Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Structuralism

I have been having a hard time figuring out Saussure and structuralism. I thought I got it, but once I read Saussure, I felt even more confused. However, I think that I was able to grasp onto one of his concepts: "The bond between the signifier and the signified is radically arbitrary"

At first this statement puzzled me beyond words, but after class and after looking at it for a while, I think I understand it. In my persuasive strategies class my freshman year, the professor asked us to draw a tree. No one in the class drew the same thing, however all of us had the basics of what a tree was supposed to look like. The thing we call a tree is the signifier, and the actual thing outside is the signified. I remember that I drew something I would have drawn when I was much younger. My idea of drawing a tree was a big poofy thing as the leaves and branches, with a straight trunk and a squirrel hole in the middle of the trunk. The person next to me had a tree with no leaves at all. Since we all had different views on what a tree looks like, that is what was arbitrary in this exercise. People can have different words for an object, but still mean the same thing as what another person thinks that object is. Everything depends on how we perceive it to be. This is why no one is ever going to have one picture of a tree that is the definition of a tree and it is what everyone thinks about when they think of a tree. We all pick out different things than other people do.

I am really hoping that I have gotten this statement down, and I also hope that studying post-structuralism is going to help me understand Saussure better!

1 comment:

Rachel said...

Who would have thought that persuasive strategies would have actually been helpful to us? I also felt the same way (very confused) after reading Saussure, but thinking about stuff from persuasive strategies really helped me.