Here is an excerpt from “Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materialisation of the Sign in the Work of Peter Eisenman,” by art theorist Rosalind Krauss talking about Eisenman’s attempt to link formalism and linguistics into the architectural arena.
“What we have learned from Saussure,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs. Since the same can be said for all other signs, we may conclude that language is made of differences without terms; or more exactly, that the terms of language are engendered only by the differences which appear among them.”
This reminds me of a couple of things. The first that comes to mind is a quote from Hermann Melville: “Tuly to enjoy warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”
The second is the analogy of the stone statue presented by French philosopher Condillac as a refutement of Descartes’ argument that ideas (specifically, perfection) are bestowed on us by God. The statue, given the sense of smell, is placed in a world that possesses only one flower scent. Not until a second kind of scent is introduced to that world will the statue begin to make value judgements about which is scent is more desirable. Condillac is ultimately attempting to prove that values and ideas are based on contrasts within our own experience.
But are they really the bottom line? It seems strange to leave out how integral comparisons are to our interpretation of experience and language. Is a “cat” really just “not dog, not peacock, not windmill, not cabinet, ad infinitum”? No dictionary is structured that way. One thing I’ve learned from my Greek architectural studies is how much we as humans relate objects to ourselves, whether it is a column with proportianal similarity or use of entasis to correct the visual warping that happens as a result of our spherical eyes looking at a building.
Am I off track here?
I don’t think so.
Contemporary semiotics is so Sausserian as to discount the possibility that language is both/and. Meaning is not as simple as contrast, though that is certainly a part of it.
Well, I’m not sure that’s entirely true, either. A child first orients itself in the world by learning the difference between ‘itself’ and ‘other things,’ which is the most basic comparison possible. 20q.net is an exercise in artificial intelligence along these very lines: build a competent twenty-questions player by teaching it the difference between similar objects.
I think the case of the dictionary is an interesting point: defined language is only meaningful relative to other, predefined language—the question I find myself asking, then, is where does the distinction come from? The fundamentals of learned language, at least, seem to stem from contrast: yes versus no, mommy versus (not mommy), etcetera.
An interesting concern, but not really accurate: a dictionary actually is set up this way, as it lists multiple meanings for the same word. Since the vast majority of words have more than one meaning, especially when slang is considered, it follows that what semiotics postulates is true: that the meaning of words is derived by differences from other words, from a context of words in relationship to each other (a sentence), and from the grammatical stucture of a sentence.
I’m not sure I at all buy the Lacanian explanation above: as with other Freud-derived theories, it is extremely difficult to test. Nicely, that allows all those working within its “confines” to theorize pretty freely. It is very convenient that we cannot just ask the infant about differentiation between self and (m)other.
Quickly these lines of reasoning deteriorate into epistemological undecidability: how can we communicate what we think unless we name it, and how can we name it without entering into the sticky language-as-difference mess?
Yet many other forms of expression, some less abstract than others, such as painting, music, sculpture, dance, certainly contain ideas, ideas it is arguable come from some other source than just being different from all the other ones.
I guess that anything that is “arguable” rather than absolute leads us to more epistemological
uncertainty, no? “Abstract ideas” as referred to above, if I’m understanding them correctly (I can’t tell from lack of proper context by the writer)-
I think you mean Kandinsky, Cunningham, Pollock, et. al., essentially modern art- don’t exist outside of their context, either (20th century art). The point is, as is Krauss’ and Saussure’s, that any sign conceived outside the system has no meaning in and of itself: the identification of ideas through expression necessitates differentiation from other ideas.It is interesting to note that existentialist theorist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (as opposed to some deconstructionist) is who is quoted as acknowledging Saussure’s point…
Absolutism being arguable does confuse matters a bit.