My "understanding" (if you can call it that) of the statement "Signs function not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position" is quite based upon his discussion on the "intrinsic" value of money. That the coin itself represents money, but really isn't worth money if you tried to sell it on eBay for "face" value. Coins = money but coins aren’t worth the money that they represent. I could make that into a cute algebraic expression if only if I could figure out how to make the equals sign with the slash through it.
It's sort of funny that the statement doesn't really need explaining, but the explanation of the statement does. I know I was out of class on Tuesday, so I might have missed a profound definition of the paragraph that shows "even more clearly" the "systematic role of phonetic differences." But when old Ferdinand proceeds to yammer on about Greek, and there is not one series of words I can get my head around until the last sentence, quoted in my first paragraph.
This is not how I think. This is not stuff I care about. I'm glad it exists, because obviously if it didn't, no one would understand each other and literature wouldn't exist in any kind of relatable sense. But, unfortunately, it is going to have to be something that I take for granted. I think this idea is important, because it reduces language to a very simple form, and gives us a basis as to why I can understand English but not Chinese. I can't understand Chinese because the sounds, and subsequent written representations of those sounds, mean nothing to me; there are no touchstones in the Chinese sound that can link me to English.
I suppose it's all a little too clinical for me. Packaging up my appreciation for language and literature into my superior sound-processing abilities is a little bit gray and depressing. I like to think that my brilliant literary mind comes from my ability to really get to the heart of a piece and analyze it through the various channels that make up my perspective. That this perspective is really just my understanding of certain phonetic signifiers is such a mathematical way of looking at something that I had previously considered abstract and applicable to myself as an individual. And anything remotely mathematical is really a turn-off. I suppose it’s nice that, through Saussure's pondering, we can all explain why we love a given work of literature, but are those reasons truly important? Are our phonetic processing abilities really what make the meat of a given work actually strike a chord? Does the fact that East of Eden STILL makes me weep after reading it once twice a year for the last 3 years really SAY anything about my phonetic abilities? I love the book, and is it as romantic to say "Gosh, Steinbeck and I, wow, we really can absorb sounds in a similarly relatable manner?" as it is to say, "Damn it all, why can't I write things like that?"
If reading stuff were a science like Saussure makes it to be, then I think it would be way harder for me to like.
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-I used the same phrase "turn-off" when I read Saussure, particularly regarding the diagrams and the rather sterile, clinical way of approaching language which makes up literature which in the form of a single book can make you weep two times a year for three years straight. Despite this, I also think that there is value in Saussure, if anything, to allow for multiple levels of understanding of literature. It seems to me at this point that the goal is not to abandon one's mode of appreciating and loving literature, but to entertain, alongside of that, other ways of understanding it, some of them clinical and off-putting.
-Always appreciate your point of view.
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