LightningBolt, 4/15

As I sat down to write this post I looked around the room and attempted to find the opposite word for everything. The first thing that I looked at was a lamp. Alterity would suggest that the word lamp has an opposite. In class it seemed rather simple to find apposing words for things such as spring or dog, but lamp seems to pose a problem for me. The example of cat and dog suggests that the words do not need to be opposites. To me the opposite of a small domesticated animal would be a large, wild animal, perhaps a dinosaur? Instead cats and dogs are very similar to each other. Both are small domesticated pets. This example leads me to believe that alterity would suggest the obverse of a lamp would be a candle. Both can serve the same purpose; just as cats and dogs both serve the purpose of being house pets, and they often have the same basic long and skinny shape, just as cats and dogs have the same basic structure. As Derrida suggests, communities value inverses in different ways. This seems fairly obvious in the example of a lamp: a community that always has overcast, dark, rainy weather and electricity will value a lamp much more than a community that does not have electricity, or a community that does not have heat and needs the warmth of a candle.

As De Saussure discusses, community is necessary in order to form meaning to words. The fact that a community values candles more than lamps will change the meaning of candles as well as lamps to everyone in the community. The importance of something or the value that it holds is part of a words meaning. However, something I do not understand about this, what if there is discrepancy within a community? Communities can be rather large and be made up of a large variety of people. If half of a community has electricity they will value the lamp while the portion of the community without electricity will value the candle. Attempting to answer my own question I would look at the definition of community: a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage (dictionary.com). Instead of looking at the entire town or area as a community, the portion with the electricity and the one without could be considered different communities.