Word meaning arises from differences among words, not representation

Evidence

What exactly is this strange two-sided sheet, the sign? Suppose, as Derrida suggests, we refuse to take for granted the opposition of ideal versus material (and hence of text versus world) of which it is said to consist, and their hierarchical relationship. What kind of a thing then is the sign, what sort of event? Derrida’s answer would be that the sign is never exactly a thing or an event, in the sense of a unique and isolated empirical particular. Words do not work in that manner. In the first place, as Saussure himself elsewhere explains, a particular word always exists in relation to other similar sounding words. Its particularity is simply an effect of the way it differs from like-sounding words, as we saw just now with certain Arabic words. The English word ‘bit’, for instance, acquires its uniqueness only by differentiating itself from words like ‘bet’ and ‘big’. ‘Big’ in turn establishes itself as different from ‘dig’ and from ‘pig’, and so on. The same is true of what we call the word’s meaning. The meanings of ‘pig’, for example, are determined by other words, such as the existence in English of the word ‘pork’ to refer to pigs when served as food. The very bond between a word and its meaning, which was said to be the essence of the sign, can be shown to be just an instance of this process of difference. To find the meaning of a word (to borrow an example from Terry Eagleton) we look up its definition in a dictionary. The definition we are given is made up of other words. These words in turn are defined by more words, and so on. Words acquire their meaning from other words, not from the accuracy with which they ‘represent’. A word and its meaning turn out to be not a unique, two-sided object, but the product of interwoven relations of differences, one ‘element’ of which exists only in terms of others, in a weave that has no edge or exterior. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 457

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clear primer on the Saussurean/Derridean account of meaning as pure difference with no exterior.
• XREF: Connects to the entry on the ‘word and meaning’ sign as two-sided sheet, and to general deconstruction reading. — connects to: Meaning arises from interdependence in difference, not from data or content. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 622; Difference is a generative relationship, not a fixed property of things — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 309; Distinction suppresses similarities just as adequation suppresses differences — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 80