semiurgy

English

Etymology

From French sémiurgie, a term coined in the 1970's in works about mass-media.

Noun

semiurgy (uncountable)

1. The production of new meanings by the creation of new signs; the expansion of the semiosphere.
   • 1994, Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, →ISBN, page 112:

     It is the same: any shock, any blow, any impact, all the metallurgy of the accident can be read in the semiurgy of the body — neither an anatomy nor a physiology, but a semiurgy of contusions, scars, mutilations, wounds that are so many new sexual organs opened in the body.

   • 1997, Steven Best, Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn, →ISBN, page 100:

     In Baudrillard's scheme, the referential world of the commodity — needs, use value, and labor — was only a historical passageway for a radical semiurgy that aims at the liquidation of society and the real, their displacement through structural codes and signs. Radical semiurgy -- that is, the proliferation and dissemination of signs, -- constitutes a new source of abstract power that lies not in the commodity nor in the organization of the economy but in the autonomous development of the sign, whose genealogy Baudrillard traced in his studies of simulations.

   • 2002, Gary Genosko, McLuhan and Baudrillard: Masters of Implosion, →ISBN, page 64:

     For some postmodernists, semiurgy alone is not enough; it must be radicalized by an act of adjectival one-upmanship whose effect on the concept is pejorative.

   • 2006, Nik Farrell Fox, The New Sartre, →ISBN, page 90:

     In this postmodern society saturated by the dissemination of media messages and semiurgy, the apathetic masses have become 'a sullen silent majority' in which all meaning, messages and solicitations implode as they become bored and indifferent to the constant messages and attempts to slicit them to work, vote, buy, consume or register an opinion.

Derived terms

• semiurgic
• semiurgically