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188 LANGUAGE

differential and negative when considered separately, their combination is
a positive fact…. 5
The question, which Saussure is unable to answer satisfactorily, is how these
‘positive facts’ of the language system are established. He has a general answer
for this—they are ‘social facts’ or ‘social conventions’—but his concept of the
social institution of language is ambiguous. Saussure recognizes that language
does not come from individual, intentional subjects and cannot be changed by
any one individual (that is, that it ‘eludes the individual or social will’), and that
6
individual speakers are ‘largely unconscious’ of its laws. Yet when referring to
7
speech acts Saussure is consistently forced to contradict this general principle
and to define language as a kind of ‘social contract’, mutually recognized and
8
adopted by a ‘speech community’. Implicitly, he assumes a network of self-
conscious speaking subjects: ‘[Language] is both a social product of the faculty
of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a
social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty’ [our emphasis]. 9
However, the language system, with its fixed meanings, precedes individual
speaking subjects, and we are left with the problem of the untheorized social
nature of meaning: ‘No longer can language be identified with a contract pure
and simple…it furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a
thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent’. 10
We can understand Saussure’s ambiguity here if we refer back to his attempt
to limit the arbitrariness of the sign. As we have seen, Saussure opts for a formal
resolution: his ‘domain of articulations’—between signifiers and signifieds,
which makes it possible for language to ‘signify’—is internal to language itself.
Yet it is impossible for language to function autonomously. In order that
signifiers and signifieds may ‘articulate’ as signs, Saussure is forced to hold to a
concept of meaning already established within the signifying chain which the
speaking subject articulates.

When we hear an unfamiliar language we are at a loss to say how the
succession of sounds should be analysed…But when we know the meaning
and function that must be attributed to each part of the chain, we see the
parts detach themselves from each other and the shapeless ribbon break
into segments [Our emphasis]. 11

Given Saussure’s resolution of the problem of arbitrariness, he is
ultimately forced to contradict the principle itself—he must presuppose a
speech community which already ‘knows’ and ‘recognizes’ the meanings
it will hear.