Quote:
Originally Posted by sltr
actually-i got to reading a bit about saussure's linguistic sign quoted in ghostcash rush's post.
here's a summary but i don't see how it applies.
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That structured system, as you quoted, the duality conformed by the signifier and signified to conform the sign, is what's at risk. The sign is arbitrary not because you can switch it around whenever you want. It is arbitrary because there is no natural relationship between a word and an object, hence calling an object used to sit down a "chair", is merely conventional.
Since power is no longer vertical, according to post-modernists, but a complex weave of horizontal relationships between subcultures, my joke referred to the crisis that the conventional sign was going to suffer because now everyone would have potential to re signify everything ("rampant polysemy).
It was a little joke between parenthesis.
