Page 160 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen
passing as the train pulls to a stop. "Look," says the brother, "we're at Ladies!"; "Idiot!" replies his
sister, "Can't you see we're at Gentlemen."
Besides the fact that the rails in this story materialize the bar in the Saussurian algorithm (and in
a form designed to suggest that its resistance may be other than dialectical), we should add that
only someone who didn't have his eyes in front of the holes (it's the appropriate image here) could
possibly confuse the place of the signifier and the signified in this story, or not see from what
radiating center the signifier sends forth its light into the shadows of incomplete significations.
For this signifier will now carry a purely animal Dissension, destined for the usual oblivion of
natural mists, to the unbridled power of ideological warfare, relentless for families, a torment to
the Gods. For these children, Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth two countries towards
which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings, and between which a truce will be the
more impossible since they are actually the same country and neither can compromise on its own
superiority without detracting from the glory of the other.
But enough. It is beginning to sound like the history of France. Which it is more human, as it ought
to be, to evoke here than that of England, destined to tumble from the Large to the Small End of
Dean Swift's egg.
It remains to be conceived what steps, what corridor, the S of the signifier, visible here in the
plurals in which it focuses its welcome beyond the window, must take in order to rest its elbows
on the ventilators through which, like warm and cold air, indignation and scorn come hissing out
below.
One thing is certain: if the algorithm S/s with its bar is appropriate, access from one to the other
cannot in any case have a signification. For in so far as it is itself only pure function of the signifier,
the algorithm can reveal only the structure of a signifier in this transfer.
Now the structure of the signifier is, as it is commonly said of language itself, that it should be
articulated.
This means that no matter where one starts to designate their reciprocal encroachments and
increasing inclusions, these units are subjected to the double condition of being reducible to
ultimate differential elements and of combining them according to the laws of a closed order.
The elements, one of the decisive discoveries of linguistics, are phenomes; but we must not expect
to find any phonetic consistency in the modulatory variability to which this term applies, but
rather the synchronic system of differential couplings necessary for the discernment of sounds in
a given language. Through this, one sees that an essential element of the spoken word itself was
predestined to flow into the mobile characters which, in a jumble of lower-case Didots or
Garamonds, render validly present what we call the "letter," namely, the essentially localized
structure of the signifier.
With the second property of the signifier, that of combining according to the laws of a closed
order, is affirmed the necessity of the topological substratum of which the term I ordinarily use,
namely, the signifying chain, gives an approximate idea: rings of a necklace that is a ring in
another necklace made of rings.
Such are the structural conditions that define grammar as the order of constitutive encroachments
of the signifier up to the level of the unit immediately superior to the sentence, and lexicology as
the order of institutive inclusions of the signifier to the level of the verbal locution.
In examining the limits by which these two exercises in the understanding of linguistic usage are
determined, it is easy to see that only the correlations between signifier and signified provide the
standard for all research into signification, as is indicated by the notion of "usage" of a taxeme or
semanteme which in fact refers to the context just above that of the unit concerned.
But it is not because the undertakings of grammar and lexicology are exhausted within certain
limits that we must think that beyond those limits signification reigns supreme. That would be an
error.

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