I very much enjoyed Benveniste’s essay on the subjectivity of language. I also agreed with much of what she said—how “I” and “you” are, in a way, the basis of language. Before two people came together and tried to communicate (as Professor Rooney said in class), there was nothing to compare anything to; without the fundamental difference between “I” and “you”, there could not be the “positive differences” that typifies language. Benveniste explains how language is subjective and how “I” and “you” are the reason for that subjectivity. “Language is possible only because each speaker sets himself up as the a subject by referring to himself as I in his discourse” (p. 225). In class, we discussed a bit how other mediums and patterns (i.e. fashion, film, advertising, etc.) are also languages—not just figuratively, but literally. I think these languages, too, must be subjective, since they are a way for on person to communicate to another person or a larger group of people. When thinking about this, I find it confusing to think about some of Benveniste’s ideas, mostly her thoughts on the opposition between “you” and “I” and how it exclusively applies to language (I assume here, perhaps incorrectly, that she does not mean “language” in the same way we discussed in class, but she means as a spoken communicative device). “It is this polarity [between ‘I’ and ‘you’], moreover, very peculiar in itself, as it offers a type of opposition whose equivalent is encountered nowhere else outside of language” (p. 225). I think that this type of opposition and subjectivity is necessary to have any sort of language at all, but I wonder if the opposition between “I” and “you” appears in other languages—what would be the “I” of, say, film? What would be the ultimate opposition and subjectivity of fashion or any other language? Is there an equivalent, or is Benveniste right in saying that the opposition between “I” and “you” does not appear outside of spoken language?

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?    

I was thinking the other day about how linking on the world wide web works very much like Saussure’s concept of value. The Google rank, or value, of a page is determined by how many other pages link to it as well as the value of each of the linking pages. Thus, if a page with many links to it, but with links from sites with very few links to them themselves, it might not be ranked as high as a page with more select number of links that come from sites which are heavily linked to. Just like the relationship among signs, the linking among webpages is constantly changing as pages are created and destroyed. The Google rank is never static and pages continue to rise and fall on the web.
Looking at the web in terms of Levi-Strauss’s idea of unity within the myth, which states, “[unity] is a phenomenon of the imagination, resulting from the attempt at interpretation; and its function is to endow the myth with synthetic form and to prevent its disintegration into a confusion of opposites” (5), unity within the web is also constructed in the imagination. Physically, the data behind all webpages is scattered across the globe on thousands of different servers. The semblance of unity that one gets from clicking back and forth between links only exists in virtual space. More than that, there is no one way to go through a website, no linear path, and that which we think of as a “home page” or “site entrance” may never be viewed if one can access the information one needs through a link.

 out of  found this valuable. Do you find this valuable?