City Living and Social Interaction

City Living and Social Interaction How much are we affected by the environment we live in? Based on the ideas on Georg Simmel the way we think and comprehend the things around as can all be effected by the region we live it. â€Å"The Metropolis and Mental Life† by Georg Simmel is a essay stating how each individuals are effected by where they are positioned in our society. He explains the difference in the lifestyles of people living in urban cities compared to people living in rural cities. Georg Simmel believes that by living in a urban city we are forced to play a supporting role to the many things going on around us.Because of the busyness of the city we are dominated by the objectivism and we forget subjectivism. Simmel believes that as humans live in urban cities that are forced to only pay attention to the things that are essential to our lives. For example in a rural region one may stop and communicate to the people through out the area, but in a urban city you do not have time to communicate with everyone. Over time we start to view these people who we do not acknowledge less and less until they are seen as objects. Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. † (Georg Simmel, pg 392) â€Å"The Metropolis and Mental Life† states that by living in a city our mind begins to act intellectual, not emotional. This causes us to only focus on the thinks that that important to get through our own life and we lose value in the little things.Simmel describes this as â€Å"blase† means that we become uninterested and unconcerned by the things around us because of over exposure. Simmel believes that although urban life can cause us to unappreciative the smaller element of our lives. Although rural life may allow you to value the smaller details in life,Urban life allows us to have more freedom and to understand ourselves. Simmel’s ideas can play a factor at both a global and a local level it can be the different between if you thank the bus driver or play apart in much bigger global issues. An example of Simmels theory on our society is the way e all grow up. As kids we have very little to worry about and because of this our interactions with others occur frequently. We are friendly and socialize lots with our peers. As we grow older we have more to worry about. We become more absorbed in our own lives and pay less attention to the people and things going on around us. This is the same thing that happen in urban cities compared to rural environments. In an urban city we barely communicate with anyone who not directly connected to ourselves, but in rural environments are are constantly chatting and talking to the people around us.This is why it is more common for people in rural cities to know their neighbors where in urban cities neighbor connections are more rare. Overall urban life causes individuals to pay less attention to what is going on around then as they are absorbed in managing their time and money. Works Cited Simmel, Georg. â€Å"The Metropolis and Mental Life. † Seeing Ourselves: Classic, Contemporary, and Cross-cultural Readings in Sociology. By John J. Macionis and Nijole V. Benokraitis. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998. 392-97. Print.

University College

David John Lodge was born on January 28, 1935, in London’s lower-middle-class East End, the only son of a musician father and a staunchly Catholic mother. The family’s straitened economic situation, his conservative Catholic upbringing, and the dangers of wartime London left their mark on young David. He began his first novel (unpublished) at eighteen while still a student at University College, London, where he received his B. A. in English (with first honors) in 1955 and an M. A. in 1959.Between times Lodge performed what was then an obligatory National Service (1955-1957). Although the two years were in a sense wasted, his stint in the army did give him time to complete his first published novel, The Picturegoers , and material for his second, Ginger, You’re Barmy , as well as the impetus to continue his studies.In 1959 he married to Mary Frances Jacob; they had three children. After a year working as an assistant at the British Council, Lodge joined the facul ty at the University of Birmingham, where he completed his Ph. D. in 1969; he eventually attained the position of full professor of modern English literature in 1976. The mid-1960’s proved an especially important period in Lodge’s personal and professional life.He became close friends with fellow critic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury (then also at Birmingham), under whose influence Lodge wrote his first comic novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down , for which the publisher, not so comically, forgot to distribute review copies; he was awarded a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship to study and travel in the United States for a year (1964-1965); he published his first critical study, the influential The Language of Fiction (1966); and he learned that his third child, Christopher, suffered from Down syndrome (a biographical fact that manifests itself obliquely at the end of Out of the Shelter and more overtly in one of the plots of How Far Can You Go? ).Lodge’s secon d trip to the United States, this time as visiting professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, during the height of the Free Speech Movement and political unrest, played its part in the conceiving and writing of his second comic novel, Changing Places , as did the critical essays he was then writing and would later collect in The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971) and Working with Structuralism (1981). The cash award that went along with the Whitbread Prize for his next novel, How Far Can You Go? , enabled Lodge to reduce his teaching duties to half-year and to devote himself more fully to his writing.He transformed his participation in the Modern Language Association’s 1978 conference in New York, the 1979 James Joyce Symposium in Zurich, and a three-week world tour of conferences and British Council speaking engagements into his most commercially successful book, Small World , later adapted for British television. His reputation growing and his financial situation brightening, Lodge donated all royalties from his next book, Write On: Occasional Essays, ’65-’85 (1986), to CARE (Cottage and Rural Enterprises), which maintains communities for mentally handicapped adults. In 1987 he took advantage of early retirement (part of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s austerity plan for British universities) so that he could work full time as a writer. Lodge soon published Paradise News (1991) and Therapy (1995).He also published two collections of essays, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (1990) The Art of Fiction (1992), and a comedic play, The Writing Game (1991). Especially popular for his academic novels, Lodge enjoyed an increasingly strong critical reception in the 1990’s. The Writing Game was adapted for television in 1996, and Lodge was named a Fellow of Goldsmith’s College in London in 1992. In 1996 he published The Practice of Writing , a collection of seventeen essays on the creative process. In this text he treats fiction writers who have influenced him, from James Joyce to Anthony Burgess, and comments on the contemporary novelist and the world of publishing; the main focus, however, is on adapting his own work, as well as the work of Charles Dickens and Harold Pinter, for television.Lodge remained a supporter of CARE and other organizations supporting the mentally handicapped (the subject of mental handicaps appears briefly in Therapy in a reference to the central character’s sister’s dedication to a mentally handicapped son). He retained the title of Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham. In addition to interests in television, theater, and film, Lodge maintained an interest in tennis that is sometimes reflected in the novels. Literary Forms Mediating between theory and practice, David Lodge has proved himself one of England’s ablest and most interesting literary critics. Among his influ ential critical books are The Language of Fiction (1966) and The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971).In addition to his novels and criticism, he has written short stories, television screenplays of some of his novels, and (in collaboration with Malcolm Bradbury and Jim Duckett) several satirical revues. Achievements As a novelist Lodge has made his mark in three seemingly distinct yet, in Lodge’s case, surprisingly congruent areas: as a writer of Catholic novels, of â€Å"campus fiction,† and of works that somehow manage to be at once realist and postmodern. The publication of Changing Places in 1975 and Small World nine years later brought Lodge to the attention of a much larger (especially American) audience. Changing Places won both the Yorkshire Post and Hawthornden prizes, How Far Can You Go?received the Whitbread Award, and Nice Work was shortlisted for Great Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize. Literary Analysis In order to understand David Lodge’s no vels, it is necessary to place them in the context of postwar British literature—the â€Å"Movement† writers and â€Å"angry young men† of the 1950’s, whose attacks on the English class system had an obvious appeal to the author of The Picturegoers , the English Catholic novel and â€Å"campus novel† traditions, and finally the postmodernism to which British fiction (it is often claimed) has proved especially resistant. In addition, Lodge’s novels are significantly and doubly autobiographical. They draw not only on important events in the author’s life, but also on his work as a literary critic.In The Language of Fiction Lodge defends the aesthetic validity and continuing viabilty of realist writing on the basis of linguistic mastery rather than fidelity to life, and in The Novelist at the Crossroads he rejects Robert Scholes’s bifurcation of contemporary fiction into fabulistic and journalistic modes, positing the â€Å"probl ematic novel† in which the novelist innovatively builds his hesitation as to which mode to adopt into the novel. Lodge’s own novels are profoundly pluralistic yet manifest the author’s clear sense of aesthetic, social, and personal limitations as well as his awareness of working both within and against certain traditions and forms. The Picturegoers Set in a lower-middle-class area of London much like the one in which Lodge grew up, The Picturegoers is an interesting and even ambitious work marred by melodramatic excesses. As the plural of its title implies, The Picturegoers deals with a fairly large number of more or less main characters.Lodge’s title also is indicative of his narrative method: abrupt cinematic shifts between the different plots, use of a similarly shifting focalizing technique, and a stylizing of the narrative discourse in order to reflect features of an individual character’s verbal thought patterns. Of the seven main characters, Mark Underwood is the most important. A lapsed Catholic and aspiring writer, he arrives in London, rents a room in the home of a conservative Catholic family, the Mallorys, and falls in love with the daughter, Clare, formerly a Catholic novitiate. The affair will change them: Clare will become sexually awakened and then skeptical when Mark abandons her for the Catholicism from which she has begun to distance herself.Interestingly, his return to the Church seems selfish and insincere, an ironic sign not of his redemption but of his bad faith. Ginger, You’re Barmy Dismissed by its author as a work of â€Å"missed possibilities† and an â€Å"act of revenge† against Great Britain’s National Service, Ginger, You’re Barmy continues Lodge’s dual exploration of narrative technique and moral matters and largely succeeds on the basis of the solution Lodge found for the technical problem which the writing of the novel posed: how to write a novel about the tedium of military life without making the novel itself tedious to read. Lodge solved the problem by choosing to concentrate the action and double his narrator-protagonist Jonathan Browne’s story.Lodge focuses the story on the first few weeks of basic training, particularly Jonathan’s relationship with the altruistic and highly, though conservatively, principled Mike Brady, a poorly educated Irish Catholic, who soon runs afoul of the military authorities; on the accidental death or perhaps suicide of Percy Higgins; and on Jonathan’s last days before being mustered out two years later. Lodge then frames this already-doubled story with the tale of Jonathan’s telling, or writing, of these events three years later, with Jonathan now married (to Mike’s former girlfriend), having spent the past three years awaiting Mike’s release from prison. The novel’s frame structure suggests that Jonathan has improved morally from the self-centered agnostic he was to the selfless friend he has become, but his telling problematizes the issue of his development.Between Mike’s naive faith and Jonathan’s intellectual self-consciousness and perhaps self-serving confession there opens up an abyss of uncertainty for the reader. The British Museum Is Falling Down This moral questioning takes a very different form in Lodge’s next novel. The British Museum Is Falling Down is a parodic pastiche about a day in the highly literary and (sexually) very Catholic life of Adam Appleby, a twenty-five-year- old graduate student trying to complete his dissertation before his stipend is depleted and his growing family overwhelms his slender financial resources. Desperate but by no means in despair, Adam begins to confuse literature and life as each event in the wildly improbable series that makes up his day unfolds in its own uniquely parodied style.The parodies are fun but also have a semiserious purpose, the undermining of al l forms of authority, religious as well as literary. Parodic in form, The British Museum Is Falling Down is comic in intent in that Lodge wrote it in the expectation of change in the church’s position on birth control. The failure of this expectation would lead Lodge fifteen years later to turn the comedy inside out in his darker novel, How Far Can You Go? Out of the Shelter Published after The British Museum Is Falling Down but conceived earlier, Out of the Shelter is a more serious but also less successful novel. Modeled on a trip Lodge made to Germany when he was sixteen, Out of the Shelter attempts to combine the Bildungsroman and the Jamesian international novel.In three parts of increasing length, the novel traces the life of Timothy Young from his earliest years in the London blitz to the four weeks he spends in Heidelberg in the early 1950’s with his sister, who works for the American army of occupation. With the help of those he meets, Timothy begins the proce ss of coming out of the shelter of home, conservative Catholicism, unambitious lower-middle-class parents, provincial, impoverished England, and sexual immaturity into a world of abundance as well as ambiguity. Lodge’s Joycean stylization of Timothy’s maturing outlook proves much less successful than his portrayal of Timothy’s life as a series of transitions in which the desire for freedom is offset by a desire for shelter, the desire to participate by the desire to observe.Even in the epilogue, Timothy, now thirty, married, and in the United States on a study grant, finds himself dissatisfied (even though he has clearly done better than any of the novel’s other characters) and afraid of the future. Changing Places Lodge translates that fear into a quite different key in Changing Places. Here Lodge’s genius for combining opposites becomes fully evident as the serious Timothy Young gives way to the hapless English liberal-humanist Philip Swallow, wh o leaves the shelter of the University of Rummidge for the expansive pleasures of the State University of Euphoria in Plotinus (Berkeley). Swallow is half of Lodge’s faculty and narrative exchange program; the other is Morris Zapp, also forty, an academic Norman Mailer, arrogant and ambitious.Cartoonish as his characters—or rather caricatures—may be, Lodge makes them and their complementary as well as parallel misadventures in foreign parts humanly interesting. The real energy of Changing Places lies, however, in the intersecting plots and styles of this â€Å"duplex† novel. The first two chapters, â€Å"Flying† and â€Å"Settling,† get the novel off to a self-consciously omniscient but otherwise conventional start. â€Å"Corresponding,† however, switches to the epistolary mode, and â€Å"Reading† furthers the action (and the virtuosic display) by offering a series of newspaper items, press releases, flysheets, and the like. â €Å"Changing† reverts to conventional narration (but in a highly stylized way), and â€Å"Ending† takes the form of a filmscript.Set at a time of political activism and literary innovation, Changing Places is clearly a â€Å"problematic novel† written by a â€Å"novelist at the crossroads,† aware of the means at his disposal but unwilling to privilege any one over any or all of the others. How Far Can You Go? Lodge puts the postmodern plays of Changing Places to a more overtly serious purpose in How Far Can You Go? It is a work more insistently referential than any of Lodge’s other novels but also paradoxically more self-questioning: a fiction about the verifiably real world that nevertheless radically insists upon its own status as fiction. The novel switches back and forth between the sometimes discrete, yet always ultimately related stories of its ten main characters as freely as it does between the mimetic levels of the story and its narration. The parts make up an interconnected yet highly discontinuous whole, tracing the lives of its ten characters from 1952 (when nine are university students and members of a Catholic study group led by the tenth, Father Brierly) through the religious, sexual, and sociopolitical changes of the 1960’s and 1970’s to the deaths of two popes, the installation of the conservative John Paul II, and the writing of the novel How Far Can You Go? in 1978. The authorial narrator’s attitude toward his characters is at once distant and familiar, condescending and compassionate. Their religious doubts and moral questions strike the reader as quaintly naive, the result of a narrowly Catholic upbringing. Yet the lives of reader and characters as well as authorial narrator are also strangely parallel in that (to borrow Lodge’s own metaphor) each is involved in a game of Snakes and Ladders, moving narratively, psychologically, socially, and religiously ahead one moment, only to fall suddenly behind the next.The characters stumble into sexual maturity, marry, have children, have affairs, get divorced, declare their homosexuality, suffer illnesses, breakdowns, and crises of faith, convert to other religions, and join to form Catholics for an Open Church. All the while the authorial narrator of this most postmodern of post- Vatican II novels proceeds with self-conscious caution, possessed of his own set of doubts, as he moves toward the open novel. Exploring various lives, plots, voices, and styles, Lodge’s artfully wrought yet ultimately provisional narrative keeps circling back to the question that troubles his characters: â€Å"How far can you go? † in the search for what is vital in the living of a life and the writing (or reading) of a novel. Small WorldLodge goes still further, geographically as well as narratively speaking, in his next novel. A campus fiction for the age of the â€Å"global campus,† Small World begins at a decided ly provincial meeting in Rummidge in 1978 and ends at a mammoth Modern Language Association conference in New York one year later, with numerous international stops in between as Lodge recycles characters and invents a host of intersecting stories (or narrative flight paths). The pace is frenetic and thematically exhaustive but, for the delighted reader, never exhausting. The basic plot upon which Lodge plays his add-on variations begins when Persse McGarrigle—poet and â€Å"conference virgin†Ã¢â‚¬â€meets the elusive Angelica Pabst.As Angelica pursues literary theory at a number of international conferences, Persse pursues her, occasionally glimpsing her sister, a pornographic actress, Lily Papps, whom he mistakes for Angelica. Meanwhile, characters from earlier Lodge novels reappear to engage in affairs and rivalries, all in the international academic milieu. A parody of (among other things) the medieval quest, Lodge’s highly allusive novel proves at once ente rtaining and instructive as it combines literary modes, transforms the traditional novel’s world of characters into semiotics’ world of signs, and turns the tables on contemporary literary theory’s celebrated demystifications by demystifying it. At novel’s end, Lodge makes a guest appearance, and Persse makes an exit, in pursuit of another object of his chaste desire.The quest continues, but that narrative fact does not mean that the novel necessarily endorses the kind of extreme open-endedness or inconclusiveness that characterizes certain contemporary literary theories. Rather, the novel seems to side with the reconstructed Morris Zapp, who has lost his faith in deconstruction, claiming that although the deferral of meaning may be endless, the individual is not: â€Å"Death is the one concept you can’t deconstruct. Work back from there and you end up with the old idea of an autonomous self. † Nice Work Zapp’s reduced expectations ty pify Lodge’s eighth novel, Nice Work , set almost entirely in Rummidge but also—as in How Far Can You Go? —evidencing his interest in bringing purely literary and academic matters to bear on larger social issues.The essential doubleness of this geographically circumscribed novel manifests itself in a series of contrasts: between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literature and life, the Industrial Midlands and Margaret Thatcher’s economically thriving (but morally bankrupt) London, male and female, and the novel’s two main characters. Vic Wilcox, age forty-six, managing director of a family-named but conglomerate-owned foundry, rather ironically embodies the male qualities his name implies. Robyn Penrose is everything Vic Wilcox is not: young, attractive, intellectual, cosmopolitan, idealistic, politically aware, sexually liberated, as androgynous as her name, and, as temporary lecturer in women’s studies and the nineteenth century nov el, ill-paid. The differences between the two are evident even in the narrative language, as Lodge takes pains to unobtrusively adjust discourse to character.The sections devoted to Vic, â€Å"a phallic sort of bloke,† are appropriately straightforward, whereas those dealing with Robyn, a character who â€Å"doesn’t believe in character,† reflect her high degree of self-awareness. In order to bring the two characters and their quite different worlds together, Lodge invents an Industry Year Shadow Scheme that involves Robyn’s following Vic around one workday per week for a semester. Both are at first reluctant participants. Displeasure slowly turns into dialogue, and dialogue eventually leads to bed, with sexual roles reversed. Along the way Lodge smuggles in a considerable amount of literary theory as Vic and Robyn enter each other’s worlds and words: the phallo and logocentric literalmindedness of the one coming up against the feminist-semiotic aw areness of the other.Each comes to understand, even appreciate, the other. Lodge does not stop there. His ending is implausible, in fact flatly unconvincing, but deliberately so—a parody of the only solutions that, as Robyn points out to her students, the Victorian novelists were able or willing to offer to â€Å"the problems of industrial capitalism: a legacy, a marriage, emigration or death. † Robyn will receive two proposals of marriage, a lucrative job offer, and an inheritance that will enable her to finance the small company Vic, recently fired, will found and direct and also enable her to stay on at Rummidge to try to make her utopian dream of an educated, classless English society a reality.The impossibly happy ending suggests just how slim her chances for success are, but the very existence of Lodge’s novel seems to undermine this irony, leaving Nice Work and its reader on the border between aspiration and limitation, belief and skepticism, the romance of how things should be and the reality, or realism, of how things are—a border area that is one of the hallmarks of Lodge’s fiction. Paradise News Paradise News centers on the quest motif and the conflicts of a postmodern English Catholic. Bernard Walsh, a â€Å"sceptical theologican,† was formerly a priest but now teaches theology at the University of Rummidge. Summoned, along with his father, to see his aunt, who left England after World War II and is now dying in Hawaii, Walsh signs up for a package tour to save money. The rumpled son and his curmudgeon father join a comic assortment of honeymooners, disgruntled families, and other eccentrics; Lodge calls an airport scene â€Å"carnivalesque.† When the father breaks his leg on the first morning, Bernard must negotiate to bring his father and his aunt together so that his aunt can finally reveal and overcome the sexual abuse she suffered in childhood. Bernard’s journey to Hawaii becomes a journe y of discovery in his sexual initiation with Yolande, who gently leads him to know himself and his body. A major theme, as the title suggests, is â€Å"paradise. † Hawaii is the false paradise—paradise lost, fallen, or packaged by the tourist industry—yet a beautiful, natural backdrop is there, however worn and sullied. Paradise emerges from within the individuals who learn to talk to one another. The â€Å"news† from paradise includes Bernard’s long letter to himself, which he secretly delivers to Yolande, and letters home from members of the tour group.As with Lodge’s other novels, prominent themes are desire and repression in English Catholic families and a naive academic’s quest for self. In a complex tangle of human vignettes, Bernard moves from innocence and repression to an awakening of both body and spirit—an existential journey that is both comic and poignant. Therapy Therapy centers on another spiritual and existentia l quest. Lawrence (Tubby) Passmore, successful writer of television comedies, is troubled by knee pains and by anxiety that leads him, after reading the works of Soren Kierkegaard, to consider himself the â€Å"unhappiest man. † Seeking psychotherapy, aromatherapy, massage therapy, and acupuncture, Tubby moves through a haze of guilt and anxiety.When his wife of thirty years asks for a divorce, he seeks solace with a series of women, with each quest ending in comic failure. Obsessed with Kierkegaard’s unrequited love, Tubby launches a quest for the sweetheart whom he feels he wronged in adolescence. Lodge’s concern with the blurring of literary forms is evident in Tubby’s preoccupation with writing in his journal, sometimes writing Browningesque monologues for other characters. Opening with an epigraph from Graham Greene asserting that writing itself is â€Å"therapy,† Lodge takes Tubby through a quest for self through writing that coincides with a literal pilgrimage when he joins his former sweetheart, Maureen, on a hiking pilgrimage in Spain.When Tubby at last finds Maureen, her recollections of their teenage romance minimize his guilt, and his troubles seem trivial in comparison with her losing a son and surviving breast cancer. At the end, Tubby is planning a trip (a pilgrimage) to Kierkegaard’s home with Maureen and her husband. Tubby’s real therapy has been self-discovery through writing in his journal; other therapies and journeys have failed. Intertwined with existential angst, Tubby’s physical and psychological journeys are both comic and sad, with an underlying sense of the power of human goodness and the need to overcome repressions. Findings and discussion Conclusion References

The Hyogo Framework For Action Environmental Sciences Essay

The construct and pattern of cut downing catastrophe hazards through systematic attempts to analyze and pull off the causal factors of catastrophes, including through reduced exposure to jeopardies, lessened exposure of people and belongings, wise direction of land and the environment, and improved readiness for inauspicious events. In short it is a program or action that is in topographic point to decrease the consequence of a catastrophe before or after it strikes.Definition of DRMCatastrophe hazard direction is a planned method of utilizing administrative instructions, organisations, and operational accomplishments to set into pattern schemes, constabularies and â€Å" improved header capacities † in order to cut down the unfavorable force of jeopardies and the opportunity of catastrophe. ( Kesten A. R. , 2005 ) ( United Nations: International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction ( UNISDR ) . , 2004 )Hyogo Framework for ActionThe Hyogo Framework for Action ( UNISDR, 2011 ) provides the undermentioned precedences for action. Priority Action 1 States that develop policy, legislative and institutional models for catastrophe hazard decrease and that can develop and track advancement through specific and mensurable indexs have greater capacity to pull off hazards and to accomplish widespread consensus for, battle in and conformity with catastrophe hazard decrease steps across all the sectors of society. Ensure that catastrophe hazard decrease is a national and a local precedence with a strong institutional footing for execution. Priority Action 2 The starting point for cut downing catastrophe hazard and for advancing a civilization of catastrophe resiliency lies in the cognition of the jeopardies and the physical, societal, economic and environmental exposures to catastrophes that most societies face. Of the ways in which jeopardies and exposures are altering in the short and long term footing. This is followed by action taken on the footing of that cognition. Identify, buttocks and proctor catastrophe hazard and heighten early warning. Priority Action 3 Catastrophes can be well reduced if people are good informed and motivated towards a civilization of catastrophe bar and resiliency, which in bend requires the aggregation, digest and airing of relevant cognition and information on jeopardies, exposures and capacities. In short people need to cognize about the catastrophe they could be faced with and what they need to make to remain alive if one stikes. Use cognition, invention and instruction to construct a civilization of safety and resiliency at all degrees. Priority Action 4 Catastrophe hazards related to altering societal, economic, environmental conditions and land usage, and the impact of jeopardies associated with geological events, conditions, H2O, clime variableness and clime alteration. These topics are addressed in sector development planning and programmes every bit good as in post-disaster state of affairss. Reduce the implicit in hazard factors. Priority Action 5 At times of catastrophe, impacts and losingss can be well reduced if governments, persons and communities in hazard-prone countries are good prepared and ready to move and are equipped with the cognition and capacities for effectual catastrophe direction. Strengthen catastrophe readiness for effectual response.Question 3The current world in South Africa with respects to Disaster Risk ManagementSouth Africa is invariably threatened by several types of catastrophes of different beginning and nature. These jeopardies, which are technological, environmental and natural in beginning, include terrible hydro meteoric events, such as inundations, drouths, terrible storms twisters and veld fires. Hazards of biological beginning, such as epidemic disease incidences, which affect worlds and farm animal, have shown an addition in recent old ages. In the excavation industry and in urban environments, risky stuff and transit accidents continue to present major challenges. Gauteng in the last few hebdomads has experienced a figure of localised implosion therapy incidents including a detrimental hailstorm on 20 October 2012 in the Germiston country ( Kesten, A.R. 2012 ) . Large Numberss of rural people migrate to urban countries in hunt of employment, although governments continue with attempts to cut down the high degrees of poorness and to rush the proviso of substructure and entree to services. They are invariably exposed to a scope of menaces due to the fact that they have to settle in insecure environments and are badly vulnerable to conditions such as inundations, H2O borne diseases and domestic fires. Vulnerability of rural communities in footings of sustainable supports and poorness are impacted on by alterations in societal behaviour in these specific communities. Poverty, due to high degrees of unemployment leaves people, families and communities missing resiliency to the impact of jeopardies. The bequest left by the Apartheid authorities impacted communities, which are now disadvantaged and urgently destitute and as a consequence, capable to high degrees of catastrophe hazard. Smaller local communities are more often prone to catastrophes w here loss of life and belongings, and the fiscal load thereof, are high. Socially disadvantaged groups are more vulnerable to jeopardies, reflecting their societal, cultural, economic and political environment. Catastrophes, in bend, are a beginning of impermanent adversity and hurt and a factor lending to relentless poorness. At the family degree, location of lodging ( e.g. on flood plains ) , primary types of business and entree to resources ( including fiscal ) ; reflect how poorness is the individual most of import factor in finding exposure.Factors lending to exposure in South AfricaThere are many factors lending to exposure in South Africa. They are: dearth ; HIV/AIDS ; uninterrupted struggle and Globalization. Famine – there is non plenty nutrient available, failures of administration and utmost degrees of predominating poorness which has led to alone degrees of adversity for many people in South Africa. HIV/AIDS – HIV/AIDS has eroded the lives and supports of 1000000s of Africans. It has left Africans vulnerable at homeowner and macro-economic degrees. Continuing struggle – struggles have really high costs, destructing past development additions and go forthing of damaged assets and substructures that impedes future additions. Globalization – developing states like South Africa can non utilize their primary merchandises to guarantee economic growing and development, because of this international market. Therefore this ensures that the rich get richer and the hapless are dragged down into poorness. Other factors lending to exposure in South Africa are: Erratic rainfall Climate variableness Break to nutrient handiness Extreme degrees of poorness Paraffin wellness menaces Failures of authorities Crippling foreign debt Collapsing trade good monetary values Limited export net incomes Animal diseases Capacity edifice, public consciousness and research Communication and information Catastrophe alleviation Drought Early warnings Energy Environmental exigencies Floods International facets Mining catastrophes Radiation related catastrophes Refugees Technological accidents Veld and forest fires Weather warningsQuestion 44.1 Emergency and Response ManagementEmergency response direction is familiar to disaster response bureaus and catastrophe victims. It includes emptying processs and shelters, hunt and deliverance squads, needs assessment squads, activation of exigency line of life installations, response centres and shelters for displaced people. Catastrophe response refers to activities that are put into action instantly anterior to catastrophes, when there is equal early warning and instantly following catastrophes. Response includes early warning and emptying of the readiness measures or programs and short-run exigency steps of alleviation every bit good as long-run recovery and Reconstruction activities. The purpose of this response is to salvage lives, to guarantee the endurance of the maximal possible figure of people affected, to restore ego sufficiency and reconstruct indispensable services every bit quickly as possible and to mend or replace damaged substructures and economic installations, place, appraise and implement development aims which cut down exposure. Response covers a scope of activities depending on the nature of the catastrophe. The activities are warning, emptying, migration or response, hunt and needs appraisal and exigency alleviation. The indispensable elements of response and exigency direction are logistic and supply, communicating and information direction, subsister response and get bying mechanisms, security and the demand to protect basic human rights, accent on the most vulnerable group, exigency operations and direction, Reconstruction and execution of rehabilitation steps. Effectiveness of response and exigency direction will be influenced by a figure of factors. They are: First, the type of catastrophe will impact the effectivity of mobilisation and application of response. Second, the badness and extent of the catastrophe. Third, the ability to take pre-action will depend on the type of catastrophe every bit good as the capacity. Fourth, the capableness for sustainable action4.2 Key countries and jobs associating to exigency and response directionResponse activities will usually be carried out under disruptive and sometimes unsafe or traumatic conditions, and therefore it is hard to implement. Heavy demands will be made on personal, equipment, installations and resources. Effective response will therefore depend on the good readiness, capacity put in topographic point as portion of a hazard decrease scheme. Sound planning, organisation and preparation are hence indispensable for accomplishing optimum success. Catastrophe hazard decrease activities should be put in topographic point as long-run steps that increase the capacity and resiliency of vulnerable groups in order to cut down the impact of future catastrophe events. The response period provides an chance for measuring bing catastrophe hazard decrease steps and thought of what needs to be improved and what needs to be put in topographic point. Weak institutional model includes unequal policy way, hapless organisation and coordination, unequal planning, unequal readiness ( out-of-date programs, low criterions of preparedness, deficiency of clear determination devising system, deficiency of clear allotment of functions and duties ) . Therefore weak institutional model may interpret into failing in early warning and public consciousness, deficiency of capacity for impact appraisal, deficiency of anterior hazard appraisal and exposure analysis, hapless information direction system and hapless status and response operations. An extra consideration is the deficiency of standardisation or the deficiency of execution of criterions which have been developed by the South African Bureau of Standards in line with subdivision 7 ( 2 ) of the Disaster Management ActQuestion 5ResilienceThe ability of a system, community or society exposed to jeopardies to defy, absorb, suit to and retrieve from the effects of a jeopardy in a timely and efficient mode, including through the saving and Restoration of its indispensable basic constructions and maps. Resilience means the ability to â€Å" jump back from † a daze. The resiliency of a community in regard to possible jeopardy events is determined by the grade to which the community has the necessary resources and is capable of forming itself both prior to and during times of demand. ( Harmonizing to the most current US/ISDR definition. )VulnerabilityThe features and fortunes of a community, system or plus that make it susceptible to the detrimental effects of a jeopardy. There are many facets of exposure, originating from assorted physical, societal, economic, and environmental factors. Examples may include hapless design and building of edifices, unequal protection of assets, deficiency of public information and consciousness, limited official acknowledgment of hazards and readiness steps, and neglect for wise environmental direction. Vulnerability varies significantly within a community and over clip. This definition identifies exposure as a feature of the component of involvement ( community, system or plus ) which is independent of its exposure. However, in common usage the word is frequently used more loosely to include the component ‘s exposure. ( Harmonizing to the most current US/ISDR definition. )Question 6The national catastrophe direction model says that it is indispensable to fit community leaders with consciousness of good patterns in bar, readyings and be aftering for these catastrophes, which may be built-in in the environment, a nd of the pressing demand to educate members of the communities in catastrophe hazard direction accomplishments. The national catastrophe direction model discusses the constitution of effectual agreements for the development and aboption of incorporate catastrophe hazard direction policy in South Africa it addresses the agreements for the incorporate dirction and execution of catastrophe hazard direction policy, it sets out the agreements required for stakeholders engagement and the battle of proficient advice in catastrophe hazard direction planning and operations and it describes agreements for national, regional and international co-operation for catastrophe hazard direction. Disaster hazard direction introduces the procedure involved in transporting out a catastrophe hazard appraisal, addresses procedures for bring forthing a National Indicative Disaster Risk Profile, describes demands for monitoring, updating and circulating catastrophe hazard information and looks at steps to guarantee quality control in catastrophe hazard appraisal and monitoring. Disaster hazard decrease addresses deman ds for catastrophe hazard direction planning within all parts of authorities. Response and recovery requires an incorporate and coordinated policy that focuses on rapid and effectual response to catastrophes and post-disaster recovery and rehabilitation. The catastrophe hazard direction procedure is the key to the effectual operation of an full squad sourced from many different subjects, involved in the catastrophe direction operation. It consists of several procedures, they are Establish the Context, Identify Risk, Analyse Risk, Evaluate and Priorities Risk, Treat Risk, Monitor and Review, Communicate and Consult. Establish the context so that there is a thorough apprehension of the context in which risk/s is present. Hazard designation is to foremost place all the possible jeopardies, whish could hold an impact on the country being assessed. Analyse hazard is to find the bing control mechanisms for the identified jeopardy and its strengths. Evaluate and precedences risk to a certain standard that is necessary towards the prioritization of the hazard. Risk intervention is necessary after they have been prioritized. Different hazards have different types of interventions and different degrees of interventions. Monitor and reappraisal is a non-stop procedure throw out the hazard direction procedure. This done to do certain the right program was implemented and the right action was taken. Communicate and consult is to pass on with the relevant people so that all the right actions can be taken, so that there is less loss to the country. The extenuation and preparedness stage starts as catastrophe direction betterments are made in expectancy of a catastrophe. Mitigation measures include constructing codifications and zoning, exposure analyses and public instruction. Preparedness is holding a: program of action at a clip of crisis ; preparedness programs ; exigency exercisings and preparation every bit good as warning systems. Preparedness has two chief purposes. These purposes are to assist people to avoid possible catastrophes and to authorise those who may be affected through programs and resources which raise their degrees of resiliency. These purposes are put into topographic point to salvage lives, to minimise the inauspicious effects of a jeopardy through effectual precautional steps and to guarantee seasonably, appropriate and efficient organisation for exigency responses. The nine following classs reflect the chief constituents of catastrophe readiness. These constituents are vulnerability appraisal, planning, institutional model, information systems, resource base, warning systems, exigency and response direction, public instruction and preparation and dry runs. Vulnerability appraisal is an ongoing procedure of people and organisations that assess jeopardies and hazards, map out possible jeopardies and predicts the alleviation demands and available resources. Planing involves many signifiers of extenuation and readiness schemes and eventuality programs for reacting to peculiar jeopardies. Institutional model is well-coordinated catastrophe readiness and response system at all degrees, with committedness from relevant stakeholders where functions and duties are clearly defined ( Twigg, 2004:288 ) . Information systems are systems put in topographic point for assemblage and circulating information between stakeholders. Resource base refers to the reso urces that are at your disposal to alleviate the general public of a catastrophe ( e.g. nutrient, shelter, medical attending, etc ) . Warning systems are ways of conveying warnings efficaciously to people at hazard. Emergency and response direction is the actions that should be taken every bit shortly as a catastrophe has occurred. Public instruction and preparation includes preparation classs, workshops and extension plans for at hazard groups and catastrophe respondents so that the populace will cognize what action to follow when a catastrophe work stoppages. Rehearsals are the chances to practise the drills which need to be implemented as a catastrophe work stoppages. Catastrophe planning is required to do certain that all the mechanisms are in topographic point to cut down the hazards and impacts of a catastrophe when it happens. Disaster planning should take into history the socio economic, environmental and other factors that cause hazard and menaces. Disaster readiness for effectual response is the system put into topographic point so that the response to catastrophes is done right and effectual. Effective information flows are needed for a figure of valid grounds that in general all consequence the extenuation of catastrophes. Preparedness planning as the challenges of the educational system in Africa is non that good due to the growing rate of African states, nevertheless the undermentioned agency of instruction to be in Africa can be used to offer catastrophe consciousness programmes and causes. Preparedness planning and developing harmonizing to Erdih ( 1988 ; 37 ) and effectual instruction and preparation programmes for catastrophe readiness should be peculiar in design, be community specific, based on a rational appraisal of the information needed, be integrated with an bing catastrophe and response system, include information bar, extenuation and recovery, be established as an on-going procedure and included as the most vulnerable sector of the population precedence. Fiscal facets of readiness planning are a large facet of catastrophe extenuation is the direction of fiscal resources. Many beginnings of fiscal aid could be considered during the direction of catastrophe in footings of catastrophe extenuation. It is good pattern to guarantee there is bar, readyings and be aftering for catastrophes and instruction for communities so that they know what action to take before, during and after a catastrophe.

Environmental Movement History Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Environmental Movement History - Assignment Example The assignment "Environmental Movement History" talks about managing and taking care of the available natural resources. For someone in a community garden class, it is important to have a deeper understanding of environmentalism and the modern-day movements that are being advanced towards a better relationship between humans and the ecosystem. This is because aside from promoting self-sufficiency, reliance to local surroundings, and liberty to decide the land production and aims of the locality, it also prevents the exploitation of other localities. A student of a community garden class should have a deeper perspective on the underlying principles of having a community garden. One should be aware that this is not just about planting, gardening, farming, or spending leisure time on worthwhile activities, but about the desire to achieve a better relationship between the human race and the environment. Overall individual health depends on the environment and involves mental, physical, emotional, and even spiritual well-being. A person may exhibit physical health but still be emotionally disturbed. For the purpose of a more common and general understanding, I will talk about physical health, which is basically the one that we aim to answer especially in community garden classes. I grew up learning to love food that is within the recommended daily intake in the food pyramid. However, one cannot deny that no matter how much we try to be careful about our food intake, we are not in control of the composition of food.

A career in culinary arts Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

A career in culinary arts - Research Paper Example For such reasons, the world of culinary arts has attracted my interest for a long time. A career in culinary arts would show me how people can be satisfied by good food; moreover, it takes training and skills to become a culinary expert. Nevertheless, the good salary and the fulfillment of seeing people pleased with their meals are the greatest rewards of a culinary expert. Food can greatly satisfy people, being one of the basic needs. A lot of people find good food as comforting, a balm to the broken heart and weary soul. Recently, many studies have been conducted to evaluate the connection of food to happiness. Remarkably, some results were worth looking into because researchers have found that certain types of substances like DHA ( simply known as Omega 3) can alleviate depression in individuals with highly-stressful situations (Gorman, 2011). In fact, the researcher named Hibbeln has influenced the American Psychological Association to prescribe Omega 3 Fatty food to their mentally ill patients ( p.2). Food promotes over-health as it supports growth and development. For many decades, the US Food Pyramid guide was the yardstick to healthy diet; however, this was discarded in 2005 as the Harvard School of Public Health came up with a new MyPyramid that was fully endorsed by the USDA ( hspa.harvard.edu). Old beliefs such as eggs were bad and that all fats posed health risk were discarded; instead, focus was more on quality of food rather than restrictive calorie-counting. It can be said then that food gives back to people in both ways- positively or negatively. But if people make wise decisions about the food they eat, they can be very healthy. This is where the role of a culinary expert comes in- to prepare healthy and satisfying meals so people can have a better life. Now, that we understand the crucial role that food plays in our daily lives, it is time to focus on how to become a culinary

To what extent does your workplace conform with the requirements of a Essay

To what extent does your workplace conform with the requirements of a learning organisation - Essay Example The organisation mainly works around the parameter that sustainable living must be promoted and that science and technology should be harnessed in the most effective way in order to achieve this purpose. I believe that DERM, my organisation, is a learning organisation. I will explain in this paper why this is so. In order to demonstrate that the Department of Environment and Resource Management is a learning organisation, it is necessary to provide some form of benchmark or standards that would set clear requirements and criteria to credibly assess DERM’s organisational capability in the context of the learning organisation concept. For this purpose I have collated some authoritative insights from experts and academics. What is a Learning Organisation? According to Forest, a learning organisation is one that purposely applies its resources towards â€Å"the acquisition of knowledge about itself and its environment† and is continually expanding its capacity to meet prese nt and future challenges with increasing sophistication and success. (p391) Central to this definition is the idea that the organisation can learn and not some individual employees or groups of employees, the management, and so forth. The organisation is recognized to have the capability to acquire knowledge and use it for its own good. Another interesting insight that adds dimension to the learning organisation concept is the variable of change or the concept of organisational change as suggested by many academics. For instance, Caldwell (2006) stressed that learning organisation is a model of a team approach to change agency and organisational change because it views organisations â€Å"not as highly formalized hierarchical structures, but as macro-systems and micro-processes of learning and knowledge creation that give primacy to leadership and change agency at all levels.† (p155) The organisation in the entire process is characterized by all employees who work together as a whole – cooperating, coordinating and collaborating – acquiring knowledge and applying them for common organisational goals. This point of view has been supported by Rosell (1995) who explained that a learning organisation is able to adapt over time to changing conditions in a way that is productive to itself and its members by having the so-called â€Å"distributive intelligence†, which calls for horizontal information flow and less vertical decision making. (p83) Senge (2006), one of those credited to have brought the learning organisation concept to mainstream attention, talked about the role that people/employees play in this framework. According to him, the learning organisation is a place â€Å"where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free and where people are continually learning how to learn together.† (p3 ) Lunenberg and Ornstein (2007) summed up the five disciplines posited by Senge that collectively create the learning organisation. These are: Personal mastery: the process of personal commitment, vision, excellence, and lifelong learning. Shared vision: Sharing an image of the future one want to realize together. Team learning: The process of learning collectively. Mental models: the ingrained assumption that influence personal and

Archimede's Constant in Everyday Life Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Archimede's Constant in Everyday Life - Essay Example Originally, according to the Webster Dictionary, π is the 16th letter of the Greek Alphabet series. The constant π is called so because it is the first letter of the Greek Letter word perimeter. The first person to use this Greek letter word for the denoting the value of pi was William Jones. In-plane geometry, the constant pi shows the relationship that exists between the circumference and diameter of a circle, regardless of its size. This constant remains the same regardless of the size of the circle. So, π = C/d serves as the basic relationship. Further modification can also help to rewrite the relationship as π = C/r2. The number is also transcendental; it is a number that is not a root of any polynomial with rational coefficients, or it is not an algebraic number of any degree. The value of pi is 3.141519...The origin of this constant can be traced back to the times of 400 BC in ancient Greece; this was the first time there has been evidence of recording the cons tant pi by a mathematician. Greeks, especially ancient Greece has been known for making giant leaps in the field of geometry and the identification of this constant does not come as a surprise. In later years of 200-300 BC, it was Archimedes who was able to approximate the figure of 22/7 for pi, for the first time ever. After Archimedes’ death, the Romans took control over the world. They are not known for the mathematical achievements and research into this wonderful constant was next to zero at this time.After the dark ages of the Roman invasion, pi gained activity again in the Renaissance period in Europe. In the 1700s, after the invention of the calculator, the fastest calculation method for pi was developed by Leonhard Euler. Now that we have the facility of supercomputers it has been found that the constant goes up to 206, 158, 430, 000 digits and counting!

Managing Multinational Operations IP 4 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Managing Multinational Operations IP 4 - Essay Example Foreign investors need to consider many factors when planning their investments in China. There are many restrictions which apply only to them. In addition, the complex approval process, layers of government bureaucracy and consequent time delays are often difficult for investors unfamiliar with doing business in China to grasp. It is therefore recommended that specific and tailored professional advice is sought prior to commencing business in China. Comprehensive professional advice is available from legal officers in Greater China region. Due to the above discussed issues it is important for any foreign investor to consider the following factors when doing business in China. This is based on the fact that long term investment project require a thorough understanding of all business attributes of doing business in that country. From the onset, any potential foreign investor needs to understand that China is very restrictive on most direct investments into the country unless their ne ed is thoroughly justified. Foreign investments in China are strictly regulated on differential basis depending on the sector or industry. The catalogue for guiding foreign investments (Investment catalogue) is issued by the Ministry of Commerce and National Development and Reform commission and sets out the specific industries which are classified as â€Å"encouraged†, â€Å"restricted† or â€Å"prohibited† for foreign investment industries (Smithson, 2010). The ones that are not specified in the catalogue are classified as permitted for foreign investment. A consideration of the investment is one of the first tasks which should be undertaken by a foreign investor contemplating any investment in China. Business scope is also an issue to be considered. All business in China is required to operate within the terms of their business scope which must be approved by the relevant government authority. Approved business scope is evidenced by a business license issued by the State Administration of Industry and Commerce or its local office. Business activities are generally restricted to defined activities. As an entity may not act beyond its scope it is important that in determining the business scope it is not defined so narrowly that it restricts the permitted operations of the company. A foreign investor in China needs to consider too the accounting requirements that the regulatory framework imposes on all businesses in the country. Accounting laws and regulations have been formulated for enterprises with foreign investments and are generally close to internationally recognized accounting standards although slight differences exist. Statutory audits are required for enterprises with foreign investments. This is the surest way to win the trust of the Chinese that you are worth conducting a business in their country. It also shows the level of commitment and financial worthiness. Another decisive factor that also comes into focus in the pre-inv estment analysis and should never is ignored is the type of incentives to be offered is also a factor to consider. It is very necessary in a competitive business enterprise as it determines customer’s choice. At the same time it increases the expenses lowering the profit to be made so it must be selected wisely. In

Push and Pull Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Push and Pull Marketing - Essay Example Since consumers’ attention is the main aim of communication mediums, communication strategy can be either pull strategy or push strategy. Both approaches are distinct from each other and every organization has to ensure that it plans and executes that strategy which will work for its offering (Hegel III & Brown, 2008). The main difference between push and pull marketing is that pull marketing induces end consumers to create demand, while in push marketing, marketers entice trade buyers to purchase and carry out the products that allows them to reap profit potential benefits (Steglin, 2012). Push Marketing Strategy In push strategy, the primary aim of marketers is to design marketing strategy in a way that will push products onto the consumers. It basically means offering attractive incentives to employees and sales representatives for pushing the product on specific points or places where there are more chances of customers buying products impulsively. In other words, in busin ess to business marketing, it means using marketing mediums to get attention of businesses to buy the supplier’s materials and products and sell it to end consumer. The main forms of communication mediums used are price inducements, promotions, trade shows, trade promotions, sponsorships and many more that will get the attention of retailers, wholesalers and other businesses to purchase the company’s products or services (Segal, 2012). For instance, push marketing strategy is commonly found among energy drinks companies as they try to get the attention of end consumers by organizing various events such as trade shows and promotional incentives. British Petroleum uses push strategy by attracting its customers who are the processors of their products that supply refined products to the end consumers. The company offers various perks, price breaks and discount offers so that it can get the attention of its business consumers. Unilever uses push strategy for its distributo rs, wholesalers and retailers so that it can get good placement for its products in their stores. Pull Marketing Strategy In pull marketing strategy, marketers try to inspire consumers to demand the company’s products or services. In this technique, a lot of money is spent as the tools used to grab customers’ attention are very expensive. The marketers need to incorporate strategies that will help in creating relations with target market and getting them engaged with their offerings. Some of the commonly used marketing mediums for pull strategy are word of mouth, sponsorships, product placement and advertisement in newspapers, on radio and Television (Segal, 2012). For instance, Apple uses pull strategy to attract its target market; it relies heavily on placement of products, Public Relations efforts and advertisements that are innovative and attractive which will help in creating more demand for its products. The company’s advertisements about its computers end with quotes like â€Å"available at specific places† or â€Å"Buy now†. Almost all the advertisements of the company has message that pulls consumers towards it as information about product with complete details are provided. Red Bull also focuses on pull strategy as it sponsors various events round the year such as Formula 1, soap box derby and concerts. With all these communication med

Analysis of Conspiracy Essay Example for Free

Analysis of Conspiracy Essay Within two hours the senior officials seem to casually discuss the most practical way of eliminating the Jewish race and conclude with the final policy solution. The film is based on the Wannsee protocol or the minutes the document which is authored by Adolf Eichmann and the document was found 1947 by Robert Kemper. The film is dramatized for entertainment purposes, meaning that it is not fully accurate because the creators tended to take certain liberties in making the film. Although at the end it is stated that the film ‘is based on a true story, with some scenes, events, and characters created or changed for dramatic purposes’. The issue still remains that most people tend to take films at face value, and do not bother doing further research about the topic at hand also the ending credits to do make that much of a difference to those people. The film as a historical source faces some limitations because it runs for ninety minutes when focusing on issue as deep as the origins of the final solutions, ninety minutes is not enough time to go into depth. The film would have been more valuable as a historical source if it had involved itself more in the debate of the origins of the final solution. However, film makers have a different duty from Historians their purpose is to entertain and not educate. The strongest limitation is the dialogue which is actually quiet misleading, because Pierson dramatizes it for entertainment purpose and it is mostly fictional. Eichmann stated in his testimony in 1962 that the last twenty minutes of the meeting were words like extermination and liquidation were used was removed from the official summary and summed in one sentence. Pierson and Mandel fail to analyse the document that the film is based on ‘minutes’ rather it summaries and add on fictional scenes for entertainment. For example in film Kritzinger protests against the idea of extermination because Hitler had promised him that this would not become a state policy. We also see another fictional scene where Heydrick pressures other senior officials Kritzinger and Stuckart to support him during the meeting there evidences suggests that he did not need to pressure them because he was powerful. During the first part of the meeting the senior officials discuss various solutions to the Jewish question, sterilisation of those with Jewish blood is discussed, and here the division between the politicians and the military can be seen. In the second part of the meeting the atmosphere becomes more serious when Heydrick suggests gas chambers and the rest of the men find out that S. S have already begun building extermination camps. The film should have clarified that Jews were already being murdered on an organised scale, Pierson slightly neglected that point. Film makers’ face the same problems Historians face when using the Wannsee protocol document, it is very open to interpretation when translated into English. Holocaust deniers have used the document to argue that Hitler had no involvement in the planning or implementing the final solution. Furthermore, Holocaust denier David Irving has argued the Wannsee conference was about immigration of the Jews, when testify during his trial he pointed that words such ‘killing’ or extermination of the Jews were not used in the conference. However in the film words like kill or exterminate were used, which is another inaccuracy because in the actual document killing euphemism are used instead. However Eichmann did confirm in his 1962 trail that after the meeting had ended the men became less restrained and freely discussed killing methods however this was deleted the official summary and replaced with one sentence. The film overplays the role of the Wannsee conference; Gerlach argues that the meeting occurred not to discuss the fate of Jews in Europe but for Heydrick to seek support from other senior officials. The conference was originally schedule for the 9th of December but happened on the 20th of January giving Heydrick time to prepare the new task based Hitler’s ‘basic decision’. Unlike other Historical source the film industry seem to have shallow research which it tends to exaggerate, this is one of the issues with this film. For this film to be an adequate historical source it should have not put so much emphasis on the conference and also focused to the prior events. Also the film does not address Hitler’s role in the final solution, most historical sources on this topic have done so, and Hitler’s role is one most controversial aspects of this topic. The relevance of the conference is widely debated amongst scholars, with conventional Historian arguing that the murdering of Jews had begun at the latest in December 1941 long before the conference. When focusing on the origins of the final solution the film gives an inaccurate perspective because although it mentions that the extermination camps were being built it fails to mention a mobile version of the gas chamber was already in use. In June 1941 the Soviet Union territory that was under Germany saw Jewish men of military age being executed by special mobile forces. On the 8th December an SS command unit used gas vans to kill Jews from neighbouring districts of Wartherland, clearly the preparations of the final solution began before the Wannsee conference. Clearly the final solution was already in place before the conference so there is no need place too much emphasis on it like Pierson. In conclusion, overall this a good film however if it is used as a historical source it should not be taken at face value. It is very good in delving into the bizarre Nazi psychology and behaviour and sophisticatedly highlights how their belief of the Nazi ideology had led them to dehumanise the Jews.

Signs in Linguistics

Signs in Linguistics A problem that typically troubles the humanities is the ambiguity of primitive terms. An inquiry into their meaning is usually undertaken only after a period of time when they are used un-critically, possibly under the presumption of their complete self-evidence. A closer scrutiny reveals that this belief is hardly warranted. The boundaries of their meanings are so fuzzy that critical analysis turns into a partial reconstruction from ground-zero. That is what this essay will attempt with the notion of the sign and its extra-linguistic connotations. This essay locates this re-construction at the moment when Ferdinand de Saussure sought to carve out the discipline of linguistics, reformulating the existing notion of the sign. The simultaneous heralding of the related, larger discipline of Semiology that for Saussure would subsume linguistics meant that the notion of the sign also got branched. Saussures contemporary, C.S. Peirces ideas of signifying construction as an unlimited sign-ex changing process- the idea of the unlimited semiosis- announced an alternative approach to conceptualizing the sign. The present essay will trace the evolution in meaning of the sign in both Semiology: the study of signs based on linguistics; and Semiotics: the study of signs based on logic. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacans understanding of subjectivity as constructed in and through language, discounting the possibility of connecting words and things will then be evaluated. Lastly, Ronald Barthes idea of the photographic image, borrowed from Peirce but reworked through the advertisement will be considered. A modern advertisement is then used to substantiate Barthes premise that though the photographic message seems like a message without a code, it ends up being highly coded. The crux of the essay is that the extra-linguistic reality that is ascribed to the sign is just that- extra-linguistic. The linguistic sign which encompasses all semiological systems is nothing but the unity of the Sr and the Sd. The precise moment at which Saussure signals his disinheritance, as it were, from erstwhile linguistic traditions is where he criticizes existing and erstwhile analyses of language as a naming process. This disinheritance of his marks the crucial juncture which sounds the birth pangs of the discipline we now conceive as linguistics and signals the heart of the present investigation. Hence, it is this moment which needs elaboration and scrutiny. What this essay will attempt to analyze is how Saussures conceptualization of the linguistic sign has influenced thinkers, psychoanalysts, philosophers, co-(and later) linguists. The influence has resulted in several different understandings of the linguistic sign that Saussure envisaged, the rationale(s) behind which will form the core of this discussion. For Saussure, an understanding of the linguistic sign as a naming process assumes that ready-made ideas exist before words, it does not tell us whether a name is vocal or psychological in nature, and assumes that the linking of a name and a thing is a very simple operation. (Saussure, Pg 65) Nevertheless, he does credit the erstwhile conceptualization of the linguistic sign as bringing him near his eventual formulation of the linguistic unit as a double entity. For him, this unit unites a concept and a sound-image. Saussure seems at pains to emphasize the non -physicality of the sound-image, calling it the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression it makes on our senses. (Saussure, Pg 66) The only sense in which the sound-image is sensory, or as Saussure calls it, material, is when opposing it to the other term of the association- the concept. Not only does Saussure re-conceptualize the existing constituents of the linguistic unit, he refashions the very idea of the sign as it was understood in his time. Contemporaries used sign to designate just a sound-image. But the profound implications of this for Saussure are evident from his comments as relayed by the diligence of his earnest, and might I add, generous students, in the Course in General Linguistics. Saussure uses his favourite example to demonstrate this. For him, one forgets that arbor (Latin for tree) is called a sign only because it carries the concept treeà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ the idea of the sensory part implies (the) idea of the whole. (Saussure, Pg 67) It is to resolve this that Saussure says that the definition of the linguistic sign poses an important question of terminology. For him, the prevailing ambiguity could be resolved if three terms were to be chosen to designate the linguistic unit and its two components. He chose sign to designate the whole. Signifier (Sr) and signified (Sd) replaced the sound-image and the concept. This was done because Sr and Sd had the advantage of indicating the opposition that separates them from each other and the whole of which they are parts (emphasis mine) (Saussure, Pg 67) Immediately after this radical reformulation, Saussure said something that pre-empted the genesis of the present discussion. He stated that the sign is arbitrary because the choice of the signifierà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ is unmotivated, i.e., arbitrary in that it has no natural connection with the signified (Saussure, Pg 69) Many thinkers (like Hjemslev) since have maintained like Saussure that language cannot be reduced to extra-linguistic factors, whether in the nature of things or of thought, in other words, that it is arbitrary. Others, like Benveniste, argue that it is partially or totally motivated by these same factors. For Benveniste, Saussures arbitrary argument is falsified by an unconscious recourse to a third term which was not included in the initial definition- the thing itself, the reality. (Benveniste, Pg 44) Benveniste attacks Saussures logic and finds the contradiction inherent in Saussures formulation. He believes that if one states like Saussure does that language is a fo rm, not a substance, it becomes imperative to leave the substance outside the realm of the sign. However, it is only when one thinks of the animal ox in its substantial particularity that one is justified in considering arbitrary the relationship between bof (French for ox) on the one hand and ox on the other to the same reality. (Benveniste, Pg 44) The tension that Benveniste alerts to in Saussure stems from the way Saussure defined the linguistic sign and the fundamental nature he attributed to it. This is elaborated upon by Benveniste through a systematic refutation of Saussures justifications for refuting objections to his (Saussures ) calling the relationship between Sr and Sd arbitrary. The first of these is the use of onomatopoeias and interjections. Saussures refutations to these objections to the arbitrariness of the sign are predicated on the notion of conventionality and these words similar relations (as other ordinary, non-onomatopoeic words) to the syntax of a particular grammar, and the difference in interjections across languages. Moreover, mutability and immutability of the sign are possible solely due to the arbitrary relationship between the Sr and Sd, according to Saussure. For Benveniste the arbitrary relationship is between the sign and the object, not the Sr and the Sd. He accepts Saussures propositions for the process of signification, not the sign. Benveniste is equally critical of Saussures notion of the linguistic value. For Saussure the identity of a given signifier or a given signified is established through the ways in which it differs from all other signifiers or signifieds within the same system. (Saussure, Pg 115) This relative value stems from the arbitrariness of the sign. For Benveniste, however, the choice that invokes a certain idea for a certain slice of sound is not at all arbitrary. In reality, Benveniste believes, Saussure was thinking of the representation of the real object and of the unnecessary and unmotivated character of the bond which united the sign to the thing signified (emphasis mine) (Benvensite, Pg 47) The crux of Benvenistes argument is that the sign, the primordial element of the linguistic system, includes a Sr and Sd whose bond has to be recognized as necessary, these two components being consubstantially the same.. linguistic values maintain themselves in a relationship of opposition which is, therefore, necessary. The description of a sign in Saussure, as the discussion on Benveniste and the following discussion on Peirce indicate, involves only the relation between its two components, Sr and Sd, and not that between the unit resulting from their union and what it stands for or refers to in the extra-linguistic world. This tension in taking or not taking the thing from the extra-linguistic world itself into consideration when defining the sign, or else, not talking of language as pure form, has manifest itself in several subsequent philosophical and linguistic debates. C.S. Peirces classification of signs is one such. Peirce defines the sign in the following way: A sign is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground. (Peirce, Pg 99) What is pivotal here is the quality of thirdness that Peirce bestows on the sign relation. Thirdness is that quality which allows translatability. For Peirce, the only way in which the relationship between Representamen (closest to Saussures Sr) and the idea of the Object (Closest to Saussures Sd) can be understood is if they are in a context. This is what the quality of thirdness enables (closest to Saussures sign). It allows the possibility of interpreting the relationship between the Representamen and the idea of the Object. The Interpretant, imbued with this quality, therefore, awakens the potential of sign generation and intelligibility. Peirces conceptualization seems to indicate that signs are not what one sees/hears but what one infers from what one sees/hears. This is the realm where the Interpretant assumes primacy and the debate on whether the sign actually refers to a name-thing relation is brought to a head. Thirdness for Peirce is that which is general. And it is, for Peirce, real too. However, it does not exist. Making a distinction between existence and reality, this essay argues, is a first step towards understanding Peirce and his contribution to the debate Saussure unfurled. Peirce seems to believe that signs exist exclusively due to their replicas, i.e. due to concrete sounds, inscriptions etc. So conceived, signs are individual objects. Nevertheless, that way of being of a sign is derivative only from its genuine being as a general object. (Peirce, Pg 76) That second way of being is essential for a sign. A sign is a kind of ideal object, general, timeless, and independent of subjective thinking. (Peirce, Pg 77) Peirce ascribes to generality the real mode of being. It constitutes the special level of being which he calls thirdness. And, nothing that belongs in thirdness can exist because only individual things are capable of existence (Peirce, Pg 77). Thus, each replica as a tempo rary individual object has to be a derivative of the genuine general sign through the context and the possibility of translatability (or, inference) that the Interpretant enables. It has no self-subsistence of its own. Physical phenomena are potential replicas of signs. However, they become signs only by entering into the triadic relation. Aside from pre-empting Lacans argument, what this triad establishes for Peirce is a multiplicity of signs. As the essay has just argued, the Interpretant constitutes the third indispensable element of the triadic relation. Nevertheless, the Interpretant is a sign in itself and needs at least one more sign as its own Interpretant, and so ad infinitum. This multiplicity of signs is for Peirce logically prior to a single sign. The system creates the necessary condition for any particular sign. However, Peirce, fully aware of this self-creative power of the universe of signs, does bring in some limitations on it in his pragmatic manner. The trichotomy of icon, index and symbol allows the universe of signs to be dependent upon the empirical world of things. In Peirces universe of sign generation, the emphasis in the icon is on the Representamen; in the index, it is on the idea of the object and in the symbol, it is on the Interpretant. The icon is a sign determined by its object by virtue of its own internal nature (a quality) and is hence, immediately intelligible. Peirces idea of the qualisign comes closest to this idea of the icon. The index is a sign by virtue of a relation of co-presence it shares with the object, an existential relationship with the object, as it were. It signifies in virtue of a relationship of contiguity with its referent. The obvious counterpart for the index is the sinsign. But it can come to have an existential relationship only through its qualities. So, an index involves a qualisign or several qualisigns. The symbol is a sign by virtue of its conventional mediating abilities (as in Saussures sign, in fact). While conventionality indicates the legisign properties of the symbol, it must also be kept in mind that every legisign signifies through an instance of its application- through a replica of it. The replica is a sinsign. So, every legisign requires sinsigns only after the law/convention renders it so. (Peirce, Pgs 100-102) For Peirce, every algebraic equation is an icon, in so far as it exhibits, by means of the algebraic signs (which are not themselves icons), the relations of the quantities concerned. Any material image, as a painting, is largely conventional in its mode of representation. In itself, without a legend or label, Peirce calls it a hypoicon. This he divides into three categories- firstness, secondness and thirdness. Images are those which partake of first firstness or simple quality. Diagrams are dyadic as they represent parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts. Metaphors represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else. (Peirce, Pg 105) What is amply evident from Peirces deliberations is that the representational character of signs as icons can be, and often is, mixed or heterogeneous. Peirce, thus, emphasizes the overlapping and flexibility of the sign categories in signifying practices. Barthes provides an analytical system to discuss the reading/interpretation of an image. Some of the questions he explores are- If the image re-presents, can it shape meaning? And how does meaning get into the image? Can an analogical representation produce true systems of signs or is it just a container of free floating information? It is here that a Lacanian understanding of the Sr and Sd relationship within the sign will not be out of order in understanding Barthes image. The crucial break that Lacan announces from Saussures formulation of the signification process is his focus on the bar separating the Sr and the Sd. Lacan introduced a new emphasis on the bar as a formula of separateness rather than of Saussurean reciprocity. This move of Lacan calls into question any theory of correspondence between words and things, thereby serving to strengthen Saussures arguments. Lacan uses the Restroom example to demonstrate his central hypothesis- we fail to pursue the question of meaning as long as we stick to the illusion that the Sr answers to the function of re-presenting the Sd. (Lacan, Pg 150)An exploration of the example will reveal that meaning that insists in the signifying chain is itself attributed to the Sd. This only happens after the meaning is inscribed in the Sd. The inscription (Sr of Ladies or Gentlemen) constitutes the Sd as such by enabling a disjunction- by making material reality differ from itself to the children. The restroom doors, it ought to be remembered, are identical on all accounts until a Sr, Gentlemen or Ladies, enters into its material constitution to make it what it is. This is how meaning enters into the image, for Lacan. The possibility of this meaning entering in to differentiate otherwise analogous material reality lies, for Lacan, in the movement of language along a chain of Srs. The other related possibility of signifying something quite other than what the signifying chain says is achieved through the act of speech. This is precisely where Lacan locates the agency of the letter. Instead of settling for the contemporary psychoanalytical view that speech masks ones thoughts (Lacan, Pg 155), Lacan thinks of the subject producing through his/her speech a truth that he/she does not know about. In order to reconcile this ( the subjects radical ex-centricity to itself) the other I can be recognized as the Other. This Other stands at a second degree of otherness which already places him as a mediator between the subject and the double which is brought to life through the language process. This Other is invoked with every lie (or, as Lacan would call it, repression of truth) as the guarantor of the truth in which it (the Other) subsists at the level of the subjects Unconscious. (Lacan, Pg 172) The similarity with Peirces notion of the mediating Interpretant, awakening the potential of inference and sign generation is obvious here. In Lacan, the Other is language itself. Language and the Unconscious are therefore parallel systems in Lacans framework, with the necessary corollary of the Unconscious residing in language. The reason for the emergence of this Other (language as the locus of signification) lies in Lacans chain of signification. This truth residing in the signifying chain gets repressed as the Sd slides under the Sr, and meaning gets continually veered off. The truth, he says, is always disturbing. We are used to the real. The truth we repress. (Lacan, Pg 169) Thus, with the sliding of Sd under the Sr, the stress as hinted at earlier in Lacan is on the bar separating the Sr and the Sd; and the Sr of outrunning the Sd in its meaning generating potential. As if to diagrammatically show the primacy of the Sr over the Sd, Lacan uses S for Sr and s for the Sd. His eve ntual formulation is thus: S/s. This discussion on Lacans conceptualization of the sign therefore brings to light two crucial points- firstly, that the meaning of material reality is shaped by the chain of signification consisting of Srs. Secondly, the agency of the letter manifests in discourse/ the act of speech, as the dimension of truth of the subject is manifest (unconsciously) only through the message that speech allows. The message that Lacan speaks of harks Saussures distinction between langue and parole. A linguistic code is a set of prefabricated conventional possibilities which the speaker uses to communicate with an addressee: i.e. to create messages. It is in the nature of language that there is a dialectic tension, as Saussure points out and as Barthes elaborates, between code (langue) and message (parole), where the code only exists because of its ability to create messages. This message is only understood because of its relation to a given code. A message is a singular, meaningful unit of discourse. A code is an abstraction created by the analysta logic reconstructed from the materials provided by the message. Living in a certain environment we internalize sets of codes that affect our semiotic behaviour, whether we are aware of it or not. Drawing / painting is always coded because it requires a set of rule-governed transpositions, that are historical (perspectives, rules, etc). Drawing requires apprenticeship, learning. Drawing, hence, is a culture of a culture, according to Barthes. He agrees with Peirce in as much as he considers it a re-presentation. However, Barthes claimed that there is only one seeming exception to the rule no message without a code: the photographic image, because it shows us something reproduced without human intervention (by means of a mechanical-chemical process) as if certain aspects of nature were being communicated through a photographic message without any loss. The photographic message, for Barthes, is then a sign which can be a very complex structure that mixes forms (code) and materials (message) of representation. While Peirce would say that a photograph as an icon would be immediately intelligible without codes, Barthes emphasis is on the illusion of reality that a photograph seemin gly perpetrates, the photographic paradox, as it were. An example to substantiate Barthes argument is in order. The essay will use an Indian Wills Navy Cut (year, 2001) advertisement to rethink the formal organisation of texts and images in terms of the active comprehension of texts and images in context. This is the context that the idea of an advertisement enables. Barthes clarifies the denotation of the photograph thus- Certainly the image is not the reality but at least it is its perfect analogon and it is exactly this analogical perfection which, to common sense, defines the photograph (Barthes, Pg 14). The photograph is a mechanical analogon whose message is the scene itself, literal reality. In the image above, the very point of advertising cigarettes is to sell them. The main obstacle to selling cigarettes is consumers beliefs that cigarettes ruin their health. The most relevant thing a cigarette advertiser can do, given the point of advertising, is to attempt to modify, eliminate, or repress that belief. The linguistic caption with overtones of a sustaining reciprocity (between the cigarettes and the buyer at one level) made for each other- signals this repression. According to Barthes, there are two kinds of relationships between text and image: anchorage and relay. The caption made for each other anchors the meaning of the image by ca lling forth the intended denoted meanings of mutual sustenance. On the level of connotation, the linguistic message guides interpretation. The principal function of connotation is ideological: the text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image (towards a meaning chosen in advance- persuading the buyer to believe in the reciprocity hinted at, while conveniently sidelining the dangers of smoking). According to Barthes, ideology or myth consists of the deployment of signifiers for the purpose of expressing and justifying the dominant values of a given society, class or historical period (the signs express not just themselves, but also all kind of value systems that surround them). (Barthes, Pg 46) This is precisely what anchorage allows for. It ensures that the connoted message is not missed. In relay the text and the image are in a complementary relationship. Here, the text provides meaning not found in the image. This works at the level of a psychological arm-twist, forgive the metaphor, with the company more or less dictating the kind of residual impression an audience will take away from the advertisement. Both the words and images are fragments of a more general syntagm and the unity of the message is realized on a higher level. (Barthes, Pg 41) The message is loud and clear- committing the reader or viewer to acceptance of the relation of reciprocity communicated. Of particular significance here is the denotation- a statutory warning relegated and literally sidelined- Cigarette smoking is injurious to health. Denotation is the literal or obvious meaning or the first-order signifying system. It connotes the pressure on cigarette companies to seem socially responsible. Connotation refers to second-order signifying systems, additional cultural meanings we can also find from the image or text. The meaning garnered from this warning is firstly, a veneer of social responsibility that the company seeks to don and secondly, the pragmatic aim to not highlight something that is evidently counter-productive to the purpose of selling cigarettes. Peirce would call this a legisign in as much as it is a convention hinted at- that of self-interest in sidelining the warning combined with the legislative bindings on the company to include a statutory warning on its package. The coded message is thus the functioning of the advertisement within a larger moral uni verse dictated by conventionality. The anonymous and non-reciprocal nature of advertising makes it generally impossible for the consumer to challenge the advertisers relation to the linguistic claims made and connotations produced, though this is a handicap to advertisers as well as an asset. The impersonality results in connotations being hazardously attributed just because they are pragmatic implications. The image, for Barthes, is a series of discontinuous signs. It is possible to read the image (as Barthes does), to understand that it collects in a certain space (the cigarette pack) certain identifiable objects (a couple joyous at the prospect of a sumptuous and, importantly, healthy, meal). The coded iconic message that one takes away is joy, health, domesticity and vitality. The background colour- green- rich with its organic overtones continues with the act of repression. The photographic paradox, according to Barthes, lies in the spectators fascination with the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as an illusion its reality [is] that of the having been there, for in every photograph there is always the stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered (Barthes, Pg 41). The repression is meant to achieve this for the company. The reality sheltered thus is the imminent danger of cigarette smoking. It should be stressed that however obvious it may be that something is an advertisement, there is always an inference to be made from the cue provided to the decision that something does indeed fill an advertising slot (i.e. count as an advertisement). What I want to stress is the (minimal) knowledge about advertising which the non-coded iconic message conveys. This message is that no matter what the symbolic connotations hinted at are, the products that are being marketed are cigarettes. It is a literal message as opposed to the previous symbolic ones. But it functions as the support of the symbolic messages. (Barthes, Pg 39) The crux of Barthes assertions seem to be that a photographic message ends up being extremely coded though initially one might conceptualize it as a message without a code. This recapitulates Lacans restroom example where meaning comes to reside in the enamel doors only when the Srs (inscriptions) intrude the doors material reality (apparently without any distinguishing codes prior to this linguistic intrusion). What the essay has sought to demonstrate in all theorists considered is that the linguistic system as a whole is not a representation of some extra-linguistic reality. What has also been shown is that there is one aspect of language that is representational. This has to be located within the larger debate that Saussure sparked when he said that Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etcà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ I shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeion, sign). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern themà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics. (Introduction to Saussures Course in General Linguistics, Pg XIV) Moreover, according to Saussure, the use of language has two dimensions which are activated simultaneously. When forming a sentence we make choices from existing paradigms (lists of alternatives, such as words or grammatical forms) and arranging them in syntagmatic relationships (word after word, etc.). There are rules that govern both. A signs value is determined by its paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations. (Saussure, Pg 123) According to Barthes, this principle can be extended to all kinds of sign systems, such as fashion (dressing up, we choose the clothes from different alternatives and create a syntagm, the combination of the clothes we wear). Hence, for him, every semiological system has its linguistic admixture. He inverts Saussures dictum saying instead that semiology is a part of linguistics. (Barthes, Introduction to Elements of Semiology, Pg 11) The problem then lies not in seeing objects as necessarily semiotic and extralinguistic facts, but, as the essay has shown, rather in assuming that these objects also have a linguistic facet in the sense that the Sr in the linguistic system either stands for them or the Sr points to them. The real problem lies, as Benveniste preempted, in discerning the inner structure of the phenomenon of which only the outward appearance is perceived (Benveniste, Pg 45) The reason why we believe that in ordinary discourse language represents reality is because the linguistic world is so powerful a force for us and the linguistic world seems so natural to us, that we assume that it must mirror some sort of non-cultural or non-linguistic reality. Because of the links between language and reality that Peirce, Lacan and Barthes alert us to, and because language seems for certain nouns to be simply nomenclature (a set of names for phenomena existing in other semiotic systems), the assumption that becomes rife is that all linguistic phenomena correlate with some sort of reality. But as Lacan tells us, in such cases the object is created by the word: the object exists and is differentiated from other objects because the word exists and not the other way around. Referents in this argument exist because they are creations of the linguistic system, a way of linguisticizing our semiotic experience- as both Saussure and Barthes envisaged in their divergent ways . The linguistic sign, then, is an intrinsically linguistic combination of a linguistically created Sr and a linguistically created Sd.