Some Notes on Master Signifiers

Master signifiers: Signfiers whose signifieds are impossible concepts of wholeness and perfection. They invoke a chain of secondary signifiers that establish their meaning and value by how they are related to the master signifier, but the master signifier itself isn’t part of the chain. Hence it can continue to stand as a perfect ideal. In order to do that, we need markers of difference or failure so that we can continue to hold it out there as something to strive for that we haven’t achieved. In fact, one definition for a master signifier would be an ideal which we have failed to achieve.

Ex. For Billionare Ted, Indianness is a master signifier representing what he doesn’t have.
      My friend Marie has never felt feminine because her voice is not soprano.
      My friend Jimmie’s midlife crisis came about when he decided he didn’t know how to be black.

Whiteness is one of those powerful socially constructed master signifiers. It acts as a nodal point of desire for Arnold, signified by the image of the flying white horse.  As a master signifier, it doesn’t mean that everyone desires to be Caucasian, but that even Caucasians desire to the White, because Whiteness signifies that fantasy of wholeness, power, wealth, purity, hope, and the absence of difference. Consider what you learned about white light in elementary school: it is comprised of all the colors, whereas individual colors are a result of refraction, which can be considered an imperfection of sorts because it depends on perspective. Whiteness is the purity of unrefracted light.

Valerie Babb, in Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture argues that throughout American history, there has been a collective and self-conscious effort to make “white racial identity the ‘authentic’ American identity” (5).

Erving Goffman, in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963), argues that there is “only one completely unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of good complexion, weight, height, and a recent record in sports” (128).

Goffman’s list represents secondary signifiers that attach to Americanness as a master signifier. There are both cultural and personal sets of secondary signifiers that attach to master signifiers, and they act as goals as well as limits. As goals, they spur us to become closer to what we consider ideal. As limits, they keep us from being completely absorbed into an ideal that would be impossible to attain and would swallow our individuality if we did. What we want, ultimately, is to be “good enough.”