Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / Semiotics and Semiology
Transcript
- All right, we are back for another If you have not heard us Duo cast lately, it's probably because you're not on the Patreon. Eric and I are taking on a new special topic series. Last we did four episodes on cybernetics and systems theory. We aren't done with it. Actually, that might come up here as to why we're not done with it anyway. The other two guys, the other half of the podcast, they like to take on the political side of things. You know, socialism. What else did they talk about, Eric, Well, conservatism quite a lot. Anything. Politics is their game. Who's fash, who's not good, and so on and so on. I think of them as the as the more politically engaged side of the duo, and Matt's our outreach to the conservatives. They also like to do interviews. Yeah, whereas I'm not at all opposed to interviews. It just seems like we haven't even scratched the surface of the things. You even know as semiotics guy, we're starting to, of course. Yeah, hopefully now we have a chance. Yeah, So this is our duo casts are for the segment of the audience who wants to learn about things, hear about things besides politics. And for myself, I only want to think about things besides politics. But it takes all types to make a podcast, of course. Yeah yeah, you'll hear some conversations that aren't dictated by political categories, which will be nice. But I think politics can be a topic within semi audis, but it's not the focus, and that's the point. We're all taking a breath from politics. It's been a bit rough for the last four years, so there's good reason. Anyhow, if you are interested in this topic you want more of it, we are paywalling it except for the intro, so we can introduce it if you want more in depth stuff. It's a paywalled Sorry. We would call this semiotics and semiology. I actually don't know what we're gonna call it. Maybe semiotics and semiology, because I know quite a bit about semiology and only a lot about one form of semiotics. But Eric is a comparative semiutitian, so he's gonna be bringing it'll it might turn into an interview cause it's his time to shine. If we're talking about cyber semiotics and bio semiotics, I don't even know what those things are, but we're gonna learn. So in the series, we'll for sure do a full episode on cs perse those delusions out there. Deluz wrote basically the cinema books on Perse plus Bergson a dash of dash of Bergson into Persian semiotics. So it's true. And Guitari as well, right, Oh yeah, Gutsari was Well, they have a funny relationship with semiotics. They go for the Danish guy Helmslev, and they have a lot of Perse in them too, so they have a kind of a weird relationship to also so Syrian semiology, So that's something that will come up. Yeah, we always seem to get back to Dilluz when we're talking. Yeah, well, I have my reasons for that. I find Deluze and Gutsari's work to be more like in my arena, and I'm sort of doing some of it for my dissertation as well, So there's a couple of things going on there. But Delusen Gutzari, the way they use perse is very interesting to me, so I try to learn a little bit about it. And they're also a little bit less explicitly political defining you know what we traditionally associate with political theory. Yeah, I mean everything goes back to capitalism, but in a very different way than it does in the Marxist tradition with the luzen Guti and they have. Yeah, it does feel like they just go so far away from politics sometimes, though we might also cover Julia Christeva. I have to remember she does something about anagrammatic anagrammatic semiotics. It's been a while since I've read it, but that might be our fifth episode or so. Yeah, Yeah, she'd be good to do. She's more in the in the so Surian semiological tradition, but she would be good to do early on. So why is it that when everyone gets out of grad school they trounce around and use the word signifier about every word? Why can't they just say word? Yeah, Well, when you use the word signifier, you're making its distinction between like the sign you use to convey your meaning and the meaning itself. That's what the sign distinguishes when you're using it in that sort of two part structure way. And there's a signifier and a signified and it's because often these the signifieds are sus. So if you say something like free market, you know what both of those words mean independently, and you combine them, then how could it not be a good thing? But you're sus about the signifier. Same with something like American dream. You're drawing attention to the fact that the what the word purports to mean and what it actually means are two very different things. Yeah. Yeah, Like this, this distinction between like the signifier and the signified opens the door for all kinds of interesting insights because now you can talk about the ways you go about making your meaning separately from the meaning itself and the system of like concepts and ideas that what you're saying links into, So you can treat these separately, and that's part of the interesting part about this distinction. And of course the signifier is usually seen as like the material component. It's the sound you make, or it's the letters you write down, and so that can be studied on its own, and like in a really extreme way, like if you're studying ancient writing or something and you have no idea what any of it means, you just have the writing left over. Those are just like signifiers with no signifieds in our universe, right right, And when when people talk about there's a gap, obviously there's a gap between the signifier and the signified. That's interestingly where ideology can slip in there, and then you can have something that's referred to that is either opposite from the word or very different from the word, and then we're kind of slipping into post structuralism as opposed to structuralism. But in terms of a French context, when you're speaking about structuralism, you're talking about one guy mainly who's also the founder of semiotics, despite the fact that I think he only ever published one book. Well, anyway, I won't leave you hanging. We're talking about Ferdinand the Sore. Don't worry. No, he didn't. He didn't publish that book. He he gave No, he published one lectures as students recorded and put in the book. And it's oh, oh, you're talking about his other book. Yeah, oh, I don't know anything about that one. No, I've I've never read it either, But yeah, what's it called. I don't think anyone's actually read that's the thing. Yeah, I think I think maybe Maya Sume might have read it. It's all okay, it's called Memoir on the Primitive system of vowels in Indo European languages. Yeah, well he was a linguist. Yeah, and that's I guess that's his only authored book. I mean there's still stuff coming out, Like they've found another manuscript of his in like the nineties. Oh wow, in his like Summer Home in Switzerland or something like that. They found a new unpublished work by him. So there's still stuff coming out with him as well. And like his tradition is really contested, especially because the book you're talking about isn't the book that semiology comes from. It's the other one, the other book that he didn't publish because he didn't write it. He gave them his lectures, and the lectures were compiled as student notes after the fact, and then they published it as a book called Course in General Linguistics. And this is where we get the linguistic turn in French that inspires. I could just name any of them pretty much, but Letty Strauss, Roland, Bart dry Da, altuzer Lacan, Christeva and on and on a goost. But they were the ones that were responding to this. And that's why about half of the names I mentioned right down in the middle are considered post structuralists as opposed to structural yea. His work was the basis for the linguistic turn. It didn't quite come during his lifetime, but later on in France and in other areas of Europe as well, with the focus on linguistics and the turn to a sort of language oriented philosophical thinking as well, that started to dominate. So that's the French side, and if you pay attention to any of my content, it's all about the French side. But there's another side of semiotix, well, at least one of them. There's several, none of which I know anything about. So Eric, can you give us like an intro to at the Anglo slash other world of semiotics besides that before we dive into this business. Yeah, alt sam alternate semiotics. Yeah yeah, well usually so sur is taught as the founder of semiotics usually a lot because he's it's convenient and his system is a little bit easier to teach and apply and all the famous people wrote on his version. Yeah, and he's like, yeah, he's well ensconced in scholarship at this point, running back many many years. But the other, the other tradition actually comes from a guy who was actually got to it a bit earlier. So this is like a little bit like a calculus story to two people independently discover the same sort of field within a few years of each other, without knowing each other. So this is Charls Sanders Purse from America, from New England, and he is actually the original founder of semiotics in its modern form, of course. Yeah, and he wrote a load of works. I think the first thing that got famous by him is probably a series of letters he exchanged with a lady in England named Lady Welby, and those got passed around and people started to read his stuff and it was very different from socirrs and it really it spawned its own tradition with different people involved, and it's popped up today in different forms as well. And it really has not much to do with so Sir in that tradition, but it's there are people who noticed him, of course throughout all of it. But really so Sirr's dominated in French theory at least. And by the way, we should acknowledge Eric has a bit of bias because Csperse or Charles Sanders Purse is his guy. Yeah, and I have never read it in the original I've read a lot of these references to him and never read his original layout of here's my structure. So I'm excited for this series because I'm going to learn this stuff. Well I should I should preface that then, because person never laid out his own stuff. There's no place you can just go into person's work, be like, where does he like just lay all this out? There's nowhere, there's nothing. It's fragments, it's bits and pieces from different works at different points in his life. Like this has been a big part of why the Percy and tradition also kind of laid a bit more dormant than so Sirs did is because of this difficulty with defining it. Well, that would have been a good career decision on his part to do that. But it's Yeah, it's widely acknowledged, including by Delo's and Gatari. They got into it. You can basically see his graphs in the Della's Cinema books if you open them up. So, yeah, I know, I know what those graphs say, but I don't know what person said. So we're going to get into that in another episode unless you do you want to introduce it, and can you do like a five minute appeal to I perse is superior to so Surian sebiotics, Oh my god, like partly because partly because I'm interested in it, so I just prefer it. But yeah, we got the bias out of the way. So now just that's a big part of it. I don't know the other the other part of it is is I've I've always been kind of more attracted to a realism. I guess you could say, like my particular trajectory I went through. I don't know, you could say like Walter Benjamin and Bruno Latour and like more materialist focused philosophy. But yeah, the reason I prefer Purse is because he has that that triple structure of the sign. He's got a role for the object thinking and it's relatively independent of our minds, but it's not completely And in a way that just broadens the application of semiotics in a way that I that I like because I'm also into environmental theory, and if you talk about it from within a so Syrian tradition, there as certain limitations I feel like you run up against and that the Persian tradition helps you get around a little bit. So that's the more that's the more boring explanation. Yeah, that might that might just become an interview. We'll probably do that next week or so. Anyway, for now, the most influential, if not the best, system, is that of Ferdinand So Sir Swiss. I think he was in Geneva, is that right? Do you know? I think it's Geneva. I'm quite sure. I'm at a ninety. Yeah. I think there's a university there and I think that's where he taught. But yeah, he never published his theories. He died relatively early. I don't know if it was an accident or what, but he never got around to writing the book on semiotics. But his students took notes, took good notes in his lectures. Shout out to all those students out there, and they made a book out of it, and that book is now the definitive guide to semiology. Yeah, nineteen sixteen. I think it was, of course, in general linguistics. So Sir died a year or two earlier. All right, So we're going to be using these two terms interchangeably to an extent. But just so everybody knows what's the difference, Eric, can you explain to me the difference between semiotics and semiology. Well, I think the way we use the term. When we talk about semiotics and the signs and signifiers and all that sort of stuff, we tend to refer to the so Surian tradition, and so Suri used the word semiology to describe the sort of science like he didn't he wasn't even doing semiology himself. He was doing linguistics, but he was focusing on the linguistic sign like what does it mean? How does it mean? And he kind of envisioned a science that he didn't really know what kind of shape it would take. That's one of the last quotes I think from the course in general linguistics. But he kind of projected this science and he named it semiology, the science of science, and he imagined it would be a part of social psychology and that linguistics would then be become a part of semiology. And so that's the way he used it, and people sort of blew past his warning about we don't know what this is going to look like yet, and people started just developing their systems. And semiotics usually refers to yeah, like when you're studying purse, you get to learn that. Yeah, Like semiotics refers we should use it to refer to the Persian tradition, so sort of wider. If so Sirr's semiology is all about human language and linguistics, then semiotics should encompass any kind of sign exchanges whatsoever, not just limited to human language systems, but also you know, quote unquote primitive language too, like we might see in animals or in I don't know, plants in the natural world. Basically because human culture. The argument here is always brought up that human culture is embedded in nature. It's an extension of nature in many ways. It's not something that transcends nature. It's not something that I mean, you could call it a unique appearance within nature. It's qualitatively different than anything else that's been around. But the idea is to broaden the focus and start talking about semiotics as something that maybe exceeds semiology and social psychology in a way. And this is where we start brushing up against a word that I've already said, bio semiotics. Do you have an example of where signs would be used in nature completely apart from you know, human human interpretation. Semiotics and the exchange of signs. The action of signs is sort of coextensive with life itself, Like life is a sign producing, communicating, and reading phenomenon. So could you refer to like the way that birds signal each other, for example, with color or whatever. Could that be a part of bio semiotics. Yeah, Like, the idea is that you find signs in the most basic forms of life. So well, birds aren't really the most basic forms of life, but you can see that animals are sign exchanging creatures, and they don't They don't just run on instincts like a machine. They also have a sort of freedom to interpret their environment and a freedom to also create signs and send out signs that serve their own purposes for it. I always give the example of the bird that fakes a broken wing. There's a type of bird, I mean, I forget what it is now. There's a type of bird that will fake a broken wing to lure a predator away from its nest. Maybe it's like trying to climb the tree or something like that, and then when the predator turns towards it and moves towards it, it gets flies away. And the idea is just that the ability to lie and assume that there's some other receptive being that's going to interpret your lie in the way you want them to. Is already a pretty like substantial cognitive structure that must be in place. And in a way bio semiotics looks at, well, how is this an example of a sort of more print, like I said, a primitive sort of use of signs sign exchange. And that's so obviously when you do that, you're not just going to think of it an analogy to human language. That would be kind of that would be kind of like you know, anthropomorphic, right, and that's something we kind of want to avoid sometimes. But so you got to think of it as qualitatively different than what humans are used to earlier phase and evolution maybe for human beings, so it's part of the structure there too, but you know, it's also different for other species. Right, we have sort of species specific modes of communication that utilize science. Right, So as soon as linguistics comes into play, and semiotics from the very beginning has been very biased towards human interpretation, thinking that it's something abstract, thinking that over we are referring to ideas, we're not just referring to, you know, pointing at things. We have a complex language and so on, and yeah, so there's been I wouldn't call biosemiotics a discipline, it's at least a subdiscipline, but it's getting some interest in a way that we're pushing sign recognition and sign use away from just humans specifically, but humans, more than any other species or social group, use signs all the time. We could refer to street signs, they don't just they're not just there for decoration. Every sign obviously means something, and in meaning something, it's controlling a situation in a certain way so that we can have a sort of shared world. And that brings us to so sir, Well, that could bring us to so many things. Well, I think we've got to cover so sour so that people know what signifier means, because everyone's on about Oh, that's just a signifier, that's a floating signifier, that's a referential signify. Yeah, okay, I hear it more often from people who I suspect don't know what it means. Yeah, well we'll talk about that maybe later, floating signal, But yeah, what is a signifier? Yeah, we can start with just what is a signifier? And I think from here on out we'll be breaking down the Sosurian tradition, because if you've read any French people, they're referring to him except for Dylis m hmm. But you still got to read so sorry to know what Deluz and Guti were reacting to and what basically all their contemporaries were reacting to as well. It's a very helpful thing to know, all right, So I don't know what you're well, your first step into this would be eric But for me, the one thing that defines semiotics from previous linguistics or linguistics before or hermeneutics. We could also talk about how how you psychologically interpret things, but for semiotics, the key difference is that the word that you use to refer to the thing and the thing refers to sort of a mental idea is completely arbitrary. There's no definite relation between a word and the thing. And if you've heard people use the word tree, that's because tree is the example on like the third page of Soccer's text. There's nothing in a tree that gives you the word tree. And this seems very natural for us to assume, because this is the way all of us think of language. But for whatever reason at the time of at the time of writing no one had said that language is just completely accidental. And it goes a little bit further than that that I want to pick up on. It's that the world does not have a predefined shape. It's not a world of you know the story of Adam when God brings all the animals to him and he's like, we need you to name everything. The Sosurian idea is that you don't even know what to name until it already is named, and once it is named, that's going to be culturally relative. It's going to depend on your context what you think is important to have a name. So it's not like everything has a name in every language. Some languages privilege specific sorts of names, like the example, this is where I go to in my head. I don't even know if this is true or not, but like the Inuit have twenty words for snow. I don't know if that's true, but I can believe it's true because they're dealing with a lot of more kinds of snow than someone like closer to the equator would be. There would be building snow, there would be like what snow that you have to watch out for, So you would need a bunch of different words for the same thing in English, which is just snow. If you are trying to have a whole bunch of use values out of different kinds of snow. And that's kind of where so sura is coming from. Your use value for things in the world determines the things that you need names for, and that's culturally different. That depends on not the structure of language itself, but the structure of your particular language. And then out of where your culture exists, then you're gonna need a lot of different words for a lot of different phenomena. Mm hmm. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Yeah, the one of the major points is yeah. That So if you're looking at the so Sirean structure of the sign right, it's a bipartite sign It has two parts. It has the signifier and the signified, and that's where the arbitrary relation lies between the two. So water is called water not because there's something watery about the word water. It's just an arbitrary name. You could call it, oh, for example, like the French do. But the yeah, the the Adam example is interesting, like Walter Benjamin actually writes a beautiful essay about this called on language of such in the language of man, and he writes about the the endemic naming system. That like story of Adam where he names all the creatures. And the idea is that Adam finds the name that fits the thing, right, Adam's Adams names that he gives to things because Adam and Eves share the language of God, and the language of God is you know, it cuts to the core of things. It's creative. You know. In the beginning was the word. So in being able to share this language in naming things, they match the name to the essence of the thing. And Ben you Mean's point was that we're no longer, you know, our language after all these tragedies Babel and things like that, We're no longer connected to the essence of the thing. So our names become sort of arbitrary. And then there's a whole other way Benumine takes it. But the idea is that, yeah, the names we give to things don't really get at the essence of the thing. They're arbitrary. And even if you say, well, what about automatopoeia, for example, what about words for things that sound like the thing? Surely that captures the essence of the thing, but like boom, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. But even that case, you just there's the cultural differences kind of overwrite that because you know, you go to France and they have different sounds for dogs and cats they make than English speakers do. People in people in Spanish speaking countries again have different sounds than French or English people do for animals. So it's not it's still culturally relative in that sense. So even in that case, it's still a kind of arbitrary connection to something that you name it cats meow meow is the arbitrary word for the sound that cats make. It still a thing I do. Gotta say, moo is pretty close. I've been around a lot of cows. Well, I can't interpret too many other sounds out of moo than moo. I mean, it get pretty weird, like moo, the sound we make with our lips. I don't think cows have lips. And then the way we write it to the word moo is just another remove away from the thing cows do. Yeah, I don't mean to distract from your point, because that is a still serve as actual point. No, No, I wish we had we could have prepared examples if we had knew this. But like even in English, you can say, for a dog bark. Obviously, dogs don't have lips, so they can't make the sound bark, but they can make the sound arf arf or wolf wolf. And that's kind of putting human language onto an automatic example that doesn't actually hold the word there. But yeah, every kid says, oh, the dog says wolf wolf. Not really. Yeah, kids are really bad at it too, and so is I mean, you just go watch like the old Batman series with Adam West and they come up with all kinds of crazies things for sounds biff and boff and boop. Yeah, the point is even automatipia is arbitrary, and that just really reinforces the point that the sign is arbitrary. I mean really, there's three there's three principles to keep in mind with the Sosirian sign. One it's arbitrary, Two it's conventional, and three language is a communal system, so signs are never private things. They're held they're held by the public. And that's the condition that we can understand each other, is that our language is common and therefore we cannot just change it. Our will that's a huge important point, you know, you point, oh what about Shakespeare. Yeah, well okay, but you can't just change the language at will. It doesn't work that way. You know, new symbols and words can develop and gain meaning and change over time. But the point is, you know, if that was, if that process were very sudden, then we would be in a lot of trouble. So there is continuity. Those three principles I think are good to keep in mind. Those really describe Socer's conception of the sign in general. Well, we can add some terms like yolo, probably added to the dictionary by now, but yeah, yeah. The thing is, when you say arbitrary, it doesn't mean that you can just make up any word, because if you make up a word, no one's going to know what you're saying. But it's socially arbitrary in the sense that they don't have any actual, real connection to the thing that you're talking about. So that where your community, whatever your community is, like I use the Inuit as an example, they're gonna have concerns about cold weather and types of weather that you wouldn't have if you were closer to the equator. That's right, Yeah, your language community is what's important here is like that's like the unit of historical analysis and languages. It's the language community. And just think about the ways people argue about old Indo European languages and things like that, Like normally it's the language community marks the borders there. I was trying to consider the way that this catches out downstream with like Altwoser response to this in terms of like in a Marxist perspective, right, you have Bart who takes this and says, not only are just words themselves signs, but we can look at advertising as signs in his book Mythologies where he just breaks down commercials and he says, like this soap stands in for the cleansing blood of Christ because and this is still true to this day. If you watch a commercial on with soap or detergent or any cleaning agent, you have these visualizations of the soap going in and removing like the evil, the dust, the dirt, the bacteria. If it's like fabriz or whatever. You get these visualizations of this cleansing soap stuff. That's you know, it has the effect of the blood of Christ. At that point downstream, it becomes like commodities themselves are signs. Yeah, and we can carry this to signs of exclusivity, signs of luxury, the luxury goods like I'm so bad at this, but like Prada or Louis Vuitton or whatever. When you see someone wearing that, then you're going to know this is a sign of wealth. So everything is not just what you see, but once it's branded in a symbolic shared experience, then it takes on all these other meanings including yeah, for example wealth, luxury or a cleansing liquid. Yeah, there's a few. There's a few things to get through to get to that point now I know where you're going. One of them is, first, how do we get to structuralism from so sir and all this nonsense about signs? And the other thing is what happens with post structuralism and the deconstructive moment, what happens with so sur and the sign? Then, so the the one question is has to do with the structure of the sign itself and the arbitrary connection to it. With Darida, right, he takes that to its logical conclude usion basically and says, why even talk about signifieds at all? So let's go back the signifier is linked to a signified through an arbitrary connection. And the signifier is not just a thing around you, right. A signifier is not anything on your desk, it's not anything that well, it is sort of something you're thinking of, but it's not exactly right. So what the signifier is called in the interest of getting this down so we can talk about things like floating signifiers later, signifiers are what are called sound images, right, that's what they're called sound image, and it's a pattern basically, right, And so both components of the sign are psychological. So this first one, the sound pattern, is a psychological connection you have in your mind to one sort of stream of consciousness, you could say, and then there's a parallel stream, and that's the signified. So the signifier what it does is it constructs signs through you know, the use of symbols and words and sounds and all sorts of things, and it's paired to a meaning. And that meaning is also a concept, right, So it's an idea. So both the signifier and the signified are both mental constructs that are just arbitrarily connected to one another and distinguished insofar as one is the thing you do to indicate the idea, and the other thing is the idea indicated. Right, So the signified is usually thought of as the meaning or the concept that the sign the signifier, part of the sign is referring to. And so, and we can before you go on, we can just play with our listeners for a second and just say, don't think of a pink elephant. So what happened is I said, despite all this technological intervention between us, I'm talking into a mic. This mic is being converted and recording onto my computer as a digital file. Nevertheless, it goes through whatever process so that the speakers or earphones that you're listening into compress the air the second you hear the word pink elephant. Now you know exactly what I'm talking about, despite the fact that you're trying not to think about it, because that was the imperative there, right, So, Eric, where in there do those two things pink elephant? Where's the difference between the signifier and the signified because these things don't exist, right, So this is kind of important to the point. Yeah, So presumably if I'm speaking to you about a pink elephant, I use that word, I use those words pink l elephant. Supposedly we share a language community in which that meaning is set right, that that it's conventional in the context of our exchange. And so when I say pink elephant, you know what I mean because of that convention, because of the like. That's what has come to understand, is the structure and so the specific pink, Like whether or not there's a pink elephant, I want you to think in abstract terms of just think of an elephant and it's pink or I actually, oh my god, I saw a pink elephant the other day on planet Earth. Whether or not like there's still there's got to be a convention, a concept that we both share, that we both in order for us to understand each other, we need to share that sort of connection, right, And this is getting to one of so Sirr's most famous other quotes, which is language is a system of differences. Despite the fact that pink and elephant don't go together in real life, you don't observe a pink elephant, it's very easy to imagine one, because you can imagine a gray elephant. But you can create the difference in your mind between a gray and a pink elephant and Now, not everyone's image in their head is going to look the same the pink elephant. It's probably going to be based on a collection of images they have in their head of where they learned, Okay, this is not a rhino, it's an elephant. This is not a mammoth. This is an elephant. And you learn that before you even basically have a memory. When you learn to say this is not that, this is something else. And that's where language is a system of differences comes in because then you can connect these differences together despite the fact you've never seen them together. So the system of differences gets them to this sense of arbitrariness in language that you can combine things that you've never seen, but you can make differences because probably what you're some sort of your psychological process is unconsciously right before you actually experience it. It's gonna be I think of a gray elephant and turn it pink because I know what gray means, and I know it pink means. You're right. Yeah, yeah, I fucked up. I should have I should have also had differential on the list two. Yeah, okay, So the three fundamental things are are that language there's an arbitrary connection to the signifier and the signified between them. There's a conventional or like languages communal, that should be one thing. And yes, the sign is differential, which means that we understand it because of what it's not. That's very strange, but that's a principle of language, and it yields some pretty good insights, I think. But the way to well, you kind of you, kind of. I want to bring this back down to earth a little bit. You figure this out when you have kids in your life. God, that sounds bad. Yeah, okay, all right, I got a nephew. I got a nephew. I don't have other kids in my life. But the kid points at like a fire truck and goes train. And the learning process there is you say no, not train, firetruck, so you correct. They're problems of learning differences. They say car, you say no, that's not a car, that's a truck, and you forget that you've learned all that stuff. But even learning language as a process is learning more what not to say than what to actually say. Yeah, so if you point to a tree and say tree to a person who doesn't know what a tree is, they could think green, They could think bark, they could think tall, but unless you teach them also the meaning of grass, bush, green, then they're not going to know what exactly a tree designates. But even after learning the word tree, you're not going to have the same word idea in your head as another person when they learn the word tree. Yeah. Maybe when I say tree, fifty percent of the audience thinks of a deciduous tree and fifty percent thinks of a coniferous tree. There's no way to measure that, but you would still be right. But you're learning that based on a series of differences. I don't think anyone is thinking bush after having heard the word tree, because you know what a bush is and you know what a tree is. Yeah. Yeah, that's a really fundamental point. Yeah, so when you Another example of a sign system is when you're you know, the lights system, right, the street lights, traffic lights so green, yellow, red, And what differential kind of cashes out to mean is that when you pull up to a light and you see you look at the color, the color is red, you're going to understand like the meaning of red based on what it's not. So don't you don't you know and you're not conscious of this you're not sitting there thinking okay, not green, not yellow, so I stop. But within a sign system, it's about the distinctions like the sign. You might say the sign obtains its value within the system of signs based on the differential relations it has with all the other signs around it. So things like things like taxonomy when you're classifying animals, right, and or just like you said trees, like I know trees because like not shrub, not bush, not grass. I know because it's not all of these other things. I know my dog is not a cat. I know my school is not a hospital. Like you have these sorts of clusters of concepts that come into place, and the differential relationship between all of them is the source of the value of the sign. This might not carry over to all of our audience, but I've had this example stuck in my head because you brought up the street lights. But a lot of the street lights here have the red light, the top one bigger. And I've been to places in the United States where they have like horizontal street lights. But for someone who's red green color blind, they're not going to notice the difference that you notice if you're not color blind. Depending on them, but they're not going to notice that they're different colors, but they will notice that ones at the top, ones at the bottom, ones at the right, ones at the left. So you can't actually tell which differences someone else is viewing, but you can tell that they know a difference, because if they didn't know the difference, they would be crashing into things and driving into the intersection. So this actually is an analogy for how languages cross cultures, and you can get an approximation, but then there's always those translation differences that you can't actually account for because you actually don't know which differences the other person is recognizing versus which ones you are. And often cases when it comes to non theoretical language, if you're talking about trees, snow water, then probably most cultures are going to be relatively similar because these are phenomena that you would have named in like the Stone Age. But when it comes to theoretical language or translating philosophy texts, translating a compound German word into English where you have to put a whole bunch of dashes in between them, then that stuff starts to get complicated, and then you don't know, you don't even know what meaning you're missing unless you can figure out how to read the original. Yeah, especially if you're trying to capture the word play going on, too, Then it becomes impossible, which is why philosophy is impossible to translate in many cases. Poetry too, Yeah, poetry takes that to its extreme and really focuses a lot on you say the level of the signifier, unless so the signified. So in English, I mean, here's an example that is pertinent to our discussion here. So sir uses three words that could all be translated into language in English, longage, la long and la parole. So the first one just refers to communication, and that could mean in English we'd call it body language. It could mean like these these gestural supplements or tone tonality that would change. And lalonge then means the full language. You could say la longue unglay. Oh, sorry, it would be unglaze, l longe unglaze in French would be the English language. But it also means the structure of language more generally speaking. But that's the structure. That's like if you added up all the words that exist in a language. There you have the language and all the rules, the rules that are strict that you you know, have to put the subject first and then the object second or whatever. But then you have parole parole where this is every single speech act. And this is even at this very moment, there's an infinite amount of English speech acts being carried out in every corner of the world Australia, India, England, Canada, Africa, all at the same time. There's all these English speech acts. And then this is where changes in dialect actually come from, because you have to adapt the language to be utile in different situations. So when you're talking about a speech act saying this thing needs to be communicated and there's like a slippage or I need to be more specific, or I need to invent a new word to be able to engage this socially, and you can ever invent a word by yourself, like we already said. But these speech acts are what caused the evolution of language. So obviously Latin evolves into Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish are because of actually environmental pressures that force these speech acts to address their environment. What are the common criticisms against so Sir Is that he has no history to language. And that's true in one sense that we'll probably get to on a later episode. I don't want to bring that all up now, but his reason for saying that the environment actually forces languages to change over time, which is how you get something like a genetic drift in the same way that you'd get a drift in species from language to language. Yeah. Yeah, The idea of change over time is interesting because like, how does something new emerge? If you just picture long as like the rules of chess, and then parole as like an actual game of chess that you're playing, then you can never do anything new in that situation. If you try to move your pond sideways, you'll probably get yelled at by your opponent. You can't do it. So if language is really that strictly rule bound, then how does it ever change? And then again that suggests that the meaningful changes, the changes that we're looking for, are on the level of long and not on the level of parole, because parole is changing and shifting all the time. But the idea is like what rules get specified and get translated into the rule book kind of thing, right, right, And that's why we can't read like we can't read Chaucer anymore because it's actually the Long English. The laws just changed the Old English, Middle English and Modern English. There those are shifts, even like the great, the great vowel shift. Yeah, that's that's that's a change in Long whereas like parole would have been involved and those things would have manifested through it. But we think like, okay, so how does it work. What's the relationship between the two? And for so, sir, you know, you have to break it down into two other dimensions, which is synchronic and diachronic, you know, like a synchronic cross section. It's all at once. You take language as it is at one moment and look at its structure, right like what are the rules of chess in nineteen ninety five in the World Tournament and speed chess? What are the rules? And then we get a structure of rules. But then diachronic you look at you're sort of more for us to look at speech and language over time. And so you know, my sentence unfolds in time when I say it, the first word I utter is necessarily earlier in time than the last time, but the structure remains the same throughout all of that. If the structure of my language was changing while I was speaking it, we would also have another problem. So that's a big focus of this kind of And then this is where structuralism comes in because it wants to look at these sorts of we're going to get to the idea of deep structures, right, even deeper than just the language we use is myth. Myth and politics will be some of those things that get investigated. But just in terms of long and parole, right, it's everything, like it's what you wear in the morning is parole right. The fashion system, whatever is in your closet is part of some fashion system that has rules, and your parole is what you wear in the morning. That's sort of Barth's this fashion analysis. So you know, like this hat is red, so I have to wear a shirt that compliments it. Maybe I should wear something a bit dark, and now what my shoes have to be? Or if you think about, like I don't know, if you guys out there have girlfriends, think about the way they dress and how they moll over the rules too? You do. Everybody does it, and so the rules are applied in an utterance to use the language metaphor, and with fashion, the utterance is what you choose to wear in that day, and the idea of the structure. How that comes into play is very interesting in this whole situation because when we want to bring in ideas from Marxism, you hint it a little bit out with value. We want to bring ideas of Marxism into play with this sort of stuff, and we talk about ideology. So ideology we picture it as maybe a sort of a second order system of signifieds. Right, ideology is the political side, and myth would be the sort of human nature relationship side. These come into play as like overcodings that code over our use of language, and code over the systems of meaning or you know, signifiers, phonemes, and that that inform our choices in the moments. So when we're looking at what structuralism is interested in is because it's not really interested in what we say, but the relationships between the things that we say, because those express the sorts of rules that are structuring the language game that we're playing, and those language games that we play, the rules of those games are then coded over by ideology. Liberalism, socialism, conservatism. Do I want to be an economic liberalist? Do I want to be a social liberal? It becomes a sort of overcoding, and it starts to influence the meanings that we use from above in a certain way. Right, So when I, you know, words change their meanings over time, because these overcodings also change. And the same with myth Right Barts goes into this and mythologies in great detail, the ways that celebrities and politicians will channel these ancient sort of mythic structures in our language in order to you know, sell themselves, marketing, to sell products. Connect it with mythological signifieds, as they would say, deep the deep structure. The signifieds that exist beyond are sorts of intentions but shape them at the same time. So all that comes into play two. And I mean, I don't know, I just said a lot, but it's a lot to get to. So sir laying down his theories versus the way it was taken up by the French structuralists and other people throughout the thirties and forties, it kind of gets to one of our themes as a duo at least, is that the difference between long and parole. Parole is pushing the rules, like you could put poetry or word play into parole, but for something to change the structure. It almost never happens, but it does happen, right, So this is sort of a systems theory perspective that we can apply here that no one conscious person, no matter how much they try, can actually change la long in a language. You can change parole as much as you want, try to play around with it, but for something to actually take shape that's unpredictable, like a what's his name that the one direction guy wears a dress and half of the people freak out that like, oh, he's so brave, it's so beautiful that he's doing this, and the other half are like, we've lost real men because men are now wearing dresses in our society or whatever. So he broke a rule. But it's not like guys on mass are suddenly wearing dresses because of that. I mean, in two hundred years, a bunch of things might happen that make that a consequence. But you can't change a rule system of language overnight. Yet we can see that it changes because in one hundred AD, French and Spanish were the same thing, and two thousand AD they're obviously not the same thing anymore, such that a native speaker of one couldn't understand the other, but even less so for Portuguese in Spanish. So yeah, there's something like a genetic drift, but this has nothing to do with conscious agency that makes you change it. And when so Sir was writing, or when he was when he was young, at least when he was probably studying for the first time because of you know, the whole colonial situation, languages were coming back from these other places and artifacts or whatever, and it was becoming an object of study where it had never been before. Obviously, they knew there was a difference between German, French and English, but then they noticed, like Sanskrit artifacts were coming back, and then they were noticing word connections or associations between Latin Greek, which you know, doctoral students had to know back then, and Sanskrit words that sounded the same, like idea would be one of them in Sanskrit's Veda or something like that. So they were noticing similarities and this led them to assume or guess, there must be something beneath all this that is the origin, like the true origin of all language, the language before Babel. So they call it proto Indo European. And this is soda Sosser's intervention saying like, it's not like proto Indo European was the original one. It's dead. Everything is arbitrary. And then, of course, as we've discussed, the uptake of that into the theoretical academy was how do we apply this to advertising? How do we apply this to ideology? How do we apply this to the history of philosophy. So, yeah, we're at we're at a big crucial moment that it's hard to I mean for me at least, Derek, I don't know both for you, but for me it's hard to figure out why this is so surprising. But when it's hard to figure out why something in the past is so surprising, it's probably because it's had so much influence on your thought without you knowing. It has become convention in a way, it's become a conventional way that we just look at the world and we're brought up in it and we don't think about it anymore. Probably, like I don't know the first people who encountered film have felt or the first people who thought about that unconscious drives may dictate a lot of our behavior. Just nobody thinks that way. Those things became a conventional way of understanding and then in a way in order to get a hold of that convention, what so sir introduces into that whole picture, because what you were describing is more like the dia chronic study of language right over time, and like philologists, you know, like like Nietzsche, even Nietzsche was a trained as a philologist. Those guys worked on language over time. And so Sirr's kind of prime contribution is to also try to say, but we also have to think synchronically about language, like what are the relationships between all the terms? How is how is there a structure that generates all of this change or all of this process anyway? Not maybe not change because a differential structure. Yeah, yeah, so it's not like a structure of things, it's a structure of relationships. And that's that right there becomes a little bit difficult to understand because then we have to speak about it in strange like either categorical terms or in terms of formal aspects of language. You know, you talk about grammar, you talk about all these different things. But yeah, so serus main contribution was also the idea of synchronic and people looked at that that's the structural element right there, the synchronic structure of language as it produces, like it doesn't produce our speech situations, but it it circumscribes the sort of horizon of possibilities at any one moment, right, And and that's linked to culture, right. Culture is one of those big sort of horizons of our pos pibilities. We get our language and our ideas from our cultural traditions, and so that's the concept in which we're brought up. But those at the same time, those have a in the Sassarean tradition, those have a structure that can be analyzed as well through a kind of synchronic analysis at one point in time, and then at a later point in time you can take another cross section and compare them. And that's how sort of comparative historical or comparative linguistics works, comparing different cultures or comparing change over time. While you were bringing it up, we don't we You and I don't know anything about linguistics because linguistics is its whole other thing. So we can gesture towards what it means. But when we're talking about semiotics, it actually has nothing to do with linguistics. I mean they have relations, but that's something that we couldn't actually speak on with any knowledge. Yeah, in a way as opposed to semiotics. Yeah, like the semiotics story always runs up against Chomsky. That's the thing, right, Chomsky's sort of transformational grammar is what removed semiology at least from the sort of linguistic core that of European scholars. I think Chomsky's theories come from the maybe the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties, and so semiology got sort of booted out of linguistics because Chomsky's method was seen as the more scientific one. But semiology then went to anthropology as in Claude Levy Strauss, It went to politics, and it went to philosophy and literary departments, it went to culture studies departments. It was everywhere but linguistics, because then linguistics took its own sort of scientific turn with Chomsky. So Chomsky really booted it out of linguistics proper. So even though semiology is like grounded in linguistics, it's lost that institutional connection in a way, and then it's become a sort of thing of its own. I think that's pretty much covers it as an introduction. Yeah, well there are good illustrations of so Sarah, we didn't get to we didn't get to purse, but he's got a purse. Has a has a triple structure of the sign. It's not two parts, it's three parts. So that's that's something to look forward to anyway, which brings in more. Yeah, more, I think you said it earlier. It's more realism is involved in it. It's not like all these things are completely arbitrary because there's a connection to the object. Yeah, there's a whole Yeah, the object causes the sign and the Persian tradition, so it's not I mean, the word reference is often thrown around in the Sosiian tradition, and like if you go look at Frega, right, he made the famous distinction between sense and reference. So the word reference is thrown around to look at what's indicated, but it's still sort of circumscribed within a linguistic understanding, and it's not really freed in the way it is in the Persian tradition of dependency on looking at it through a lens that's informed by language, and the Persian tradition is not beholden to that kind of lens. Yeah, this, the Soser version of it, really stresses the accidental or arbitrary nature of it. Sounds like that there's a third element that sort of grounds it in actual phenomenal experience that's not just arbitrary, all right, So we'll look forward to that next time. If you've never heard it before, I hope you like this introduction. If you have, I hope it was a bit of a refresher because once you read the works that you know, most of the time that we talk about it seems like they totally focus on the arbitrariness of signed and the goal at that point becomes really to intervene in this arbitrariness of signs, and as we've been talking about, the difficulty is not being able to intervene. Yeah. From the structuralist perspective, I mean, that was one of the first things dari Da says is maybe there's been an event in the history of structuralism. And that's kind of the key point is that, like, how can there be an event if everything is already determined by a structure. We haven't even discussed the medium yet. Hopefully, if you're into some of these postmodern figures that you'll hear some echoes of what they're going to talk about. I want to go back and look at some of this stuff, or follow our series, which will be a short run of episodes after this one. Yeah, all those things that are forgotten in the COMMUNICATESE for now. Why don't we wrap this one up. This pipe is not a pipe. I hope there's no mediation whatsoever. All right, m hm