Lost in the Cosmos

word apple which you utter is part of my world but it is not a singular thing like an individual apple. It is in fact understandable only insofar as it conforms to a rule for uttering apples. But the oddest thing of all is your status in my world. You—Betty, Dick—are like other items in my world—cats, dogs, and apples. But you have a unique property. You are also co-namer, co-discoverer, co-sustainer of my world—whether you are Kafka whom I read or Betty who reads this. Without you—Franz, Betty—I would have no world.
    VII

    The world of the sign-user is a world of signs.
    The sign, as Saussure said, is a union of signifier (the sound-image of a word) and signified (the concept of an object, action, quality).
    If you protest that your world does not consist of signs but rather of apples and trees and people and stars and walking and yellow, Saussure might reply that you don’t know any of these things but only a sensory input which your brain encodes as a percept, then abstracts as a concept which is in turn encoded and “known” under the auspices of language.
    Take the sign apple. It consists both of the sound-image apple and also of a kind of general impression of apples you have known, embodying qualities of roundedness, redness, shine, texture, and sound of apple flesh at bite and pop of apple-skin against teeth, tart-tang taste, and so on. *
    One’s world is thus segmented by an almost unlimited number of signs, signifying not only here-and-now things and qualities and actions but also real and imaginary objects in the past and future. If I wish to catalogue my world, I could begin with a free association which could go on for months: desk, pencil, writing, itch, Saussure, Belgian, minority, war, the end of the world, Superman, Birmingham, flying, slithy toves, General Grant, the 1984 Olympics, Lilliput, Mozart, Don Giovanni, The Grateful Dead, backing and filling, say it isn’t so, dreaming …
    The nearest thing to a recorded world of signs is the world of H. C. Earwicker in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
    VIII

    In a sign, the signifier and the signified are interpenetrated so that the signifier becomes, in a sense, transformed by the signified.
    Saussure gave a formal analysis of the dual nature of the sign. It remained for Werner and Kaplan and other writers to describe the dynamic process by which the signifier and signified are interpenetrated and the former transformed.
    If you do not believe that the word apple has been transformed by the percept apple, do this experiment: repeat the word apple aloud fifty times. Somewhere along the way, it will suddenly lose its magic transformation into appleness and like Cinderella at midnight become the drab little vocable it really is.
    Further evidence of the interpenetration of signifier and signified is false onomatopoeia.
    Words like boom, pow, tick-tock are said to be onomatopoetic. But what about these words: spatter, slice, brittle, limber, blue, yellow, high, low, rattle? Many people would say that there is some resemblance between these words and the things they signify. Blue sounds more like blue than yellow. Brittle sounds brittler than limber. But there is no such resemblance. Or rather, what resemblance there is, is far more remote and problematical than it appears. The resemblance occurs because the signifier and signified have been interpenetrated through use by the sign-user.
    Slimy does not sound slimy to a German speaker.
    IX

    Signs undergo an evolution, or rather a devolution. *
    At first, the signifier serves as the discovery vehicle through which the signified is known, e.g., Helen Keller discovering water through water —or any two-year-old learning the name of a new object—Peirce’s example:
    B OY: What is that?
F ATHER: That is a balloon.

    Note that when a child hears a new name, he will repeat it; his lips will move silently while he frowns and muses as he considers how this round inflated object can be fitted into this peculiar utterance, balloon.
    Next, the signifier becomes transformed by the signified: the signifier balloon becomes informed by the distention, the stretched-rubber, light, uptending, squinch-sound-against-fingers signified.
    Next, there is a hardening and closure of the signifier, so that in the end the signified becomes encased in a simulacrum like a mummy in a mummy case.
    F IRST BIRD WATCHER: What is that?
S ECOND BIRD WATCHER: That is only a sparrow.

    A devaluation has occurred. The bird itself has