Saussure | Differentiation

Langue leads to the concept of value or differentiation. Language as signifying depends upon the selection of one linguistic item as against other possible items, then language as signifying depends not upon the particular positive properties of what is uttered but upon the formal difference between what is uttered and what is not uttered.

Speak loud or soft (as long as audible), or write down (as long as legible) the same sentence, it does not carry any more or less information. What matters is the same structure of formal relations is preserved.

Again, the chess analogy is useful here.

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[*]The particular material properties of the chess board and pieces are in certain respects irrelevant.
[*]When played in correspondence, the pieces may be different (wooden or plastic), but both will use standard symbolic notation (Q4 to K5)
[*]As a game, it is still one and the same.
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To think chess as a game, is to think the board and the pieces formally, abstracting away from their full individual thingishness, their quidditas (properties that a particular substance (e.g. a person) shares with others of its kind).

In the world of things, a chess piece may never actually be in the center of a square, it may even be overlapping. In the world of abstractions however, in the game, they are wholly on one square until it overlaps enough to be on another square. No degrees of on-ness, non transitions between squares. The board is differentiated out into sixty-four perfectly discrete categories of space.

In the case of language

Signifyers are visible marks and audible sounds but not on the same level as non-signifying sights and sounds. The important thing in the word is not the sound alone but the phonic differences that make it possible to distinguish this word from all others.

To an English speaker who has only heard a single category for th in ‘that’ and ‘thief’ will find it very hard to recognise what is going on in a language where the difference between these two sounds is significant.

The difference is glaring, but we overleap them so automatically that only a special effort of retraining can recover them. The categories are so ingrained we never really hear the full individual sound at all.

The principle of differentiation applies no less to signifieds – concepts. They are concepts, but not in the ordinary way we think of them.

The concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with other terms of the system. The most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not.

Rape

Consider the signified concept by the word ‘rape’. It leads to strong feelings, yet it is curiously empty by itself. It depends on the position of a word in a system, which includes such opposing words as love and marriage. What marriage is, is what rape is not.

Meaning categories that society transmits is an interdependent whole. Change one Signified and the others much change too.