Signs and Metaculture: "Sign" and the "Transcendental Signified" 1.2

I’ve been thinking more about the previous post, and I’d like here to add a small musing to “Signs and Metaculture: ‘Sign’ and the ‘Transcendental Signifier’”.

When we speak to each other, we are participating in the use of signs. But to what extent do we create the meaning of the sign and to what extent does the meaning derive from the references it make to the other signs with which it interacts?

I believe I was a little unclear on what the exact nature of our participation in creating meaning was. See, if we hold that the word has meaning entirely external to what we say, then we do not participate in any sort of “making” process whatsoever, but merely use what has been passed down to us. Yet, as we can see in the ever-changing nature of language, there must be an alteration at some point in the communication process. At the same time, however, we cannot assert that the words we speak are entirely made to mean whatever we want them to mean. So the question becomes, what role do we play in the equation?

Well, there are three main claims about this argument, all of which were just mentioned, but I’ll make them clearer:
1. Words have meaning; we don’t change the meaning of the words, and if we think we do, we are confused and are twisting the way language ought to work.
2. Words gradually change meaning due to changes in culture and philosophical understandings of the world. That’s the nature of the beast and we just float along with it, affecting it, but not intentionally.
3. Words have no fixed meaning, nor is the meaning tied to culture; the only way we can understand a word is by being in agreement with the person we are speaking with. You know what I mean when I say a word, so we give the word its meaning together.

Most people who agree with (1) tend to be moralistic and priggish about ought-ness and ethics. It would be great if language were like that, but the fact is, meanings do change, whether we like it or not. Sure, most people with a traditional moral background would love for there to be stability in our understanding of things, but most things, like language, ethics, and morality, are somewhat mobile in practical existence. These people would have an exceedingly difficult time putting together a dictionary since they would be constantly searching for the True meaning of a word (which, by the way, doesn’t exist, shh… it’s our secret).

Those who side with (2) are generally staunchly democratic—they believe that the society determines existence. Of course, then you get caught up in discussions over whether the changing contexts of language affect the specific meaning of a word, then you end up needing a new dictionary for every cultural situation. Here we play some role in changing things, but not as individuals, as class and cultural groups.

Our friends in (3) would never be able to put together a dictionary at all, for obvious reasons--they don't need one! Each person determines his or her own perception of meaning and reality. If I think masochism is a good thing, you can't convince me any differently, because that's what brings me pleasure. If I think "burger" means a portabella mushroom and tomato on a hamburger bun with Swiss cheese, that's my prerogative.

So, most of you reading this will probably fit into one of these categories (with a little mixing a matching, of course). I'll leave it at that for now, and see if any of you have any comments. I'll tell you what I think when I have a bit more time.

(Here's a spoiler - it has something to do with my previous post, a little to do with the act of "making", and a lot to do with not really agreeing entirely with (1), (2), or (3). I'll be a bit presumptuous and say, enjoy the wait!)

Chase-An Overview of my Demographic Concerns

So I’ve given a lot of thought to the topic of my first blog entry. I mulled over quite a few, but there is one topic that I have been reading and thinking about for some time: demographic decline in the West and East Asia and its possible result in economic, societal, and cultural collapse. In a nutshell, the problem is simply that every first-world nation except the United States have fertility rates below replacement level. That means that their populations will decline, leaving less and less able-bodied and vigorous young go-getters to drive their economies, and more and more elderly and retired people that need to be taken care of by their children. Immigration will be the only way to save their shrinking workforce and economy. This might ultimately mean that Europe and Japan will go the way of the Roman Empire...

Ok, so it’s awfully pretentious of some no-credentials undergraduate student like me to be writing about such a massive issue. But this is some serious stuff, a lot more serious than climate change or the price of oil or whatever crisis of the day people are talking about. I hope this blog entry gets people thinking about something that has a tremendous potential effect on our children’s and grandchildren’s world.

Our world is changing. And I’m not thinking of its temperature. Social scientist say that to maintain a countries population the average woman needs to have 2.1 children. That makes sense, as each married couple replaces itself with two kids, and there’s an additional tenth of a child to make up for any children who die prematurely. But in the European Union the fertility rate is at 1.5, with Lithuania at the lowest (1.22) and France at the highest (1.98), according to the CIA World Factbook.1 As Europeans have less children, the average age of the population gets older and more people retire and need money from the welfare-state. In order to maintain its economy, an increasing number of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East are needed to boost the shrinking workforce. These immigrants are primarily Muslim, and with them they bring the seeds of Islamic society. This situation, to say the least, is not good. The whole situation makes me recall when in my high school Humanities class we discussed the fall of the Roman Empire. One of the biggest reasons for the Empire’s fall was its decline in population. With their great success and lives in pursuit of pleasure, the Romans began to stop having babies. No new babies means no new soldiers, workers, or government officials. Without people power the huge state of the Empire collapsed, and the Romans were unable to resist as they were swept away in wave after wave of barbarian migrations (the result of my German ancestors, I suppose). Shrinking and aging population and huge and expensive bureaucracy in the EU sounds quite similar.
People might say, “Ok, the white European population is certainly in decline, but these immigrants will assimilate and discard much of their culture for the wonderful consumerism of the West. To worry about people with a different skin color taking over is a quite racist and xenophobic thing to do. What culture they do keep will add a nice zest to the European food-scape.” I’d say it is arrogant to assume that our post-modern materialistic culture is so inherently superior that it’ll assimilate all foreigners like the seemingly invincible Borg of Star Trek. And it doesn’t sound like some Europeans even want to let them assimilate, as the leader of the Church of England Archbishop Rowan Williams is calling for a degree Islamic law to be adopted in the United Kingdom.2 Having in one country two legal systems from two completely different world-views sounds like a very bad idea to me. Unlike the United States, Europe is not a society founded by immigrants (at least not in recent history), so I‘m not sure if Europe can integrate its new citizens like we can. There’s a good chance Western Europe will end up looking like the Balkans in the not too distant future.

There is an excellent book I read by Mark Steyn titled America Alone.3 He discusses the demographic situation in Europe and the implications it could have on the United States. I really like the essence of his argument as he puts it in his prologue on page xxxv:
“Age + Welfare = Disaster for You
Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way”
Though not an academic work, I feel his ideas cut to the heart of this issue, and thus the I highly recommend his book.

On the other side of the world Japan has a similar problem, but a different solution. With a fertility rate of 1.22, and if it doesn’t change soon Japan’s economy is in serious trouble.4 Japan could open its doors to immigration, but the homogeneous nation seems antsy about that idea. So instead they turn to robots, which could result in an interesting evolution of society, for better or for worse.5

The United States, so far, has a healthy social scientist recommended fertility rate of 2.10. Of course our population continues to grow as well through immigration, but it’s driven by Latin Americans, who are Roman Catholic and share many of our values, and so I don’t think it poses the same threat as Europe’s immigration problem does (it could even greatly help us, but that‘s another blog article entirely). Though our economy might have hit a rough spot right now, I think our growing population will serve us well in the future. But there are still people buying into outdated Malthusian ideas about how eventually we will all starve because there are far too many people. Radical environmentalists are constantly bombarding people with prophecies that we are on the verge of ecological collapse-that our exploding population will soon run out of all its resources and there will be famine, war, draught, disease, and pestilence. They‘ve even convinced a environmentally conscious woman to abort her child and sterilize herself to be sure she doesn‘t end up making more ecological disasters (meaning new human beings).6 But people like the old Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich are completely wrong. Ehrlich’s predictions that we would all starve to death in the 70’s and 80’s failed to come true. The reason being that when a human being is born into the world, he doesn’t just bring an appetite and a carbon footprint; he brings the potential for creativity and innovation. It may sound hokey but people are our most valuable resource. Technology has more than kept up with our growing population, much to people like Ehrlich’s chagrin.7 But if there are no people to innovate or to invest in new technologies, than how can be produce enough to support an elderly population?

What alarms me about this is the underlying causes of this problem. I can think of two probably ones. First and probably least influential (as of right now) is a change in ethics. Radical environmentalists encourage people to value animal life on the same level as human life, such as in the philosophy as Peter Singer. This doesn’t bring animals to the human level, but rather brings us down to theirs, and so a can of worms is opened up and it can be considered moral for human beings to drive themselves to extinction to “save the planet.” (what is quite ironic about this is that it doesn‘t even make evolutionary sense, as a species priority is to preserve itself, at the expense of others if necassary). Secondly and more problematic is our shift from a culture centered on family to one centered on the self. People put off having children for their careers, or so they can enjoy life with less responsibilities. And in the long run those notions are incredibly detrimental to society.

I hope to continue this topic in later blog entries. There are many areas that need further discussion, for example, what this means for China or the change in ethics that could accompany a huge demographic shift. As an Orthodox Christian, one particular issue that emerges from population decline is what it means for the Church. In Greece, Russian, Romania, and every other country where Orthodoxy is the dominate religion fertility rates are well below replacement levels. This could mean that Orthodoxy in America will have an increasing importance in the years to come. Hopefully I’ll be able to write some more in the future, but these next few months I expect to be pretty busy. I hope you’ve enjoyed my article, and that it has provided food for thought. In between now and the next blog I hope to watch a new documentary about this very subject matter: Demographic Winter.

Signs and Metaculture: "Sign" and the "Transcendental Signified"

First, “Sign”, perhaps the most common and complex term tossed about by modern literati. So commonly debated and utilized has the term been that even upon hearing “si-”, many professors merely roll their eyes, as if to say, “Oh no, not again!” Yet, while they may be sick and tired of opening that particular box of fury (and I am not learned enough to give a full-on discussion of its history), it is important to briefly address the nature of the sign and its implications for everyday communication and human interaction.

Very concisely, here is a simple description of the sign, as defined by Ferdinand de Saussure[1]:

1. The sign is the holistic representation of two parts—the signifier and the signified.
2. The signifier could be said to be the form of the sign, and the signified the concept.
3. To give an analogy, a sign is a painting; the signifiers are black, white, grey, and red watercolors; and the signified is a woman riding a horse.

There are many instances in which we interact with signs in daily life—traffic signs, advertisements, giving someone the thumbs-up. Each sign has its own meaning: a traffic sign is a directive, ordering you to stop, go, turn, etc; an advertisement (let’s take a KFC billboard as representative) is another form of directive—“eat my chicken”; the thumbs-up is a form of acknowledgement of past obligation: “you did a good job.”

More often than not, however, the experience we have with signs is in the form of verbal communication. In speech, the spoken word is the sign, the form of the word is the signifier, and the meaning of the word is the signified. Saussure gives the example of the sign: “arbor”, where the letters “a-r-b-o-r” comprise the signifier and the idea of ‘tree’ is the concept, or thing signified. Thus, in the phrase, “an arboreal recluse”, we understand it means “a hidden place with trees” only because we know that the sign “arbor” implies the meaning of ‘tree’.

All right, here are some problems associated with theories of signs:

1. If the spoken word, “arbor” brings to mind ‘tree’, the next question we have to ask is, what kind of tree? When you say arbor, am I thinking of a dead oak while you are thinking of a cluster of beautiful palm trees? The next step is that we must be more and more specific with our words—defining each and every word. Of course, the only way to define what we say is with other words, so we are caught in an everlasting circle of definition in order to understand each other.

2. Jacques Derrida discusses the problem of representation. The way that we have described the sign above involves representation: the signified is represented by the signifier. Representation, he says, has two ways of being understood: representation as describing/defining a thing or re-presentation as one thing standing in the place of/reproducing another. He shows the nature of signs to be representational, and as such to be contingent upon there being something to re-present. This he follows to the source of an object which represents itself and which “is present before the act of repetition” (“Speech and Phenomena” 13), that is, it exists before signs and is that which all other things are representations of. If all signs represent something else, then there must be something at the origin that cannot represent anything other than itself. As the primary thing which all others represent, it is the “transcendental signified”, that which takes no part in the other signifiers because of its transcendence. However, by asserting itself in the act of being, or in its presence (by being “re-presented”), it negates its own existence, since it, by nature, can never be represented (in the sense of definition) in the first place. Because it is transcendent and nothing can represent it but itself, then when the “transcendental signified” represents itself it is brought into the realm of things represented, which means that it is made present (which it cannot be by nature).

While there are more discussions, let us only address these two, as they are complicated enough. Problem (1) is based on the theory of signs being a social construct, centered on interaction between human beings. Essentially then, the difficulties become psychological incongruencies (psychological because the problem is associated with the concept of the signified in a person’s mind, whether the person who vocalizes the sign or one who hears it). Thus, if the sign is a social construct, then the most important part of the sign is the signifier and how the signifier is used. If the problem lies in the signifier, and not the signified, then it is with the signifier that human communication finds its meaning. For, we cannot (unlike some Sci-Fi characters) comprehend the unspoken psychological existences. And if the meaning of the sign lies in the proper communication of it within society (because a concept has no meaning if you can’t structure it in a particular form, even in your own mind, and it is meaningless without communication between beings) then primacy of the signifier rather than the signified in the human psyche becomes apparent.[2]

The main issue that I want to point out with Problem (1) is that, if the sign is a social construct, then it becomes entirely relative to the communicative abilities of those in the society. Take, for example, a child who says, “Ba!”, and the parents understand that to mean, “I want my bottle.” Naturally, if the child continues to grow, his social surroundings will inevitably change, and he cannot be allowed to continue the use of “ba” to mean “bottle.” Now let us look at another way of viewing signs and see if it helps any with combating the sign as an entirely social construct.

Briefly, Tolkien the philologist (following Barfield) taught that modern languages evolved from a common root language, a teaching that is very common in anthropological studies but at the time, the two were not considered different spheres in philology[3]. In tracing the common root language, Tolkien believed that one might find the origin of human communication. And, if “in the beginning was the Word”, and the Word is the apex of communication without verbal effort, then the beginning language must be a social manifestation (though tainted) of the transcendental Word beyond. It was Tolkien’s philological desire to romanticize the languages of human races and find the traces of their common origin in their ancient communication. We might call this theory of language, centered upon the Logos, “Logos-centric”. Each word and phrase, since it is directly derived from its predecessor (and the primary antecedent is the Logos), is contingent upon the immediate presence of the Logos.

In hearing our dilemma of the child presented above, Tolkien might say that the word “bottle” has meaning outside of the child’s concept of what the word means. The child cannot just invent a word (“ba”) and say that it is substitutable for “bottle”. He merely does not know what word to use, so uses another in its stead. Just as we use the word “arbor” to represent ‘tree’, we use it in place of knowing the expression that might have been used in the original, or divine language. So, in this concept, the sign is not a social construct, but a way of participating in the divine eternality of the Word. Indeed, the more fully we understand languages and the construct of signs, the more we come to participate in the Word. For example, if the only image and concept that comes to mind when we hear the word “arbor” is a palm tree or dead oak, then we do not fully understand the sign. The sign ought to re-present in our minds not only a dead oak, but also “gopher wood”, “olive branch”, and “Cross”, not to mention all the other implied socially constructed, but poetically and divinely useful, representations of the sign. When we hear “arbor”, the more we know, the more we experience. Hence, the study of language, for Tolkien and others, was important to an experience of that from which all things originated.

Here is where we come to Problem (2), the seemingly more complicated of the two. Derrida claimed that the statement, “I am”, was inherently a representation, an act of making the “I” reflexive and present. And if the “I” was supposed to be the “transcendental signified”, it would follow that it was that which could not have a signifier. And the “I am” statement is an attempt by the “I” to signify itself, since it has no adjective defining what state of being the “I” is in. Basically, Derrida wanted to “de-construct” the structures that had been built—structures which all had a single locus as their fixed object. Whether this locus was God in theology, the sun in the solar system, reason in Western philosophy, or the “transcendental sign” in language, his assertion was that these things themselves are not stable, they are constantly in motion. Thus, the binding laws of connection (that which binds all things in a structure to a center) could not apply, but must be themselves in motion. And if they are in motion, then the signs cannot have their meaning based upon the centralized concept, or “logos.” So upon what does the meaning of language signs rest? Upon the differences in the signs themselves—how they relate to one another, how they are used, and to what end their usages permit. A sort of inter-connectedness of meanings arises, rather than a centralized presence or “logos.” In other words, “arbor” would not represent ‘tree’ because it centered around a certain fixed state, but rather because the words surrounding it allowed it to take on the meaning of ‘tree’.

Of course, this assertion is in direct conflict with the beliefs of “Logos-centrism” described in the teachings of Tolkien. The sign is not entirely socially constructed, however. Indeed, the sign, for Derrida, constructs society. Society participates in the grand “play” of signs in that it constantly references signs, and by proxy their interplay of meaning, but the signs themselves still dwell outside of physical existence. It is in the constant reference of the signs to one another that we find the connection between the three philosophies here present. As we pointed out above, in the “Logos-centric” understanding of language, the more references we understand in the meaning of the sign, the closer we get to an experience of what lies beneath, thus we participate in the eternal self- and inter-referential nature of the signs.

This does not negate the fixed center around which the signs and our understanding of those signs circulate, as the center itself need not be separated from the interplay of signs and may actually assist in the constant change of reference. For, if the Word of “Logos-centrism” cannot be fully re-presented in the signs we make (as we are inherently tainted), then we must constantly be representing our experience in various and incomprehensive ways. This also addresses Problem (1), as it points out that each word has its meaning inherently intertwined with the use of other words in society while at the same time being maintained by the ever-present Logos. What does this mean for practical life? For starters, it means that the words we use are by their use a reference to and re-presentation of the original Word and that the inter-referential nature of signs inherently contains divinity and is not limited to a social construct.


Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. “Speech and Phenomena.” In A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Edited by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Flieger, Verlyn Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World. Kent State University Press, 2002.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Chicago: Open Court, 2004.

[1] While I reference Sassure here, I do not intend to go over the entire Course in General Linguistics nor debate the failures of Sassurean philosophy (for a somewhat entertainingly harsh and un-learned reaction to post-Saussurean theory, see Not Saussure by “Dr.” Raymond Tallis). I do not wish to go into a lengthy discussion of post-structuralist thought nor alternative theories of defining signs (viz. Donald Davidson’s “triangulation” theory, etc.). This is not because they are not interesting, indeed I find them more intriguing than Saussure’s model, but for the purposes of this essay, I will mostly allow Saussure’s model to stand (for now), so as not to bore you.
[2] See Lacan for a psycho-analytical defense of the SIGNIFIER/signified split.
[3] Indeed, it is important to understand that Saussure’s teaching was almost in direct reaction to the assumption that anthropology and linguistic studies must go hand-in-hand, as he taught that, while they can contribute to one another, the two fields are entirely separate.

Signs and Metaculture: Introduction

In the upcoming series of essays titled "Signs and Metaculture", I intend to provide an understandable explanation of certain common terms used by literary critics and scholars. I will show how, in its respective definition, each term carries the vast importance of constructing perspectives on everyday experience. I will explain certain theories of each word or phrase in history and how each theory can drastically alter one's concept and experience of reality.

I do not purport to be an expert in any sense on historical literary criticism and will not give a detailed analysis of competing schools of literary thought. However, I will reference particular schools and a few critics during the essays, so a brief explanation will be necessary. Because I lack expertise, I welcome all feedback on the series.

Lastly, I hope to provide at least six essays in installments of two month intervals, but this is subject to change. Enjoy!