(Late) Post Class Blog

My apologies for the lateness of my post class blog. I completely failed to remember it was due before Sunday. However, although the complexity of the material did not change, my perspective on the De Saussure, Barthes, and Macherey readings had after our class meeting last Thursday. I was able to see that the complexity of the material was the heart of the matter. In other words, it reiterated the idea that the complexity of language has everything to do with the power of language. 

If language is so complex... how do we understand it? We can't understand things without our understanding of the bigger picture, our experiences, and the presence of others(our community). De Saussure explains that language should be looked at as a science. Our text, "Critical and Cultural Theory Reader", states that “the community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value”(6). Saussure distinguishes between the individual utterance of language, parole, and the system of language(community), la lange. La lange is an abstract system that we all engage in daily. 

I found myself reflecting back on la lange and parole in a social encounter this weekend. My roommate along with several of our friends were relaxing in my living room last Friday evening when my roommate, Erin, asked what everyone wanted to do the rest of the day. Before anyone could answer she said, "All I plan on doing is being horizontal." Perplexed I asked "what do you mean horizontal?" She explained that it was something she started saying this summer insinuating that she physically wanted to be horizontal, whether that be lying on the group watching TV or just horizontal in her bed. I laughed, with a confused expression on my face and she proceeded to say "I just want people to catch on and for it to become a thing." I noticed here that Erin was exhibiting the individual use of language, parole, with her own quirks that nobody in the room collectively understood.