Response Paper 2

This article is very much similar to Mitchells who quotes, “Representation is always of something or someone by something or someone, to someone. Representation isn’t that simple, it’s more complex than just “a dab of paint”, representing that the stone represents someone” This simply means that everything we read represents something. Belsey’s article goes in detail of “how” this representation works. This is quite interesting since before this article is read, no one really thinks about how this process of identifying things with words works out. “Language is not a way of naming things which already exists, but a system of differences with no positive terms” (Belsey). Now to explain his theory, “language of sign”, we can look at a few examples. One was mentioned by Belsey himself. He wrote that sound image of the word dog is linked with the concept of the dog itself. To explain what he meant, we can ask ourselves this question, “How do we know what this specific word means a dog?” Well the answer is quite simple; we relate the image of a dog we have seen to the word we have read. “Creates an illusion of transparency of language” (Belsey). This is how words are identified and matched to what it represents. Another example would be the bathrooms. How do we know which bathroom is for what male or female? The bathroom has a picture of stick figure woman or man that let us know that which one is the one we are supposed to use. Now how exactly does that