Elmo, 11/22

Something I found very interesting from class this week was that we are almost to our last theorist and a lot of the material is relating back to some of the first theorists we have learned about, it seems that we have almost traveled in a loop. Derrida’s idea of “the trace” seemed very familiar when we started discussing it in class. Derrida explains the trace by saying that within every signifier in our society is a trace of something else, something that has been left over some something else. This concept was exemplified when Dr. Roj showed us the word “shell” and then “s ell” and we still recognized it as “shell”. The trace of the “h” was leftover in our heads therefore enabling us to recognize “s ell” as “shell”. This is very similar with what we had learned at the beginning of the year with Barthes and Macherey’s ideas of rupture or the gap. They say we make meaning out of the gap by filling in what’s missing, similar to what we did in the “shell” example. Something else that Derrida talked about that seemed familiar was “logocentrism”. Logocentrism means being central around words, basically that everything in our society revolves around words and how we need words in order to make meaning. This concept relates to DeSaussure and his ideas about how words and their meanings help us to make meaning out of our lives and help us to better understand, without words we wouldn’t be able to know about or explain much of anything. Another relation I found was when Derrida said “there never has been and never will be a unique word, a master name” (140). I saw that this concept closely relates to the one of Adorno’s idea of sameness. Adorno says that everything today is the same and this is what Derrida is touching upon in his quote. It’s really cool to me that though all of these theorists are vastly different yet they still all have some similar ideas to relate upon.