Generally speaking, the sign in the contemporary humanities is entirely secular, artificial, arbitrary, and ultimately meaningless, whereas the banished symbol is implicitly religious, spontaneous or “revealed,” and supermeaningful. Most everyone in the humanities today assumes that the “sign is arbitrary”—that is, that texts, words, dreams, and visions all refer to other texts, words, dreams, and visions; in short, all such signs are entirely and completely “constructed” by historical, social, and neural processes and do not refer to anything outside themselves. They cannot. They can only
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