Page 174 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Semiotics and the Dialectic of Information 163

Figure 7.1. Relation of Signs and Information. Von Weizsäcker's notion of information
adds the material dimension that de Saussure's idealist or immaterial semiotics lacks.
form that conquest may take, brings about changes in an idiom by transporting
it into different surroundings. All kinds of facts could be cited as substantiating
evidence. . . . Here we come to the third point: the relations between language
and all sorts of institutions (the Church, the school, etc.). All these institutions
in turn are closely tied to the literary development of a language, a general phe-
nomenon that is all the more inseparable from political history. . . . Finally,
everything that relates to the geographical spreading of languages and dialecti-
cal splitting belongs to external linguistics. 6
How un-de Saussurian these statements seem! They are significant,
nonetheless, for at least two reasons. First, they indicate that de Saussure was
aware of the limitations of his method. Second, he may be contrasted with
many contemporary poststructuralists, who have embraced de Saussure’s