Download …meaning is based on difference

…meaning is based on difference.
Another way to say this is: meaning is based on exclusion or inclusion.
Another way to that is: meaning is based on boundaries, borders, limits.
Another way to say that is: meaning is based on absences or presences within certain
borders, boundaries, limits.
Take the word “cat,” for example.
Note, that even to begin talking about the word, “cat, as a word, we set it off with
quotation marks. We enclose the word within the boundaries defined by the quotation
marks. In other words, we announce difference and this difference begins to make
meaning possible, i.e. a meaningful conversation about the word, “cat,” as opposed to the
animal. The quotation marks help to let us know what we are talking about and what we
are not talking about (inclusion (we are talking about words) exclusion (we are not
talking about animals.)
“Cat,” as a word, also exists as a “sign,” either an aural construction (the spoken word,
“cat”) or a visual construction (the written or typographical word, “cat.”). Sign’s function
through limits, boundaries, absence, presence. For example, the spoken word “cat,”
depends on silence, at least enough silence, for it to be distinguished from the other
words and sounds around it if it is function effectively as a sign. If you have tried to have
a conversation in a loud bar, you understand the boundary issues involved here. In a loud
bar, the boundaries between words become blurred or erased entirely by the aural
environment (loud music).
Niklas Luhmann, the sociologist, somewhere says that one definition of death is to totally
merge with one’s environment—i.e. at death our bodies start to re-merge with the
environment. Life is a constant struggle for maintaining difference. On the other hand,
you’ll notice Luhmann said (if I recall correctly) to totally merge is death. Some
mergence with the environment is necessary. Too much difference and we cannot survive
either. For example, you cannot be so different that you don’t use oxygen or metabolize
food. Sometimes blending with the environment is necessary for survival. Normalization
is the process by which people partially merge with a particular symbolic system. For
example, most males know how to look normatively male, i.e. they agree to merge
themselves into symbolic maleness to a degree. Females, same way. People who fail to
properly merge sometimes suffer ostracism for this, i.e. they are excluded socially.
Interestingly, the act of excluding people is another way for the excluders to feel more
“included” more “merged” into their groups. Likewise, the excluded often bond (include)
over their exclusion.
The same is true of signs. They must distinguish themselves from their environment. The
black type on the white page, the letters not piled on top of one another, but evenly
spaced (with even amounts of absence (space)). On the other hand, the sign must partially
merge with (or connect to) its symbolic environment. For example, кошка, is, or so
Google assures me, the Russian word for “cat.” However, if this word were uttered to me
on the street or if I came across it in a book or on a piece of paper, I would not know that
it referred to the four legged animals that roam my house twenty-four hours a day. I
would not know this because кошка is insufficiently merged with (or connected to) the
symbolic system I know, namely English, for me to make much use of it.
On the other hand, I recognize that кошка is a sign. I can learn what it means. I can learn
how to say it. Then, I can start using it. People may not understand me (insufficient
mergence) but I will understand and if I get others to use кошка they will understand,
too. Then the four legged animal referred to as “cat” can also be called кошка. So what?
The point here is that the four legged animal referred to as “cat” does not have to be
called “cat.” It can be called anything, as long as people “agree” to it. We can call a cat a
quixel and be perfectly understood by one another if we all agree that the animal formerly
called “cat” will now be called quixel. This agreement is an act, if you will, of mergence.
Quixel becomes an English word (merges with English) to the degree that we use it we
can understand it as an English word. This is what Culler, and Saussure mean by the
arbitrary nature of the sign. Signs are not natural things like rocks (or cats) but are
conventions used by people and they can be created, modified or even abandoned. Since
agreements between people are unique things languages (which in this view are
agreements) are unique. People who speak French or Arabic have made different
agreements about how to handle the world through language from those who speak
Spanish or Russian. So, for example, words about colors are often difficult to translate
from language to another because some languages have colors (agreements about how to
describe the visual world) that others do not.
So what?
Well…let’s see. What if you imagined that your language was not conventional (i.e. a
series of agreements spoken and unspoken between people about the use of signifiers
(like words))? What if you believed that your language was the language of God because
you were the people of God and God taught you how to speak? If so, you might be
predisposed to believe your language, being the language, after all, of God, was the best
language for doing the things one does with language (speaking, writing, making lists,
epic poems, and conversation) and you might further think that your culture, which has a
strong relationship to language, is the best culture. You might not be afraid to impose
your language (the language of God spoken by God’s people) on other people or your
culture (the culture of the people of who speak God’s language and were taught by God)
and so on. And this kind of thing has happened more than once in human history. It
happens partly because people do not believe that the symbolic system they live within is
an arbitrary one. They believe it is natural, inevitable, even divine. In other words, that it
is strongly distinct from what is artificial (often everything else).
Now language is not the only sign system or, rather, there are many sign systems that
function a lot like languages. Gender is one—all the rules that go with acting male or
female. Race is another—all the rules that go with identifying someone as belonging to
one racial group or another. Food another—think of the web of differences in various
ethnic foods. Games are another. And on and on and on.
Now, if these are all arbitrary systems. That means that are all equally arbitrary. That
means that they are not inevitable systems. That means that change, even radical change,
can occur.
For literature what this means is: an awareness that no literature (no culture) is naturally
better than another. In other words, English literature has no natural superiority to
Swahili literature and, in fact, Swahili or Russian or Japanese literature (because they
represent different ways of looking at the world) are valuable because they are not
English. This leads to an awareness of what we do with foreign literatures. Do we ignore
them? Do we translate them? When we do translate them, how much of their strangeness
do we preserve? What do we translate out of foreign literatures? What do we ignore?
We can also imagine quasi foreign literatures within our own literature, literatures that
have maintained a level of difference (failure to merge) within the larger symbolic
system—just as different social groups have: Women’s Literature, African American
Literature, Native American Literature, Gay Literature. We can then study these
literatures, examining how, and why, they maintain their difference and what that
difference means. We can also examine the way the larger, “merged,” if you will, culture
deals with these literatures. Does the larger culture value or devalue a particular kind of
literature? Likewise genres like SciFi, Romance, Horror, Mystery and so on are
“difference” sub systems. We can ask how they maintain their difference, how this
difference manifests itself, and so on. We can study how people (readers) encounter these
differences, come to recognize them, what the differences mean to readers, to authors, to
institutions (the government, religious leaders, the media, the educational establishment).
Literature (and criticism of literature) can also interrupt the process of difference or bring
it to light. Literature can foreground difference or sameness (ambiguity). Mysteries, for
example, are about sameness and difference. A crime is committed. Everyone looks the
same. But it is the detective’s job to prove that not everyone is the same. Someone is a
criminal. The detective makes them visible as such so that can no longer merge with the
environment and remain concealed. Or literature can do this by upending our
expectations about what is appropriate.