysis, the limits of signifying signs become evident in the traces of embodiment evident in the film, I, Robot (2004) , that was inspired by Isaac Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics. As a challenge to the disembodied figures of contemporary science fiction, this study addresses what happens to embodiment under the orders of simulacra, to pose a transitional step in the movement from signifying semiotics to mimesis, via the a-signifying model of semiotic analysis.
doi:10.30958/ajmmc.5-4-2 fatcat:jffexcpxnbghhdvj2pkukyj6gu