Page 104 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 95

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

individual... Speaking...is an individual act. It is wilful and
intellectual’ (Saussure, 1974, p. 14). This distinction between
institution and event would be of central importance to almost
all subsequent structuralisms, for it was the institution—the struc-
ture—that became the defining preoccupation for structuralist
analysis.
Just as Durkheim had insisted on the essential arbitrariness
of the specific content of sacredness and of profanity, so too
Saussure insisted that ‘the linguistic sign is arbitrary’ (p. 67). For
Saussure, language is a system of signs; and a sign is the union
of signifier—or symbol—and signified—the idea or concept, as
distinct from the thing that is symbolised. Thus: ‘The linguis-
tic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a
sound-image’ (p. 66). This suppression of the referent, or ‘thing’,
freed the signifier both from the referent itself and from the
signified. Language is thus entirely a matter of social conven-
tion, in which the signifier and the signified, and the relations
between them, are all radically arbitrary. Each element in the
language is definable only in terms of its relation to other
elements in the system of signs. And, just as Durkheim had
defined the sacred and the profane in terms of their difference
from each other, so too Saussure insisted that ‘in language there
are only differences without positive terms . . . language has
neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic
system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have
issued from the system’ (p. 120).
Saussure also posited a sharp distinction between synchronic
analysis, of the structure of a given language at a given point
in time, and diachronic analysis, of how the language changes
over time. Given that every language operated at any given
time as an independent system, it followed that historical analysis
was synchronically irrelevant: ‘Since changes never affect the
system as a whole... they can be studied only outside the system’
(p. 87). In this respect, as in many others, Saussure was the arche-
typical proto-structuralist thinker: where Durkheim had
continued to adhere to a residual evolutionism (Durkheim, 1976,
p. 3), Saussure initiated an in principle methodological antipa-
thy to historicist modes of explanation that was to prove

95