The Signifiers

I know we're probably all sick of the signifier/signified ideas from last quarter, but while reading an excerpt from the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe is describing a conversation he has with a young man in the counter culture and how to these people "Everything in everybody's life is...significant" (17). The anecdote involves the young man trying to open a writing surface and is saying that the fact that they make it open out is an invasion into his life by the people who produced it.

This reminded me of our conversations last year about the 'hip' people who signified on others, who lived beyond the straight and narrow, bland meanings of things in the world and were a level above, and thus hip. This story is similar in that now the hippies, the counterculture, appear to be signified meanings onto objects, things, and events that occur, seeing them as more than what they are, of being significant "symbols" with deeper meaning.

I thought this was especially interesting considering what Professor Decker was saying today in lecture about the Beats (the 'hip'sters of the 50s) influencing and even, in certain individuals, becoming the Hippies of the 1960s. Here is at least one piece of evidence for this idea, both the hipsters and the hippies apparently think in the same way, by signifying meaning.