Arbitrary Signs, 2

I have the suspicion that Saussure’s theory of the arbitrariness of signs depends on a political theory – namely, some form of social contract theory that posits a pre-social state of nature.

Saussure seems correct that signs are arbitrary if we imagine some Adam formulating language de novo . To associate the signifier cat with the concept “cat” or snow with “snow” is no more obvious or necessary than associating the signifier rustilifaction with “cat” and lourvin with “snow.”

But only Adam was Adam, and everyone else entered a linguistically articulated world.

No doubt they still had opportunities to associate signifiers and signifieds that Adam had missed, just as astronomers still today have the opportunity to give names to newly discovered phenomena. But many of these are motivated signifiers – that is, new signs are assigned to the newly discovered phenomena based on existing signs.

Cain may have encountered fruit that Adam had never seen, and had to provide the sign for it. But it seems just as likely (more likely, it seems to me) that he would draw on existing signs as that he would invent a new sign “just cause.” Perhaps he would invent a sign that combined existing signs (“hippo-potamus”) or because of a phonetic connection with an existing word.

Murray Gell-Mann, who named “quarks” assigned the word originally as a nonsense term, but then discovered that Joyce had used the term before him: “In 1963, when I assigned the name ‘quark’ to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been ‘kwork.’ Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word ‘quark’ in the phrase ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark.’ Since ‘quark’ (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with ‘Mark,’ as well as ‘bark’ and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as ‘kwork.’ But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the ‘portmanteau’ words in ‘Through the Looking Glass.’ From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark’ might be ‘Three quarts for Mister Mark,’ in which case the pronunciation ‘kwork’ would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.”

This is about as arbitrary as it gets; Gell-Mann before his quarks is like Adam before the beasts. And yet Gell-Mann discovered a motivation for the term in English literature.