ABSTRACT
Thought and sound, as I have already pointed out, are analogue domains of, respectively, perceptual experience and bodily process. Crucially, Saussure argues that the phonic and conceptual terms which comprise the two orders of difference in languex have no positive value. He points out that 'the language system comprises neither ideas nor sounds which pre-exist the linguistic system, but only conceptual differences and phonic differences stemming from this system' (CLG: 166). How, then, can an analogue continuum of pure differences give rise to 'ideas' and 'sounds'? Ideas and sounds, as Saussure defines them, have positive value. They do not pre-exist the language system; rather, they emerge from it by virtue of the selective combining of the two orders of difference in the making of signs. There has been a good deal of misunderstanding on this point. As I argued in Chapter 3, section 4, langue1, as a system of pure values, is a system of contextualizing relations for the making of signs. What matters are the ways in which these values are distributed in the combining of the two orders of difference. In this way, as Saussure argues, the system of values is the constitutive link between signifier and signifed in the sign (Chapter 9, section 2):
But to say that everything is negative in the language system, this is only true of signified and signifier taken separately: when the sign is considered in its totality, one is in the presence of a positive thing in its order. A linguistic system is a series of differences in sounds combined with a series of differences in ideas; but this putting together of a certain number of acoustic signs with corresponding cuts made in the mass of thought gives rise to a system of values; and it is this system which constitutes the effective link between the phonic and psychic elements on the interior of each sign. Although signified and signifier, taken separately, are purely differential and negative, their combination is a positive fact; it is indeed the only kind of fact that the language system consists of, since the distinctive characteristic of the linguistic institution is precisely to
maintain the parallelism between these two orders of difference. (CLG: 166; my emphasis)
The sign, 'considered in its totality', is a positive, rather than a negative, fact because it represents the combining of selections of terms from the two orders of difference in response to some specific contextual requirement. The terms themselves may be selectively combined and re-combined in new ways in many different contexts. It is the overall system of values which entrains and co-ordinates the cross-coupling of the two orders. The act of selectively combining negatively defined terms from the two orders of difference means that the analogue continuum is digitalized as a positive distinction in the making of a sign. This is why the sign in its totality has positive value:
When one compares signs among themselves - positive terms - one can no longer speak of difference; the expression would be inappropriate, because it is only correctly applied to the comparison between two acoustic images, for example,pere ['father'] and mere ['mother'], or to that between two ideas, for example, the idea of 'pere' and the idea of 'mere'; two signs each comprising a signified and a signifier are not different, they are only distinct. Between them there is only an opposition. All of the language mechanism, which will be discussed below, rests on oppositions of this sort and on the phonic and conceptual differences that they implicate.
