Nickolas Herman
Critical Theory
Steven Cohan
October 5, 1995
Communication, Myth, and the Arbitrariness of Sign:
A Mutual Co-Reading by Barthes and The Crying Game
Saussure's concept of the arbitrary nature of sign, since articulated by him in the early part of the twentieth century, has served as a starting point for a variety and range of intellectual permutations remarkable in recent history. This resilience, despite the extreme diversity and often contradiction of the theoretical uses to which the concept has been put, can suggest either its empirical truth or the scarcity of alternatives. The
arbitrary sign may be either a final answer or a concept we have as yet been unable to question. In this paper, I will propose a hypothesis which asserts the latter. Grounded in a communicative paradigm of language and language-culture, I will propose a reading of the concept of the purely arbitrary sign as instrumental, radically supra-referent, and mythic in nature. The limits which I will argue must be placed on the arbitrary sign--the linguistic and cultural processes within which the arbitrary
sign plays only a limited role--are conversely communicative, referentially bound on the levels both of sign (or sign-system) and physical reality, and post-canonical in nature.
For the purposes of our discussion here, what is most important is not Saussure's observation that to choose the sound-image "dog" rather than "chien" for the domestic canid is an arbitrary act. The truly ambitious--and historically influential--elements of his theory are the result of the amplification of the above principle. Saussure makes the leap (in no way logically necessary) from "the individual sign is arbitrary" to "therefore, all systems that consist of signs must be organized only around numerous arbitrary acts of meaning-creation, and cannot be organized around any other principles of meaning." The purely arbitrary sign is the sole and absolute source of language-structures. As he writes in his "Course in General Linguistics,"
"[it all] boils down to this...in language there are only differences without positive terms [his italics]....Whether we take the signifier or the signified, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences which have issued from the system"
(Saussure 120).
This extrapolation of the nature of entire sign-systems from the arbitrary nature of sign has had two extremely important consequences for all investigations that would follow. Firstly, it implicitly asserts that no other psychological or physiological factors play any role in shaping language. It proposes a theory of the mind; that is, it asserts a particular psychic nature as an established referent. Saussure writes, "Psychologically our thought--apart from its expression in words--is only a shapeless and indistinct mass" (Saussure 111).
Secondly, this picture of individual psychic nature is extended to that of entire cultures. He contends that "No society...knows or ever has known language other than as a product inherited from preceding generations, and one to be accepted as such" (Saussure 71). Because our very ability to think derives from the system we are raised in, there are no grounds from which to make major changes in culture-wide systems. "We cannot control the linguistic sign" (Saussure 71), and every "means of expression...is based...on collective behavior or, what amounts to the same thing, on convention" (Saussure 68). On a system-wide level, the arbitrariness of sign becomes "differential," and because of the vast interconnected network of differential meanings, the sign is no longer easily or consciously alterable. Thus Saussure has arrived at a theory of sign-system which both asserts a single unified cognitive essence from which all meaning is made, and negates the possibility of an individual capacity to express meaning from any relatively autonomous subjectivity. All meaning is homogeneous in origin and all subjectivity is constructed only.
Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Luce Irigaray all pursue, on some level of their work on systems of meaning, a critique of a particular sign-system as excluding some factually undeniable referent. This excluded referent is for Freud, the unconscious; for Marx, labor; and for Irigaray, female sexuality. (Due to constraints of space, I will examine in detail only the case of Freud.) Each of these factors, these writers argue, has the potential to disrupt and re-orient any sign-system which constructs the space the factors occupy without faithfully representing their properties. In other words, Freud, Marx, and Irigaray all posit limits, imposed by certain empirically existing referents, on the arbitrary nature of sign.
For the purposes of this paper, each of these excluded referents can be very usefully considered as consisting of some form of relational principle manifested in the physical world. Moreover, their effects on the sign-systems reconstructed with their inclusion parallel these referents' relational quality; discourse becomes multiple rather than homogeneous, and mediating of diverse meaning-sites rather than originally constitutive of all meaning through a uniform, single essence. Sign-systems, when altered in this way, do not merely acknowledge "the existence" of a referent by giving it a name, but are profoundly infused with that referent's inherent dynamic in their modes of constructing meaning.
The referent that Freud argues must be engaged and accommodated by our concepts of sign-system is the unconscious. Sign-systems may be constructed--Freud in fact has no doubt that they are--but there is, in addition to the arbitrariness of sign, a further psychic principle involved in the individual and social creation of meaning. To begin with, we cannot think of the meaning of language as always consciously present (or presentable) to us; rather, Freud writes that "mental processes are in themselves unconscious and that of all mental life it is only certain individual acts and portions that are conscious" (Freud 25). The unconscious not only exists, but it has the power to shape language. (In parapraxes, a powerful expressive urge which a speaker has not acted on "is put into words against the speaker's will" (Freud 80).) Moreover, Freud posits "instinctual impulses which can only be described as sexual" (Freud 26) as fundamentally formative influences on this conscious/unconscious human psychic nature, both in the case of mental illness and "the highest cultural, artistic, and social creations of the human spirit" (Freud 26).
Clearly, Freud argues for the addition of certain dynamics to our concepts of the creation of meaning, and these dynamics--while not totally incompatible with it--cannot be reduced to the arbitrary nature of sign. The unconscious and the sexual in the human psyche are, for Freud, not merely "conventions" which might someday drift out of our lives; they are fundamental, scientifically certain and genetically integral to our species. The purely arbitrary sign is not, in Freud's theory, the only formative principle of mind and structures of meaning. Moreover, the referents of which Freud urges the acknowledgment are highly relational in nature, and the study of sign and sign-system must undertake a new form of discourse--psychoanalysis--in order to make sense of the interconnections of conscious and unconscious. Freud's assertion of the relational referents of the unconscious and human sexual instinct thus compels not only their naming, but a system-wide reorientation of discourse toward relationally-structured modes.
The work of Freud, Marx, and Irigaray strongly suggests that if relationship-based referents and their corresponding discursive modes are to be manifested in sign-systems, the arbitrary nature of sign must be significantly limited. By highlighting the paradigmatic tensions between instrumental and communicative theories of discourse (as do the Frankfurt School and writers like Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, and Walter Benjamin) this limiting can be conceptualized on a level more comprehensive than a gradual taxonomy of fragmentary excluded relational referents and the discourse-modes they require. Indeed, until the limits on the arbitrary sign can be theorized in some rigorous way, many relational referents and discursive modes will remain as profoundly excluded from hegemonic institutions and practices as the unconscious, labor, and female sexuality once were.
As it relates to a communicative paradigm of language and culture, the principle of the arbitrary nature of sign as what Saussure called "the master-pattern for all branches of semiology" (Saussure 68) possesses four extremely relevant characteristics. It is an instrumental principle, to perhaps the most radical degree possible; it leads to the separation, on many levels, of the sign from referent; it asserts a definition of internal cognitive nature which is intended to legitimate particular modes of system construction; and (as a result of the combination of the first three attributes) it is fundamentally mythic in structure.
Any attempt to categorize the arbitrary sign as an instrumental mode cannot be grounded in an absolute, global definition of what is "instrumental" and what is not. A simple (but subtly problematic) definition can be found in the distinction between "means" and "end." A hammer, for example, exists primarily for the purpose of driving nails; it is not in its hammerness an end in itself, but derives its meaning as a hammer only in that it can be or is used for driving nails. Kant applied this concept of instrumentality to human ethics, arguing that people should be treated as ends in themselves, and that it was an act of brutality and immorality to treat them as a means only. To enslave people for the purpose of producing colonial wealth should be viewed as a treatment of them as "means only"--that other functions inherent to their nature, such as health, happiness, dignity, and autonomy, have been coercively denied.
These two examples illustrate the complexity of the concept of instrumentality; it exists to some extent in human life as a creative and beneficial force, but it can also cause great harm if its boundaries are not controlled. The essence of instrumentality can be understood then, in the context of both its benign and destructive uses, as the conceptualization of an object or entity's meaning as consisting solely of its applicability to some function directed outward--beyond itself--and not encumbered by any qualities that impede or constrain that function. The arbitrary act of sign-creation is such an instrumental act; I choose the word "dog" not out of consideration of the feelings or innate properties of the letters d, o, and g. The word "dog" exists solely to act as a signifier for the concept "domestic canid," and as such the sign it participates in is a practice
fundamentally informed by instrumentality. Thus, in extending the dynamic of the arbitrary sign to other practices, we are necessarily producing an instrumentalized construction of those practices.
Another attribute of Saussure's principle of the pure arbitrariness of sign is its implicit separation of sign from referent. The linguist L.S. Vygotsky reflects this principle in his defintion of mature language ability in adults as consisting of "signification independent of naming" and "meaning independent of reference" (C/L 75). In Saussure's view, it is the "differential" that is the only source of meaning in elaborate sign-systems, not those system's reflection or embodiment of any other psychological, social, or cognitive processes. Entities such as these (of which the unconscious is one example) can only be viewed as referents, extant in the physical world, that exert constraints on the arbitrary sign. Thus, in order to circumvent implicit limitations on the arbitrary sign,
Saussure severs his concept's relation to referents of all types. In effect, in order to preserve his model Saussure isolates language from all other spheres of human cognition, as well as from any physiological or neurological structures which might be built into the brain (as work such as that of Steven Pinker is now beginning to compellingly argue).
A third element of the pure, unlimited arbitrary sign is that it entails a definition of the internal, cognitive nature of the mind in order to facilitate the construction of external systems of meaning. This should not be understood as a simple concomitance, that is, the simultaneous and unconnected assertion of two separate hypotheses. Most literally, for
Saussure, the arbitrary sign is a building block out of which all systems are made exclusively. The internal cognitive property leads directly to the formation of external, observable, semiotic practices. (He writes, "language never exists apart from the social fact, for it is a semiological phenomenon" (Saussure 77).) This dynamic not only illustrates the instrumental principle by which the arbitrary sign functions on the
system-wide level, but the twin absolutes of this instrumentality: a complete and unqualified definition of internal nature, and the equally unquestionable (from the point of view of method) legitimacy of the systems which that unitary internal nature constructs.
In "Theodor Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity--Self-Assertion Gone Wild," Jurgen Habermas writes of Adorno's book The Dialectic of the Enlightenment:
"The cunning Odysseus escapes animistic charms and mythological forces; he evades ritually prescribed sacrifices by apparently subjecting himself to them. The intelligent deception of those institutions that uphold the connection between an overpowering nature and a mimetic, self-adapting, still diffuse self is the original Enlightenment. With this act a permanently identical I is formed and power is gained over a desouled nature. The I acquires its inner organizational form in the measure that, in order to coerce external nature, it coerces the amorphous element in itself, its inner nature [italics mine]. Upon this relationship of autonomy and mastery of nature is perched the triumphant self-consciousness of the Enlightenment. Adorno calls into question its undialectical self-certitude." (jh 100)
In Habermas' view, Adorno considers the "triumphal procession of the instrumental spirit [as] a history of the introversion of the sacrifice," "an act of violence which humans and nature undergo in the same measure" (jh 100). Here we can see a superb articulation of the various but integrally linked dynamics of instrumentalization: the fundamentally violent severance of signifying practices from referents in nature and the individual; the creation of a single internal principle of identity; and the "telos" of the control/construction/demystification of all systems external to the "I."
The relevance of Adorno's analysis of instrumentality to a critique of the arbitrary sign is profound on multiple levels. Especially germane to the argument of this essay is the fact that Adorno chose as a metaphor for the spirit of the Enlightenment the escape by Odysseus from "mythological forces." The instrumentalizing of discourse,
then, Adorno considered to be the survival mechanism of an embattled and constantly self-sacrificing subjectivity against a world in which nature was overpowering and the subject was denied coherence and the self-presence of sign. The instrumental subject, however, does not escape this dilemma, it merely internalizes it; in its "undialectical
self-certitude"--the lack of a sense of limitation of the instrumental--the subject "regresses, as self-assertion gone wild, into nature" (jh 100). It appears, then, that the instrumentalization of discourse and subjectivity merely shifts the site of the mythic sacrifice.
The complex set of connections between instrumentalized and mythic discourse can greatly illuminate and reconceptualize the literary practices based on an arbitrary sign. Claude Levi-Strauss writes in The Savage Mind that mythic thought is "imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its search
to find meaning" (Levi-Strauss p. 22). Roland Barthes asserts strikingly similar approaches to the practices by which we engage the literary text. He argues that the central principle of meaning in the literary text is "the infinite [i.e. unlimited] paradigm of difference" (S/Z 3), and adds that "This difference is not, obviously, some complete, irreducible quality (according to a mythic view of literary creation)...on the contrary, it is a difference which does not stop and which is articulated upon the infinity of texts, of
languages, of systems" (S/Z 3). Barthes' discourse is clearly not mythic in the most literal sense; this does not, however, preclude the possibility of its having internalized through instrumentalization the mythic sacrifice. The connection to mythic modes are made even more direct (as they are in Freud) by the allusion to augury and the interpretation of omens:
"The text, in its mass, is comparable to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks; like the soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the flight of birds, the commentator traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings..."
(S/Z 14).
In addition to the mythic convention of the endless recycling of limited material in pursuit of meaning, Barthes' image of the "templum of the augurs" (S/Z 22) illustrates two other dynamics integral both to myth and to literary theory grounded in the arbitrary sign. One is the separation of sign from referent, in the sense that neither the actual patterns of the birds' flight nor the particular "templum" chosen--a fish's entrails, a
patch of sky, a great novel, a "B" movie, or a blank page--has any intrinsic meaning to limit interpretation. The other dynamic is that of taboo: the deference, in response to social convention and coercion, to the interpretive decisions of a specific class and thus to the subjectivity that interpretation constructs.
In closing, I would like to turn now to a brief reading of Barthes' S/Z and the film The Crying Game, in order to examine certain interpretive modes and to propose alternatives.
Barthes' concept of "jouissance" has been defined by Robert Young as "the ecstatic loss of the subject" in the "pleasure of the text" (Young 32). Yet "jouer" means to play, as in "game," and without question such an activity can intrinsically involve crying (or serve as an occupation, such as literary critic). "The Crying Game" (the crying game) is the endless pursuit of signified, signifier, and meaning which absorbs the psyche when certain relational experiences are violently severed. Barthes certainly can write that
"The slash (/) confronting the S of SarraSine and the Z of Zambinella has a panic function: it is the slash of censure, the surface of the mirror, the wall of hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstraction of limit, the obliquity of the signifier, the index of paradigm hence of meaning" (S/Z 107).
But as the song says, "I know all I need to know about the crying game." The real Saracen is the one that kills Jody, and leaves Dyl in a world in which meaningful subjectivity is desperately scarce. The galaxy of signifiers may be infinite, but it is also strictly limited.
Barthes "index of meaning" is Freud's--castration. Irigaray cites Lacan's notion of castration as figurative, involving the lack of "the signifier of desire;" which Irigaray conceptualizes as the "ceaselessly recurring hiatus between demand and satisfaction of desire" (Irigaray 61). The index of meaning is not the arbitrary sign, but that concept's
destruction of intersubjectivity and communicative modes, and the subject's redefinition along instrumental lines. Sign is not in fact arbitrary, but the construction of it as such brings to bear--through the fetishization of the non-referential sign--the communicatively coercive power of convention, tradition, and taboo. To fracture sign and referent is the act by which taboo enables mythic discourse.
Such readings conflict with post-Saussurean methodology because they both limit the arbitrary sign to a secondary role in meaning-production and subvert the templum of the expressive object--for Barthes, the narrative text (readerly or writerly). Of communication as a code, Barthes writes
"[It] should be understood in a restricted sense; it does not cover the whole of signification which is in a text, and still less its 'significance'; it simply designates every relationship in the text which is stated as an address...or as an exchange....In short, communication should here be understood in an economic sense (communication, circulation of goods)" (Young 156).
In this context--the theorizing of intersubjective expression as limited to the internal transportation of the materials of narrative--the following passages from Marx are particularly apt:
"If it be declared that the social characters assumed by objects, or the material forms assumed by the social qualities of labour under the regime of a definite mode of production, are mere symbols, it is in the same breath also declared that these characteristics are arbitrary fictions sanctioned by the so-called universal consent of mankind." (Marx 103)
"The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to nature" (Marx 91).
Furthermore, Habermas writes, quoting Adorno, that
"Adorno was convinced that the principle of identity attained universal dominance in the measure that bourgeois society was subjected to the organizing principle of exchange. 'In exchange [bourgeois society] finds its social model; through it nonidentical individual natures become commensurable, identical'" (jh 109).
Irigaray critiques this function of instrumentalized discourse in the specific context of female sexuality:
"...By submitting women's bodies to a general equivalent, to a transcendent, super- natural value, men have drawn the social structure into an ever-greater process of abstraction, to the point where they themselves are produced in it as pure concepts...." (Irigaray 190).
What these hypothesized connections among the arbitrary sign, instrumental and communicative discourse, modes of knowledge-production in bourgeois society, and mythic practices illustrate most clearly is the need for a skeptical discourse which can critique these categories. Both canon and exegesis as concepts require a scrutiny undeterred by the paradigm shift that would result in the transition to new modes of discourse which are more congruent with the communicative hypothesis, that is, modes of discourse the disruption of which has been argued here to be the source of expressive authority for instrumental or taboo-based systems. Such a discourse would make the same arguments as this paper does, but in a far simpler way, in far simpler language, and in the context not of an analytical artifact but of interactive discourse generated communicatively within social relationships of all sorts.
Citations from:
Barthes, Roland, S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. Hill and Wang, New
York,1974.
Barthes, Roland, "Theory of the Text," in Untying the Text: a Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Routledge and Kegan Paul, Boston, London, and Henley, 1981.
Cohan, Steven, and Shires, Linda M. , Telling Stories. Routledge, New York and London, 1988.
Freud, Sigmund, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis. Trans. James
Strachey. WW Norton & Co., New York London 1966
Habermas, Jurgen, "Theodor Adorno, The Primal History of Subjectivity--Self-Affirmation Gone Wild," in Philosophical/Political Profiles. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1985.
Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1966.
Marx, Karl, Capital. The Modern Library, New York, 1906
Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics. Philosophical Library, New York, 1959.
Vygotsky, L.S., "Thought and Word," in Linguistics for Teachers, ed. L.M. Cleary and M.D. Linn, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1993.
Young, Robert, Untying the Text: a Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Routledge and Kegan Paul, Boston, London, and Henley, 1981.