Monty Python's Flying Saussure

This week's post delves into some theory. After reading Derrida, De Beauvoir, and Saussure, my understanding of where language originates is only slightly enriched, but more muddled than anything. I have a tenuous understanding of Saussure and the relationships of the sign, signifier, and signified, and their relationships to one another. An aspect of Saussure's theories is that in order to determine what something is, one must be able to define it in terms of what it is not. In order to define something, one needs something dissimilar to exchange with it or or something similar to compare it to. He uses the example of determining what a five-franc piece is worth. In the first example, one can exchange the five-franc piece for a fixed amount of goods (bread, paper, gloves, etc.), thus defining it in terms of dissimilarities with other things. In the second example, one can determine the value of the five-franc piece by comparing it with one-franc pieces or something else that is similar, i.e. another form of currency such as the dollar. This defines the five-franc piece in terms of what it is similar to.

Saussure argues that there is a dependent relationship between the signifier and the signified, that both rely on each other. Somehow, this reminded me somewhat of the Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, "The Argument Clinic"...

The patron, Micahel Palin, desires an argument and feels that he is not getting what he has paid for. John Cleese, the worker (comically) disagrees in what he defines an argument to be, thus actually reaffirming that the patron is getting what he has paid for by continuing to effectively contradict him on the nature of argumentation. In fact, they are having a meta-argument about the nature of arguing. Palin is defining what he feels argumentation is by comparing it to what it is not ("An argument is a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition" and "an argument is an intellectual process, while contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says"). Saussure would say that Palin is defining what argumentation is by contrasting it with what it is NOT, i.e. contradiction and gainsaying. Cleese, being the foil, replies with "It can be", on a meta-level fulfilling the promise of argumentation for money while also affirming his own definition of what argument is.

In a silly, roundabout way, the Python crew provide a brief look into an aspect of Saussure's explanation of the nature and origin of language. How they are able to keep straight faces throughout is unknown.