Page 175 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

164 Chapter Seven

basic synchronic and immaterialist positions, but who fail to acknowledge (or
perhaps even be aware of) the limitations.
What then was de Saussure’s method? “My definition of language,” he
wrote, “presupposes the exclusion of everything that is outside its organism
7
or system—in a word, of everything known as ‘external linguistics.’” He jus-
tified this approach by claiming that it facilitated the investigation of lan-
guage as a structure or as a system. He compared language to chess, arguing
that one need not understand the history of the game or account for external
influences upon it in order to comprehend how chess works:

In chess, what is external can be separated relatively easily from what is inter-
nal. The fact that the game passed from Persia to Europe is external; against that,
everything having to do with its system and rules is internal. If I use ivory chess-
men instead of wooden ones, the change has no effect on the system, but if I de-
crease or increase the number of chessmen, this change has a profound effect on
the “grammar” of the game. One must always distinguish between what is in-
ternal and what is external. In each instance one can determine the nature of the
phenomenon by applying this rule: everything that changes the system in any
way is internal. 8

Arguably, however, de Saussure’s chess analogy is far from apt: the rules
of chess (including the number of pieces) have remained static for centuries,
whereas language undergoes continuous change and those changes are, ar-
guably, in response to external factors. De Saussure bypassed the problem of
linguistic change (and thereby the relation of language to the external world),
moreover, by insisting he would only study language synchronically.
Returning now to von Weizsäcker, we can see from his declarations that in-
formation (and, by implication, signs) require: (1) an object such as ink on pa-
per (or vocal chords, or some other vibrating object) that is, by definition,
both form and substance; (2) a medium or carrier (air, water, light waves,
electric current, etc.) which is altered (“re-formed”) through contact with the
object and which then through that patterning carries certain of the object’s
properties (as when white light reflects from an object); (3) a message recip-
ient whose sensory apparatus is sufficiently acute to detect the patterned
medium; and (4) a code or codes whereby the representation of the object as
carried by the medium is interpreted by the recipient (a “signified” is pro-
duced). The absence of any of these components means there is no informa-
tion, no in-forming. Typically, when cultural studies and political economy
are set against one another, either (a) one or more of the requisite components
of information is marginalized, attention being focused only on matter or on
form, or (b) the rival paradigms adopt one or other of the dual approaches to
language highlighted by de Saussure, namely internal or external linguistics.