Nichole 4-10

First, I have to say that we have completed a WILD task of getting a correct telephone message all the way around the room. That is record breaking.

Even though the game didn’t really prove Doc Rog’s point, the class got the message that I had talked about in my pre blog for Derrida but can now put a name to the concept that I understood earlier: that is differ ance. This means that the farther you are removed from a work, the less true that word is to its inherent meaning. I used the example of when we did the exercise in class in the beginning of the semester with the stories of baby shoes turning into complete narratives after seeing the series of words. Similarly, I took four VERY long years of Latin in boarding school and three VERY long semesters at Rollins and would always get this: “O latin, that’s a good language to take, it is the root of all languages, you can understand all others now, right? And you must have good English grammar too!” Yea right! I wish I could but very few words are actually similar to other languages. That is because, as Derrida would explain, the words a differed. Latin evolved into romance languages and from there evolved into other languages until we came up with modern day English. My English grammar is so far removed from the root, Latin, that I don’t even recognize the relationship. AH ha! That is ideology at work. Something that has become so common sense I don’t even see it in effect (to site my friend Hebdige). Basically what it comes down to is that we have to “free ourselves from these mechanisms” by looking for “the trace”, or root of the words slash ideologies, so we do not get carried away in a sea of ideologies that have been established over time.