Have you ever sat and listened to someone’s conversation and suddenly find yourself thinking about the nature of what people are vocalizing? How do people know what to say? How is it that people have ever been able to decipher the multitudes of different sounds, pauses, and inflections? How is it that we as human beings can hear a word and automatically make sense of it and derive meaning? Jacques Derrida says that people derive meaning from language according to what each person has experienced about each word and that we communicate through “signifiers” in order to produce “signifieds.” He calls his theoryDifférance due to the fact that is deals with the differentiation between words that are similar to each other and the meanings that people construct (279).
This may all sound interesting, however, it can also be very cryptic. A simple example of Derrida’s signifier-signified is through the use of the word “house.” If one person hears the word “house,” he may automatically think of the building where he lived his childhood which may then bring forth other memories and meanings for “house.” However, someone else may hear the same word and think of Dr. House MD because he is a weekly watcher of the T.V. show by that name. The signifier there would be the word “house” and the “signified” would be the meaning that each man initially thought of when he heard the word, whether it’s a building or a television character. It occurs, then, that Différance functions in very much the same way as Google does: through our conversations, other people may input a signifier such as “house,” and the search engine (our minds) may output what might be the signified for that particular situation.
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. "Différance." Ed. Julie Rivkin. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. 278-99. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment