Comments | geekboyjournal: 'My friends and I found the gateway...'

geekboyjournal

'My friends and I found the gateway...' - Name The Quote

Aug 01, 2007 16:16

You can always tell it's going to be a good day when... you learn the future

I've been thinking a lot recently about language, and specificly, non-spoken language. The idea of how we as a species communicate through signs, signals and the like. For example. the obvious intention here is that this meter is broken. But there are none of the usual ( Read more... )

Comments 5

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geekboyjournal August 2 2007, 22:09:53 UTC

But is that body language bourne out of your closeness to Em rather than any sort of universal truth? could you take that and apply the knowledge to a person in India?

I see what you're getting at with the tin food, its interesting to look at the signs that one culture takes as given but is lost in other places. My personal interest lies in the signs that unite us rather than divide us,

cryurchin August 2 2007, 12:56:45 UTC

if you're interested in signs and language and non-verbal communication you need to get thee to some jacques derrida and then maybe some jean baudrillard who talks about contemporary sign systems, specifically the hyperreality of the sign culture in which we live. no baudriallrd = no matrix for all geekboys fact fans :)

wish i had time to comment on this more...this is the stuff i love :)

geekboyjournal August 2 2007, 22:01:05 UTC

but the inherent issues with Derrida's deconstructionism and Baudrillard's post-modernism is the resistance of them for definition. They offer us no answers, simply more questions. And the way my thinking deviates from that of hyper-reality is that these social interactions with these signs is a real one. They are representative of things greater than the sum of their parts but those things are still true stimuli, the meter is really broken.

cryurchin August 3 2007, 01:51:31 UTC

whilst there's no easy 'definition' of deconstruction or postmodernism, there are attempts. deconstruction, loosely, reads things (the text, which can be most anything) against itself, revealing disruptions which point to ways in, ways to subvert a text to reveal some truth. postmodernism, as defined by Lyotard, is simply a 'incredulity to metanarratives', to the stories that tell us how the world works (god, law, author/reader, society, self etc.). you are right in as much as deconstruction only offers us questions, but that is more because it is an approach to dealing with text. postmodernism resists offering answers because it believes there are none. i am aware that this is oversimplified, but this is an lj post :) one thing i would say though is that the interaction with signs in baudrilliard is most definitely 'real', in fact it is more real than our interactions with anything else.

_matt

anonymous August 3 2007, 01:58:09 UTC

ooh, and the darwin thing. who's to say that our responses to these things are anti-evolutionary? maybe they make perfect anthropological sense in a wider way than we are currently able to proceed. making art has been suggested as being evolutionarily beneficial (art was originally used to make things 'special', by making pots and arrows and tools special people wanted to make them and to interact with them, thus more 'artistic' culture thrived with their extended skills), yet we couldn't have seen this without the wider attention granted to cultural studies in our age. im not against your ideas, not at all, i think that there is every chance that our physical bodies at birth may not change whilst our minds and societies change drastically. the evolution may be technological. signs, the wash of them around us, the drift of them through us, their oscillation, addition and subtraction, shifts in meaning and form, all of this probably shows us the way to the future of our species as soon as we develop the tools to interpret them ( ... )