Arbitrary sign?

In his Problems in General Linguistics , Emile Benveniste criticizes Saussure’s claim that the relation between the signifier (the sound sequence) and the signified (the concept) is arbitrary, often using Saussure’s own work to advance the critique.

Benvenist argues that, Saussure to the contrary, the relation is necessary and inevitable: “The concept (the ‘signified’) boeuf is perforce identical in my consciousness with the sound sequence (the ‘signifier’) bof . How could it be otherwise? Together the two are imprinted on my mind, together they evoke each other under any circumstance. There is such a close symbiosis between them that the concept of boeuf is like the soul of the sound image bof . The mind does not contain empty forms, concepts without names” (45).

Saussure’s error arises from a confusion that arises from his exclusion of a third term from his definition of sign, namely, the thing. Saussure eventually sneaks the thing back into his discussion “by a detour” but the opening definition in terms of signifiers and signifieds is a purely formal definition: “if one states in principle-and with reason-that language is form, not substance . . . , it is necessary to admit-and Saussure asserted it plainly that linguistics is exclusively a science of forms. Even more imperative is the necessity for leaving the ‘substance,’ sister or ox, outside the realm of the sign” (44).

The irony here is that without the thing, there’s no basis for claiming that signs are arbitrary: “Now it is only if one thinks of the animal ox in its concrete and ‘substantial’ particularity, that one is justified in considering ‘arbitrary’ the relationship between bof on the one hand and oks on the other to the same reality. There is thus a contradiction between the way in which Saussure defined the linguistic sign and the fundamental nature which he attributed to it” (44).

Benveniste concludes that “the mind accepts only a sound form that incorporates a representation identifiable for it; if it does not, it rejects it as unknown or foreign. The signifier and the signified, the mental representation and the sound image, are thus in reality the two aspects of a single notion and together make up the ensemble as the embodier and the embodiment. The signifier is the phonic translation of a concept; the signified is the mental counterpart of the signifier. This consubstantiality of the signifier and the signified assures the structural unity of the linguistic sign . . . . For the speaker there is a complete equivalence between language and reality. The sign overlies and commands reality; even better, it is that reality” (45-6).

The theologically resonant language here is not accidental because Benveniste recognizes that the question of the “arbitrariness of the sign” is not really a question of linguistics but of metaphysics: “It is indeed the metaphysical problem of the agreement between the mind and the world transposed into linguistic terms” (46). When the linguist decides that the relation is arbitrary, he sets himself against the experience of the speaker. But, on Saussure’s own terms, this doesn’t refute the speaker’s experience of identity between sign and reality. Because Saussure defines the sign as the relation of the signifier and signified, he leaves the basis of the charge of arbitrariness (that is, the thing itself) entirely outside the definition of linguistic sign.