Structure Constitutes More Than Its Elements

Structure's Boundary Conditions—Wholeness, Transformation, Self-Regulation

Piaget began his inquiries into structuralism by first isolating what was common
to all structuralist thought. Number one on his list was the "affirmative
ideal"; that is, the ideal of intelligibility aspired after by all
structuralists. In addition to the definitions that were proffered by various
structuralists as part of the "affirmative ideal," Piaget also understood structure
to be more than the sum total of its elements.

Structuralism, according to Piaget, is also characterized by transformations, e.g., 2=1+1, the synchronic/diachronic distinction, not not A = A, and by self-regulation
processes that tend to maintain and perpetuate the continued existence of
structures. Thus, in so far as structuralism is characterized by transformations, the
laws that constitute structure must themselves be structuring. Piaget clarifies:

"Indeed, all known structures--from mathematical groups to kinship systems--are,
without exception, systems of transformation. But transformation need not be a
temporal process: 1+1 "make" 2; 3 "follows hard on" 2; clearly, the "making" and
"following" here meant are not temporal processes. On the other hand,
transformation can be a temporal process: getting married "takes time." Were it
not for the idea of transformation, structures would lose all explanatory
import, since they would collapse into static forms." [Jean Piaget,
Structuralism, 1970, p.12]

The self-regulation aspect of structuralism may be considered from a logical or mathematical point of view, i.e., the rules defining structure, (or, in the self-maintenance systems that define a healthy organism). Within the diverse range of the structuralist
movement, Piaget located the boundary conditions for structuralism in the
attributes -- wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation. However, to the
extent that structure can be formalized, Piaget believed that structure should be formalized. Because the significance of this concept, "the limits of structural formalization" is so important, I now digress to a brief discussion concerning foundational problems in mathematics, i.e., a discussion concerning "the limits of structural formalization."

Experience Is Structured Along Subject And Object Poles

Logic Of The Spontaneous Organization Of Activity In The Thought Of Piaget

"There seems to be little evidence that Cassirer, Mead, and Piaget ever had much
direct influence on one another. This makes all the more interesting their
convergence on a common point of view." [Don Martindale, 1981, p.339] Indeed,
whereas Cassirer found the origin and evolution of symbolic meaning to reside in
the "work" of man, Piaget, in a like manner, put the origin of structure and the
symbolic content that it generates, in the organisms capacity for action. Howard
Gardner has this to say regarding the priority of the act in Piaget's psychology:

"Piaget reached a crucial insight: the activity of an organism can be described
or treated logically, and logic itself stems from a sort of spontaneous
organization of activity. At this time he also formulated the notion that all
organisms consist of structures--i.e., of parts related within a whole--and that
all knowledge is an assimilation of a given external into the structures of the
subject." [Howard Gardner, The Quest for Mind, Piaget, Levi-Strauss, and the
Structuralist Movement, 1973, p.54]



In addition to the similarity that occurs in Cassirer's and Piaget's concepts
of "work" and "action" the thought of these two men converge in another respect
also. Both men believed that the subject and object poles of experience are not
simply "given." Rather, for Cassirer and Piaget, the subject and object poles
of experience are "products of experience.” As we have already seen, Cassirer
came to this conclusion, at least in part, based on his studies of Pre-modern
man's mythology. Piaget, on the other hand, arrived at this conclusion as a
result of his investigations into the language acquisition of young children. In
a study of early two-word utterances Piaget (1951) “was able to show how the
subject pole and object pole of a child's experience remains undissociated in
the early stages of language development." [Edited by B.Z. Presseisen, Topics in
Cognitive Development, 1978, p.7]


For Piaget, the long and active process that results in what we take to be the
knowledge of our objective and subjective experience begins in the recognition
and coordination of sensorimotor activity. By locating the source of cognitive
structure in the sensorimotor activity of babies, Piaget opened up the
possibility that structure was grounded in nature and not in mind. In his
investigations Piaget inquired into the source of this structure. He asked the
question, "Did structure lie in man, nature, or both? In an attempt to answer
this question Piaget offers us his own constructionist structuralist method.

Claude Levi-Strauss—Summation

Tapping Into The Panhuman Mainstream Of Objective Thought

For Levi-Strauss man is engaged in a society that is not just a simple
reflection of the mind's universal internal categories, man is engaged in a
society which is a determining agent in itself, a determining agent arising out
of the unconscious laws of semiological systems. The mind, according to this
view, is a thing among things, arising from the same laws that produce culture
and societal relationships. This idea becomes more clear if you consider a
famous passage from the introduction to The Raw and the Cooked, (where
Levi-Strauss... defended himself against the criticism that his interpretations
of South American myth may tell more about the interpreter's thinking than about
that of the Indians):

"For, if the final goal of anthropology is to contribute to a better knowledge
of objective thought and its mechanisms, it comes to the same thing in the end
if, in this book, the thought of South American Indians takes shape under the
action of mine, or mine under the action of theirs.

"Here Levi-Strauss assumes that it is possible to by-pass the problems of
social and cultural analysis that are central to anthropology and to tap
directly into the panhuman mainstream of objective thought." [David
Maybury-Lewis, Wilson Quarterly, 12:82-95]

Is it any wonder that critics of structuralism respond that structuralism is
not humanism because it takes away, or refuses to grant, man any status in the
world? Levi-Strauss's anthropology and philosophy cannot, in my opinion, escape
the bite of this criticism. In the psychology of Jean Piaget we encounter
another variety of structuralism which attempts to analyze the structural
origins of mind from a less fixed point of view. It is now to Piaget's
structuralism that we turn.

Society Is The Determining Agent For Levi-Strauss

But Who Fathered The First Mother?

Using the concept of binary opposition, Levi-Strauss analyzes the Greek Oedipus
myth into its constituent parts. For Levi-Strauss, the problem of the
relationship of these parts becomes resolved in the third level of semiological
analysis, i.e., the continuum of successive and related oppositions. For
instance, he tells us that, in order to analyze a myth, we should isolate and
identify its constituent units, and that we should write down these units, in
the form of sentences, on multiple small cards. These sentences should describe
a certain function as it relates to a subject at a particular time, as in the
case of "Kadmos kills the dragon" in the Oedipus myth. When we group these cards
according to common relationships we not only get the myths diachronic meaning
(a record of events as they occur in the story), we also get the myths
synchronic meaning (the "langue" side of myth-- its structure frozen in time).
By using this technique (Strauss compares this technique to reading an orchestra
score sheet the harmony part of which is read vertically while the melody is
read horizontally) the synchronic and diachronic levels of mythological meaning
come into view, thus Levi-Strauss tells us: "There-from comes a new hypothesis
which constitutes the very core of our argument: the true constituent units of a
myth are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations and it is
only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to
produce a meaning."[Ibid. p. 293]

In his essay on myth, Levi-Strauss, goes on to identify the bundles of
relations that define the Oedipus myth and he comes up with an interpretation of
the myth that is supposed to show how man, through his mythology, copes with the
enigmas and inconsistencies which occur in nature, e.g., birth/death, the
cultural answer to origins as opposed to biological answers, etc. To sum up,
Levi-Strauss's analysis of myth plays one group of binary opposites over and
against another group of binary opposites in the belief that, on some level,
conflicting opposites tend to neutralize one another, or, at the very least,
make myth and myth making a lively, productive and ongoing utilitarian
experience. But, after all is said and done, the question, "Who fathered the
first mother?" still persists.

When The Brain Acquired The Ability To Make Plus/Minus Distinctions

Search For Mind Code Continues

A major influence on Levi-Strauss's anthropology came by way of Marx and Freud.
Both of these men tended to place extreme emphasis on the concealed aspect of
the motivational force behind human behavior. For Marx this motivational aspect
was a natural consequence following from the social fabric of social structure
and economic realities, while for Freud these motivational aspects were
repressed deep within the person's psychological experience of the
unconsciousness. Following the path of the thought of these men Levi-Strauss
identified gift giving as the integrative function promoting social solidarity, i.e.,
the incest taboo to be part of the hidden matrix holding together kinship
systems. But, for Levi-Strauss, the hidden agenda behind a person's motivational
consciousness is nowhere more revealing than can be found in the mythology of
any given culture.

Levi-Strauss began his investigations of myth with the publication of “The
Structural Study of Myth” (1955). He believed myth to contain the "universal
code" that if properly understood would unlock the door to the unconscious as
well as the conscious mind. For Levi-Strauss, mind represented an objective component of the brain and, like any other object, the principles underlying its constitution could be investigated and discovered. With this end as his goal, he investigated the structural nature of myth. In his book, “The Savage Mind,” he sought to disclose in his description of the "concrete logic" of Pre-modern man that "...there is no such thing as `The Primitive Mind'; or, for that matter, `Modern Mind'; there is only `Mind-As-Such.'" [Hayes and Hayes, editors, Claude Levi-Strauss: The Anthropologist As Hero, 1970, p.224]

One cannot read very far into the works of Levi-Strauss without concluding that
he believed he had found the mind's code, however subtle, variable, and
kaleidoscopically shifting it was, in the elementary logic of Pre-modern man.
According to Bottomore and Nisbet, this universal logic becomes identifiable in
the significance Levi-Strauss places in the concept of binary opposition:

"Levi-Strauss argues that man, by the very nature of his mind, views the world
with binary concepts--for example, odd and even numbers. ...(M)an's capacity to
symbolize with his fellows requires that in the course of evolution the brain
acquired the ability to make "plus/minus distinctions for treating the binary
pairs thus formed as related couples, and for manipulating these relations as in
a matrix algebra." [Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, A History of Sociological
Analysis, 1979, p.584]

It was precisely in the significance Levi-Strauss attributed to binary
opposition that lead him to believe "the mythical value of myth remains
preserved, even through the worst translation." [W. A. Lessa and E.Z. Vogt,
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Structural Study Of Myth, p. 292] Using the framework
of binary opposition, Levi-Strauss has given us a description of how to
structurally analyze myth. Accordingly, myths are more susceptible to a
semiological analysis then were kinship systems and he wastes no time in making
that analogy. Acknowledging the Saussurean principle of the arbitrary character
of linguistic signs, he says:

"In order to preserve its (Myth) specificity we should thus put ourselves in a
position to show that it is both the same thing as language, and also something
different from it. Here, too, the past experience of linguists may help us. For
language itself can be analyzed into things which are at the same time similar
and different. This is precisely what is expressed in Saussure's distinction
between langue and parole...If those two levels already exist in language, then
a third one can conceivably be isolated." [Ibid. p. 291]

Claude Levi-Strauss—Code Searching

The Kinship System As A Form Of Language

Although one could argue that Levi-Strauss is as Kantian in outlook as is
Chomsky, it quickly becomes apparent after reading some of Levi-Strauss's
anthropology that there will be no attempt on his part to populate his mansions
with real, freedom loving people. Whereas, as I have already pointed out, Kant
makes an attempt to personalize his transcendental subject, Paul Ricoeur tells
us "Levi-Strauss's philosophy is a Kantianism without a transcendental subject."
[Philip Pettit, p. 78] Levi-Strauss's zealous attempt to capture the categories
of mind in his structural analysis of myth, kinship, and totemism turns the
subject into an object via his structural analysis.

Levi-Strauss's 1949 study of kinship systems came at the beginning of his
career, before he had fully developed his structuralist method. But, in his
approach to kinship, his method was already apparent. Levi-Strauss
brought to this study a collectivist, functionalist perspective. He was
following the line of study already documented in the works of Durkheim and
Mauss. In his emphasis on using women as objects for gift giving, he was simply
extending Mauss's thesis that gift giving promotes social solidarity within
one's own culture as well as promoting a cross culture solidarity when gifts are
cross culturally exchanged. Like Mauss, Levi-Strauss believed that these
reciprocal relationships were established for integrative rather than for
economic purposes.

Kinship relationships are varied and perplexing. All societies have to have
social arrangements which allow men and women to get together for the purpose of
having children. For Levi-Strauss the incest taboo became the distinguishing
characteristic which sets man apart from other animals. This rule, that one had
to marry outside of the family, became the first principle in his kinship
system. The second and more controversial principle could be found in his
explanation concerning who gets to marry who.

"In early human societies," Lewis informs us, "kinship was too important a matter to be left to chance or to individual whim. Systems of regular intermarriage among groups were therefore set up, and Levi-Strauss demonstrated ingeniously how they could have resulted from the idea of marrying out, but not too far out, i.e., marriage between
certain kinds of first cousins." [David Maybury-Lewis, Claude Levi-Strauss and
the Search for Structure, Wilson Quarterly, 12:82-95] This cross culture
marriage and exchange of cousins (usually on the maternal side but not always)
became the key, according to Levi-Strauss, that unlocked the perplexing nature
of kinship systems.

Another suggestive and more structuralist feature of Levi-Strauss's analysis of
kinship systems is found in his claim that marriage regulations and kinship
systems are a kind of language. He says:

(Marriage regulations and kinship systems are)… “a set of processes permitting
the establishment, between individual and groups, of a certain kind of
communication. That the mediating factor, in this case, should be the women of
the group, who are circulated between clans, lineages, or families, in place of
the words of the group, which are circulated between individuals, does not at
all change the fact that the essential aspect of the phenomenon is identical in
both cases." [Philip Pettit, p.70]


Understanding kinship systems in this way moves us, once again, in search of
that “illusive code," fixed in time and waiting to be discovered, that
ultimately, Levi-Strauss believes to be at the core of his investigations. In
his structural analysis of myth this quest continues.

Free And Spontaneous Acts Of The Human Spirit--Chomsky

Free And Spontaneous Acts Of Inquiry Through Self-Expression

Chomsky's concept of "innate qualities of mind" must itself be understood as a
form of the creative aspect of mind for, in his analysis of deep structure and
surface structure, he describes a system of rules for generating sentences and
the sorts of words that may replace any given word in a sentence, in the context
of a creative process. He says: (Human language)..."is free to serve as an
instrument of free thought and self-expression. The limitless possibilities of
expression constrained only by rules of concept formation and sentence
formation, these being in part particular and idiosyncratic but in part
universal, a common human endowment."[Ibid. p. 29]

For Chomsky, the deep structure that expresses the meaning of the sentence is
common to all languages. It is the transformation rules that rearrange, replace,
or delete items of a sentence that differ from one language to the next. In
conjunction with language's deep and surface structures these transformation
rules come together in the form of the "organic" nature of language in which,
according to Chomsky, all the parts are interconnected and the role of each
element is determined by the generative processes that constitute language's
underlying form. Language, from Chomsky's point of view, even though it is
conditioned upon maturational processes, and interaction with the social and
physical environment, is understood to be free from stimulus control as it
permits the spontaneous activity of inquiry and self-expression. Chomsky, in
this sense, if not totally successful, at least attempts to secure in his
structuralist interpretation of language, a place for the free and spontaneous
acts of the human spirit.

Chomsky-Deep Structure Is Common To All Sentence Meaning

The Saussure Chomsky Difference

Whereas Saussure dealt with language in terms of a holistic system of
differentiation, Chomsky extends this system into the realm of transformational
or generative grammar. Saussure's structuralism did not build bridges between
itself and Kantian philosophy. It might even be argued, in fact, that Saussure
tried to burn a few of these bridges. Except for his use of certain essential
Kantian categories, e.g., identity (memory), plurality, differentiation etc.,
Saussure's structuralism restricts itself to organizing and orientating the
methodological study of language. Chomsky, on the other hand, developed a
differentiating, holistic theory of language that allows for novelty and
creativity. Saussure's langue and parole, in Chomsky's linguistics, became
language competence and performance. With the performance attribute of language,
Chomsky took a syntagmatic approach to language which essentially means that
Chomsky added to Saussure's theory a recursive body of rules for the purpose of
generating syntax or sentences in the performance of speech. This generative
syntax became one component of the two-component aspect of Chomsky's linguistic
theory.

Chomsky believed language to be a product of both a deep and surface structure
of mind. In this respect, he split language syntax into two levels, one to
describe the deep structure of language and one to show how this deep structure
transforms into surface structure.

[Footnote. Chomsky illustrates: To take a simple case, consider the sentences
"John appealed to Bill to like himself" and "John appeared to Bill to like
himself." The two sentences are virtually identical in surface form, but
obviously quite different in interpretation. Thus when I say "John appealed to
Bill to like himself," I mean that Bill is to like himself; but when I say "John
appeared to Bill to like himself," it is John who likes himself. It is only at
what I would call the level of "deep structure" that the semantically
significant grammatical relations are directly expressed in this case. Noam
Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, 1971, p.24]

In this regard Chomsky is giving language analysis a more Kantian perspective.
Chomsky was not shy about his belief in innate structures of the mind. Kant's
influence becomes apparent when he says:

"There are, then, certain language universals that set limits to the variety of
human language. The study of the universal conditions that prescribe the form of
any human language is "grammaire generale." Such universal conditions are not
learned; rather, they provide the organizing principles that make language
learning possible, that must exist if data is to lead to knowledge. By
attributing such principles to the mind, as an innate property, it becomes
possible to account for the quite obvious fact that the speaker of a language
knows a great deal that he has not learned." [Noam Chomsky, Cartesian
Linguistics, 1966, p.59]

Search For The Hidden Code At The Heart Of Language, Myth, Literature, History

The Diachronic Axis Of Language

The concept of "irreducibility" is a universal concern of all structuralist
thought. In Kant we witnessed his desire to identify the defining "universals"
of all human experience. In Saussure this desire becomes fulfilled in his
systematic and holistic interpretation of language. Shortly, we will be talking
about how Levi-Strauss, Piaget, and Foucault express this same idea. The
credibility of structuralism rests, I believe, on making the synchronic aspect
of nature intelligible and accountable to some form of empirical verification.
Saussure's synchronic nature of language, at least in the form of linguistic
theory, moves us in that direction. Sensitive to this issue, Saussure believed
he was removing the mystery of language and placing it in the material world
with his concept of language's synchronic aspect. And, indeed, this idea that
language can be understood synchronically, frozen in time, has inspired many
structural investigations into the "hidden code" that the proponents of
structuralism believe lies at the heart of language, myths, literature and history.
At the very least, after Saussure, there arose a new skepticism for any
investigation of language that had as its goal the disclosure of the "essence
of language.”

In addition to its synchronic component, language may also be characterized, in
the terminology of Saussure, along its diachronic axis. Language evolves as the
expression of a collectivity moving through time. Language is not invulnerable
to societal or cultural pressures. The institution of language, over time,
becomes violated by dialects and slang. Language changes, but it does so
according to its own inertia. According to Michael Lane, this evolution takes
place as a result of societal pressures and influences. Lane says:

"This is apparent from the way in which language evolves. Nothing could be more
complex. As it is a product of both the social force and time, no one can change
anything in it, and, on the other hand, the arbitrariness of its signs
theoretically entails the freedom of establishing just any relationship between
phonetic substance and ideas. The result is that each of the two elements united
in the sign maintains its own life to a degree unknown elsewhere, and that
language changes, or rather evolves, under the influence of all the forces which
can affect either sounds or meanings. The evolution is inevitable; there is no
example of a single language that resists it. After a certain period of time,
some obvious shifts can always be recorded." [Michael Lane, Introduction to
Structuralism, 1970, p.51]


Language, at any given moment in time, may be investigated along its synchronic
or diachronic axis. Structuralism, for the most part, prefers to study language
in its synchronic aspect. It is for precisely this reason that structuralism
opens itself up to attack by those schools of thought which deny the possibility
of studying anything whatsoever independent of its social context, e.g., Marxism.
In general, structuralism, and Saussure's structural linguistics in particular,
have also been criticized for its disregard for human creativity. Noam Chomsky,
a leading advocate of structural linguistics in today's academic environment,
has responded to the latter criticism with his discovery and development of
transformational grammar.

Fixed Nature Of Wholes In Language—The Synchronic Axis Of Language

Language Depends On The Word For Its Field Of Signification-The Word Depends On
Language For Its Meaning-Reciprocal Movement

Once Saussure had delineated the structure of the word, he also delineated the
structure of language. For Saussure, the sign relates to language in the same
way as the signifier relates to the signified. The word, as opposed to being a name for an object, is a differentiation in the set of linguistic units that, when taken as a whole, constitute a language. A word acquires its meaning, according to Saussure, in the way it differentiates itself from the whole, the whole being the collective expression of an entire language. We find here the same double movement constituting the meaning of the sign as it relates to language, as we did in the word relationship of signifier to signified. Here the word becomes dependent on language for its meaning and language becomes dependent on the word for its "field of
signification." Thus the arbitrary character of the sign is what
permits order and meaning to arise in the world. John Sturrock, in his book
“Structuralism and Since,” underscores this distinction when he says:

"The extremely important consequence which Saussure draws from this twofold
arbitrariness is that language is a system not of fixed, unalterable essences
but of labile forms. It is a system of relations between its constituent units,
and those units are themselves constituted by the differences that mark them off
from other, related units. They cannot be said to have any existence within
themselves, they are dependent for their identity on their fellows. It is the
place which a particular unit, be it phonetic or semantic, occupies in the
linguistic system which alone determines its value. Those values shift because
there is nothing to hold them steady; the system is fundamentally arbitrary in
respect of nature and what is arbitrary may be changed." [John Sturrock,
Structuralism From Levi-Strauss to Derrida, 1979, p.10]

Saussure, using the above characterization of language, distinguishes between
langue and parole. Parole becomes the particular acts of linguistic expression
in speech while langue becomes the component aspect of language
that generates meaning through the internal play of differences. In
this respect, language forms a system of contrasts, distinctions, and oppositions
that come together in the form of pure values which, as Sturrock points out, are
solely determined by how they differ from each other as they are produced in the
system of language. Thus, language becomes a theoretical system
operating according to linguistic rules where in speakers of language, in order to
communicate, must obey these rules. It then becomes the job of linguistics
to discover the mechanisms which make language possible.

Language, in addition to being inherited, forms, according to Saussure, a corpus of
linguistic rules arising out of ahistorical conditions that allow a person to
understand and be understood. To the extent that language succeeds in this
endeavor, it is collectively determined and not susceptible to arbitrary change.
Saussure calls this aspect of language the synchronic nature of language
and it is in this synchronic nature of language where we encounter for the first
time the idea of the "fixed nature of wholes."

Reciprocal Movement Is What Saussure Identifies As Word

Structure Of Language

With his analysis of language, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
contributed greatly to the modern structuralist school of thought. Saussure
instituted into language analysis the working concept of wholeness. Prior to
Saussure, language was studied as an independent phenomena arising out of the
individual circumstances of various cultural groups. Using wholeness as a
working concept was a new idea for language theory but it was not a new idea for
the already well established tradition of organic sociology as it was expressed
in the works of Comte and Durkheim. This organic connection became evident in
what Saussure took to be the linguistic principles at work in all languages. The
purpose of language study was in fact to reveal these principles.

Saussure argued that language was a collective, orderly, and coherent
phenomenon. Language, therefore, could be studied as if it were a social system
that was susceptible to understanding and explanation as a whole. Saussure
thought of individual linguistic units as a patterned wholeness. Words, he
argued, were devoid of content when studied in isolation. Their meaningful
content arose only when they were studied in relation to one another. He based
his conception of the linguistic unit on the assumption that where there was
meaning - in a word or sentence - there would also be structure. This idea was
in conflict with the nominalist view of language that took words to be mere
names of things. For instance:

"Some people regard language, when reduced to its elements, as a naming-process
only - a list of words, each corresponding to the thing that it names. This
conception is open to criticism at several points. It assumes that ready-made
ideas exist before words; it does not tell us whether a name is vocal or
psychological in nature (arbor, for instance, can be considered from either
viewpoint); finally, it lets us assume that the linking of a name and a thing is
a very simple operation - an assumption that is anything but true. But this
rather naive approach can bring us near the truth by showing us that the
linguistic unit is a double entity, one formed by the associating of two terms."
[Michael Lane, Introduction to Structuralism, 1970, p.43]


Saussure goes on to explain how this "double entity" must be conceived. The
word, according to Saussure, unites a concept and a sound-image and not a thing
and a name. In this sense, the sound-aspect of a word becomes inseparable from
the meaning content of the word and the reverse also holds true. This double
movement, sound acquiring conceptual meaning as conceptual meaning becomes
differentiated by sound, is what Saussure identifies as the "structure" of the
word. Saussure, in the following diagrams (unfortunately, my computer only produces words) illustrates this idea.

In the diagram below (missing diagram but the idea is still there) imagine three circles, one around each of the joined identifiers. Then imagine an up and down arrow on each side of each circle—that's six arrows, three pointing up, three down-- and you will have a
mental image of Saussure's diagram.



Concept "tree" picture of tree
Sound-image arbor, connecting arrow



[Ferdinand De Saussure, Course In General Linguistics, Translated by Wade
Baskin, 1959, p. 66-67.]

In these diagrams we see a representation of the working concept of wholeness as
it becomes operationally defined in the linguistic structure of the word. Here
the two elements of sound and word become intimately united, as each refers to
the other. Saussure, by calling the sound-image of a word the signifier,
differentiates the meaning of the word into its two components, the signifier
and signified. Together, the signifier and the signified combine to form the
sign, i.e., the whole as differentiated from its opposing elements.