Nichole, Derrida

In Jiggy’s blog, he talks about Derrida’s idea that there are no longer innocent texts. Everything that we see for the first time is linked “to a chain of signifiers” which we have seen before. This concept reminds me so much of Barthes discussion of the understanding of words, but instead of words we are now examining images. Think back to the exercise we did in class with the stories or screen plays that we made up based on a series of words. We all witnessed first hand how a chain of words previously read can significantly change the direction of a story and in the end we all ended up with different ones. Well I think the same works here in saying that everything we see, we connect to previous experience with signifiers. Thus, we may not all get exactly the same meaning out of an image every time. In fact, that most likely is never the case.

I like how Jiggy brings up the idea that if we had no experience or didn’t make connections to past experiences, our existence would be very difficult. He uses the example of golden arches associated with food but it can literally be linked to anything, even our most primal instincts would be thrown off if we didn’t have a greater understanding of previous experience with images and signifiers. Just think: we wouldn’t even know where to use the restroom when we need it (instead we might think someone was trying to go tribal on us and painting men and women on certain doors). The spine of our existence would no longer exist. This kind of proves everything that we have discussed over the course of the semester in saying that signs and ideologies are literally everywhere and have become so “normal” to us that we don’t even recognize what we would or wouldn’t be without that saturation in our heads.