Charles Sanders Peirce’s Theory of Signs, Meaning, and Literary Interpretation

Despite 9/11, “United We Stand,” and the USA Patriot Act, it seems that we are still afflicted by logocentrism and essentializing metanarratives. Decades of inoculation by deconstructive serums—first introduced by Jacques Derrida’s 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins University entitled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”—have failed to immunize us, readers and scholars, from lusting for truth, presence, or origin far removed “from freeplay and from the order of the sign” (1986, 492). The order of the sign instructs us, following Saussure’s dictum, that the relation between the signifier (word), its referent (thing or idea) and its signified (meaning) is arbitrary. Not in the sense that words mean just anything you decide it means. There is no natural resemblance between sound-image, referent, and idea; the link between signifier and signified is based on alterable social convention. Saussure taught us that the meaning or value of a sign in any language results from its difference to all the other signs in that language. What is important is not history (diachrony) nor reality (the referent), but the system of differential relations among signs (synchrony). Such differential relations are embodied in the spacing and ambiguity of writing as material practice or process, in contrast to speech (which Saussure privileged) and its single, self-identical intention. Barbara Johnson glosses Derrida’s valorization of writing as the euphoric “free play” celebrated earlier: “When one writes, one writes more than (or less than, or other than) one thinks. The reader’s task is to read what is written rather than simply attempt to intuit what might have been meant” (1990, 46).