Over the past week I felt as though I understood what Structuralism was, and that I could convey that message to other people. Once we started reviewing Post-Structuralism in contrast to that, I was starting to doubt myself. Saussure seemed pretty easy to follow since this was my second attempt in a class to learn about Structuralism, granted the first attempt was a simplified one. We learned about three key ideas and the one that most stuck out for me was the quote ...
"signs function not through their intrinsic value, but through their relative position"
Saussure is saying that signs (which contain both the signifier and the signified), are not recognized or understood on their own, they work through the understanding of the context that it is in. For example, the word house is only understood, when put in context with the words, shack, mansion, hut, palace, etc.
I understand this statement as being that all words don't have an essential meaning. The only way to understand the meaning of a word is to know where it stands in context to other words. Essentially the meanings of things are only known by someone when they are put into relation to other words that are similar but have different meanings. For example, I know what a rocking chair is because I know what a stool, a couch, a lounge chair, is.
The reading for this week I feel as though complicated the idea of what I believe structuralism to be, all the key ideas include, Post-Structuralism puts that on its head. I think the idea, that meanings of things are different and that is stable in Structuralism, and in Post-Structuralism it says that meaning is destabilized threw me for a loop.
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