Prof: So I'm going to be
pointing to the board,
at least in theory.
 
I suppose I expect to be
pointing to the board a little
bit more today than ordinarily.
 
The usual function of my
[chalk]
equivalent of Power Point isn't
quite the same today because I'm
taking an interest in some of
these diagrammatic matters as
well and,
as I say, I will be pointing to
them.
 
All right.
 
So to begin I'm actually going
to postpone something that
you're probably already
wondering about,
although it will come into this
lecture on a couple of
occasions--
that is to say,
the full relationship in terms
of the influence of both
movements--
between the Russian formalists
and Saussure's notion of
semiology and semiotics--
until next week when we discuss
Roman Jakobson's essay,
"Linguistics and
Poetics,"
where I think the relationship
between the two movements in
which he himself was involved
will become clearer and will
come into focus more naturally
than if I tried to outline what
the connection between the two
movements is now.
So that is an aspect of our
sequence of lectures,
beginning with the last one,
that will be postponed until
next week.
 
Now semiotics is not in itself
a literary theory.
As we'll learn from Jakobson
next week,
literature can be
understood--or what he calls the
study of literature,
"poetics"--
can be understood as a subfield
of semiotics,
but semiotics is not in itself
a literary theory.
In other words,
perhaps to your frustration,
what you read today has nothing
at all, in and of itself,
to tell you about literature.
 
This isn't the last time this
will happen during the course of
the syllabus,
but then of course,
our job is to bring out the
implications for literature of
texts that we read that don't
have any direct bearing on
literary study.
 
The important thing about
Saussure and the discipline of
semiotics is the incredible
influence that it has had on
virtually every form of
subsequent literary theory.
That's what we need to keep in
mind.
Semiotics evolves into what is
called
"structuralism,"
which we'll be considering next
week.
 
That in turn,
as it were, bequeaths its
terminology and its set of
issues and frameworks for
thinking to deconstruction,
to Lacanian psychoanalysis,
to French Marxism,
and to binary theories of race,
colonization and gender--
in other words,
to a great deal that we will be
studying subsequently on this
syllabus.
 
So while again,
what we read for today is not
in itself literary theory,
it is nevertheless crucially
formative for a great many of
the developments in literary
theory that we'll be studying.
 
Now as an anecdotal or
conjectural aside--
I've always found this so
fascinating I can never resist
talking about it--
there are various texts in our
field--
the history of criticism,
literary theory--
texts that are considered
foundational but which curiously
enough,
a la Foucault,
don't actually have an author.
Aristotle's Poetics we
know actually not to have been
one of the texts written by
Aristotle but rather to be a
compendium of lecture notes put
together by his students.
This is one of the reasons why
in the golden age of Arabic
scholarship in the Middle Ages,
there was so much dispute about
the Poetics.
The manuscripts we find from
this period are full of marginal
notes where the scholars are
chiding each other and saying,
"No, no,
no.
 
It can't be that way."
 
In other words,
in a way it's a disputed text
and it is not written by
Aristotle, but it's also a
foundational text.
 
Aristotle is considered the
"father of criticism,"
and yet he is also what
Foucault would call a
"founder of
discursivity."
Well, the odd thing is it's
exactly the same with Saussure,
who can be considered the
father or patriarch of a certain
kind of literary theory as I
have just indicated.
Saussure's Course in General
Linguistics is not something
written by Saussure but is a
compendium of lecture notes
written by his students in a
series of lectures that he gave
from 1906 to 1911 and then
gathered together in book form
by two of his disciples who were
linguists.
Now it's odd that this text
does have the same formative
function.
 
Scholars who go to Geneva go
for a variety of reasons when
they look at the Saussure
archive.
Some of them are predisposed to
dislike Saussure and to hope
that they can somehow discredit
him by learning more about
things that he thought that
aren't actually in the text.
Others like Saussure and feel
that he needs to be rescued
>
 
from his compositors,
and yet others go in an
attitude of worship and hope
that the archive will yield to
them full confirmation of the
integrity of the text we call
the Course in General
Linguistics;
so that in a way,
the study of the Saussure
archive,
given the volatile relationship
of that archive with the actual
text that we have,
is a kind of map that,
if one were to study it,
one could associate with the
history of thinking about
literary theory in the twentieth
century.
This is really all neither here
nor there.
I just find it interesting that
two people who are incontestably
>
 
founders of discursivity in the
field that we study are in fact
not strictly speaking authors,
>
somehow or another confirming
the insight of Foucault in the
essay that we began by reading.
 
Anyway, enough of that.
 
We have to try to figure out
what Saussure is up to.
Let's move on to begin to do so.
 
What is semiology?
 
It's the study of existing,
conventional,
communicative systems.
 
All of these systems we can
call "languages,"
and "language"--
that is to say,
the words that we use when we
speak to each other--
is one of those systems.
 
Other systems:
the gestures that mimes use,
semaphores, railroad semaphores
and a stoplight--red,
green, yellow--are all semiotic
systems.
In other words,
all of them are modes of
communication with which we
function,
the intelligibility of which
allows us to negotiate the world
around us.
 
Semiotics has expanded into
every imaginable aspect of
thought.
 
There is a Darwinian semiotics,
understanding the relationships
among species in semiotic terms.
 
There is, in other words,
a semiotics of virtually every
imaginable thing understood as a
language made up of a system of
signs--
signs we'll be getting to in a
minute--
but in the meantime,
it's important to understand
what semiology actually is.
That's what it is.
 
Oh, I meant to ask you.
 
How many of you did not bring
the passages that I sent to you
by e-mail last night?
 
All right.
 
We have them here and they'll
be passed around.
We have about twenty-five
copies, so don't take one if you
don't need it.
 
I am going to be turning to the
second passage on the sheet in
which something about the nature
of these systems,
I think, can be made clear.
 
"Language,"
says Saussure,
"is not a function of the
speaker."
Here of course he is talking
about human language.
"It is a product that is
passively assimilated by the
individual."
 
Now what does this mean?
 
The fact that human language is
not my language--
that is to say,
the fact that it doesn't
originate in me,
the fact that it's not,
in other words,
my private language--suggests,
of course,
a certain loss because it means
that when I speak,
when I use language in speech,
I'm using something that is not
strictly my own.
It's conventional--that is to
say, it belongs in the public
sphere to all of us,
and there's perhaps a certain
sort of Romantic loss in that.
 
Wouldn't it be nice if language
in some sense were my own?
But the incredible gain which
makes language something like
the object of science that
Saussure is hoping to secure--
this is one of the things,
obviously,
that he has in common with the
formalists--
the incredible gain is that if
language is not private,
if it's not my own,
if it's not something that I
can make up as I go along,
and if, in other words,
it is conventional,
belonging to all of us,
then that's precisely what
allows it to be communicative.
It is a system of signs,
in other words,
that we can make use of,
that we recognize as signs
precisely because they exist
among us as something that can
be shared in common.
 
This then is the object of
Saussure's attention as a
linguist and as a semiotician.
 
Now what's implied in this idea
is that language is something
that we use.
 
The best way to say it and the
quickest way to say it is that I
don't speak language.
 
Language as something that
exists as an aggregate all at
once,
arguably--and this is something
that's going to come up again
and again as we come back to
these coordinates that we'll be
touching on from time to time
today also--
arguably, language as an
aggregate is something virtual.
 
You remember that Freud said we
have to infer the unconscious
from the erratic behavior of
consciousness.
There's got to be something
back there, so we're going to
call it "the
unconscious"
and we're going to try to
describe it.
It is very much the same with
language, or "langue"
as Saussure calls it.
 
What we do is
speak, and when we speak,
of course, we say correctly
that we "use"
language,
but we still need to know what
language is and we need to
understand the relationship
between language and speech.
 
Now we can understand language
as a kind of aggregate of
everything that's in the
lexicon,
in the dictionary,
together with everything that
would be in some sort of ideal
or utterly systematized set of
rules of grammar and syntax,
but there is no real aggregate
of that kind.
 
In other words,
it exists, it's there to be put
together partly as a matter of
experiment and partly as a
matter of conjecture by the
linguists;
but as a composite thing
existing in a spatial
simultaneity,
synchronically,
language is something that in a
very real sense,
as is the case with Freud's
unconscious,
we infer from speech.
 
Now speech is what we do.
 
Speech is the way in which we
appropriate, deploy and make use
of language, and Saussure calls
that "parole."
Parole is the unfolding
in time of a set of
possibilities given in space,
that set of possibilities being
what Saussure calls
"langue."
Now language is a system of
signs.
What is a sign?
 
Saussure's famous diagrams make
it clear enough.
[Gestures to board.]
We have above the line a
concept and we have below the
line a sound image.
In other words,
I think of something and that
thinking of something
corresponds to a sound image
that I have ready to hand for
it.
That can be understood in terms
of thinking of the concept
"tree"--
that's why this is in quotation
marks,
I speak Latin--and knowing that
the sound image correlative to
the concept tree is
"arbor,"
right,
I can think of
>
something like that [drawing of
a tree], something in some way
resembling that.
 
By the same token--I still
speak Latin--the sound image
corresponding to it is
"arbor."
I may or may not get back to
this today,
but in this question mark [on
the board next to a sign diagram
in which the signified tree is
written over the signifier
arbor, neither of them in
quotation marks]
is the secret of
deconstruction,
all right?-- just
>
to keep you poised and on
tenterhooks.
In the meantime,
what Saussure is doing with
this relationship above and
below the line is,
he is saying that there is an
arbitrary relationship
between the concept and the
sound image.
The concept he calls a
"signified"
and the sound image he calls a
"signifier."
A sign, in other words,
is made up of two sides in,
as it were, a thought moment:
a relationship between that
which is signified and that
which signifies it.
It's to be understood that we
have to think of them together.
They're not divisible.
 
Their relationship is necessary
but, as we'll see in a minute,
arbitrary, and each sign is
like that.
The way in which we put signs
together is to take these
bundles,
these binary relationships
between a concept and a sound
image,
and adjust them in an unfolding
sequence.
That's how we speak.
 
That's how we make a sentence.
 
All right.
 
So in a way the idea that a
signifier,
a sound that I make,
arbor,
refers to a concept and
by implication,
by a very powerful and strong
and necessary implication,
not to a thing--is not
in itself new.
The idea that a word signifies
an idea and not an object is
already fully developed in John
Locke's Essay on Human
Understanding and is more or
less commonly agreed on ever
afterwards and is,
as I say, in itself a
conventional thought that
Saussure adapts and makes use
of.
 
But what is new in Saussure and
what really is foundational in
semiotics as a science is two
things that Saussure then goes
on to say about the sign.
 
The first thing he has to say
is that the signified-signifier
relationship,
as I said, is arbitrary.
And the second thing he has to
say is that the way in which we
know one sign from another--
either studying language in the
aggregate,
whereby clusters of signs exist
in associational relation to
each other,
or studying it in speech acts,
in speech,
whereby signs exist next to
each other in a sequence--
the way in which we understand
what a sign means is
differential.
 
So that what's new in
Saussure's thinking about the
relationship between signified
and signifier is that the sign
tied up in this relationship is
both arbitrary and differential.
Okay.
 
This is a first walk through
some essential ideas.
I want to go back to the
distinction between language and
speech and refer you to the
first passage which--
now all of you have it--is on
your sheet,
because like the Russian
formalists,
Saussure is chiefly concerned
in outlining what he means by
"semiology"
to establish the semiological
project as a science.
 
Like the Russian
formalists--and in a way like
the New Critics--
talking about their
"academic"
colleagues,
Saussure is vexed by the
messiness and lack of system in
the study of linguistics.
 
This is what he says in this
first passage.
He says: If we study speech
from several viewpoints
simultaneously,
the object of linguistics
appears to us as a confused mass
of heterogeneous and unrelated
things.
 
This is speech.
 
[Gestures towards the
horizontal axis of the
coordinates on the board.]
I'm a linguist and so what do I
do?
 
I study speech,
I study speeches,
and if I do so,
and if I keep thinking about it
in a variety of ways,
all sorts of frameworks jostle
for attention.
 
Saussure continues:
This procedure opens the door
to several sciences,
psychology, anthropology,
normative grammar,
philology and so on which are
distinct from linguistics but
which claim speech in view of
the faulty method of linguistics
as one of their objects.
As I see it,
there is only one solution to
all the foregoing difficulties.
 
From the very outset [and this
is >
a really peculiar mixed
metaphor]
we must put both feet on the
ground of language and use
language as the norm of all the
other manifestations of speech.
It's as if he's trying to hold
language down.
>
 
"Stay there.
 
Stay there."
 
We put both feet on the ground
of language so that we have it
intelligible to us as a system,
as something that can be
understood,
precisely, differentially,
that can be understood in the
variety of ways in which
language organizes signs.
 
It might be worth pausing over
the variety of ways in which we
can think of signs in language,
all of which have to do with
the way in which a given sign
might be chosen to go into a
speech sentence.
 
Take the word "ship."
 
"Ship"
is very closely related in
sound to certain other words.
 
We won't specify them for fear
of a Freudian slip,
but that is one cluster.
 
That is one associational
matrix or network that one can
think of in the arrangement of
that sign in language,
but there are also synonyms for
"ship":
"bark,
"boat,"
"bateau,"
a great many other synonyms--
"sailboat," whatever.
 
They, too, exist in a cluster:
"steamship,"
"ocean liner,"
in other words,
words that don't sound at all
the same,
but are contiguous in
synonymity.
They cluster in that way.
 
And then furthermore
"ship"
is also the opposite of certain
things,
so that it would also enter
into a relationship with
"train,"
"car,"
"truck,"
"mule,"
modes of transportation,
right?
In all of these ways,
"ship"
is clustered associationally in
language in ways that make it
available to be chosen,
available to be chosen as
appropriate for a certain
semantic context that we try to
develop when we speak.
 
So that's the way a sign works
in language.
This is the tip of the iceberg
for any given sign.
By the way, in what I'm saying,
I oversimplify by supposing
that the basic unit of language
is a word.
The linguists know that that's
not at all necessarily the case.
Linguists can work at different
levels of abstraction with
language.
 
Sometimes the basic unit is the
phrase,
but some other times the basic
unit is the phoneme--
that is to say,
the single sound unit--
or if one's studying language
as a system of writing it might
be the syllable.
 
It could be the letter
understood either graphically or
audibly,
and the variety of ways in
which one can choose a basic
unit in the study of linguistics
means that you need a special
word for that unit,
which is characteristically
"the tagmeme."
In other words,
whatever you are thinking of as
your systematizing,
your understanding,
of language,
and as the basic constituent
unit--
"the word"
being probably one of the less
popular choices,
>
 
even though that's the one I've
just used--the blanket term for
that is "the tagmeme."
 
So you can understand the
associational nature of signs
also as tagmemic.
 
Then of course,
since there is a certain amount
of semantic payoff,
let's say, even when you're
talking about a phoneme--
especially because,
as Saussure will say,
and as I'll get back to,
in the misleading onomatopoetic
drift of language,
perhaps a certain sound has
certain connotations,
meaning the sound may cluster
in an associational network.
But depending on the unit
chosen, the associational
networks will differ.
 
But at any level they will
still exist as a matrix.
In other words,
how else could we have any
sense of systematicity in
language?
It is always probably the case
that when I speak I won't choose
just any word.
 
e.
 
e.
 
cummings actually boldly
experimented with this principle
and he attracted the attention
of the linguists,
particularly a linguist named
Dell Hymes.
e.
 
e.
 
cummings wrote sentences like
"He danced his did"
where "did"
is obviously not a word you
would have supposed to be in any
way involved in a relevant
associational cluster.
 
"He danced his did":
that is in every sense a
misfire,
as one school of thinking about
language would call it,
and yet at the same time,
cummings thumbs his nose at us
and deliberately uses that word
almost as though he were issuing
a critique of semiotics but at
the same time such that
semiotics would probably have
available to it its ways and
means of refutation.
A certain amount of ingenuity
is all that's required to notice
that the "d"
sound or "duh"
reiterates the "d,"
the "duh"
sound in "danced,"
and that there are all sorts of
combinatory pressures on his
consciousness to choose
"did"
as opposed to some other
seemingly irrelevant word.
 
So in any case,
you can still,
even with these egregious
examples,
understand language even in its
infinite variety nevertheless as
associational and as clustering
its available signs in ways that
make them more readily to hand
for choice than they might be,
all other things being equal.
 
Well, in any case,
so language is a system of
signs.
 
The signs are both arbitrary
and differential.
Now what does this mean?
 
This is actually the second
thing, maybe,
that we learn under the
influence of what we call
"literary theory"
and the thinking that surrounds
it about the nature of
perception.
If the sign is both arbitrary
and differential--
that is to say,
if there is no such thing as a
natural sign,
something that is linked by
nature,
by the nature of the thing and
the word together with the
thing--
if on one side of the border,
as Saussure puts it,
we look at a cow and say,
"ochs,"
and if on the other side of the
border we look at a cow and say,
"boeuf,"
and if we cross a considerable
body of water and we look at a
cow and say "cow,"
plainly the relationship
between the thing and the
sign--
the matrix signifier,
signified--just doesn't exist.
 
So signs are arbitrary-- and
they're also differential.
I have to be able to
distinguish between all the
signs I use in any communicative
sequence.
How do I do it?
 
By putting in signs which are
not other signs.
The sign is not linked to the
natural world by any natural
means, and the sign is not
linked to other signs by any
natural means.
 
I don't know a unit of
language-- which I use to
communicate with you--
positively.
I know it negatively.
 
I know it only because it is
not everything else.
Its direct relationship with
the thing that's most closely
adjacent to it somehow either
through similarity or
dissimilarity can never be a
relationship of identity.
It's not that other thing,
but, generally speaking,
the point about a sign is that
it's not any other thing.
This is true even in homonyms.
 
This is true even of seemingly
identical signs,
because each has its use value
and is only intelligible as that
which it exists to mean in a
certain context.
So it is always the case that I
can only know what I know if
it's a question of being
communicated with,
having something rendered
intelligible for me,
negatively.
 
I can't know it because it just
is that sign.
I don't know it positively.
 
I'm about to give an example of
this which I hope will flesh out
what I'm trying to get across;
in the meantime,
let's look at a couple of
passages in Saussure that may
make the point.
 
Now not on the version of the
sheet that I passed out today
>
 
but on the version that I sent
electronically last night,
there is a fifth passage,
and that passage is actually a
combination of formulations by
Saussure that are in two
separate parts of your text.
 
The first one is on page 844.
 
Can this possibly be correct?
 
I >
 
hope it can.
 
No, it is not correct.
 
It's page 845,
the lower left-hand column
where Saussure says:
Language is a system of
interdependent terms in which
the value of each term results
solely from the simultaneous
presence of the others as in the
diagram, [just below it]…
In other words,
the value of a term--I say
something, I utter a sound--the
value of that sound cannot be
determined except by its
context.
 
I can't know it except by the
way in which it differs from
everything that surrounds it.
 
He goes on to say--this is on
page 847 about halfway down the
left-hand column:
… [A]
segment of language can never
in the final analysis be based
on anything except its
noncoincidence with the rest.
Arbitrary and
differential are two
correlative qualities.
 
And then again another passage
on page 846,
the right-hand column halfway
down: "…
[C]oncepts are purely
differential and defined not by
their positive content but
negatively by their relations
with other terms of the
system."
Now probably this is hard to
accept intuitively.
We feel as we process the world
around us that we know things
for and as what they are.
 
I look at something and I know
what it is,
forgetting that possibly I only
know what it is because of a
context in which indeed it is
not those other things that are
linked to it.
 
Now I want to take an example.
 
I could use any example but I'm
going to use something which
plainly does move around among
various semiotic systems.
It's a piece of language but it
also belongs to other sorts of
semiotic systems as we'll
immediately see.
I want to use the example of
the red light.
Now in a stoplight,
which is probably just about
the simplest semiotic system
that we have--
it only has three,
one is tempted to say,
variables plainly differing
from each other:
red,
yellow and green--we have two
ways of thinking about the red
light.
If we think that our knowledge
is positive, we say
"red"
in a red light means stop.
It comes spontaneously to us to
say "red light"
means "stop."
 
Now if all we have to go on is
just this semiotic system,
it's going to be kind of hard
to put up resistance to that
sort of thinking because by the
same token we'll say
"yellow"
means "pause,"
"green"
means "go."
These three lights with their
respective colors just do
positively mean these things.
 
Everybody knows it,
and I'm certainly not thinking
when I approach an intersection
that when the red light goes
on--
I'm not saying to myself,
"Oh,
not yellow, not green."
>
 
My mind just doesn't work that
way.
All right, but still it's a red
light, right,
and our hypothesis is that the
red light has positive value in
the sense that it means a
certain thing.
It means, we say,
"stop."
Well, suppose the red light
appeared on or as the nose of a
reindeer.
 
In that case the red light
would be a beacon which means
"forward,"
"go,"
"follow me,"
"damn the torpedoes."
Right? >
 
We've got to get these presents
distributed.
No time to waste.
 
And we race off--perhaps
risking an accident,
who knows?
 
>
 
--we race off under the
compulsion of the meaning of the
red light, which is
"go,"
right?
 
Now by the way,
there's an anecdote,
the truth of which I've never
been able to ascertain,
that during the cultural
revolution in China,
Madame Mao very much
disapproved of the fact that red
lights meant "stop"
because red is,
of course, the color of
progress.
It ought to mean "to go
forward"
with everything behind it,
but needless to say her
thoughts on the subject were
never implemented because
>
 
if one day red light means
"stop"
and the next day red light
means "go,"
there might be a few problems.
 
This, by the way,
is a way of showing the fact
that everything which appears in
a semiotic system is
conventional,
right?
I mean, there is an emptying
out of positive meaning in the
very awareness that,
after all, the red light could
mean "go"--
I'm about to go on and give
more examples.
 
It's conventional.
 
Whatever the convention is
within a system of differences,
that's what makes the sign
intelligible.
All right.
 
Just some other examples:
a red light over a street door.
Well, that doesn't mean
"stop."
That means "go in,"
"come in,"
right?
 
And of course it exists in a
semiotic relationship to a white
light over a street door which
means "this is my house;
if you wish you can ring the
bell but I'd just as soon you
stayed out."
 
This light is probably on to
keep burglars away and so:
"stop,"
right?
The red light is intelligible,
in other words,
within that semiotic system.
 
Now over an auditorium
door--and of course we've
already been gazing at that
light back there,
and it's not a good example.
 
I wish it didn't say
"exit,"
but it does say
"exit,"
because that kind of weakens my
point,
but over many auditorium doors
a red light just hangs there.
Obviously, it doesn't mean
"come in"
in the sense of the red light
over a street door.
It means "go out,"
right?
"This is the way out.
 
This is the way you get out of
here," not "This is
the way you get in here."
 
There are a lot of ways in
which a red light means neither
"stop"
nor "go,"
but we are sort of confining
ourselves so far to the ways in
which a red light has something
to do with locomotion or the
lack thereof.
 
In each new system,
you can see it takes on a new
meaning always with respect to
whatever it is not.
Well, we can continue.
 
On a light-up valentine it
means "don't stop,
go."
 
It has the function,
in other words,
of negating its own meaning in
another semiotic system,
in this case the semiotic
system of the stoplight.
On an ambulance or a police
car--admittedly,
many of these lights are blue
these days but let's suppose
that,
tradition prevailing,
that they are still red--
they mean "get out of the
way" or "stop,"
right?
In other words,
they probably bear a distant
relation to the semiotics of the
stoplight,
and that's probably why red was
chosen for ambulances and police
cars: because they put into your
head the notion of
"stop."
 
But it's a notion that's
complicated in this case by the
equally imperative notion
"get out of the way,"
which doesn't at all
necessarily entail stopping but
rather accelerating in a
different direction.
All of that somewhat
complicates the picture,
but at the same time,
I think you can see that there
is a connection between those
semiotic systems.
It's a weak system in terms of
color.
In the case of the ambulance
and police car,
it's more a question of
brightness.
As I say, red tends to be
chosen, but then if you get lab
experiments showing that that
particular color of gas blue is
somehow or another sort of more
invasive of your consciousness
than red is,
then you move away from the
arbitrariness of the choice of
red as a color.
As I say, there's a certain
instability which could never
apply in the semiotics of the
stoplight because there it's not
so much a question of the
brightness of the color--
although that has been
experimented with,
as you know--but rather the
insistence that the color is
just that color.
 
Then finally--and here is
where, in a way,
this is perhaps the most
interesting thing because it
forces us to show the
complexity,
to see the complexity,
of semiotic relationships:
a red light,
just to return to the Christian
holiday,
a red light on a Christmas tree.
Now our first thought is,
Oh, aha, that has no
meaning, right?
 
It's no use talking about the
negative relationship between a
red light and a green light and
a yellow,
white, or blue one--whatever
the other colors on the
Christmas tree are--
because they all have the same
value.
 
They're all bright,
they're all cheerful,
they all say "Merry
Christmas,"
etc., etc., etc.
 
So what are you supposed to do
with that?
Here you've got a red light
which doesn't seem to enter into
this sense of the arbitrary and
differential.
Well, that's because it's
actually not a gross constituent
unit in a semiotic system,
right?
"Bright lights"
is the gross constituent unit
and the variety of those bright
lights,
which is a matter of
aesthetics, is,
ironically enough,
neutralized by the common
signifier governing our
understanding of them,
which is "bright
lights"--
in this case,
particularly on a tree or
festooning another ornament that
has some sort of comparable
value.
 
Once you get that,
once you get the value,
"Christmas tree,"
as opposed to "red
lights,"
"red lights"
being perhaps a part of some
Christmas trees,
then you see that you're back
in a semiotic system and a very
obvious one,
because a Christmas tree is a
not-menorah,
not-Kwanzaa candles.
A Christmas tree,
in other words,
is a sign that can only be
understood intelligibly in terms
of a certain cultural
understanding.
We think of course,
oh, we know what that is,
and of course probably we do,
but we're misled in supposing
that that's the key to the
understanding of it as a sign,
because it's very possible to
imagine a circumstance in which
someone wouldn't know what it
was,
forcing us despite its
familiarity to ask ourselves,
"Well, what is it and how
do we know what it is?"
Then we realize once again that
we can only know what it is if
we come to understand--
in this case,
probably, it's best to say a
cultural system,
understood as a semiosis,
within which it appears.
So this last version of the red
light introduces interesting
complications which I don't
think should confuse us.
I think they should actually
show us a little bit more about
how we can understand the
organization of the things
around us and within us as
systems of signs.
We know that we've already
learned from Heidegger and the
hermeneutic tradition that we
know them as something,
but it remained to show
how we know them.
That is to say,
we don't know them positively.
I mean, Heidegger raises the
interesting fact that we
spontaneously recognize
something.
But that's one of the things
which could be dangerous for
semiotics because it would make
us think or assume that we know
things positively--
without thinking,
in other words,
"I know that that's an
exit sign,
I don't know that it's a white
thing with red marks on it,
but I know that it's an exit
sign";
but I can't know that,
the Saussurian argument goes,
without knowing that it is not
all the things that it's not.
 
If it were all the things that
it's not,
or if it were identical to all
the things that somehow or
another it's not,
then I would be in a very
difficult situation because I
wouldn't have any means of
knowing it in particular.
 
The very fact that I need to
know it in particular is what
makes me need to know it
negatively.
In other words,
we now know two things about
how we perceive things from the
standpoint of this subject
matter,
and it's very useful to put
them together,
the fact that we always know
things first--
but at the same time the fact
that it's misleading to think
that our knowing them first
means that we know them
positively;
we know them first but we also
know them negatively,
in negation of other things.
 
Okay.
 
So let me just return once
again to the way in which sign
systems are intelligible because
lots of- there are going to be
lots of moments in a course like
this in which what we seem to be
saying is that,
"Oh, we can't know
anything,"
or "We don't know what we
know," or "How do we
know what we know?"
Maybe we're skirting rhetorical
questions of that kind,
but we're really not.
 
What we're talking about today
is how we do know things.
Right?
 
If we take semiotics seriously,
it gives us a rather
sophisticated means of
understanding precisely how we
know things,
but it insists that we know
things because of their
conventional nature:
that is to say,
because they are conventions
existing within a system of
conventions insofar as we
recognize them--
things, signs--as existing,
because if we're thinking about
a thing,
we're thinking about that thing
as a sign in semiotics.
If we don't know that,
if we don't recognize its
existence in a system--
if we can't think what system
it belongs to,
perhaps to put it in a better
way--that's tantamount to saying
we really don't know what it is.
I think the more we think about
it,
the more we realize that we
only know what it is if we know
the system that it belongs to,
which is to say,
all of the things related to it
which it is not.
Right?
 
Okay.
 
So the intelligibility of sign
systems is their
conventionality.
 
That's why it's impossible for
anybody to come along and say,
"Oh, I don't like the fact
that the red light is red.
It's symbolically the wrong
move.
Let's make the red light the
symbol of 'go.'"
And now with the ecological
movement it would be very
difficult to make the green
light the symbol of
"stop,"
and in any case all sorts of
complications would arise.
 
>
 
Right?
 
But in the meantime you see
that we can't mess with
conventional systems by imposing
the individuality of our will on
them and expecting anything to
change.
A seeming exception is the fact
that sometimes individuals can,
through the exertion of their
influence and prestige,
actually change the way we
speak about things.
This is a seeming exception.
 
Think about the way Jesse
Jackson almost single-handedly
convinced us that we should use
the expression "African
American"
even though it's a cumbersome,
polysyllabic expression which
you would think somehow or
another would be intuitively
rejected because it's so hard to
say,
but it worked.
He convinced us all to say
"African American."
You say to yourself,
"Ah ha!
There is an example of somebody
taking language by the scruff of
the neck and changing it as an
individual,
exerting an individual will
over against the conventional
nature of language."
 
The semiotician's answer to
this is it never could have
happened simply as an act of
agency, as an act of will.
It had to be acquiesced in.
 
You needed the community that
makes use of linguistic
conventions to acquiesce in a
change of use.
Remember, language exists
synchronically:
it only exists in a moment,
in a moment of simultaneity.
We study language
diachronically--that is to say,
we study its history.
 
We study its unfolding in time.
 
Now this unfolding is not,
according to the semioticians--
and here's another link with
the Russian formalists--
is not a question of studying
the way in which language is
changed from without--
that is to say,
studying the way in which,
for example,
an individual can rise up and
insist on changing one of the
signs;
but rather a sequence of
synchronic cross-sections.
 
From moment to moment,
language changes,
but if we're to understand it
as language we have to honor its
simultaneity.
 
In that case,
we understand it as a sequence
of cross-sections rather than
something that somehow
organically changes through
time.
At each cross-section,
people are either willing to
use a certain sign in a certain
way or they're not.
That's the crucial thing:
if they're not willing,
the use of the sign doesn't
work, which confirms the idea
that nothing can be changed
simply by individual agency in
and of itself.
 
All right.
 
I need to come back to
synchrony and diachrony.
I'll do so next time and
probably in subsequent lectures
because we're going to keep
using these coordinates.
We're going to keep using the
things that exist in space,
virtual or not,
and the things that unfold in
time in their relationship with
each other as we continue to try
to understand these basic
principles which shape so much
of subsequent literary theory.
 
Thank you.
 
