signifiant / signifié
The tie between signifier (sound or letters) and signified (the concept) is conventional, not natural.
No law of physics makes the sound "dog" refer to the furry animal outside.
The image Shore uses for it, in our paraphrase.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Nothing natural or God-given ties a signifier to its signified: the word dog refers to dogs only by differing from cat and hog, and by sheer convention.
Put simply Saussure: nothing in nature or from God ties a word (the "signifier") to what it means (the "signified"). "Dog" means dog only because it differs from "cat" and "hog", and because speakers have settled on it.
The avant-garde recasts the representation question: art is no mirror of life but a hammer for building it, a shift from representing to creating that eventually leaves no ground underfoot.
Put simply Shore: the avant-garde changed the question of what art is for. Art is not a mirror held up to life but a hammer for building it. Moving from showing to creating eventually left nothing solid underfoot.
What makes kinship a system is not blood or descent but a representation held in people's minds: arbitrary, not grown spontaneously from any real situation.
Put simply Lévi-Strauss: a kinship system is not made of blood ties or descent. It exists in people's minds, as a set of ideas fixed by convention, not something that grows naturally out of real life.
Structuralists meet modernists on the point of arbitrariness: because the linguistic sign is arbitrary, meaning turns out contingent, neither natural, universal nor intrinsic.
Put simply Shore: structuralists agree with modernist artists on one point. Since the link between a word and its meaning is a matter of convention, meaning is never natural, universal or built into things.
1 link between claims that both use the term. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
SaussureNothing natural or God-given ties a signifier to its signified: the word dog refers to dogs only by differing from cat and hog, and by sheer convention. L10 · 20:22
ShoreThe avant-garde recasts the representation question: art is no mirror of life but a hammer for building it, a shift from representing to creating that eventually leaves no ground underfoot. L10 · 37:05
Shore describes the avant-garde's move from representing to creating as completely severing signifier from signified, the terms she introduced through Saussure.
Terms that appear in the same claims.