Kiwi -8/31

I thought after reading Saussure and Barthes there was no way I was going to be able to do a post on what I just read. However, after going back through the readings, slowly, numerous amounts of times I was able to comprehend that, in language there are only differences. These differences involve positive terms between which the difference is set up. Though in language there are only differences without positive terms. But the statement that everything in language is negative is also true only if the signified and the signifier are considered separately. When we look at the sign as a whole, we have something that becomes positive in its own classes. So what does all of this mean?
The linguistic sign has two elements: Signifier- the form that signifies and Signified- the conceptual meaning. Two important characteristics of the relationship between the signifier and the signified: 1) As invisible as two sides of a piece of paper 2) Something that is always an arbitrary (random) convention (meeting/gathering).
“ Although both the signified and the signifier are purely differential and negative when considered separately, their combination is a positive fact; it is even the sole type of facts that language, has, for maintain the parallelism between the two classes of difference is the distinctive function of the linguistic institution.”(pg.11)
“There is nothing at all to prevent the association of any idea whatsoever with any sequence of sounds whatsoever.”(De Saussure) Saussure asserted the independence (autonomy) of language with respect to reality. Signs have no inherent meaning. Sign derives entirely from relation to other signs within the languages system. Roland Barthes argued that signs in any signifying system can be understood by means of language. He developed a framework for the practice of examining cultural signs and reading their meaning within larger structures of myth. Myth operates by transforming a sign (the signifier/signified) in the first-order language system, into a mere signifier in the second-order system. For example say we are looking at a picture of a young French African American boy saluting. The signifier would be the black solider giving a salute. Barthes sees the figuration of the photo, that is to say, the arrangement of colored dots on a white background as constituting the signier, and the concept of the black soldier saluting the tricolor as constituting the signified. Together, they form the sign.