Saussurean holism makes meaning autonomous from both objects and the subject

Evidence

Words, as we have seen, no longer signify by virtue of their referring to objects, by rather through their relation to other words. The subject, consequently, is no longer directly constitutive of language, endowing words with meaning by dubbing objects to which it has independent access. Meaning is now autonomous, produced through the interrelations of signifiers. … It establishes that the subject cannot act, as Husserl believed, as the unmediated, ‘self-present’, starting-point for the constitution of the world: consciousness is necessarily mediated, imbricated with discourses which transcend the subject. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 307

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spells out the consequence of Saussure’s demolition of atomism: meaning becomes autonomous from reference and from the constituting subject.