The Sound-Image : Plato And Saussure

Philosophy of Language
1

One of the more exciting concepts in Saussure is the sound-image of a word. Why should the spoken word, which needs time for its expression, have a frozen image ?

Plato’s keyword ἰδέα (idea) may help us here.

The word idea comes from Greek ἰδέα, romanized: idea, ‘form, pattern’, from the root of ἰδεῖν idein, ‘to see’.[3]

I would like to use ἰδέα not to discuss the “meaning” of words —where it is also and more obviously relevant — but instead something “deeper” than that, which allows for a word to be a word.

Consider, for instance, the word “mother” in the context of spoken language ( remembering Saussure’s phonocentrism). Forget, for now, the meaning of this word. Consider instead its (oxymoronic) “sonic form.”

All the billions of the vocalizations of this word so far are plausibly unique. “Mother” has never been said in exactly the same way twice. Yet the word mother has been said in each case.

In his famous Course in General Linguistics, Saussure tells us that

[I]t is impossible for sound alone, a material element, to belong to language. It is only a secondary thing, substance to be put to use. A coin nominally worth five francs may contain less than half its worth of silver. Its value will vary according to the amount stamped upon it and according to its use inside or outside a political boundary. This is even more true of the linguistic signifier, which is not phonic but incorporeal —constituted not by its material substance but by the differences that separate its sound-image from all others.

Elsewhere:

The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses.

Finally:

Putting it another way, language is a form and not a substance (see p. 113). This truth could not be overstressed, for all the mistakes in our terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming things that pertain to language, stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance.

I suggest that the sound-image as “form and not a substance” can be understood in terms of Plato’s ideas. Or, equivalently, Saussure’s sound-image is a promising way to understand Plato’s use of ἰδέα.

While Plato used ἰδέα in a more general way, is this special case if the sound-image helpful for understanding Plato’s emphasis more general on forms ?

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For Saussure, the signifier is the sound-image. The sound I make to say “hello” causes a “psychological imprint” which is form rather that substance.

The signifier, being auditory, is unfolded solely in time from which it gets the following characteristics: (a) it represents a span, and (b) the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line.

The signifier, though an “image,” is auditory in some psychological or formal sense. It is “unfolded solely in time.” The signifier is idealized sound.

The signifier, the sound-image, is the ἰδέα that is instantiated in a teeming plurality of “material” vocalizations. Etymologically, the ἰδέα is optical rather than auditory. An image is static or timeless. Why does this matter ?

In this context, the ἰδέα effects the “penetration” of the timeless into time. Or rather the sound-image, as ἰδέα, is the timeless within time itself.

Let us consider, as a phenomenologist might, the ἰδέα or sound-image of a tune that can be played on many instruments at different times and places. Is any performance of this tune the tune itself ? No. But we only have a performance of the tune if the sound “participates” in its ἰδέα or sound-image.

What is this “participation” ? Is it something so fundamental that we can only try to point at it ?

I hope I’m establishing the relevance of Plato here. Some may be eager to dismiss Plato’s use of ἰδέα as otherworldly and “metaphysical” in a pejorative sense. But Saussure needs his own version of this Platonism to account for the saying of a word.

Note that we have not discussed the “meaning” or “value” of the word, the signified. We have only looked at the signifier, the “material” side of the sign. This “material” side turns out to be “form rather than substance.”

For instance, we speak of the identity of two “8:25 p.m. Geneva-to-Paris” trains that leave at twenty-four hour intervals. We feel that it is the same train each day, yet everything — the locomotive, coaches, personnel — is probably different. Or if a street is demolished, then rebuilt, we say that it is the same street even though in a material sense, perhaps nothing of the old one remains. Why can a street be completely rebuilt and still be the same? Because it does not constitute a purely material entity; it is based on certain conditions that are distinct from the materials that fit the conditions, e.g. its location with respect to other streets. Similarly, what makes the express is its hour of departure, its route, and in general every circumstance that sets it apart from other trains. Whenever the same conditions are fulfilled, the same entities are obtained. Still, the entities are not abstract since we cannot conceive of a street or train outside its material realization.
…
Let us contrast the preceding examples with the completely different case of a suit which has been stolen from me and which I find in the window of a second-hand store. Here we have a material entity that consists solely of the inert substance—the cloth, its lining, its trimmings, etc. Another suit would not be mine regard- less of its similarity to it. But linguistic identity is not that of the garment; it is that of the train and the street. Each time I say the word Gentlemen! I renew its substance; each utterance is a new phonic act and a new psychological act.

3

Does he though? Why can’t saying a word just be producing a new token (i.e. utterance in the sense of sound event) of it, the word itself just be the equivalence class of tokens, and the class just be the calling of any and all the tokens by the same word-name?

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I can understand the reluctance to drag in Plato’s ἰδέα. It’s not really needed, but it makes Plato more interesting to me and fits in with an interpretation of his “unwritten doctrine.”

I would put equivalence class in a semantic/role equivalence class with ἰδέα. Or include equivalence class in the ἰδέα of ἰδέα. But now this takes beyond a focus on the sound-image. I do very much like to generalize the point made in this thread, but I thought it prudent to stick to a vivid example of the general phenomenon.

When you say the same word-name, what do you mean exactly ? As I understand the situation, we have to “instantiate” the word to try to point at the class.

In speech, I might say “the word mother.” Then I might say “the word mother is a pragmatic-role equivalence class of sounds.” This seems good, but then this “class” looks like a synonym of ἰδέα ( as I use it in this context).

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Oh, ok. I just wanted to dispute that Saussure or anyone needs to embrace a Platonistic approach to account for the saying of a word.

But I do see the attraction, and the perceived need. I agree for example that equivalence classes are a Platonic notion, in a way. Still, I don’t see that they necessarily come with the whole shebang of mental images and ideas and concepts in tow? Is all.

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Right. So my “ontocubic” appropriation of Plato has it that ideas are not concepts in the sense of internal mind-stuff. Objects in the world are ( generalized) signs and signs are objects in the world with a “historically generated and situated” significance. Not just conventional, which is too abstract, but dialogical (Bakhtin).

The “image” metaphor really only makes sense in its emphasis of something static. The “idea” or “class” is relatively timeless so that things have enough stable identity to change.

The signs in the “internal monologue” are objects in the world with the “quality” of remembered speech rather than the “quality” of present-tense speech-for-the-ear. Basically the internal/external distinction is itself merely a matter of signs.

I can see why Derrida got worked up about difference.

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Can’t we nowadays just say that all language, all mathematics, symbolic communication generally, are structures in consciousness? Which is not to say that it’s ‘internal’ or ‘in the mind’, as if from some point outside of it.

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I’ve quoted Saussure so far, so now I look into Plato’s *Parmenides.*

Parmenides speaks first in the excerpt.

Then each individual partakes either of the whole of the idea or else of a part of the idea? Can there be any other mode of participation?

There cannot be, he said.

Then do you think that the whole idea is one, and yet, being one, is in each one of the many?

Why not, Parmenides? said Socrates.

Because one and the same thing will exist as a whole at the same time in many separate individuals, and will therefore be in a state of separation from itself.

Nay, but the idea may be like the day which is one and the same in many places at once, and yet continuous with itself; in this way each idea may be one and the same in all at the same time.

I like your way, Socrates, of making one in many places at once. You mean to say, that if I were to spread out a sail and cover a number of men, there would be one whole including many—is not that your meaning?

I think so.

And would you say that the whole sail includes each man, or a part of it only, and different parts different men?

The latter.

Then, Socrates, the ideas themselves will be divisible, and things which participate in them will have a part of them only and not the whole idea existing in each of them?

That seems to follow.

Then would you like to say, Socrates, that the one idea is really divisible and yet remains one?

Certainly not, he said.

How can we apply this to Saussure’s sound-image ? His signifier ?

Does the idea or sound-image cover vocalizations like a blanket or a sail ? That metaphor fails, because it suggests that different parts of the blanket ( of the sound-image) cover different vocalizations. It divides what is one. The first metaphor is better. The sound-image, the idea, is the day which is one and the same in many places at once.

The sound-image, an “equivalence class of vocalizations” has no official representative. It has no being apart from its representatives. But no finite collection of representatives exhausts this class, because the word is here for us now as one we can vocalize. This cannot be treated as secondary, for our inquiry is largely precisely this ongoing vocalization of the sound-images we are trying to make sense of.

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The coin analogy is a good one, because what you are talking about here is an assumption of"value" rather than meaning. We say that the word “mother” has the same meaning each time it is spoken, and so we are inclined to say that each instance is the same word, and therefore has an equal value. But this is not really the case. My “mother” has a different value to me than your “mother” does, and vise versa.

We can do the same thing with the coin too. As much as we are inclined to say that the value of the coin is five francs, because we are swayed by the idea of “objective values”, it is really the case that five francs is the meaning of that symbol. So the coin itself, which has the meaning of, or symbolizes, five francs, has a different value to different individuals or even to the same individual in different circumstances.

The participation is the supposed objective meaning. Any specific tune referred to, the tune called “X”, has a referent by way of meaning. The tune called “X” has a very specific meaning, and therefore certain criteria to be fulfilled in order for a performance to qualify as a performance of X. That is what is commonly called meaning. “Participation” in this sense, is fulfilling the criteria of what is meant by the term.

Notice how “value” is quite different, being inherently subjective. You might prefer one performance of X better than another, even though they are both the same thing, a performance of X, just like one instance of “mother” is more highly valued than others, even though they all fufill the criteria required to participate in the supposed objective meaning.

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I basically agree with you, but consciousness is also the “presence” or the “being” of the world, IMV, so we can just as well say that they are structures in the world.

Both approaches get something right. The “in consciousness” emphasis recognizes that the sign has a for-me-ness in terms of both its perceptual presence and its significance. The “in the world” emphasis recognizes that these structures are shared.

I think this “twin character” of meaning is why Husserl eventually focused on the problem of intersubjectivity.

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…for beings, right? Which is why, in fact, we’re referred to as ‘beings’.

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Just my take but:

Conscious/sentient organisms (indeed entities or beings ) are sites associated with a consciousness that is precisely and only the being/presence of the world from the point of view of that organism/site.

These sites/organisms ( empirical egos, for instance ) have their being entirely as/in “their own” consciousness and the consciousness of other beings. So my empirical ego, for instance, has all of its “moments” or “aspects” ( all of its being )scattered across many “phenomenal streamings” of the world. We must include future “consciousness.” The future as possibility is no less “real” and indeed, in a particular sense, what is most real; the character of world is oncoming.

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What is the medium in which all of this takes place? Doesn’t all of this take place within consciousness, in the broad sense - not individual consciousness alone, or the ‘empirical ego’ but in the collective consciousness of culture?

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I am thankful to @bongofury for turning me on to Goodman. I had no idea that the EQ approach was already prominently out there. I found role semantics in Sellars, but I think that the EQ ( or what I want to interpret as the Platonic ἰδέα ) is a damned skeleton key.

Anyway, here’s some good Goodman:

“To make a faithful picture, come as close as possible to copying the object just as it is.” This simple-minded injunction baffles me; for the object before me is a man, a swarm of atoms, a complex of cells, a fiddler, a friend, a fool, and much more. If none of these constitute the object as it is, what else might? If all are ways the object is, then none is the way the object is.
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I cannot copy all these at once; and the more nearly I succeeded, the less would the result be a realistic picture. What I am to copy then, it seems, is one such aspect, one of the ways the object is or looks. But not, of course, any one of these at random—not, for example, the Duke of Wellington as he looks to a drunk through a raindrop.
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Rather, we may suppose, the way the object looks to the normal eye, at proper range, from a favorable angle, in good light, without instrumentation, unprejudiced by affections or animosities or interests, and unembellished by thought or interpretation. In short, the object is to be copied as seen under aseptic conditions by the free and innocent eye. The catch here, as Ernest Gombrich insists, is that there is no innocent eye.
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The eye comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart, and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice." It selects, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. It does not so much mirror as take and make; and what it takes and makes it sees not bare, as items without attributes, but as things, as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked.
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The myths of the innocent eye and of the absolute given are unholy accomplices. Both derive from and foster the idea of knowing as a processing of raw material received from the senses, and of this raw material as being discoverable either through purification rites or by methodical disinterpretation.

In terms of the OP, the object is a generalized sound-image. Now Plato’s term ἰδέα is more appropriate, but even this is too ocular, for the world is more than a vision. The better approach is shamelessly ontological. We understand the term “thing” itself in terms of the generalization of ἰδέα.

If all are ways the object is, then none is the way the object is.

This is the object understood as no more than the open system of its “moments.” Is “moments” the right word ? It captures the “temporal spread” of the object, but not the spatial. “Aspects” emphasizes point-of-view in ocular-tactile terms. “Instantiation” does not sound right to me, because it makes the object “too present.”

We might say that the object is the EQ of its “presentations.”

Wittgenstein warns us, playfully, not to seek the “true face” of the object.

In order to find the true artichoke, we divested it of its leaves.

In my view, we are shooting poetry at a fundamental structure of the world.

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Right. I would frame it in a different lingo though. Each sounding of the word MOTHER has its own value. Note that I also use the word “significance” for what I think you mean by “value.”

As I see it, each sounding is unique and each value is unique. But unique sounds are linked to their respective unique values through the same sound-image. I think it’s safe to say that much of the value comes from the “participation” of the sounding in the sound-image.

I don’t disagree. I think we can empirically study what humans on average count as a performance of the tune. Fair enough.

But I’m probably most interest in the “experience” of this participation. It usually happens automatically. I just hear someone say “mother.” In some cases, I hear garbled speech. Or maye there’s a song where two plausible word-interpretations of the sound compete.

I agree with you completely here. Good or bad performances are not the theme. Just the “participation” of a sound in the “idea” or “sound-image” of the tune is theme.

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Yes, in the collective consciousness of culture. But how ? IMV, something like this:

Basically subjects meet “through” shared objects. For humans, those objects categorized as signs are especially important.

If we consider spatial objects, for an intuitive analogy, two different subjects in the same room are given two different aspects of the same chair. Both subjects understand the chair to be “more than” this instantaneous aspect. I can walk over to where you are standing and see things from your point of view. I can’t see the chair through your eyes, but I project my own experience to try to understand how the world is for you. In logical terms, the chair is “between us.” I tacitly and maybe explicitly understand the chair as “infinite” in the sense of providing the possibility of further revelation, of “being seen” from still other points of view.

As I see it, my instantaneous consciousness is the being or presence of an aspect of the chair, which I “take” as just the transcendent chair. I need to slip into the phenomenological ontological mode to thematize the aspect itself.

Signs, as qualitative perceptual objects/events in the lifeworld are likewise “between us.” I hear the sounding of a word from one side of the room and you from the other. The categorization of a sound as belonging to a sound image is personal, but we are so good at it in practical life that the spoken word is there like a chair is there.

In my view, the “significance” of that heard sign is “there with the hearing of it.” The sign does not signify only in “purely conceptual” terms. A warm hello or bitter insult delights or wounds me. More relevant to your concern, jargony phenomenological claims may register as word salad or profundity. In the same room, the same sounds can be assigned to the same sound image by the two subjects/hearers and yet signify quite differently. Both subjects can transcribe what was said in the same way, but it is “word salad” to one and “profundity” to the other. Furniture isn’t so intensely poly-faced.

To me this is one of early Heidegger’s primary interests, namely the “historicity” of “meaning.” To be in a world is to share that world with others in that world largely through signs. I’d bring in Bakhtin too. For him, it is dialogue that gives us the reality of language and not monologue. I come to trust that I understand and that I am understood through the back and forth of dialogue. As signs are traded back and forth —if all goes well — both participants come to trust that the signs have a same-enough significance for both of them. Of course in real life we have a mix of dialogue and rooms full of strangers and cashiers and so on. So it’s more like picking up the jazz that varies from room to room, but with a certain continuity (like it’s all still English). Bakhtin mentions that first-rate specialists can be lost in more free-wheeling conversations, in which they are not at home. This suggests that each subject is unique and more or less at home in different segments of the world.

If we imagine the “ocean” of concrete speech acts as mostly stable but basically in flux, then we have, in my view, something like culture in terms of signs. Saussure allows himself the synchronic abstraction of a snapshot of the language. This allows him to examine a frozen approximation of the living language-organism and point out its structure.

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We might even do ourselves more justice by calling ourselves, as consciousness, being itself. The flesh-and-blood person, a being, is a site of world’s revelation, of its being.

I include other sentient creatures, without denying that there is something special about us, which I’d explain largely in terms of the “historicity” of signs.

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Yes, on board with your account of signs and signifying. You’re approaching the issue from a different perspective to mine, but complementary to it. I’ll put it like this. I generally advocate a form of phenomenologically-influenced idealism for example in the essay ‘the mind -created world’. A common objection to that is, but don’t we all share a common world? If the world is the creation (actually, I should say construction) of mind, then why do you and I an even my dog see the same tree, same ball? To which my answer is, consciousness is collective - we share a common sensory world, and a common language (well, not so much with the dog, although even there we do in part), and so we render and understand things basically the same way. A ball to you is a ball to me, we will both render the meaning the same way. I say ‘basically’ because there’s also much room for disagreement or even incommensurability in what we see. Not so much disagreement in terms of concrete objects, the proverbial ‘ball’ or ‘chair’ because on that level we share a collective sense of what these objects are and mean.

Harking back to Plato, the question posed by the Greeks was ‘what makes the object what it is?’ They were always concerned with what could truly be said of what is. The essence of a particular thing is the answer to the question ‘what is it?’. Which is easy enough for chairs and apples, but much less so for justice, beauty, and the Good and the other matters of concern to philosophy.

But this is a portentious saying, isn’t it? All very well to say it, but isn’t there a sense in which this is the whole ‘story of philosophy’? I haven’t read all of Being and Time, but I know from what I’ve read that ‘unconcealment’, alatheia, was central to his project. And that he thought classical metaphysics concealed this rather than revealed it. So they’re all very big ideas — portentious, as I say.

Going back to Wolfgang Fasching’s essays on Vedanta, for instance — the ‘revelation of being’ in Vedanta is ‘Self Realisation’. That is the aim of the entire philosophy. But that is a quest for the sake of which generations of aspirants were prepared to abanddon hearth and home and commit themselves to an ascetic way of life. It wasn’t understood as a matter for casual discussion.

None of which is to say that your analysis is mistaken, but to draw attention to the profound nature of the subject.

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Our views aren’t so far apart. For those far away from both of our views, they are both “just crazy idealism.” Indeed, I’d probably sound in some ears like more of an idealist.

But, technically, not that those sneering materialists would care ( joking), I’m a ( radical ) pluralist. The “to-the-roots” prefix just means that categories like “mind” and “matter” are no more “ontologically deep” than “carrots” and “peas.” Though obviously historically important and important for communicating my position. This pluralism is achieved by identifying consciousness and the being of the world. Of course I have to account for from-a-point-of-view-ness “in” the manifested object, so I don’t get to sneak away from “mind” all that easily.

But this is “just idealism” without the ontological difference. Not that the sneering monistic-reductive physicalist will care. Still it matters to me, because the world is there and if this there-ness is a stuff then it too should be there somewhere. Where in the world is the presence of the world ? Nowhere. Hence the strange “idealism” that takes the form of a denial of consciousness as a stuff or thing or entity. Yet celebrates “it” as being itself.

As I see it, we should indeed account for our sharing of the world through things, as you describe. But I view at fundamentally beyond explanation as the elusive condition for the possibility of explanation. Those who projected “material causes” behind phenomena weren’t explaining anything, in my view. If the communal synchronization of our experience needs a explanation, how is the echo of this synchronization a second level any kind of progress ? Now we have two layers of mysterious synchronization.

Hence my appreciation for Mill who saw through this alienating confusion. He didn’t pretend to explain it. He just carefully examined what we mostly vaguely mean by “physical” objects, and his account tacitly included the crucial element of time via the emphasis on possibility.

But yes we render things mostly the same way, except when it comes to signs. The “meaning” of signs is distinctly human, arguably our connection to the infinite, which I like to understand in terms of the unwritten oncoming future.

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Yes. This is one reason I call the object in general a generalized sign. I take Saussure to have “specialized” Plato’s ἰδέα for his theory of the sign. Lately I found that Nelson Goodman approaches the issue in basically the same way. I might be accused of recklessly generalizing, but I “see” it and can only try to say it. When I read fragments of Plato’s unwritten doctrine, I can find what I see expressed in it. But I have already emphasized that the same sound-images/inscriptions “show different faces” to different subjects. So I only share what seems like a joyful reading with others, to see if they can find anything in it. This Saussure thread was an alternative focused approach, sharpening what can then be generalized.

The difficulty with justice, beauty, and the good — in my view — is that these are extremely important signs and also extremely ambiguous and contentious signs. They are perhaps the most subject to historicity in some regards.