Post Class

I thought it was really interesting how Tuesday’s class discussion on “Differance” tied in so well to our theorists at the beginning of the semester. Derrida relates to Macherey, Barthes, and DeSaussure, but he also brings in a new element when talking about what is left out of the text. He refers to the “gap” or the “rupture” as “erasure.” He says that it is important to understand what is under “erasure”, what is being left out, and we must be very critical of that. He also expands on DeSaussure with his notion of language being arbitrary. With language, we can never pin down an exact meaning for a word because there are so many associations that we make with language that differs from person to person. We are always trying to find differences in words and we are unable to get out of this process.

In Thursday’s class discussion on Foucault I thought the connection of surveillance to ideology was interesting because I had not thought of ideology in terms of Foucault’s ideas previously. One quote that stuck out to me in class was, “A real subjection is born mechanically from fictious relation.” We operate under a system of ideology that has been created for us. We go along with the system that has been constructed for us without resistance. In thinking about this after class I related this the most to the surveillance that takes place in school, and particularly high school. The surveillance that exists within school is what makes it possible to get order over that many kids. Without the ideology of surveillance set in place, the student to teacher ratio would not be enough to keep order. With the ideologies far fewer adults are able to keep control over hundreds of high school students.