Page 63 - Decoding Culture

56 D E CODING CULTURE

studying their role in social life. This as yet non-existent science he
calls semiology, and he conceives it as part of social psychology.
Natural language is a special type of system within this semiologi­
cal domain, and his interest in it - and, presumably, the conceptual
apparatus that he develops for analysing language - is essentially
semiological. That is, he is first of all concerned to understand
those features that are common to all systems of signification. Any
system of signs functions as a communicative process in conse­
quence of its own structuring system - its langue-like set of codes
and conventions - and the task of semiology is to explore the oper­
ation of such systems in their social context.
This immediately raises the question of what is to constitute
the basic unit of a semiological system - namely, what is a sign?
Saussure's answer involves a further famous distinction, that
between signijie and signifiant or, in the now conventional English
rendering, signified and signifier respectively. The linguistic sign,
Saussure argues, is double-sided, always containing two elements.
It does not connect a name to an object, as some correspondence
views have tended to suggest, but links the concept carried by the
sign with the sound-pattern through which the sign is given
expression. To avoid ambiguity, Saussure replaces 'sound-pattern'
and 'concept' with the more abstract terms 'signifier' and 'signified',
a choice which also has the effect of highlighting the applicability
of this distinction to all significatory systems and not just to the lin­
guistic sign. Whatever the concrete material of which they are
composed, all signs involve both a signified and a signifier.
This leads on to a key claim given succinct expression in
Saussure's blunt declaration that 'the linguistic sign is arbitrary'
(ibid: 67). When first encountered this assertion can seem rather
puzzling, partly because of the overtones of randomness in the
word 'arbitrary', something of which Saussure was himself aware.
To clarify his claim, he expands on the idea of arbitrariness in

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