What’s happening in Europe and North America at this time?
Bohr/Planck/Einstein = atomic model changes due to advances in physics
Electrons are now understood to a field and not individual things
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
Current understanding was that Good and Evil exist and they are embodied in things, Nietzsche says “good” and “evil” are just terms that we use to make sense of the world, they are not intrinsic to the world
Truth is a “mobile army of metaphors”
Things -> “words”
Freud -> “primal scene” (repressed memories)
Oedipal complex: the male child wants to fight their fathers to protect their mothers
Dreamwork: what are dreams about?
Dreams signify repressed memories, language of the unconscious
How do symbols relate to each other? Studying the syntax and logic of the dreams
Freud rejects the primal scene
Famous work: Interpretation of Dreams
The thing -> story itself
We are no longer understanding the world as stable objects
Cognitive behavioral therapy says that you can’t control how you feel about things, but you can control how you think about things and that changes how you behave
Emphasis on representation and consciousness
Monsieur Saussure draws a picture of language (the diagram with A, B, and a bunch of squiggly lines)
A is mental part of language, morphemes
B is the material part of language, phonemes
Language is the interface in the middle of these lines
Language is not a thing, it is a form, domain of articulation, a link
Ideas about language going on at this time
Expressive
Referential
Language is not in the brain or in the world, it’s found in the system of relationships between those things
Cultural metalanguage exists as well (stop sign metaphor)
Semiotics of hairstyles
In the movie Rambo, Sylvester Stallone has long permed hair, despite being a soldier. Soldiers normally have buzzcuts, and in the 80s a lot of men had mullet hairstyles. Similarly, men are associated with short hair, and women are associated with long hair.
Rambo’s hairstyle communicates that he is neither soldier nor civilian, male nor female, he exists beyond these categorizations
Like the swamp being neither entirely land nor water, Rambo is neither one nor the other
La langue = language as a system
Nothing means anything in and of itself, it only has meaning in relation to other things
“Cat” contains both phonemes and morphemes, making the sound of /kæt/ and referring to an animal
Both are governed by oppositions
/kæt/is not /bat/
An animal is not a human
This is what Saussere is talking about with the idea of “value” (it only exists in context)
A 20 euro bill doesn’t really have value in US because you can’t use it to spend on anything here, this means the value is cultural and communal
In English, we distinguish “sheep” and “mutton,” which refer to different things, but in French, there is no distinguishing between sheep as an animal and sheep as food
Sheep, chickens, cows, pigs live on the farm
Mutton, poultry, beef, and pork exist on a plate
This distinction serves as the context
Leftover from when French was a prestige language during the Norman Invasion in 1066, French ppl could afford to eat the animals whereas English working class folk were working on the farms
The semiotics maps out the class struggle
Anglos, Saxons, and Jutes were speaking Germanic languages
Vulgar/ cuss words come from German, French is considered more “fancy”
You wouldn’t say, “Damn, my derriere hurts!” you’d say, “Damn, my butt hurts!”
Saussere distinguishes signified and signifier
Signified is the mental ideation
Signifier is material and phonetic
The sign is not a thing, the sign is a relationship
The system of language is a system of differences without positive terms
Meaning is only generated through contrast: binary opposition
Levi Strauss has a whole dichotomy between the raw food and the cooked food in various cultures
Similar to nature vs culture (is organic chicken “natural”?)
Basketball is “culture” whereas skiing is “nature”
Car commercials show ppl driving these fancy new cars in nature, but in reality you pick up the car at the dealership and if you drive it in nature, you’re gonna end up killing nature
There is nothing in any culture that does not communicate
Even shoes communicate things, such as class, authority level, age
Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”
Two movements in the poem
Sameness and difference
Identity and difference
Divergence and convergence
The theme is semiotic, things only mean something in relationship to something else
Difference between two paths in second stanza: it’s greener
Difference between two paths in third stanza: one i’ll take now, one I’ll take later, but then he says that he’s never gonna travel the other one
Speaker believes he’s coming to crossroads, but Frost says it’s not really all that different
Speaker wants there to be a thing, but there is no thing
Why is the wood yellow?
Sunlight could be coming through, making it by definition not nighttime