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C O N C E P T S
therefore say that entirely arbitrary signs reahze better than others the se-
miological ideal” (F lo o -io i; E 68). And this is why linguistics can become
“le patron général de toute sémiologie,” both the model or template and
the boss o f semiology.
There is a delicate operation underway here, as in the case o f ono
matopoeias; do not deny the possibility of motivated signs but make arbi
trary signs the norm, so that the goal o f linguistic and semiological analysis
becomes to demonstrate the arbitrary and conventional nature o f suppos
edly motivated signs. It is as if Saussure had realized that the passion that
might best drive semiology and its heir, cultural studies, would be the de
sire to expose the arbitrary and conventional nature o f whatever is present
ed as natural or motivated. The drive to demystify the natural or the mo
tivated, to uncover the true conventionality o f the allegedly natural, has
been essential to the fortunes o f literary and cultural studies in the past
few decades.
Saussure himself recognized that the arbitrariness o f the sign distin
guishes language from other sign systems: “Even the fashion that deter
mines our dress is not entirely arbitrary— one cannot depart too far from
the conditions dictated by the human body. Language, on the contrary, is
limited in no way” (F no; E 75-76). But the idea o f the arbitrary sign as
semiological norm triumphed over this other line o f reflection. In Barthes’
Mythologies, for example, the presence o f motivation is recognized: “pas de
mythe sans forme motivée” [no myth without motivated forms] But this
motivation, this allegedly natural relation between form and meaning, is
treated as an “alibi” that permits us to get away with denying the contin
gency and historical character o f our practices— claiming that I choose my
clothes for fit and comfort, not for the meanings they bear.
The famous photo on the cover o f Paris-Match o f a black soldier
in French uniform saluting the flag signifies, on the semiological plane
Barthes calls “mythique,” that France is a great empire and that all its
sons, without distinction o f color, serve faithfully under its flag. The re
semblance between this salute, this uniform, and those o f white soldiers
is a motivation that makes the image seem to give rise “naturally” to the
concept and allows historical contingency to mask itself as Nature. “Nous
sommes ici au principe même du mythe” [We are here at the very prin
ciple o f myth]
3. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris, Seuil, 1957), 212.
4. Ibid., 215.
The Sign: Saussure and Derrida on
I Z I
This naturalizing tendency o f semiological systems is what semiolo-
gists and practitioners o f cultural studies fight against: to unmask the cul
tural operations and reveal the arbitrary and conventional nature of the
sign. “ From an ethical point o f view,” Barthes writes, “what is disturbing
in myth is its motivation. I f there is a health o f language, it is based on the
arbitrary nature o f the sign.”^ So we can devote ourselves to diagnosing all
the ways the languages o f our cultures, present and past, fail to be healthy.
Thus, for instance, Judith Butler’s vital work in gender studies has been
based on a distrust o f any signifying distinction presented as natural and
the desire to reveal the conventional forms o f the signifying operations by
which we are daily obliged to enact “man” or “woman.”*’
The position briefly expounded in the Course has been a crucial pre
supposition o f a range o f projects in literary and cultural studies, driven
by the suspicion o f motivated signs and the presumption that if one finds
in texts distinctions or categories presented as natural, they have not been
analyzed with sufficiently sophisticated methods or else that the author is
in the thrall o f a dubious ideology.
Insofar as this distrust o f motivation derives from Saussure, it is
worth returning to the Course— and to the curious reflection on motiva
tion I cited earlier. Derrida comments on this passage in the section of Glas
beginning, “Le glas acharne une lecture grammatologique de Saussure.”
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