Words are the medium between meaning and ideas. Or should that read "meaning" is the medium between "words" and "ideas"? The literal object, or that which is referred to, may in fact disappear or be irrelevant as referent, but the dual role of words to point to themselves as literal things and to point beyond themselves as signs must be stressed -- meaning is the fire that is produced by rubbing words together and their abrasions abide even when they are "rubbed out," erased, or "written off." The medium is not the "complete" message, and the message cannot be reduced to either "mass" (Lord's Supper) or "mess" (garbled messages). The medium both constitutes and deconstitutes, materializes and dematerializes, makes itself appear and disappear in the message. The code (langue) and the message (parole) persist only in the medium of their transient transmission. The message does not express the total content(s) of the code, just as the phenotype does not make visible the total content(s) of the genotype (which itself is a "written" code). The words may not express the entire "idea" but they do address the multiplicity of meanings in each of their instantiations. Words are objects that exist materially on the page, but the things to which they "refer" do not necessarily exist. Meanings then can be seen as separate, intentional acts and are therefore two-sided in that they have a sensual (sensible, sensory) component as well as an intelligible component. And might not "meaning" itself partake of both a sensual and ideational element, of phenomenal as well as (and as distinguished from ) material aspects, in order to reproduce a kind of sensualized meaning?[NOTE 40] If meaning did not have this actual, material content in its concept, how could one get meanings across (across language -- in Hyppolite's terms), through the medium of language? What is the relation between meaning (Bedeutung), idea (Idee), concept (Begriff)? Do words simply "refer" to objects (referents)? If words themselves are not objects, things, through which meanings pass and are communicated, what are they? They must be objects with physical, literal, material reality, but are they indissociable from their meanings? Not things, no longer objects, and not yet meanings.