Meanings
- uncountableThe production of new meanings by the creation of new signs; the expansion of the semiosphere.
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.
2002, Gary Genosko, McLuhan and Baudrillard: Masters of Implosion, →ISBN, page 643 more examples
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.
1994, Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, →ISBN, page 112In 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.
1997, Steven Best, Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn, →ISBN, page 100In 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.
2006, Nik Farrell Fox, The New Sartre, →ISBN, page 90
Origin
- Frenchsémiurgie
- Englishsemiurgy
From French sémiurgie, a term coined in the 1970's in works about mass-media.
More words from French
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
semiurgy. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/semiurgy
“semiurgy.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/semiurgy. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “semiurgy,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/semiurgy.
Source: semiurgy on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.