Chinese Woes and The Kardashians

The feeling of not knowing anything came up so many times while I was reading Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes that I stopped counting. That certainly didn't stop me from scribbling "so true!" multiple times along the side margins; the concepts discussed were difficult to wrap my head around but very interesting, and both writers were spot-on with their arguments.

In de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, the Swiss linguist begins with the notion that a thought is but a "shapeless and indistinct mass" (de Saussure 5). I already knew this – but realizing that thoughts are defined solely because of words (the building blocks of language) and by association blew my mind. The more that I think about it, the more that I noticed just how true his statement is. Without language, the nonsense would remain nonsense, and nothing would make sense. There would be no such thing as "sense."

Being bilingual made understanding the chaotic value-significance difference slightly easier. Between English and Chinese, there are definitely words within each language that mean the same thing. However, there are also words from either language that cannot be translated into the other without losing a part of its wholesomeness — wouldn't this mean that although certain Chinese words can be translated to some extent, it would effectively result in the stripping of a level of significance, since it is the relationship between its values that determines its significance (de Saussure 9)?

For example, there is a saying in Chinese, 折腾. For the lack of better words, it can roughly be defined as someone being indecisive and is always looking for self-inflicted trouble. As I try to come up with a better explanation, I start to understand what de Saussure means by words having different values.

Roland Barthes, on the other hand, has me hitting myself in the head with The Pleasure of the Text. It was certainly a good read, but the moment Barthes states that we "do not read everything with the same intensity of reading" (Barthes 108), I thought about the different reading speeds I have. Personally, I spend more time reading something I like, being thorough with details and making sure I can maximize my knowledge on the subject. On the other hand, I read much faster on texts that I dislike, hoping to reach the end just so I can be over and done with them. It's so ironic that though I know I should spend a good portion of my evening on my reading for my Honors class, but instead I scour the internet researching articles about blue whales.

What struck me most about Barthes is when he mentions that authors "cannot choose to write what will not be read" (Barthes 109). As an amateur who posts bad poems periodically on a blog, I can never anticipate how many readers will like this or that. When I believe that a work is well-written and deserves the attention of a hundred pairs of eyes, it is the scrap that receives most recognition. Just as it is true that a writer cannot pick which one will be popular, nobody chose for  Keeping Up with the Kardashians to become such a hit. It just is.

I wonder who the next Kardashians are, or who will pick as so.