Marie89, 4/14

Throughout class on Thursday, I could not stop myself from making connections from Derrida to the beginning of class when we discussed semiotics. We are a culture based on language and we gain power from knowing words and names. It is difficult to thing that what we are based on as a culture is actually ambiguous and only functional because of intertextuality, or as Derrida would put it, Traces. Everything that we base our culture on, is then not stable, yet built on a million other things that were constructed by someone one day. I found it interesting when we did the activity in class about the dog where we kept building from its core. There seemed to be thousands of connections to one word, yet we thought we had a pretty good understanding of the word before we entered class. The fact that we can not make sense of one word without finding thousands of other words that we also need to make sense of is a strange concept, yet be base all of our knowledge on the idea of words and names. It is also interesting how different words connote different emotions. For example, the term winter could connote extreme cold for some while in Australia, is connotes warmth. How can we base a culture on such an unstable concept? It is until we question the words and the reliance upon them within our society, that we are assured of our culture. Once we question words we try to demean them and that is when we become more insecure about the stability and coherence of our culture. So, even though we are moving away from absent-minded observers, we are also taking away from the meanings of words and deconstructing what they stand for, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but an endless process.