Give the Sign and Swing Away

Reading Saussure last week was a little bit intimidating, but I will try to make some sense out of it. When he says, "in language there are only differences without positive terms," he is saying that meaning only comes from within the linguistic system. For example, our meaning of Night is only comprehensible because we understand Day and vice versa. Therefore he says "the idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it." Meaning that when we look at signifier and signified separately, their meaning is "differential and negative," but when looked at together, we are able to get a positive and total meaning. So, we can not understand the meaning of a word unless we look at it in the context of the linguistic system.

Post Structuralism works to challenge these ideas. For this theory it is not so simple to say that combining signifier and signified can give us a total meaning; they do not have a stable relationship. In class we discussed the idea that the signified keeps slipping farther and farther away, and in its place we continue to get more signifiers. Therefore we can truly never get at the meaning of something because the meaning keeps getting deferred. I want to try and give and example of this... bare with me.


Let's use 'baseball' as the signifier. You have the image in your head, and you know what it sounds like. So what is the signified? Is it the actual ball? Or do you take the meaning of 'baseball' to be the sport itself. If so, you start to see other signifiers right? Like players, teams and rules. With each one of these signifiers, the meaning of 'baseball' gets father and farther away from you. All these other and sounds and images expand and defer the meaning and we are unable to get a true and stable meaning of the word.


Hopefully, I didn't confuse you... because I am still kind of confused! Haha.



Ciao until next time!