  The theory of meaning that underpins this view of the artwork’s structure thus seems to anticipate a Saussurean definition of language. Famously, Saussure analysed the functioning of language as a ‘diacritical’ system in which each sign owes its signification not to a substantial, one-to-one relation between word and referent, but rather to its place within the overall linguistic system. Basically, a sign means what it means on the basis of ‘not being’ any of the other signs. ‘Dog’ means what it does because the signifier (the material sound) and the signified (the intended meaning) differs from all others, and especially the proximate ones: ‘log’, ‘fog’, ‘god’, and so on; ‘wolf’, ‘cat’, and so on.