SCHEMATIZING (11)

By: Joshua Glenn
May 10, 2023

One in a series of posts via which HILOBROW’S Josh Glenn will attempt to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.

From Bruno Taut’s *Alpine Architektur* (1919). In the last pages, glass architecture seems to implode upon itself, with an illustration of an atom-like structure, with the note: “THE SPHERES! THE CIRCLES! THE WHEELS!”

A key insight of Saussure’s: We can only know what a particular utterance means if we understand how it means — i.e., how it fits into the overall language-system. An utterance has no meaning independent of the overall language-system; therefore, it’s crucial to study the difference — the distinctions and oppositions — between what is uttered and what might have been uttered instead. This is an abstract approach: Instead of “reading” an utterance by its positive content, you’re reading it negatively — what it is, is whatever all other utterances are not. Meaning is relational; each “signified” forms part of an interdependent whole that — as a system — is what makes all meanings meaningful. The terms in such a system are mutually and reciprocally defining; you can’t fully grasp a term until you grasp what opposing terms are logically implied by and presuppose it. Only when we describe a signified in terms of what it is not, rather than in terms of its contents, do we begin to see the implicit assumptions that we’ve absorbed without conscious evaluation.

So I, perhaps,
Am neither mole nor mantis;
I see the constellations,
But by their gaps.

— from C. Day Lewis’s Transitional Poem (1929)

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SCHEMATIZING (11)

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