Trying to Understand Saussure

The statement that I felt I understood the most from Saussure's article read, " Signs function, then, not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position." Personally, I think that what Saussure meant by this was that words by themselves do not have a built-in meaning. We cannot give a particular word any certain value and meaning all on its own. We must therefore, compare words with other words, and through this means, obtain a certain sense of value by what the word is and is not. Because a word by itself is completely without meaning, it must be placed in a positive or negative position, so that we can compare it with other words, and as a result gain its meaning and value. When a particular word such as "tall" is stated, we are able to identify it and know its meaning, because we know what it means to be "short." If we didn't know what "short" looked like or meant, we could not identify the word "tall." The word "tall" is only given its meaning through comparison with other things that it is not. The word "tall" does not possess a built-in meaning all on its own. All words maintain a relative position with other words in a given language. According to Saussure, words being compared with their opposites, in order to gain access to their meaning, is very beneficial, because it allows us to gain a better understanding of the word's ultimate value and usage in language. However, post-structuralism, in contrast to structuralism and Saussure's view, believes that the meaning of a word is never fully complete or stable. In fact, post- structuralism believes that taking a word and comparing it to its opposite, does not aid a word's meaning, but instead complicates it- ruining the meaning of the word. Meanings are never stable, and can assume different values. Therefore, everything Saussure stated about gaining a word's meaning and function through its relative position with other opposing words, is completely complicated and opposed by post-structuralism. I think it is safe to say that structuralism and post-structuralism are at war with one another.