The arbitrary reading sign

The Saussurean sign: "The sign is the whole that results from
the association of the signifier with the signified."

A lot has already happened since Ferdinand de Saussure's foundational text in semiotics. Today, I don't mean to pick up on all the terminological plethora that now surround us. I only want to make a crude observation on how any dualism can become a closed system that eventually would want to find a way of explaining the dynamic relation between the opposing terms without multiplying entities so much that the system becomes totally open and indefinable. This is the balancing act, I believe, needed in any formalism. Too closed, the system becomes useless; too open, the system disappears with all the elements that were made to explain what is and isn't in the system. From 1, we go to 2, which will need 3 to stay as 1, but then needs 4, and so on. In this case of the dualism Signifier-Signified, the "sound-image" and the thought or concept that stood for these respective opposite poles must somehow be linked to form the Sign, despite the postulated "arbitrariness'' of any link between them. Whether spoken or written, the sign, which receives its value through a continuum of difference in the same way that a color gets its hue from its place in the spectrum, must be seen as both a divided whole and as a singular double. The system that hovers somewhere and that manifests itself only as differential values must also be able to maintain the bar between signifier and signified, without one turning into the other, and creating a confusion between them.

Of course, today, we have succumbed to the (easily misapplied) idea that everything is a signifier after all, and a signified is just another signifier treated differently. By collapsing the poles, we are left with a single term (without saying that this term is a singular thing). The amusing thing about it is that by reducing the dualism, we are now flooded by an endless chain. The system is totally open. Anything in the light of difference can be a potential sign. Derrida reserved the term "mark" for this threshold that always inaugurates writing and language as an open-ended economy. (There is no date in the past to point to as an originating moment of this event, since even the idea of an "event" itself requires this as a "prior" moment.) However, this is a strange "signifier" because it refuses the binaries that previously were clamped on to it. In fact, we cannot even point to it, indicate something as a "signifier," as if something else existed outside it or before it.

It must be kept in mind that the deconstructive "signifier" is fundamentally a critique of metaphysical notions in signification, which revises a naive concept of representation where a transcendental realm can be apprehended without first passing through a network of signs. Perception presupposes a cleavage between a "self" and an "other" as inscription within the network of signifiers. The objects we see or live with are automatically part of this open-ended "system" of signification. The table in front of me is real, but it is automatically a signifying or signified table, always associated with a narrative that we either know vaguely or minutely. Aside from that, this table is also set apart not only from other tables but also from other objects that are not tables. The table in front of me is not a simple, naked, pure object that pre-existed meaning. The very concepts of "object" or "concrete" are themselves "abstract" notions. The referential field is the product of a binaristic operation that allows this field to be distinguishable as the objective target of a "language." In this operation, both fields are actually pushed toward mutually determined "reification." This means that we can even envision signification in reverse and say that it is the table in front of me that represents the word "table."

In short, the problematic of reference is modified altogether in this situation. The referent function has not been at all obliterated, and neither was "reality." In fact, the referent function is a part of this open economy, but not as another domain apprehensible before the semiotic operation of differences. We no longer require a pre-existent, non-semiotic domain in a binary set up to get us a system of signification with a referential function. If an "external" referent (external in relation to whom or what?) is assumed by this function, it is less the effort to postulate a prior domain opposite of the sign than an operation to bolster the reality of signifying acts as a possible gesture. The sign can only point to what is already signified. These opposing domains are mutually constitutive coincidentally, much like Escher's hands drawing one another. Because of this, it would also be misleading to say that the sign preceded reality as much as it is to say the reverse. They are produced at the same time, as the "two sides of the same coin."

Drawing Hands by M. C. Escher, 1948, Lithograph

Within a "primary" differential spectrum, a secondary plane of differences arises where subsequent binaries are built up : "inside" or "outside," "sign" or "referent," and so on (the difference that creates differences). In other words, referents are part of the system of signs, not outside it, and the sign instantiates the empty vector or the wake of this binary set up. The sign, then, is the function of a binarism at work in which the pair "sign vs. nonsign" (which are both signs) would be subsuming the pair "word-referent." For the formulation of a semiotic theory, one term of the binary is singled out, then isolated to become the Saussurean "sign" in a meta-semiotic framing, divided further into the signifier and signified. In this theoretical elaboration, any question relating to the fourth item (the nonsign, a category that appears to be critical differentially in the emergence of the sign) seems to have been left out. (It remains to be seen if many of the confusions in the discussion of signs and meaning stem from not identifying these distinct levels properly. The concept of the sign in the 20th century is, after all, a metalinguistic product.)

If a sign can have two parts, what is stopping us from giving it more? Isn't this what happened with C. S. Peirce who went from a triadic model to generate over 59,000 types of signs, reducible to 66 categories? (How big or how long is a "sign" anyway? A word, a novel, all of writing? This is a question we will try to discuss another time.) What if every semiotic instance becomes a coordinate in a mathematical sense that each sign would be occupying a unique number in space and time, having its own distinctive combination of parts? Each sign would be a unique event, and every interpretation would be a literal mapping of one sign over another (a kind of "temporal binding"). Metaphorical processes are, at the bottom, really just modelled after a real world process of mapping signs over other signs. When reciting any sign, we postulate a resemblance between a previous use and the subsequent mention of the "same" sign. This analogic operation is required for the successful recognition and reading of signs in any interpretative coordinate. Or, we can say that what we call a "sign" is actually a moment of reading.

Metaphorical mapping is both the symptom and the principle of a literal semiotic mapping process where a third term is always produced that is neither the first nor the second term in the equation. An example of this operation on the meta-semiotic plane is the Saussurean "sign." I would think that this sign is less an object than the name of a binaristic operation similar to "metaphor."  By extension, we can also say the same thing to reading: another binaristic operation.

Chains of binaristic mappings

In a scheme that I am trying to lay out here, the whole process begins with a differential network where binaries can begin to play, and where marks evolve into "glyphs" (to carve out, to cleave). Even at this stage, none of these "readable" items are positive terms possessing a self-contained plenitude (their identities are necessarily composite). The birth of languages in this case presupposes a primary differential force (called "writing" in the deconstructionist sense). The glyphs that we later use also become operators in a signifying gesture that maps the "linguistic" with the "non-linguistic" or vice versa. If this same operation is mapped over the meta-semiotic process of the Saussurean "sign," it is because it instantiates the very principle of metaphoric operation of signification. At any point in the chains of mappings, every mark, glyph, sign, word or metaphor is a moment of reading that perpetually generates the binaries that make signifying possible. That is, we do not read the sign; the sign is the reading.

Formulated this way, the sign is not an object, but an event. To speak of the sign as an object, we will need to distinguish a semiotic operation from the typographic and sonic reproduction of alphabetical forms and features. To speak of the sign as "opaque" is to map a physical quality of 3-D objects and printed letters on to the semiotic sign, negating its operation as a reading event and as metaphorical mapping. In common polemical formulation, this is saying that signs don't represent anything, or don't have a meaning beyond what they are physically. Reading now becomes impossible (Edmond Jabès) because the meanings that were formerly mapped with the semiotic sign have finally become untenable or unbearable, if not just simply completely abritrary.