WoolyBully7, Derrida

“The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it (127).” This represents the importance of context. Taking things in and out of context is a crucial part, I believe, for “re”-learning De Saussure and understanding this part of Derrida’s article on Difference. What a sign actually signifies is not as important as what it seems to mean in relation to signs that surround it. One example I created of this is looking through a car magazine and seeing a Toyota Prius on one page and what that initially means, which is car, or transport. But if on the two pages before that ad, you saw pick-up trucks, and then saw pick-up trucks again on the two pages following the ad I would think of environmental awareness or technological progression. Here we can see how important the context is of the signs around that original sign.

What Derrida tells us is that the concept of the Prius only exists due to other pre-existing chains of concepts “by the systematic play of differences,” i.e. vs. pick-ups and other cars. De Saussure said that “language is a set of interdependent terms that derive their meanings from the simultaneous presence of other terms.” Thus, the terms used only represent their true meanings only when they are placed next to other terms somehow related to each other and since, “in language there are only differences,” and no two things are the same.