Let me 'splain. No. There is too much. Let me sum up.

For those of you too lazy to read comments, Steph commented in response to my last post and pointed out that it was Saussure, not Derrida who said that language was arbitrary. So here's your linguistics/literary theory lesson of the day.

Ferdinand de Saussure is called the father of linguistics. He argues that language is arbitrary. Saussure talks about what he calls "signs".

For Saussure, the word "tree" (for example), is a sign that consists of two parts, inseparable from each other, like the two sides of a piece of paper. A sign is made up of a signified and a signifier.

In the case of the word "tree", the signifier is the sound of the word. The signified is the idea of tree that comes with the sound.

The important part, for Saussure, is that there is no inherent connection between the signified and the signifier. It's arbitrary. Saussure didn't think that meant anything profound about meaning, he just wanted to point out that the sounds we make have no inherent connection to the real world objects they describe.

Then Lacan says: no, the signifier isn't the idea of "tree", it's other words. "Tree" has a meaning to me only because "bush", and "shrub", and "forest", and "cat" and "city" also have meaning and I can compare those words to each other. Lacan calls it the "signifying chain".

Then along comes Derrida, who says that language is constructed, and uses the term "deconstruction" to describe his approach to philosophy. Derrida says, in a nutshell, that written words do not stand for spoken words, which do not stand for thoughts, which do not stand for platonic ideas, which do not stand for metaphysical realities. Language, literature, it's all a semantic game. Texts have no particular meaning, because words have no particular meaning. Interpretation is endless, and there's no such thing as "truth".

And Derrida leads to English grad students who can't have a conversation without reminding everyone that the words we are using have no ultimate meaning, and that there is no meaning in texts. That everything can be a "text", and that you don't have to be able to read in order to "read".

And I say: Bah. Because language may be contextual but we exist in a context together, and if we want to, we can actually understand each other. If we want to.