Just a paper I submitted for my class... I think it's nice :))

In her Chapter 2, “The Linguistic Sign” Julia Kristeva calls into question Principle I of the study of linguistics, “the arbitrariness of the sign”. She says this and I quote: “the ‘arbitrariness” of the sign is, so to speak, normative, absolute, valid, and obligatory for all subjects speaking the same language” (Kristeva, page 14 Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics). This calls to mind that the nature of a language is something that exists between “discourse” or “linguistic” communities and consequently binds them through a shared system of consciousness. This shared system of consciousness though emerging from the social, through convening of communities to assign signifiers to signified in language and discourse, is not open to frequent dissenters and has a primary normative quality-- that conformity to tradition is what is considered “good.” Hence Kristeva articulating the qualities of language as such: absolute, valid, and obligatory.
Another point that the arbitrary nature of language posits at is its “unmotivated” character. Kristeva expresses it as follows: “the word ‘arbitrary’ signifies more exactly unmotivated, that is to say, there is no natural or real necessity linking the signifier and the signified” (Kristeva, page 16 Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics). In addition to this, Saussure himself or at least those who wrote “Course in Linguistics” express this property of language as well and I quote: “Language is a convention, and the nature of the sign that is agreed upon does not matter” (Saussure, page 10 Course in General Linguistics). This just goes to show that language as a system of signs and the relationships that they build are not important, the fact remains that no matter how perceived inefficient or idiosyncratic a system of signs is, it is still valuable in that it serves its purpose of binding people and creating communities through a shared system of consciousness. I invoke here Kristeva’s mention of Saussure notion that “language is an 'extra-rational' function, which mean that its material offers itself up to practice of differentiation and systematization that do not necessarily fall within the province of the subject’s reason” (Kristeva, page 16 Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics). The semiological life of a sign is beyond knowledge since this same semiological life of the sign that is language for a community of speakers, is itself a necessary pre-condition for knowing. To put it simply, before we even begin to be rational, we need to irrationally assume the rationality of a language from which we are obliged to move about.
In this exposition of the arbitrary nature of language, Kristeva makes some reservations in taking it as it is. Kristeva comments that “it is not the relationship between the signifier and signified that is arbitrary… What is arbitrary is the relation between this sign and the reality it names, in other words, the relation between the language symbol and its totality and the real outside it that it symbolizes” (Kristeva, page 16 Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics). In this dispute whether Saussure means to say what is arbitrary, Saussure must allow us to fill the gap since as Kristeva said: “his reasoning has found it lacking” (Kristeva, page 16 Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics).
I personally adhere to this criticism of Kristeva since Saussure himself said that “what is natural to mankind is not oral speech but the faculty of constructing a language, i.e. a system if distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas” (Saussure, page 10 Course in Linguistics). The usage of the words “arbitrary” and “unmotivated” is contradictory and at the very best paradoxical when juxtaposed with mankind’s natural faculty of constructing language. The fact that Saussure himself believes that it is simply natural to construct language regardless of its form whether in phonetics, writing, gesturality, or etc, there is already the unarbitrariness and motivation in language. Mankind just can’t help but to construct a language. With this image in mind, I bring to light Kristeva’s comment. Every human artifice that we construct for ourselves though emerges from our free willing as creatures simply capable; these artifices in turn construct us. In this sense, I depict language as like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we have created a creature that we need to tame in order for it to serve us.