Le Bon saw word-image dissociation as a perversion of language, not inherent to it

Evidence

In contemporary theoretical terms we could say that Le Bon is making allusion here to two well-known phenomena: the unfixity of the relation between signifier and signified (in Le Bon’s terms: the relation between words and images) and the process of overdetermination by which a particular word condenses around itself a plurality of meanings. For Le Bon, however, this association of images is not an essential component of language as such, but a perversion of it: words have a true significance which is incompatible with the function of synthesizing a plurality of unconscious aspirations. A strong frontier separating what language truly is from its perversion by the crowd is the unquestioned presupposition of his entire analysis. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 68

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how Le Bon’s presupposition — a true signification separable from crowd-prompted associations — differs from the contemporary view that such unfixity is intrinsic to language.
• XREF: connects to: Suggestion was an unexplained mechanism that supposedly explained everything about crowds — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 86