"Insignification" is a play on words instigated in part by the technological, economic, social, linguistic forum I've chosen for our online class discussion: this blog. I tried several other names for the blog – attempts at evocative but easy to remember monikers that can be condensed into the tag end of a URL – but they were all taken. As such, the title of this blog illustrates one of Ferdinand de Saussure's central claims about language: "The distinguishing characteristic of the sign – but the one that is least apparent at first sight – is that it always eludes the individual or social will." Whereas speech is at the command of the individual, language "is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual." In other words, we don't control language, we live within it. The rules and conventions that come along with a particular blogging platform can be seen as a reflection of the massive accretion of rules and conventions that structure language itself. So this is a great place for us to explore the question, What does it mean to live in signification? If there are no ideas prior to language, but language can only point imperfectly toward ideas and never even approach real things, as Saussure argues, is every speech act within this signifying system doomed to insignificance?
We'll see the influence of Saussure's Course on General Linguistics on almost all of the theorists we read in this course. It seems to me that everyone from Cleanth Brooks to Donna Haraway has worked to dislodge the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified that Saussure delineates here. And literature itself, I believe, is constantly making renovations on the signifying structure that Saussure describes. We'll see how successful those renovations have been.
