Jacques Derrida

Some sort of philsopher right? ;)

He's right, they are always right, that's what those stuck-up British philosophers of the school utter boredom never understand. As per Baudrillard of whom someone said quite cleverly, "after awhile you get tired of someone who is always right" (or something like that).

Actually I do know very little about dear Jacques, I'm more of a Deleuze man myself. But I read Derrida for Beginners with some interest (I just love those little books). Had some interesting ideas that in a way a lot of us take for granted these days (you know the problematic status of dualisms, that sort of thing)

But I do know the favourite philosopher of a pirate.

SARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRtre.

One of the issues at stake in Derrida's own writing is that concepts cannot simply be extracted from one context and used in another one -- and that the task of getting to grips with the genealogy of a concept may never be adequately completed. (But on the other hand, to use a concept at all requires lifting it from its 'context' -- in fact 'context' may just name this a priori portability of a concept.)

This in turn becomes one of the differences Derrida observes between his own work and that of Deleuze, when he expresses his reservation with the idea of philosophy as the creation of concepts put forward in Deleuze and Guattari's _What is Philosophy?_. For Derrida we might think more in terms of a reception of theoretical concepts, and then some particular ways of handling them (including humour, for example) rather than the voluntaristic application of a concept to a problem, or the creation of new concepts _ex nihilo_.

do we have a Foucault thread? if not, should we start one?

My experience with Derrida via work involves his TAs asking for oodles of books to be placed on reserve. I suspect most of them are by him or about him.

But at the end of the day, he has rarely delivered. I think I mean, reading him has usually been frustrating, bringing less insight than the time / effort demanded. (There are no absolute standards here, needless to say - but I'm saying JD comes near the bottom of the heap: and there is **so much else to read**.)

Insight != Knowledge, Truth or whatever. I want whatever a writer can give me - beauty, fun, laughs, surprise, emotion - as well as / instead of what feels true. One of the above might do. JD rarely gives me any of them.

That is to explain why I don't really bother with him now. I know that others do, and they must get something: good luck to them.

Foucault: good writer; useful thinker (explicit 'toolbox' thinker, I think). Yes, I go back to him (or I should, or could) - except that for a long period of his career, you know what he's going to say. (But jeez, that shouldn't be a crime...)

But I'm sure I have said before that for a lazy aesthete like me, the key French PWWII maitre is Roland Barthes by a million miles. Plus, he gives me and Stevie T something to talk about when we're on the 3rd round of ales and have polished off Morrissey and O'Hara.

Why is this an interesting statement? It seems vacuous to me. It's equivalent to saying that a person's genealogy may never be adequately completed because to complete it you'd have to take it back earlier than the original one-celled creature from which he or she descended. The use of the word adequately here is dysfunctional. A genealogy is complete when it tells you what you want to know. It stays complete until someone gives you a good reason for wanting to know more. Are you sure that it's Derrida's idea that genealogies of concepts may never be complete - rather than, say, Paul de Man's or Barbara Johnson's or Christopher Norris's fumbling attempts to explicate Derrida? I've barely read Derrida, and maybe I went after the wrong books (Speech and Phenomena and The Gift of Death - might as well have been in Greek, for all that I got out of them). But I have read Richard Rorty and Newton Garver on the guy, and what they say doesn't square with this. Maybe what Derrida really wants to say is that the genealogy of a concept doesn't have to be complete unless you want it to be, but that's not the same is saying that it can't be complete. And why would Derrida go for such metaphysical/metalinguistic statments anyway? I thought he didn't believe in such things?

Anyway, apparently I.Penman is/was crazy about ol'Jacques. I'm still looking for a JD text that deals with Penman's obsession in re. the relation between thinking and hallucinations. Anyone here have an idea where to look?

As for the genealogy of concepts: I didn't say that it was "Derrida's idea that genealogies of concepts may never be complete". I merely remarked, in the context of a discussion about ways of using concepts, that this was one of the issues at stake in his work. It would be possible to argue that Derrida has no ideas of his own (because it is the problem of ownership itself with which he is (in part) concerned); that Derrida presents no arguments; or that Derrida would agree entirely with Pinefox, that there is so much else to read, that we will never be done with it. In which case, why read Derrida? I can only refer my honourable friends to the answer I have already given.

There is very little good secondary reading on Derrida. Rorty's account of Derrida is nearly as bad as that of Habermas. De Man's work has an extremely complex relation to that of Derrida, but in none of his texts does he set out to 'explain' Derrida. This is a problem, since Derrida's work is infuriatingly obscure in many places. (I can, however, unreservedly recommend anything written by Geoffrey Bennington.) The early work (eg. _Speech and Phenomena_) is steeped in the vocabulary and thought processes of phenomenology; much of the later work (eg. _The Gift of Death_) consists of transcribed oral presentations. All the many different types of text Derrida has produced require different types of reading. If there is one constant, it might be that they all work over other texts and ideas, sometimes alluding as if by reflex, to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and so on. Reading Derrida's texts on their own, as if that ought to tell you something in and of themselves (and it can do) may already be to miss the point, somewhat.

Where to start with Derrida? If your approach is philosophical, my personal suggestion would be to begin with his introduction to Husserl's _Origin of Geometry_. This is a fiendishly unreadable text, but once you're clear on the phenomenological refutation of historicism and Derrida's subsequent displacement of the concept of transcendental historicity, _Writing and Difference_, the most interesting early essay collection / book (it is, perhaps, both) should be easier. Much of the rest follows. I think Derrida's most important recent text is _Politics of Friendship_, but it is also a difficult one. (But no more so than many of the key texts in the history of philosophy.) Most accessible? I'm not sure I could comment on this, since each text presents its own unique combination of difficulties, and I've spent too long reading many of these books, and continually discovering new problems in them, to remember which was a good introduction.

Rorty on JD is bad, yes - but that != Rorty is bad. The weird thing is, RR doesn't (shouldn't) need JD to make his case. He should let JD play in his own garden.

Closest to fun the PF has come with JD surely = Of Grammatolgy, for its mild cliffhanger aspect. (Like I say, I like Fun in buiks.) But I have to respect what Alex T says re. his personal affinity for JD; and he's certainly not the only one to feel that way.

*If* I were to attempt to invert my position and think JD more positively, I would try to describe him sth like:

He thinks very hard and very slowly - no faster than he must; at his own pace - about things which are fundamental - structures of thinking which are endemic and hard to escape; he has no confidence that he'll escape them, but thinks it might be worth thinking around it anyway, for thought is a valiant labour (of love?); he does this thinking not by striking out into the darkness (Descartes etc) but by reading other people, and sparking off (veering off from) the smallest things they say, into comments which are small, yet whose implications might not be small (it's too early to say); and if we are serious about thinking (which is what Reason or Philosophy are supposed to be), we should give him a chance.

But I'm put off from reading Derrida because: (1) Derrida's prose is difficult (and I don't know French, hence don't get a lot of the wordplay), (2) most references pro or con to Derrida's ideas make him seem to me like a bullshitter and a mediocrity, or (3) the discussions and explications of him become obfuscatory filibusters.

And true to form this thread so far is acting like just another filibuster.

Three of Tom's questions about Derrida are: "What does he say? What do you think he says? Is he right?" I jumped on Alex's post not through any fault of Alex's but rather because, for the first time in the history of ILE/ILM, someone seemed not just to be referring to Derrida, or tossing forth an opinion on the guy, but actually to be presenting one of the man's ideas. Now Alex is saying that I misunderstood, but still, maybe at least I've got a foothold. Maybe. If this discussion doesn't do the usual ILM/ILE fadeout. And I do appreciate the reading list. But meanwhile, the filibuster continues:

It would be possible to argue that Derrida has no ideas of his own (because it is the problem of ownership itself with which he is (in part) concerned).

Well, it would be possible to argue that Bob Dylan has no songs of his own, because it is the problem of ownership itself with which he is (in part) concerned. In fact, he calls his new album Love and Theft. But it doesn't follow that Dylan has no songs. And it doesn't follow that Derrida has no ideas, either, whether they are his own, swiped, or community property. So what are they? Like, one or two of them, at least? Alex, Sterling, Pinefox, mark s? You've all talked on this board as if you'd read Derrida and had some idea what the guy was going on about. So what is the guy going on about? Or were the four of you just bluffing? (And don't say that Derrida just can't be summed up or condensed, or that one of the issues at stake in his work is whether ideas can ever be adequately summed up or condensed. If I can do Meltzer, for chrissakes, you can do Derrida. At least you can try.)

By the way, to say that Dylan has no songs of his own would be just as vacuous as saying that genealogies of concepts may never be adequately completed. You can say it, but the phrase "his own" ends up just as useless and irrelevant as "adequately completed" did (and is unrelated to any concept of "his own" that I could ever possibly care about).

I didn't say that it was 'Derrida's idea that genealogies of concepts may never be complete'. I merely remarked, in the context of a discussion about ways of using concepts, that this was one of the issues at stake in his work.

I don't see how it's any better as an issue than as an idea. The question "Are genealogies of concepts ever adequately complete?" is no less empty than the idea that they may never be adequately completed. What is being asked? What's at stake? There's no general question here that I can see, and no answer needed. Imagine if someone told me that one of the issues at stake in my work was whether "songs are ever good." I wouldn't know what the guy was saying, and unless he tried to explain himself further, I wouldn't care.

Describe the structures of thinking that Derrida believes are endemic and hard to escape. And in what sense are these fundamental?

I ask that second question because from my meager secondary reading I had the idea that whatever Derrida thought about structures of thinking, he very much did not believe that any particular structure was "fundamental" for, say, the entire species. "Endemic" would be within a particular "discourse" or tradition or activity. I'd thought.

Hard to respond here, cos it all seems so contradictory. I like what you say, I like the no-nonsense tone, I like the probing, I like the Dylan refs. Yet the level of aggression is so hyper and weird. But... I like that, too.

Attempted response...

>>> But I'm put off from reading Derrida because: (1) Derrida's prose is difficult

Not that difficult, relatively speaking - as you yourself indicate later on.

>>> (2) most references pro or con to Derrida's ideas make him seem to me like a bullshitter and a mediocrity

Well, maybe you're right. Maybe that's what he is, so... where's the problem?

>>> (3) the discussions and explications of him become obfuscatory filibusters.

I like the term filibuster for JD, but will not have it applied to me, thank you very much.

>>> And true to form this thread so far is acting like just another filibuster.

Jeez - a little overheated, this?

>>> Alex, Sterling, Pinefox, mark s? You've all talked on this board as if you'd read Derrida and had some idea what the guy was going on about.

I have read him. So have they, surely. Surely we wouldn't have said it if we didn't mean it (to adapt Lloyd).

>>> So what is the guy going on about? Or were the four of you just bluffing?

How dare you accuse me of bluffing? What I said above was mostly how I had a problem with JD!! That's no bluff!

>>> If I can do Meltzer, for chrissakes, you can do Derrida. At least you can try.)

Meltzer = ?

>>> He thinks very hard and very slowly - no faster than he must; at his own pace - about things which are fundamental - structures of thinking that are endemic and hard to escape...

Describe the structures of thinking that Derrida believes are endemic and hard to escape. And in what sense are these fundamental?

This feels like 'Ithaca' 'Catalogue these books'.

But that's OK. I like the aggression here, cos I think it bespeaks honesty and seriousness. Still, it is hardly for me to answer the question. I was trying to voice a favourable view of JD, though it's not really my own. I am now trying to work out a way of answering your question, and can't do so; presumably cos I am not a Derridean. I sympathize with your impatience - I've been there. But I'm not sure the bull-in-a-china-shop approach is the best. But I could be wrong - maybe it is the best after all.

But come now, Mark - it is such standard fare that 'JD Has Been Misinterpreted'. (Thus, I'm afraid, I find this move of yours rather over-familiar piece of rhetoric - *unlike* the rest of your post.) very book on JD says this about every other book on JD; or they say that the very idea of a book on JD is (hey! how interesting!) somewhat self-contradictory; or that it's time to take him back from the Yanks; or whatever. And if what you say is true, then it should still be possible for you to say what JD *is* about. I don't want you to, or anyone to, particularly. My life has been enough spent on the geezer already.

I've never seen Mark's body. Maybe that's the trouble.

hm.

Do you no the jurisprude from Edin., err, Christianiddis or -iopolous or something? He's good friends with out tutor, we're getting him next term I think.

I only revived this because we had our Derrida tute today and I don't think he is a good writer but am unsure with him as a thinker. Not too interesting. Foucault was much more exciting and a better writer (scaffold puns ridin all over the place).

Where is Frank?

"Le 11 Septembre, as you say, or, since we have agreed to speak two languages, 'September 11'. We will have to return later to this question of language. As well as to this act of naming: a date and nothing more. When you say 'September 11' you are already citing, are you not? Something fait date, I would say in French idiom, something marks a date, a date in history. “To mark a date in history” presupposes, in any case, an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar, for these are – and I want to insist on this at the outset – only suppositions and presuppositions. For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. The telegram of this metonymy – a name, a number – points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about."

Anyone care to paraphrase?

"September 11 [le 11 septembre] gave us the impression of being a major event, one of the most important historical events we will witness in our lifetime, especially for those of us who never lived through a world war. Do you agree?"

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/066649.html

jd can generally take an awful long time to say stuff - but there's more to what he's saying as a whole (on that link) than my redux: he's saying it that way to get you in a mood to be attentive to what's not being said

(ie like elmer fudd: "be vewwy vewy quiet, i'm hunting wabbits)

jonathan z. i take yr point, i'm just not sure if the best way to get ppl to think for themselves abt the shadow side of eloquence and rhetorical power is by being ALWAYS snappy and zippy and grabby

(on the other hand JD is *never* any of those things, though in some ways his problem is that he is too compressed haha)

this phrase is one of both Derrida and DeMan's favorite red herrings

What he says about philosophy has not always been banal, or has not always been obvious.

(haha "like nations on a map with no names" -- WHERE the fuck did i just read that!?)

im not sure what that means but it seemed very funny.

they're like monads except they throb

is this like saying that naming something necessarily means "we do not know what we are talking about"? (and therefore means that we never know what we are talking about - we just talk about words) or does this only apply to metonyms?

crown -- > king
shake your ass -- > shake your entire body
9/11 -- > ?

then once he's actually GOT himself started, where he gets to (which comes after this little section), is the important bit

it isn't arbitrary (the name of the event is the DATE the event happened on); it *is* unusual (holidays often get metonymised this specific way - 4th of july - but what else does? off the top of my head can't think of any other political-military events)

(black friday? bloody sunday? that's the best i can do...)

it could almost suggest that 9/11 was instantly commemorated, which is kind of creepy.

is there a difference between "1066" and "the Norman Conquest"?

Didn't people immediately start using 9/11 because of those numbers specifically? People would not use 9/10 or 9/12, would they, if it happened on these dates instead?

it's still a fairly minor throat-clearing of an idea in itself: just the route JD comes at stuff

x-post re battle of boyne

oh right: but even so, it's the holiday celebration that's created the metonymy, surely?

'In this regard, when compared to the possibilities for destruction and chaotic disorder that are in reserve, for the future, in the computerized networks of the world, "September 11" is still part of the archaic theater of violence aimed at striking the imagination. One will be able to do even worse tomorrow, invisibly, in silence, more quickly and without any bloodshed, by attacking the computer and informational networks on which the entire life (social, economic, military, and so on) of a "great nation," of the greatest power on earth, depends. One day it might be said: "September 11"—those were the ("good") old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous! What size, what height! There has been worse since. Nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this; it already knows it, and that's what's scary.'

Possible argument: the problem lies with the people who keep asking people like JD about things like 9/11, when there is no very good reason to think that he will have anything more brilliant to say about it than the rest of us.

Perhaps his banal replies signify commendable politeness, in their refusal to say 'Why are you asking me?'.

I can understand him: he is banal!

Sometimes Derrida says banal things - or at least, obvious things, which lots of other people could easily have come out with.

Sometimes his obfuscatory words may be saying something banal.

Sometimes he may not be banal.

Sometimes perhaps he does not obfuscate.

I find the JD fandom and perhaps the JD critique brigade typecast. There is perhaps too much nervy reactive anger, if that word is not too strong, and a sense that battle must be joined. I doubt that it need be.

Possibly we are all typecast.

I feel as though I am repeating something I have long ago said.

Read the interview: I'd love to have a conversation with jacques derrida bcz i suspect it would never be straightforward (he'd take 2 mins to ans one question and maybe an hour to ans the next so I'd have to interrupt him a lot).

x-post: I'm 'out of my depth' too. I'm not sure i'm sorry tho'.

I think that a desire from other people to know what JD thinks about eg. political issues has sometimes prompted him to say things that are fairly banal - as might you or I if we felt forced to offer opinions on such things.

I am being too easy on him here, as some of the banality has come in his own books rather than interviews.

I do not claim that his 'philosophical' work is banal.

I think that we should not assume that 'philosophers' have a privileged take on 'politics'. They are 'members of the public' like others; and they are presumably good at... 'philosophy'.

(i tend to agree w.pinefox that a lot of stuff on politics is not particularly startling as political commentary goes, though personally i do find his language a nice change of pace and rhythm from most of the godawful boilerplate garbage that politics seems to generate...) (why? it didn't used to...) (but i think his work on questions about what constitutes the sovereignty of states - and how we solve disputes here - is at least nibbling away at the right area of the issue)

(q: ponge - does he lose in translation possibly?)

The first time my brother met Derrida was after a conference where JD had been savaged by some Marxists (no doubt for 'obfuscation'). My brother offered some words of support, but Derrida turned and, without a word, walked away. My brother was mortified. The second meeting, however, was much better. Derrida had actually read some of my brother's stuff and congratulated him.

Even if the discussion isn't lead by "professional" philosophers but by practitioners, I think every field would do well to consider the basic assumptions of its theories and its practice. Aren't legal systems based (even if in name only) upon political theories? The problem is that all the societies covered by international law don't have the same tradition in political philosophy and, as far as I know, the Western tradition doesn't cover relations between states. So new work needs to be done in political philosophy, maybe in terms of both coverage and "acuteness."

pf- I didn't say you were being controversial but just pointing out that, while some of it wasn't really saying much that i hadn't heard before I did like the bit where JD talks abt the date.

I did like Jonathan's edit. made it easier to digest the actual interview.

I did... edit... it easier to... interview. (Apologies to Jonathan and Dan Perry.)

ok so it wasn't an edit, just trimming some bits.

I am doubtful as to whether 9/11 necessitated a radical rethink of basic assumptions. Most of us have 'responded' to it, or thought about it, via the same old bunch of assumptions that we had before.

Possibly that is a 'Eurocentric', ie. non-American, perception.

Rick Poynor, the design critic, recently pointed out that the No Logo movement suddenly looked 'anti-American' in the aftermath of 9/11, because the whole context of our thoughts about the world changed. 'The same bunch of assumptions that we had before' maybe, but in a new context with new meanings which none of us could ignore. Suddenly everything was much more ideological. We were forced to extremes. 'With / Against'. There was no neutral ground. You couldn't be Conciliatory Ned any more, and just say 'there's truth on both sides'. I probably had to shift ground less than most, because I've always worked on the assumption that everything is ideological anyway.

Possibly it is mistaken to assume that most or many people were.

My view of the anti-capitalist movement has not changed due to 9/11. Has that of anyone on this thread?

I don't think I have ever met anyone who has changed any major 'beliefs' (a difficult word, perhaps) due to 9/11.

The one thing that the aftermath (if it is that), ie. Iraq, has changed my mind about is: it has made me less sympathetic to T Blair.

I might give this a bit of thought and come back later, but I do like Derrida, and I do think he is of onsiderable value on political events and ideas.

show where there are binaries that don't necessarily work

I think it's the way that binaries do work that concerns Derrida. He's not a mechanic fixing broken ones. He's showing how, although they're necessary, binaries necessarily create all sorts of ghosts which 'haunt' our thinking, semi-visible. Which makes him not so much a 'ghost buster' as a spiritualist, teasing words from his ouija board.

'All sentences of the type "deconstruction is X" or "deconstruction is not X" a priori miss the point.' (Derrida, 1983)

I think that this thread is being too kind to him, as "these threads" usually are. I think that this may be a reaction against scattergun dislike and distrust of him. I don't find the JD-fest appealing or unpredictable.

but pf is korrekt that i find the following line a bit lame
"derrida says you can never read a text too carefully but i refute that THUS: by not reading derrida CLOSELY AT ALL! hahaha!!"

The Pinefox, are you trying to claim that being good at philosophy is no more useful a guide to the value of the person's political opinions than, say, being good at singing (we all know that musicians are constantly asked for political views)? In its theoretical sense at least, surely politics is a branch of philosophy? (Also, The Pinefox, what do you think of JD on Joyce?)

Maybe the difficulty or obfuscation in his work is a deliberate strategy and part of his meanings - I think taking a meaning from this that when you think you understand something you are probably wrong and it's all more complex than you realise is not to misrepresent some of what he is saying. Also I think he regards the attempts at some pure, rational language for philosophy as inherently impossible. But I think there a whole bunch of philosophical and literary ideas feeding into the way he writes, not just what he writes. Ooh (I found this after writing the above), he says (of metaphysical terms like 'presence') "My intention is to make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by these words."

Some of the debate here about whether his writing is inaccessible, bullshit or just banal reminds me a bit of a good account of the four stages scientific theories can go through, in a transition to being accepted:
1. Nonsense
2. This may be true, but it is of no interest
3. This is true, but unimportant
4. This is obvious

I'm not sure (again responding to The Pinefox) that he thinks we should change our basic assumptions. I think he thinks it's worth teasing them out, and showing where they might not be solid. I haven't come across anything that I recall to suggest that he thinks there are clear and solid foundations we should use instead, just that we should be aware of the limitations or weaknesses of what we have.

A quote from JD re what I was arguing with Momus before logging off: "Undecidables are threatening. They poison the comforting sense that we inhabit a world governed by decidable categories." That's why I thought he was suggesting that the binaries don't always work. I think he very much likes these undecidables, and I do too. (I was thinking at leangth just yesterday about the line from Lola where Ray sings "I'm glad I'm a man, so's my Lola," which I realise is a different kind of thing from what Derrida enthuses about in 'Plato's Pharmacy', say, but it has some things ambiguous and playful and indeterminate in common with JD's most famous neologism, differance (sorry, don't know how to do the accent here).)

There is some truth in a jokey suggestion upthread that summarising any of his views is to misrepresent them. He said that all sentences of the type 'Deconstruction is/is not [X]' "a priori miss the point", so this thread is in trouble! (haha, xposting at its finest)

One other point about his talking about political matters: as a thinker with a huge international reputation (named in a Knowing Me Knowing You episode as the world's top living philosopher, if that isn't Peter Ustinov) his statements carry authority. Since most of what he has chosen to throw that weight behind has been things I believe in (he's spoken for nuclear disarmament and against apartheid, for instance) I am happy with this. I don't think he claims that his ideas or those of deconstruction prove much about these positions (though he has deconstructed the logic of deterrence - again, better at taking apart ideas than building new ones). (I'm less comfy with his stance on feminism, though I think I'd need to do more reading to get just where he is on this - the few statements I've read pull in differing directions.) I've seen interesting suggestions that his long silence on Marxism (until the fall of communism in Europe) was because although his deconstructionist approach could undermine that as well as any other ideology, he wanted not to be on the opposite side.

Enough. As you can tell, he is a thinker who interests me, so I'm keen to poke the thread along a bit, if I can.

but what is the point of making that term 'enigmatic'? Its fine to suggest other meanings (maybe that's what you're saying).

''I'm not sure (again responding to The Pinefox) that he thinks we should change our basic assumptions. I think he thinks it's worth teasing them out, and showing where they might not be solid. I haven't come across anything that I recall to suggest that he thinks there are clear and solid foundations we should use instead, just that we should be aware of the limitations or weaknesses of what we have.''

OK but haven't ppl always tried to re-evaluate assumptions that are thought to be solid? what does 'deconstruction' do that is new here (maybe it might take too long to explain)?

but if you treat it as something to THINK about rather than just throw about it has other implications which are somewhat useful. for example it can mean -- "this thing you hold to be true, treat it as a text, treat your understanding of it as a text, treat other's descriptions and statements about it as text, and now ask how it came to be." which is cool, but assumes you have a good idea of various useful ways to treat texts besides saying "oh look! they're made up!" about them.

He is a critic of philosophy and philosophers and philosophical texts rather than someone making new meanings and ways we should live. With these metaphysical terms, it seems an entirely valid thing to say that the way they are used doesn't properly or completely or unambiguously work.

i suppose by implication treat things a paintings if you are GOOD AT LOOKING.

or like fruit if you LIKE TO EAT!?

Also, since I speak French it seems to me like a rhetorical power-move to be so often using French terms at specific moments rather than translate. On one hand you can certainly use this to point to & mark respect for legitimate critiques of translation. On the other hand you can use it to make a concept that is not new really stand out and seem important because you refuse to translate.

I'm glad that the pinefox's shoulder rubs (without too much salt) against others whom i like.

Jacques Derrida: my opinion of is short in the sense that I would say Habermas is difficult to read and I would also say Lyotard talks about 'le differend'.

I don't much about him is what I'm saying but the sheer force of meme-longevity makes me want too.

What is wrong with being banal? I'm willing to listen.

And an ill typist.

(hence eg rhetoric and dialogue and pedagogy and ______ and ______ are ALWAYS part of the deal, hence whatever)

(i can't help but think that the sheer repetitiveness of some texts in the canon comes from exactly these exchanges. derrida: A. Blount (or whoever): Not really. derrida: etc.etc. (i.e. smart stuff) thus A still stands, etc. unfortunately this tends to be an impediment to progress in thinking. which is to say arguing about A directly is less useful than applying it to B, C, D as desired rather than INVENTING B, C, D for the purpose of refuting A)

is saying something is "beyond language" equiv. to saying it is "beyond comprehension"?

do you not think about eating buffalo wings when you eat them? is that thinking in words? has your lover ever asked you "lower, faster, ah right there" while you eat her out? or has she maybe just moaned in a different pitch of shifted her thighs and is that language too?

no things but in ideas themselves

how much of living as a HUMAN is specifically human?

to some people, talking about this is pointless stuff: these people shouldn't bother talking about it! for others, i.e. Derrida and people who like him, it's loads of fun

so even when you harrumph about it and reach for something untainted bcz isn't that a better version of whatever, it ain't, so better to get used to it and be cool about it

(also the biology, culture etc involved in mastering speaking, latterly reading, writing have a huge presence in society, even when we don't actually think about them or refer to them much...) (a LOT of argts on ilx cd be rephrased as judgments abt level or "quality" of readership, like it carves the world into a hidden class structure)

(and he means language in a v.wide sense there: "text" is - or was at the point he wrote that - his technical term for the generalised sphere of communication, bigger than eg just speech or writing, but DEF - explicitly - including mathematics)

i find the games side to it a bit tiresome, as in the games he seems to enjoy, but i also think he's right not to drop that down to a "mere" set-asideable level, cz it's a big and maybe wrong assumption to make to just decide that the GAMES aspect is an irrelevance and a distortion compared the serious, proper useage... cz that develops later, out of the games...)

(and it's not as if i don't opt for jokes a lot myself)

(one of the things i like abt ilx as a structure is that it allows a tremendous play between extremely difft er ahem "modes of address")

I'm not so sure! Though again may I recommend Blanchot, whom I think is saying "there is nothing without/outside language, nor is there anything at all in language"

an impenetrability that ensures my continued deification in France and elsewhere.

Point of information — Derrida’s reputation in France is not in any way comparable to its status in Britain or the US (both in terms of good and bad things said about him). This is an important point, because so much of the problems in discussing Derrida do genuinely stem from the difficulty of translation between different contexts — never impossible, but never to be taken for granted. Like the assumed demand that a ‘philosopher’ should have something - what? Useful - to say about a ‘major event’.

That language strategy could be dramatically counterproductive, though (turning off more people than it turns on, too easy to make fun of, etc.). It seems counterintuitive to deliberately make something more complex, just to stop people in their tracks. I do find the language to be a stumbling block.

This is a really interesting comment. If it is counterintuitive to make something complex, then surely all philosophy is counterintuitive? But the assumption that this is done for effect - deliberately to obfuscate or to provoke - seems odd. I mean, why ask a philosopher about something if you want the same answer a journalist, or a politician, or a bloke in a pub, might give? Putting things in ‘simple’ terms is often the easiest way to a) obscure complications which are just there, whether we admit or not and b) apply a kind of rhetorical force to the situation: e.g. asking someone whether they believe in freedom really means ‘take one of these two reductively established positions so I know whether to shoot you or not’. So a) there’s nothing wrong as such with making things complex and b) what are you afraid of? Derrida’s response is (on one level) ‘I can’t answer the question you have posed in those terms because so many of them seem to me extremely obscure, so let me show you what I think needs to be clarified before we can begin’. i.e. Derrida is seeking to CLARIFY, but that necessarily involves making things more complex.

But there’s another assumption, which is that Derrida should respond in your language, rather than his. Isn’t that a slightly strange demand? i.e. you’re asking why these damn foreigners can’t speak your language. (Even that’s a philosophical foreigner rather than a literal foreigner). [Mark makes a similar point, I discover reading the remainder of the thread] If you were to pick up one of Derrida’s essays on Husserl, or Heidegger, would you say ‘that bastard hasn’t written a beginner’s guide to Husserl, he’s written a complex text which I’d have to know a certain amount about philosophy, and about Husserl, to get something out of’? Yes, the specific genre here is that of an interview, but the context is unclear - Derrida is trying, as Foucault did, and as others have, to present his work in a non-technical context. (Although in the second extract he recalls some of Schmitt’s arguments). But this doesn’t mean not asking technical questions, or using technical language. If you want Derrida’s response to something, this is how he thinks! And yes that’s a calculated risk - not everyone is going to have the patience to take the time to explore why he’s asking these questions, and in this way (as this thread proves!). But that’s his risk. The response that ‘I can’t be bothered to read something difficult like Derrida’s work’ is at least an honest one.

mark, what about the stuff he says on war between states (or classical war) vs. civil war (or partisan war) and now international terrorism? this must be relevant to your rights-based constitutions thread. although i don't think it's a problem with the choice of political philosophy as much as the way they are used to justify actions. or maybe this is the problem derrida is talking about: terrorism has made it necessary to make explicit a philosophy for international law

What Derrida is saying is something like: 1) Schmitt distinguishes between ‘classical war between states’ and ‘partisan war which breaks those rules’; 2) this is a useful distinction and it’s the kind of technical clarification we need to try and understand and describe the world better; 3) but this is never going to be *enough* because 4) the real world already deconstructs such oppositions - Bush has declared war (as if the US was a state making war in the classical sense) but against an enemy who does not fit into traditional categories; 5) so a CRITICAL reading of Schmitt would need to accept that the real world is messier than the theoretical or abstract world view and work out how to continue the kind of project he’s interested in while taking account for those elements of messy reality which frustrate such a project. Now, as the Pinefox observes as smartly as ever, this may be banal - but most of what we can say on such a topic is banal. It’s not an attempt to develop a new theory of terrorism, or of international law, as such: in fact Derrida advances very little under his own name, describing instead what a critical reading of Schmitt *might* achieve (but might not). But again, this is an interview not a full-blown philosophical essay. If you’re interested in his reading of Schmitt, there’s plenty in Politics of Friendship, although strictly speaking that’s a series of seminar sessions, not a philosophical essay (not that it’s not philosophical). Being clear about the status of these texts, and of what Derrida says is important because it presents what he’s doing as offering starting points for your own responses, he’s not telling you what to think, but making suggestions as to how you might begin to think, if you stop expecting the world to offer you easy answers.

does Derrida believe in MONADS

I don’t know much about the term Monads - I take it to come from a Leibnizian / Spinozan (?) type philosophical discourse. Derrida has not written anything I can think of on Spinoza - most of his work is either on classical philosophy, some medieval thinkers, and on post-Kantian writings. But if you wanted me to guess, the answer would be NO, because singularity is always fractured or contaminated in his work, the One is always more or less than one, never whole and complete in itself. i.e. like many post-Hegelian thinkers, identity is always relational. (But see remarks on dates later)

It would cheer me a tad if on... "threads like this", people who like Derrida would sometimes take more sceptical positions re. him, and perhaps even vice versa.
I find the JD fandom and perhaps the JD critique brigade typecast. There is perhaps too much nervy reactive anger, if that word is not too strong, and a sense that battle must be joined. I doubt that it need be.

I kind of agree with the Pinefox here, although he probably has me down as a member of the Derrida fanclub. It tends to depend on the context - I can often disagree with Derrida, and have done in public forums, but in other cases, like here, I think sympathetic clarification is the more effective strategy. It tends to be far too easy to knock someone’s position rather than trying to see their point of view from inside. Once you do that, it tends to become harder to attack it - so it might be a good rule of thumb to do this with whatever you read, or indeed whoever you’re arguing with.

I think it's the way that binaries do work that concerns Derrida. He's not a mechanic fixing broken ones. He's showing how, although they're necessary, binaries necessarily create all sorts of ghosts which 'haunt' our thinking, semi-visible. Which makes him not so much a 'ghost buster' as a spiritualist, teasing words from his ouija board.

This is quite a neat statement of Derrida’s aims I think. But I would certainly add that he’s very interested in some of the political consequences of ignoring the ghosts and pretending they’re not there. Making the ghosts appear is part of his project, trying to act out possible attempts to reckon with the ghosts, and finding a way of thinking about the ghosts which doesn’t (because it can’t) claim to have adequately banished them or factored them in, is another.

'All sentences of the type "deconstruction is X" or "deconstruction is not X" a priori miss the point.'

This perhaps not so helpful. Is it from the letter to a Japanese friend? (Could check but books are upstairs!). If so it occurs in the context of a discussion which does try to find ways to talk about deconstruction - so Derrida is not just throwing up his hands and going ‘oh it’s all so difficult / intrinsically undefinable (which verges on a kind of mysticism). And given he has regularly produced sentences of that type, it would be a funny kind of thing to say, were it not for the fact that there is always context - so a word, a sentence, a whole book, is never complete in itself. The same might be said of any event - and we’re bordering here on what he says about 11/9. To name an event - to cite it in discussion say - is always to limit it, by setting borders and parameters around it. Obviously this is what we do all the time, and there’s nothing intrinsically *wrong* about it, but it has certain effects, not least that it means we’re always having to forget or exclude things in order to handle the concepts we use to interpret the world, just as we often forget that those concepts are only concepts (and then elevate them into abstract terms which can be used to label good and bad, right and wrong).

I don't know how much Derrida hates slogans, no matter how much he may protest - "there is nothing outside the text" is the "Just Do It" of Critical Theory

But certainly at the time of writing Derrida never knew what was going to happen to that phrase (for example its translation into other languages), and by God it’s buried in a long and dense text. He has always insisted that the word ‘deconstruction’, just for example, was never intended to introduce some kind of manifesto. If subsequent events made it convenient to use that word as a kind of shorthand, and to take positions around it so be it - but obviously the fate of a word can never be determined by one person, and in this as in other things Derrida has responded to what happens elsewhere.

Since this smacks of the apologetics Pinefox is fed up with , maybe I should add that I think Derrida has deliberately used forms of sloganeering in certain places, and a number of times I wish he hadn’t or wouldn’t. But on the one hand Derrida is being told (again this thread is typical) ‘put it in manifestos, in words of one syllable I can repeat or disagree with’ and on the other ‘don’t reduce things to buzz-words and slogans’. The guy’s only human.

his statements carry authority. Since most of what he has chosen to throw that weight behind has been things I believe in (he's spoken for nuclear disarmament and against apartheid, for instance) I am happy with this.

Martin is I think talking absolute sense here. If Derrida doesn’t have an obvious position on ‘feminism’ (although I think it’s fairly clear, depends what exactly you’d be looking for) it’s because he knows that ‘feminism’ is such a disputed and complicated term, that there are plenty of feminists he might agree with and plenty he would have little common ground with: he would almost certainly, and I think I’ve seen him do this, insist that we can only talk about ‘feminisms’ in the plural (as we can only really talk about ‘deconstructions’ in the plural). Derrida was for a long time very unhappy with the public and supposedly authoritative position he was expected to take, and so there are few interviews and only a couple of photographs of him before the mid-to-late seventies. After his involvement in debates surrounding the teaching of philosophy in France, Derrida appears to have become more open to taking public stances. Again, that was his decision, and we can say we think it was right or wrong, but we cannot a priori quibble with his right to make his own decision on that.

it seems to me it calls for an infinite regress of re-evaluation - rather than propose a standard for obtaining truth (like pragmatism for instance) it simply proposes a method for undermining all possible conclusions! its a useful tool but not something you can live by

I like to think that accepting that any decision you make is always provisional, and that you might like to look back and say well that was wrong (or right), is a possible way to live. It would mean never assuming that you were right and someone else was wrong, but would mean you were prepared to act as if you were right when you judged the situation to call for that. In fact, it’s pretty much what we do the whole time isn’t it? Since the re-evaluation would be infinite, deconstruction would never be something you could actually ‘live’: but you might be able to live more or less deconstructively (i.e. more or less taking the apparently ‘given’ or ‘natural’ for granted). This may also sound banal: but the specificity of Derrida’s project, for example, lies in the kind of questions he asks to the specific texts, ideas, events that he considers. Examined carefully, the results may not be so banal - in fact, obviously they’re not, or we wouldn’t have all this fuss to deal with. (Not sure I’ve explained that very well)

"there is nothing outside the text"

Trouble is that this isn’t really about ‘texts’ in any obvious way. In the essay it’s from ‘text’ has become something like an improved term for what Heidegger calls ‘Being’ i.e. ?the world; ?language; ?everything. Difference being that Derrida wants to insist that anything we might care to investigate will have the same characteristics as a text (ie in being resistant to final determination, being totally pinned down to an unequivocal meaning (i.e. translation into another context / discourse / language / paraphrase). The fact that ‘Being’ can be translated into ‘text’ itself acting out the inherent destabilisation of even such terms which seek to identify fundamental concepts.

So it’s not quite enough to say that Derrida’s work is about texts, or even about language. In a couple of places he describes deconstruction as being whatever happens to happen, or happens not to happen: i.e. if we could talk about (but by definition we can’t) it would be everything which is and everything which isn’t. But these aren’t the best terms to use to look at what he does. What I mean is, deconstruction is about events not language or texts. (Footnote: this is the starting point for some of my own research, in which I argue that you can understand political events, usefully, as being deconstruction in progress, if you look at them a certain way, and that this opens up issues which other ways of looking at them ignore.)

i.e. it might be easier to think of Derrida in the Kantian or phenomenological traditions, but really pushing the problem of how do we ever have access to ‘things’ to what’s out there to its limits, rather than as a ‘it’s all language games’ or discourse theory type of guy.

What I mean is, deconstruction is about events not language or texts.

i.e. it might be easier to think of Derrida in the Kantian or phenomenological traditions, but really pushing the problem of how do we ever have access to ‘things’ to what’s out there to its limits, rather than as a ‘it’s all language games’ or discourse theory type of guy.

these comments are really interesting, and i'd like to find out more about the differences. thanks for the clarification on my comments on the interview.

when ppl say "[x] date is when everything changed" he is saying "no, lots of things stayed the same"

I can't. What I've heard of his seminal stuff sounds wonderful, but that statement, though true, is also not very unusual; I'm sure Brbara Ellen has said much the same; and in any case the same goes for September 3 1939, May 6[?] 1979, or what have you. 'Everything changed' is journalistic shorthand, yes; there's no necessary fit beteween metaphor and 'reality', yes. I'll back back up on this bitch when I've read 'On Grammatology'. Laterz -- enjoy the nowties!

(ps i am totally allergic to heidegger, so ignore this post if yr milage varies)

Oh dear :-( Thomas McCarthy in his attack on Derrida makes a similar claim -- i.e. that all this talk about difference simply leads to a politics of cultural differences, and the rise of political particularisms. As anyone whose read Derrida's comments on nationalism knows, this is not the case. Because all identities are only in / through a wider process of differentiation, the opposition between identity / difference falls apart, and certainly can't be mapped onto equality / difference. I think Derrida does follow Hegel in the sense that the institutionalisation of certain forms of equality via the state is seen as necessary, even if it such equality will never be equal enough -- i.e if we ever managed to treat everyone equally as citizens, this would still only ever be formal / abstract equality (in Hegelian / Marxist terminology) or a failure to address each citizen as equally different (in more Levinasian / Derridean terms).

(also there's the ice-t link)

Yeah, I shd do this, but I'm trying to write about 30s stuff now. So maybe he could help if... Is there any derrida which wd help me understand sartre? But probably I need background in phenomenology etc? I'm coming from history/politix angle (this para contains huge elision)

I think this might be more Deleuzean (although I am no expert on GD): JD is all about the philosophy, GD seems to me much happier to get on with the sensing / eating / desiring etc. (thus too vitalist for me.) So for JD it might be 'treat things as texts if you good at thinking about reading' 'like fruit if you are good at thinking about fruit.' To the extent that this implies that something like deconstruction might be going on in the natural sciences, in fact anywhere that people are having to think about the categories they use to understand and order the world, I like it. I guess the problem would be that the natural sciences (from a Derrida perspective) don't treat the rest of the world like friut -- they simply assume a great deal about the nature of science, the relationship between science and reality etc., the teleological progression of knowledge -- rather than submitting these things to the kind of demystification process that takes place when you say 'this is no longer what it appears to be, an apple, but is in fact all sorts of things at once, and not as distinct from - say - a pear, when you get down to certain basic levels of analysis. So the distinction between an apple and a pear is not natural but relative to a context, and therefore subject to revision. The fact that plants or animals do occasionally get reclassified suggests that something like this process can be at work.

Not as yet, but thanx for the recommendation: what I'm assembling is about the Popular Front/Spanish War as seen through arch-quietist Henry Miller. JPS is kind of side-matter here; I suppose I'm trying to rewrite those debates through later eyes, but the thing I'm on is basically 'Barton Fink' meets 'Rogue Male', so... !. One day I will get round to JD; but I don't think I'll ever specialize.

being and time is sorta simultaneously w.la nausee? (from memory only, i might be v.wrong abt that)

Ooh that looks wicked. Probably there is no short cut and all that but fuck it, I'm using it as a short cut. when i get paid. and i finish this otter stuff.

nauesee=193? (to use bowie term, or '1938' really.

Slightly mixed feelings.

1. Relatively readable, I suppose, compared to JD on some other things.

2. The intellectual history traced in eg. 'Two Words for Joyce' does have an importance - and I am not averse to the 'personal' aspect of this stuff (ie. 'I first read JJ back in 1958', etc.)

3. He has supplied one or two new metaphors for people to work with - notably computers, telephones, postal systems.

4. But just to say that is to be too generous. Given the length of his major essay on JJ, ths lack of insight and illumination it offers (compared to eg. any much less well-advertised and less often read decent critic of the writing) is almost record-breaking.

my own take on critical theory generally speaking is that it's performative: that its central interest is not as criticism but as literature, and that as criticism is success relies on how well it works as literature. This is why I prefer Paul De Man to Blanchot, even: he's a hoot to read. Of the major post-structuralists, I think Derrida is (oddly) the one most closely alllied to 'proper' philosophy: I say "oddly" because he's almost exclusively interested in literature & in bringing literary tropes to bear on his investiagations. Since I consider all critical theory just a different kind of fiction, and am a sucker for narratives, Blanchot's and De Man's narrative-heavy strategies work best on me.

But I have not read Derrida in several years. I agree that we should have a "reading Of Grammatology" thread.

(i wd not even know if he wz good or bad or useful or timewasting eg on mallarmé)

But I'm fairly certain this would not REPAY the debt, so this book exists as a title only

(haha "debt" is JD's MUCH SUPERIOR alternative - ie clear and meaningful and useable - for the pesky i-word)

I would say that De Man is as good and better than most normal-style critics - his "arche de-bunker" schtick is simply magnificent

I have a feeling we have been down this dirt road before

PS / yes it is true that JD on lit is generally less incisive than at least early JD on eg Rousseau or Levinas -- though this is complicated irritatingly by the inclusion of his drama-king Rousseau essay on Acts of... Literature.

Because i learnt a lot from Derrida which is not stuff exclusive to his work, but common to a whole intellectual tradition / milieu (bit of both) I would probably attribute more of how I know think to his impact on me than any other thinker. But that's not necessarily to do with being Derrida, just someone I studied at a particular time, if you see what I mean.

Derrida is certainly nearer to philosophy than Foucault or Lyotard say, I'm not sure about Deleuze. The entire gamble of Derrida's work is (described one way) concerned with being super-philosophical but also being against or anti or just plain different from philosophy at the same time, and showing that it is strictly impossible to decide which. I'm not sure how fair it is to describe Derrida's work as mostly concerned with applying literary techniques to philosophy, because there is a philosophical trajectory underneath his work, which his interest in the concept of literature is put to work on. Certainly he has never claimed to be a literary critic in the sense Blanchot or de Man are (and I have yet to see even a cursory account of the influence of the latter on the former, although there are clear verbal echoes in at least one place), so I don't find it surprising that people don't find him particularly helpful in reading literature. What I find slightly interesting is why people think they should find him useful for this.

(this seems a bit unlikely - it requires wilder to understand lubitsch to understand that a. L's work should only be valued in money terms, and b. that the content of L's work at every level is an argument that all such work should only be valued in money terms)

also this is a debt which can never to arbitrated by a third party (which rules out the entire purpose of the cash nexus heh)

his daughter is still alive though

(this is bcz they are too caught up dealing - or not dealing - with the nature of their OWN debt to both prior parties)

Potlatch=like todal free-for-all? Probably involving jouissance, and lashings of derives?

Someone said upthread that philosophy = Oh Really? & So What?

Two more options:

Let's Try and Make This Simpler vs (or, and) Let's Try and Make This More Complicated.

Both impulses are comprehensible and exist in a dialectic, perhaps.

JD cannot on the whole be accused of the former. He may possibly be enlisted to the latter.

The question could then be: does he Complicate things in a useful / helpful / interesting / moving / nice / pretty / enlightening / funny [etc] way? Or does he complicate things unhelpfully and leave us not much better off at the end in any of those ways and more? Or: do the gains his complications give us outweigh the losses? Or: are they worth the effort? (Analogy with Proust here.) (Many different questions, perhaps, not all to be mixed up.)

Over years I came to feel that his brand of complicating was not doing enough of the good stuff, and was doing too much boring and unhelpful nothing-much stuff.

Mark S quotes me upthread - and it is nice of him to remember what I said. And his words suggest to me what I have sometimes thought: that maybe people (like eg. us) like or dislike (or a mix) eg. JD the way we like and dislike eg. Kafka, Beckett, or Defoe and Dickens for that matter.

I think I have taken this A-road before.

Sadly this thread has lost me in just the way Kogan has complained about a few times - I think I have the first idea about some of what Derrida has been on about, but if we are to just talk about this stuff in terms of how it relates to Mallarme and how Deleuzian it might be, I very quickly get lost. This isn't particularly a complaint, since unsurprisingly the discourse between Alex, Mark and The Pinefox is zipping around rather above my head, and asking them to take little baby steps everywhere so I can keep up would be completely unreasonable. I'm more meaning to apologise for backing away and looking for someone posting kitten pics...

False! The third party creates the debt and pays it as he/she sees fit, unless I misread Barthes! Crit theory exclamation point party hurrah!

the third party doesn't create the debt: the third party may not even be aware of the debt - not all readers end up being writers, their handling of the debt may only ever manifest in a world w/o possibility of audience (like, i dunno, someone who becomes a doctor after reading pushkin) (or chekhov, i forget which one was the doctor)

(actually for the purposes of the thought experiment it doesn't matter)

enrique the idea of debts which no amount of money can repay or address are commonplace, so THAT line won't fly

All readers are writers!

The festival of exclamation points continues!

i.e. in what way is it "real" to privilage "text" as everything, or is it just a historic "accident" of "text" (in the more traditional sense) being a place where thinking about it FIRST meant thinking about mediation? i.e. how do we distinguish "everything is textual" from "everything is everything" and what implications does that carry with it?

also how is consuming an apple like consuming a book or a sentence?

doesn't the redefinition of text simply recognise a colonial reality? that (eg) a visual examination of a painting can be converted into writing or speech, but not vice versa?

i actually really dislike that redefinition of text, bcz i think it's misleading (plus i get sick of the word being used instead of like "book' or 'article' or 'poem' when the general-technical meaning is not actually required by the context)

(okay that's a dodgy evasion there)

you can make a movie ABOUT a book, or a painting too though?

Why can't you grow an apple about a book?

The Pinefox, are you trying to claim that being good at philosophy is no more useful a guide to the value of the person's political opinions than, say, being good at singing (we all know that musicians are constantly asked for political views)? In its theoretical sense at least, surely politics is a branch of philosophy?

Alex mentioned that Derrida has avoided taking public stances, but I was wondering if this question could be answered in terms of the relationship of philosophy or theory to other disciplines. It's interesting that Alex called Derrida's approach specific. (I remember reading something by Heidegger for an English class in which the object of discussion was translated as 'thing'...)

What should I read if I want to find out more about how Derrida fits in with the phenomenological tradition and the relationship between phenomenology and the philosophy of language?

Yes, but the result was Adaptation, which for me was a waste of time, money and spirit.

As for phenomenology, wasn't that a major thing that he was reacting more or less against? That problematizing (well I like that word!) of metaphysical terms like 'presence' was surely addressing that.

This is pure ideology, and fails to take into account that narrative tends to be made after events, and to confer sense (often spuriously) onto them retrospectively. We actually experience the world through our senses (ie phenomenologically), which might be a better reason for invoking 'Heidigger' (sic).

the allegedly pure-presence state of the phenomenological [bracketed] sensual moment is demonstrably non-existent = derrida's (anti-heidegger) argument everywhere, pretty much (cf eg writing precedes speech)

ts: time as our internal structuring mechanism (cf kant/heidegger/derrida tho in v.difft ways) vs time as an externally existing - metaphysical? - dimension which god understands but we can't (ok this sounds like kant but actually is the opposite of what he thinks at least during his earlier funny period)

BUT

animals w/o speech (that we know how to translate) clearly have memory, are able in some sense to "tell themselves internal stories abt their own experiences and how these inform the current situation" - whatever the brain-body mechanism for this, it involves a kind of accessible-readable electrical-biological trace somewhere = writing obv

hence writing precedes speech

I have never bought the nothing-is-outside-text line and never will. Why? Because I can observe myself observing, and catch myself textualising my experiences after the observation. Sure, there are necessary structuring process going on ('cognition'), but they are pre-linguistic, not post-linguistic.

the non-technical word for deconstruction is "chicken-egg stuff"

momus yes by (non-poetic) logic that is obviously the case: what parts of the "world" do you consider by definition unreachable within this yes wide but coherent definition of "text"* (i don't in fact think the claim requires they be reached yet or indeed that we will actually ever reach them)

*(what is a better term for it? relayable consciousness? as i keep saying, i don't like "text" used in this broad sense bcz it's so easy to toss up bogus contradictions which get their specious force from the ordinary-language usage of text)

i'm really off the point anyway, carry on - i've totally lost the point of how this relates to the specialist use of "text"

(did we just reach a pf banality point)

yes, i'm aware of that; what i'm asking is, for derrida can we back date the existence of these 'laws' to the time before newton? ditto the existence of elements, pluto, etc.

see my problem is that momus is saying that his apprehension of various sense-data happens outside his capacity to himself tell stories about it, and then this capacity switches on subsquently and deals with it in "linguistic" fashion - as a series of bloc states, i guess

whereas i'm saying that the weave of reception and interpretation operates at either a microswitch level - you flick back and forth below self-awareness - or (if these are indeed different) they have long ago pre-emptively adapted to one another and become one thing

clearly there are primarily absorbtive, primarily intuitive and primarily analytic states (others too probably), but i take their permament codependence and constant interraction as constitutive of consciousness in itself anyway

Tom -- are you deliberately attempting to sabotage my attempt to get some work done this week?

-- alex t (alex...), September 25th, 2001 1:00 AM. (admin)

Yes.

-- Tom (ebro...), September 25th, 2001 1:00 AM. (admin)

it isn't; but other scientific phenomena are; ie actually existing forces were not perceived (of course, now i'm at a loss for one, but discovery of planets might do). i used a bad example i suppose.

okay -- in some cases let's say it's hard to dissociate the phenomenon from its alleged causes. having a ruddy face for example... ach, i'll come back when i know what i'm on about.

no doubt; i suppose i'm just impatient, but that seems basically mealy-mouthed (i'm using the proper terminology here). what if they aren't consistent, however? which is more than likely to be the case
for example, ideas of historical causation.

i could accept that strictly our own understanding ox [x] phenomena is itself partial; i still have to bum rides off of people.

if pluto was "beyond text" then we STILL wouldn't know we'd discovered it

If the texts aren't consistent we have to doubt the texts, the explanation, or the assumption that the phenomena now are as they were then.

I'm not sure what you mean by ideas of historical causation.

"this is after all (among other things) a theory of active consciousness in time"

well, in any theory you have one motive force privileged above others: god, men, economic 'forces', for example. history remains as controversial as ever because of these conflicting worldviews; and i imagine it's similar, but not quite so similar, in science. it's hard to dissociate phenomena from causes very often. but in any case, mark's right that pluto was 'beyond text' for ppl 100 years ago; i'm trying to understand derrida, and see if he wd feel that that meant pluto did not exist 100 years ago. this is basic stuff i know.

i.e. what does it mean to be a good "reader" of something that is not a book and why is it useful?

what can we elaborate as ways to be a reader?

ie the modernist irruption = artists/craftsmen honing their conscious round the material requirements of what they worked on (material = technique, content AND the stuff it wz made of) in order not to be caught up in the overweaning rationalised ideology of conformism-via-OFFICIAL-"texts")

ie yes we DO get distracted by text-vs-notext argts, when actually politics and the social whatever is - in part - abt the distinctions and battles between levels and types of text (and our mastery of same)

Another thinker who could be inserted into that dialectic is Raymond Williams. He seems to me to hve had an urge to 'complicate' which did not mean a total lack of illumination. NB that this is not a blanket defence of his work.

Your point that JD has taken up stances on nukes and apartheid appears to me to back up my claim that we do not philosophers to tell us what stances to take on such issues: or rather, that his views on those matters (which are probably just fine) are no more exceptional than yours or mine.

I think it is a mistake to say: 'Look, JD has taken up positions on nukes, apartheid and whether killing kittens is wrong - therefore he has something (philosophically?) special to contribute to our politics'.

I do not claim that you have said that.

And what text is modified by the rule, the glue-pot, the nails?

"Our knowledge of thing's length, the temperature of the glue, and the solidity of the box."

Would anything be gained by this assimilation of expressions?

(okay okay, sorry about that)

Alex mentioned that Derrida has avoided taking public stances

No, he did at certain points -- i.e. until the mid-to-late 70s. However he has been quite selective, and is I think quite distrustful of the idea of the intellectual as someone whose views on major world events should be solicited. He has taken public stances (this is by no means an exhaustive list, but based on what I can remember of the top of my head) on topics including: Palestine, the wearing of headscarves in French schools, immigration laws, Czech dissidents (before and after his arrest in Prague), apartheid...

trying to understand derrida, and see if he wd feel that that meant pluto did not exist 100 years ago.

In his introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry Derrida argues that Husserl encounters a problem accounting for the historicity of ideal structures. i.e. the laws of geometry are clearly non-material; they also originate at a point in time (they are made not discovered). However they are then clearly in some way transcendental, i.e. not dependent on their material inscription in some form (including in people's minds, memories, not just in books or on stone tablets). Husserl's solution to this problem does not satisfy Derrida (can't remember quite what it is) but rather than come up with EITHER the Kantian conclusion -- time and space are a priori conditions of consciousness, but do derive from the human mind -- which tends to divide a realm of transcendental constants from an inaccessible material reality -- OR the materialist solution -- that ideas are functions of particular sets of material, social and historical circumstances (which leads to relativism), Derrida suggests that *everything* is like geometry, and has a quasi-transcendental status. i.e. Pluto (like any other 'event' (i.e. an ordering or naming of an instance in the manifold of space/time) doesn't exist until its origin (discovery): but that origin is in principle repeatable from the very beginning, so there can be no particular priority attached to that beginning. (Or you might say, as soon as it has been discovered, it has always been there). (I think I've explained this right, but it's a tricky question)

Sterling's idea that we read the world through text sounds much more like Fred Jameson in The Political Unconscious -- i.e. there is a real world out there, but our access to it is mediated by texts -- which a) assumes the existence of a real world (as opposed to an unreal world?) independent of our consciousness of it but b) separates our knowledge from it forever, and seems to regress to Kant. I think Derrida is a realist (this is a disputed point, but C. Norris argues it quite convincingly) and so when he says 'text' he doesn't mean 'this thing between me and the world', he means 'the world'. That which 'IS', is like text, making the analogy viable, because it can never be definitely said to be (which would mean being able to distinguish that which is from that which isn't, presence from absence), so it has the indeterminate and unfinished character of a text / a ghost / quasi-transcendental geometry etc. But in both Derrida and de Man there is a privilege attached to 'materiality' (de Man) or things, which remain or resist (Derrida). But this is not a materialism, since ideas are equally singular and resistant to being subsumed under concepts (to use a more Adorno-esque terminology) as things are.

that assimilation and translation may be loss as well as gain eg (my theory of music is partly that its apparent "untranslateability" is a central part of its social value, and that its generation of a communal will-to-translate is another.... these two values are in tension i think) (also this theory of music may be in tension w.my overall "text"-thesis: i don't know cz i only just thought of this)

"yes but if the world is all text does pluto exist before we discover it?"
"it's in the NEXT CHAPTER d00d!"

>>This is pure ideology, and fails to take into account that narrative tends to be made after events, and to confer sense (often spuriously) onto them retrospectively. We actually experience the world through our senses (ie phenomenologically), which might be a better reason for invoking 'Heidigger' (sic).

I am pleased to have successfully arrived at the world's first example of pure ideology! Anyhow mark pretty much said what I'd say - that narrative is ongoing, permanently occurring; that sense-events are also construed within narrative (i.e., "I am writing" is non-different from "I wrote"). Again this is cinniblount's "I am eating the fries" from upthread. Our experiences = narratives in progress, else all is chaos! Which it is, and can't be, hence Derrida

I also think that cardigans and wee bracelets made of sweets should be worn in all Scottish schools.

exactly -- does deconstruction exist for those millions of us who kno nothing of it? has derrida said anything before you read him?

what is hidden in the term "text" (or put there by derrida and by us) which makes it a stonger more powerful term than any of these others?

and WHEN did this thing become hidden in the word text? was it always there?

This may or may not have to do with why "9-11" became the shorthand for the terrorist attacks on that day.

Nonetheless, "the task of getting to grips with the genealogy of a concept may never be adequately completed" still seems vacuous, and various subsequent statements here (e.g., those about ideas being "subject to revision") seem cousins in vacuity. And Alex and Mark need to face this issue - that so much "theory" talk that at first seems significant and startling breaks down into platitudes and truisms. E.g., we start with "There is nothing outside the text" and end up with "Man is a social creature." And a question I would ask myself - as an armchair sociologist - is "What is going on here, when so many smart people are gripped by these platitudes? And what is it about theory/philosophy that seems to give these platitudes genuine significance?" (In any context other than theory, Mark's statement - "when ppl say '[x] date is when everything changed' he is saying 'no, lots of things stayed the same'" - would surpass platitude and achieve social retardation and mental illness.)

But there’s another assumption, which is that Derrida should respond in your language, rather than his.

Is that the assumption? Whether it is or not, those two are not the only choices, my language or his. Ditto to Mark on a postmodernism thread: "iii. x will not agree to use ['postmodernism'] in y's perhaps-precise sense bcz this will simply allow y to win the argument x has with him/her."

The alternative is for two people with incommensurable concepts or lexicons to use the concepts that they do have in common to explain to each other the ones that they don't. This doesn't entail adopting the other person's concepts, but it does require understanding them. And don't say that such explanations are impossible: Every dictionary defines a term in words other than the one being defined. Thomas Kuhn was perfectly capable of explaining Aristotle's concept of motion, despite that concept's belonging to a mode of thought different from ours, and despite no word in modern English coming close to matching Aristotle's concept. "Change of position, the exclusive subject of mechanics for Galileo and Newton, is one of a number of subcategories of motion for Aristotle. Others include growth (the transformation of an acorn to an oak), alterations of intensity (the heating of an iron bar), and a number of more general qualitative changes (the transition from sickness to health).... Position is thus, like wetness or hotness, a quality of the object, one that changes as the object moves or is moved. Local motion (motion tout court in Newton's sense) is therefore change-of-quality or change-of-state for Aristotle, rather than being itself a state as it is for Newton. But it is precisely seeing motion as change-of-quality that permits its assimilation to all other sorts of change - acorn to oak or sickness to health, for examples." There. It's because our concepts of oak, quality, health, etc. are close enough to Aristotle's that Kuhn can use them to explain the foreign concept "motion."

Now, I'm not requiring that Derrida (or Joyce or Allred or Sinker) always write so that I can understand him. But I reject the idea that it is necessary for him not to. If Kuhn can communicate, so can Derrida, and so can you. And what I call the "ILX fadeout," in its basics, is the unwillingness or inability to make the attempt, to find the common words that would explain the uncommon concepts. Often there seems to be an unawareness that the words one is using don't communicate.

Trouble is, what Paul de Man, for instance, has taken from Derrida seems to be the idea that an expression loses its meaning in the stream of life. Or actually, de Man seems to flop around between two incompatible views, one where difference is the condition of meaning and one where the meaning of an expression is its transcendental signified. (But I've only read what de Man wrote in the late 1960s, and his ideas may have changed over time. But his claims that sign and meaning never coincide, that all expressions are mediated, and that language names a void, only make sense if "meaning" means the transcendental signified. Whereas if it's difference that makes meaning possible - and vice versa - then those statements of his are simply irrelevant.) (And I'm aware that I'm throwing around terminology without explaining it. Just to prove that I can be as incomprehensible as the next guy.) As a philosopher, de Man's a mess, but his confusion isn't mere incompetence but serves a psychological purpose. It seems to me that in order to think that Derrida's ideas in relation to difference have any import outside of philosophy, you have to be something of a mugwump, you have to hold incompatible views, be simultaneously dualist and antidualist, postivist and antipositivist, foundationalist and antifooundationalist. Otherwise, Derrida's stuff about difference is just - like Wittgenstein's - a retort to previous philosophy and has no application elsewhere. (Which is exactly what I think.)

I don't know if Derrida himself is a mugwump.

When we say: "Every word in the language signifies something" we have so far said nothing whatever; unless we have explained exactly what distinction we wish to make. (It might be, of course, that we wanted to distinguish the words of language (8) from words 'without meaning' such as occur in Lewis Carroll's poems, or words like "Lilliburlero" in songs.)

Of course, Wittgenstein would count conversation starters and expressions of awe as meaningful too, and he wouldn't claim that we always have to explain exactly what we're distinguishing from in order to be saying something: Often it's obvious what we're responding to. One of his points (to repeat what I said over on the pomo-vs.-futurism thread) is that what gives a word meaning isn't its standing for some object (what object does the word "signify" stand for? What object does "five" stand for? "Of"? "Help!"? "Come here"?) but its social life, as it were, its role in social practices. And this social life can be summarized in this statement about meaning: An event (such as a statement) only has meaning if there's a difference between the event's occurring and its not occurring. The previous sentence is just a platitude, by the way, and barely meets its own criterion for being meaningful: It only exists to counteract previous philosophical ideas (e.g., the reductionism that Quine attacked in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism": that a statement is meaningful only if it is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience). Beyond that, my sentence has no interesting consequences. Wittgenstein realizes this; English dept. profs seem not to, seem to imagine that it's world-important. Furthermore, the sentence really needs to be "An event (such as a statement) only has meaning if there's a meaningful difference between the event's occurring and its not occurring," since obviously, if there were no difference you wouldn't be able to even notice that an event had occurred. But this just reduces to "An event only matters if it matters," which is not an earth-shattering point. And who decides what differences are significant? You understand, there are no useful generalizations to be made here, no general principles. Philosophy has nothing to say about "meaning," unless you think that "events are contextual" and "events happen in time" tell us something we didn't already know, or you think that "for an event to be meaningful it must relate to something it is not" has interesting "dialectical" consequences.

The way Wittgenstein's statement gets you into the stream of life - but you're already in the stream of life, and what he's really trying to get you to do is to stop doing philosophy - is "X only has meaning if you can distinguish it from a bunch of not-X's, which in turn only have meaning if you can distinguish them from other things, and so on." So in understanding one thing you get to understand a lot of things, and you're moving through time, since X both contrasts with previous stuff and has consequences - it must have consequences, or else it wouldn't contrast with anything.

Again, what I've just written doesn't rise high on the meaning meter, given that I don't see what interesting consequences would arise from reading it. I mean, if you hadn't read it, would events in your life forget to contrast with other events? I wrote it because it brings up the supposed regress that seems to have Alex and Ryan veering foolishly towards skepticism. My reasons for thinking that such questions as "can we ever adequately complete a genealogy of X?" and "can we ever adequately know the consequences of X?" are vacuous and foolish are (1) the answer has to be "yes," because if we couldn't ever adequately complete or know anything, then the word "adequate" would have nothing to contrast with and hence would be meaningless, and (2) the reason we learn more about something's antecedents, its context, and its consequences, is not to compensate for some lack. We're enriching our understanding, not recovering from some inadequacy.

The alternative is for two people with incommensurable concepts or lexicons to use the concepts that they do have in common to explain to each other the ones that they don't. This doesn't entail adopting the other person's concepts, but it does require understanding them. And don't say that such explanations are impossible: Every dictionary defines a term in words other than the one being defined. - Frank Kogan

I wonder if a difference between Derrida and Wittgenstein is that Derrida is trying to show how language does not work. Language is social, but that doesn't mean that it can't be examined as an independent system. Maybe there's a difference in how they think it's grounded, or in their focus: language <-> world vs. language <-> speakers.

My guess is that Derrida doesn't think that "language" should work differently but rather that we could gain by being more self-conscious in our use of it. I don't know. I think that some fans of Derrida's want to believe that he provides them with tools to open up the possibilities of language and life and with weapons to understand and counter manipulation. I doubt that he obliges them, particularly. However, the illusion that he does so may actually encourage them as they open their lives and counter manipulation. The placebo effect.

Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words "block," "pillar," "slab," "beam." A calls them out; - B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. - Conceive this as a complete primitive language....

We could even imagine that [this] was the whole language of A and B; even the whole language of a tribe. The children are brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in this way to the words of others.

An important part of the training will consist in the teacher's pointing to the objects, directing the child's attention to them, and at the same time uttering a word; for instance the word "slab" as he points to the shape....

But if the ostensive teaching has this effect, - am I to say that it effects an understanding of the word? Don't you understand the call "Slab!" if you act upon it in such-and-such a way? -Doubtless the ostensive teaching helped to bring this about; but only together with a particular training. With different training the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding.

"I set the brake up by connecting up rod and lever." -Yes, given the whole of the rest of the mechanism. Only in conjunction with that is it a brake-lever, and separated from its support it is not even a lever; it may be anything, or nothing.

One would like to say that nothing here - the words, the teaching, the carrying of slabs - stands alone. But bear in mind that this is a somewhat peculiar use of the term "stand alone," one that only pertains to mechanisms that we might call "theory" and "philosophy." "Stand alone" would mean something like "not part of any discourse, not part of any form of life." This "standing alone" is not something that I can actually imagine.

"For most of 1941, Britain stood alone." Now, this is a different "standing alone," as the claim here is just that Britain was the only nation at war with the Axis powers. It isn't a claim that Britain somehow existed in a sphere in which there were no other nation states, no international relations, no other peoples for the British to contrast themselves with, no war, no world.

Now, I'm wondering in what circumstances it would make sense to say "Britain does not stand alone" and mean "Britain does not exist in a sphere in which there are no other nation states, no international relations, etc., does not exist outside of discourse." I mean, I believe it, and I've said it, but to what purpose? Has anyone ever claimed otherwise? Just what distinction would I be making?

Now, I could be explaining to a young child that formerly there were no nation states, and in the future there might not be any either, and so "Britain" might come to mean something different, or the term "Britain" might vanish altogether, except as the name of a historical entity. But even in this context, to say, "Therefore, 'Britain' does not stand alone," would be odd. Superfluous. I've already made my point.

And anyway, few young children will have gotten this far on this thread.

I could be explaining to a positivist or a phenomenologist that I don't think that statements stand on their own, and to the extent that his positivism or phenomenology tells him otherwise (I don't really know, not knowing enough about positivism or phenomenology), he has to revise it. But this is just an esoteric point in an esoteric field, and I don't see where it applies outside the field.

"But if we realize that 'Britain' does not stand alone, we can imagine that there are alternatives to the nation-state system." We can imagine those alternatives anyway. I don't see how the failure to say "Britain stands alone" prevents anyone from imagining alternatives.

And more to the point, I don't see how saying e.g. "'apple' and 'pear' don't stand alone" (Alex's example) or "'up' and 'down' don't stand alone" helps us to imagine alternatives. Again, no one is claiming that "apple" and "up" stand free of relationships. It's not a relevant comment.

So I don't see how the statement "For most of 1941, Britain stood alone" is eligible for deconstruction, since "constructs" such as "1941" and "Britain" and "stand alone" don't contain the idea that they are eternal and context free. Or, if by "deconstruction" you mean "we don't know that the mechanism - the context, the discourse - won't unravel over time," then "deconstruction" is a vacuous term that applies to everything and nothing. (If you wish to say "X is eligible for deconstruction," you also have to say what it would be like for something not to be eligible for deconstruction.)

"I set the brake up by connecting up rod and lever." -Yes, given the whole of the rest of the mechanism. Only in conjunction with that is it a brake-lever, and separated from its support it is not even a lever; it may be anything, or nothing.

Only in conjunction with the concept of things not deconstructing, can the word "deconstruction" mean anything.

You must be able to conjoin the rod and the lever in a common mechanism in order to draw a distinction between rod and lever. And vice versa. Differences and similarities evolve together. Without the mechanism you can have no difference, and without difference you can have no mechanism. And with that sentence, once again we have achieved vacuity. Except Alex seems to be saying something contrary:

I guess the problem would be that the natural sciences (from a Derrida perspective) don't treat the rest of the world like fruit - they simply assume a great deal about the nature of science, the relationship between science and reality etc., the teleological progression of knowledge - rather than submitting these things to the kind of demystification process that takes place when you say 'this is no longer what it appears to be, an apple, but is in fact all sorts of things at once, and not as distinct from - say - a pear, when you get down to certain basic levels of analysis. So the distinction between an apple and a pear is not natural but relative to a context, and therefore subject to revision.

I'll put aside the contentions about science (seems to me that it's the zoologists and not the demystifiers who successfully reclassify things, and demystification is just wanking; it also seems that you're confusing "science" with "positivist philosophy of science."). In any event, I would say the opposite of what you're saying. It's the very fact that an apple doesn't stand free of context, of pears, it's the very fact that we can't talk about apples free of the social uses that entangle apples with non-apples, it's all this that allows us to differentiate between apples and pears and to make judgments about what's natural and what isn't. The words "natural" and "distinct" are part of the mechanism too, part of the discourse, the context. You're doing the mugwump shuffle here, first claiming that an apple isn't an apple since it's always in relation to pears etc. (rather than being the eternal apple in the sky?) and then claiming that its being in a context is what makes it distinct from pears. No context, no distinction. You're going to have to make up your mind. Which is it? I suggest you choose the latter (the distinction between apple and pear is relative to a context, the context creates the distinction) and jettison the former (the context breaks down the distinction between apples and pears). You seem to be running together two different usages of the word "distinct," the everyday usage ("we can tell apples apart from pears") and a quasi-theological usage ("to be distinct, apples, like souls, must exist even free of all relationships"). But it's only the quasi-theological distinction that breaks down, and no one ever set it up in the first place. (Maybe some Platonists did, once. Zoologists don't.)

"This is no longer what it appears to be, an apple." I don't follow you. In context it's sure an apple. Biology doesn't claim that apples exist free of contexts. Evolutionary biology is as contextual as you can get. You could say, "this is no longer what it appears to be, a transcendent, eternal apple," but you wouldn't, because that's not how it appears. So I don't see what it is that you've demystified. Zoologists might someday reclassify apples and pears so as to obliterate the distinction. Then again, they might not. And so what? Are they mistaken to think they're right just because we don't know for sure that someday, someone might decide otherwise? "Subject to revision" doesn't entail "and therefore can't possibly be right." And of course judging something "right" also occurs in a context, and again, so what?

Your use of the word "natural" seems bizarre. "The distinction between an apple and a pear is not natural but relative to a context." Again, you're flip-flopping your ideas. How does being relative to a context make something unnatural? Are you claiming that nature isn't a context, and that the word "nature" isn't contextual? How can something be natural and not be relative to some context? Your sentence might work if you substituted "transcendent" or "supernatural" for "natural," but why would you do such a thing? Or, to ask a real question, why would someone taking your stance associate the word "natural" with "transcendent"? (This is as if you'd said, "There's nothing outside the text. Oh, except for nature. That's outside the text. And so are distinctions. They're outside the text too. And outside the stream of life.")

Taking out the phrase "not natural but" we get "the distinction between an apple and a pear is relative to a context." This sentence is now correct, but at the cost of its apparent profundity. It's lost its zip.

To get excited by "distinctions are relative to a context," you have to, in your heart, be committed to the opposite, to the idea that real distinctions cross all discourses and transcend all contexts.

I meant "the failure to say 'Britain doesn't stand alone."

Well, distinctions can be expressed and conceptualized and communicated as well as anything else (I don't know how one would argue that they can't be). Mostly, though, we don't consciously think "In using this word, I am distinguishing between this and that," any more than when we're sitting in chairs we continually think "I am sitting in a chair." We don't notice until the chair is kicked out from under us. But certainly some person speaking can be saying A and unconsciously assuming that you'll take it in comparison to B, whereas he thinks the comparison is to W, and so the A he hears isn't the A you said, even though they sound the same.

Here's an example (from the Village Voice) where the potential for misunderstanding was used for comic effect.

The band is sounding like mayhem, but in double time (I mean, compared to usual regular-speed mayhem).

The author of that sentence was making a wisecrack, pretending that "mayhem" was the norm and that the distinction he was making was between speeds of mayhem, whereas actually the distinction he was making was between double-speed and regular-speed rock. For the joke to work, I the reader have to know at the minimum that he's saying (1) the band sounds like mayhem (as opposed to sounding less destructive), (2) the band was playing faster than most bands do, and (3) most bands don't sound like mayhem. (And I must say that the author was lucky to have such a sympathetic and attentive reader as I.)

Seems that in some of my examples I was confused about who was speaking to whom.

I wrote it because it brings up the supposed regress that seems to have Alex and Ryan veering foolishly towards skepticism. My reasons for thinking that such questions as "can we ever adequately complete a genealogy of X?" and "can we ever adequately know the consequences of X?" are vacuous and foolish are (1) the answer has to be "yes," because if we couldn't ever adequately complete or know anything, then the word "adequate" would have nothing to contrast with and hence would be meaningless, and (2) the reason we learn more about something's antecedents, its context, and its consequences, is not to compensate for some lack. We're enriching our understanding, not recovering from some inadequacy. -Frank Kogan

Language is cultural. Speakers of a language do not reinvent the language each time they use it. The understanding the speakers have of the expressions used in a conversation may be adequate for the communicative goals of that conversation, but these expressions have a life of their own beyond that conversation.

In the scenario with the builder and the assistant, say that the assistant was apprenticed from birth. Then it is likely that the language of the builder will have played a role in the assistant's concept formation. And the language of the builder's master...

When I said that maybe Derrida is interested in showing how language does not work, I didn't mean it in a normative sense.

Maybe the language <-> world vs. language <-> speakers dichotomy is false cos it's really a triangle.

I wonder if it would help to think of this in terms of explaining language to a species that doesn't have language. How much can you take for granted?

I hope so.

i think frank is probbly correct that if i'd come at JD from another angle - eg if JD had set text at college and wittgenstein had been extracurricular reading around, which might have been the case five yrs later - i wd be being defensive here abt LW rather than abt JD

the first post i made on this thread is komikal bcz plainly untrue, but i do feel that the answer i want to give frank - a non-reductive explanation of an affinity - is actually very VERY hard to do: it certainly can't be done simply by listing "ideas" (reason not the least: kogan has convinced me that the reason i like meltzer is NOT really his "ideas" - which in a shallow/nostalgic sense i enjoy, it's true, and have internalised and pursued myself - but tonal, really, and attitudinal and rhythmic... i read RM to put me in a particular mood, to bring to mind's foreground a certain stance, i think – and ditto maybe w.JD (who i anyway read a lot less than meltzer)?

also ( to repeat myself): "a LOT of argts on ilx cd be rephrased as judgments abt level or "quality" of readership, like it carves the world into a hidden* class structure"

i consider this a derridean idea, which i think is interesting

(*is it hidden? how can it be hidden when everyone who can read can see it in operation?)

i also believe that a lot of the problem w.the way JD writes derives (paradoxically enough) from a (doomed?) attempt to sidestep or neutralise this same fact of divergent power in the world (ie people who don't read "well" being at a disadvantage in certain situations)

To be less relentlessly negative for a brief instant: my favourite JD remains, I think, the Prologue or whatever to Of Grammatology. And some of the book itself - the Rousseau and Levi-Strauss chapters.

The phrase "preserves yet destroys" seems dead wrong, but Mark assures me that I don't understand it. He hasn't assured me that he ever intends to explain it. The phrase "union of opposites" seems wrong, since I don't think that the relation between "event" and "something it is not" is oppositional. That's my "wisdom" on the matter. I think that Marx is being ridiculous when he says that something's being a commodity makes it something it is not, but I don't know if Hegel bequeathed him this ridiculousness.

But philosophical "grounds" are about levels of being. For something to be grounded, it has to be grounded in something that's firmer, deeper, more solid and less destructible. Speaking for myself, rather than Wittgenstein (but I assume he'd agree), I'd say simply that I don't believe in different levels of being. Saying "Slab!" is an event in the world, just as a rainstorm is an event in the world, and frog dying is an event in the world, just as my posting this response is an event in the world. It doesn't make sense to say that these are grounded in the world; they're already part of the world. Of course, parts of the world interact with other parts of the world, but that's as true of volcanoes as it is of verbal commands.

I'm still puzzling over this, in case I'm misreading you. I don't see how you connect the first half of the statement ("an apple is no longer what it appears to be, an apple") to the second ("but is in fact all sorts of things at once"). Why not say, simply, "an apple is all sorts of things at once"?

An apple, like a person, can play more than one role. (Lucrezia Borgia: daughter, sister, wife.) Off the top of my head, I can think of several roles that an apple currently plays: edible object, commodity, projectile, ripened plant ovary, bearer of carcinogenic pesticides. You can probably think of many others. And we can create new ones. For instance, if I want a context that eliminates the distinction between apples and pears, I can build a large checkerboard the size of a small room, and use fruit as the red pieces and shoes as the black. So for this purpose, there's no need to differentiate apples from pears, but we haven't lost the ability to do so for other purposes. The phrase "this is no longer what it appears to be, an apple" baffles me. I suppose I could say to someone who doesn't know of my new checkerboard, "This is no longer what it appears to be, an apple, but rather a checker piece." But once he knows it can be a checker piece, then "checker piece" is merely another characteristic of an apple, and an apple is once again what it appears to be. An apple wouldn't stop being what it appeared to be unless I discovered that it - somehow - didn't actually have some of its most well-known and beloved characteristics.

We're always having to forget and exclude things in order to handle the concepts we use to interpret the world.

To what extent is this true? We don't have to forget that apples are commodities (and can therefore be exchanged for a teacher's love, or for money) in order to play checkers with them. It's true that as a whole the culture has "forgotten" many things - few nonscholars know that "planet" used to be a non-Earthlike object that wandered in the heavens above the Earth, rather than an object in space (like Earth) that revolves in a fixed orbit around the Sun. But those of us who do know the earlier concept are nonetheless perfectly capable of using the later. When doing astronomy, we don't put the earlier concept into play, whereas when reading ancient texts we might. But now we're back to platitude. The only way to be nonplatitudinous here is to say that knowing the later concept prevents us from knowing the earlier. But quite obviously it doesn't.

For sure, we at times tell ourselves A, not imagining that there could be alternative stories B, C, and D. But this doesn't mean that we can't imagine alternatives.

And so what?

(Is the fantasy here that Derrida has a special method - "deconstruction" - for better imagining alternative stories?)

Do dates (e.g., 9/11) interpret the world? That would be an odd thing to assert. Do clocks interpret the world? Is "How about if we edit it at 3:00 PM my time [Rocky Mountain Time]?" an interpretation of the world? This'd be like saying that bridges and highways are interpretations of the world. A world without dates and hours and minutes wouldn't be interpreted differently, it would be different.

But then again, a world without interpretations would be different too (since interpretations are part of the world). But be careful not to fall into talking as if there were something else ("the world") somehow behind and more real than "3:00 PM" and "September 11."

To name an event - to cite it in discussion say - is always to open it up, by giving it a potential role in stories, histories, plans, rather than letting it sit alone and meaningless.

Not that what you said is wrong, but what I just said is also right. Seems to me that not to name an event is much more limiting than to name it.

Why the obsession with limits, anyway?

Mark Sinker (on the conservative-impulse-of-punk thread):

there were no over-arching tendencies, it was the end of a unity not the start of one: the pistols alone contained six complete distinct and incompatible youth sub-cultures (seven if you include jamie reid)

Well, I'd quibble here - don't see why there can't be a bunch of overarching tendencies ("end of unity" seems to be an overarching tendency itself), and obviously the six subcultures weren't all that incompatible, or the Pistols couldn't have contained them - but my point is that the name "Pistols" didn't prevent Mark from knowing seven stories about them, and won't prevent him or others from coming up with more.

In a gender-reversing move, the Sex Pistols could also have referred to themselves as the Sex Pistils, and the Slits could have been the Sex Stamens, and they could have done duets about the procreation of apples and pears.

I hope you don't object to my referring to the Pistols as an "event." I think I can do so legitimately.

But anyway, getting back to objects, the name "apples" obviously doesn't prevent someone from using an apple as a checker piece. We can even imagine that the person who invented the game of checkers - not having checker pieces available - used fruit and shoes when he first thought it up and demonstrated it. Now let's say that before the invention of board games, every object that could potentially be a game piece already had a name ("fruit" or "shoe" or "pebble" or "coin"). Would such names have performed a limiting action that prevented the invention of checkers (i.e., no one could imagine game pieces, as all potential game pieces bore names that restricted them to nonboardgame roles)? And conversely, does it makes sense to say that before the game of checkers was invented, the names "shoes," "pebbles," and "coins" were excluding and suppressing the objects' use as checker pieces?

Something that I would do as a boy, and that people still do: We want to play soccer, we have a soccer ball, and we're at a park with wide open space but no boundaries or goals. So two of us take off our jackets and lay them on the ground several yards apart and say, "These are our goalposts, and if you kick the ball between them, you've scored a goal." So (1) an object's having one name ("jacket") doesn't preclude our giving it another, and (2) the second name ("goalpost") gives the object scope that it hadn't had previously. Jackets are doing something that they hadn't done before.

Could it possibly make sense to say that in order to use jackets as jackets, it is necessary to exclude and forget their use as goalposts?

so alicia keys being a commodity doesn't change her qua her but changes her qua how she's viewed which in a way is her too.

i don't think that's a wrong point at all, altho it is sorta obvious. marx's original use of this was not as a general "whoa!" point but in a very precise context as against particular economic theories which neglected every aspect of commodities save their value as commodities (i.e. exchange value).

the reason i like hegel etc. is coz at every step the philosophy isn't towards abstraction but towards more actual things in the world (esp. his Logics) and so what he presents is a model of approaches rooted in practicality. like "unity of opposites" is really a few different things -- but mainly a reminder to look at the inner dynamic of things, that in every tendency there are countervailing forces, etc. trivial on its own, but a good starting point just like contrarianism is a good starting point (and sorta the same thing) like if people are arguing that matthew shipp (say) is innovative then it's important to articulate why he might NOT be, as a starting point. hegel insisted on looking at EVERYTHING as sums of tendencies (including the tendencies themselves) and knowledge as an all-sided expansive thing which could only be navigated through a self-consciousness of intent, as part of the individual situating *themselves* similarly within the world.

"preserves yet destroys" is really just "sublates" and again its an invocation of a set of models, but say apply it to newtonian vs. relativistic physics. relativistic physics "preserves yet destroys" newtonian in that it preserves the fact that newtonian physics works in most cases but destroys the claim that they're the real explanitory laws. hegel might say, or maybe i would about him at least, that he preserves yet destroys aristotelian logic.

so what's the difference between that and "change and continuity" which is the conventional boring history paper title? well the important, hegelian, part, is insisting on the relation between the two, that one needs to determine what needs to stay the same for the other part to change, what needs to change for the other part to stay the same, or how changing is the only way to stay the same (which is a question of what criteria of "sameness" you are applying).

also i think a convincing case can be made that Hegel was the first person to argue about "grounds" what you are here (i.e. to not believe in different levels of being).

unfortunately, quoting a bit of hegel is terribly difficult since he's really only got three word aphorisms and then enormous multi-page things. also he's quite difficult and sometimes very stupid, or trite.

which is to say that if we ask "why is it called 9/11 while nobody calls the day (say) of the Bay Area quake by its date and more people know it as d-day than its date even though d-day IMPLIES a date?" then maybe the answer will be interesting.

(nb this applies to hegel too -- his use is that sometimes he reminds you to ask good questions)

a trivial way of looking at how something's name is defining is pro-choice vs. pro-life, as terms which set political landscapes define metaphoric patterns by which people approach the thing in question, etc. i.e. a fetus is a fetus and abortion is abortion but abortion is also this social concept and the struggle for that social definition is also the struggle for whether and how it occurs. when someone says they are pro-life they are saying that abortion is death, for example, i.e. murder, i.e. that a fetus is a human life. they're defining ALL SORTS of things. So asking the question "what is implicitly defined by calling something pro-life" is sharp if you're anti-abortion and deciding if that's the term you want to run an ad campaign on or if you're pro-abortion and trying to ask someone who's never considered that question to break down what they mean by it and what they may have accepted, as embodied in that term, which they have not examined seperately.

But what I'm reacting to is the idea - I'm not sure if this is Alex's or not - that taking one position excludes being able to acknowlege or comprehend the other, knocks the other out of the conversation, with the other only capable of being reintroduced by some difficult theory-based method.

so alicia keys being a commodity doesn't change her qua her but changes her qua how she's viewed which in a way is her too.

No, it does change her. It just doesn't necessarily make her into something she is not.

so sometimes to come to terms with things, i think we do strip away the parts that don't fit with the "theory" of the thing that we're developing, and when we put them back in it changes the "theory" but if we never took them out then we'd have nothing at all.

concretely, say, i used to despise frats in college and then i just watched Old School and it made me feel good about some aspects of what it said frats are about, or could be. now my appreciation of those things is stronger because i had developed other understandings of the world with which to contextualize Old School. but, i suspect, if i hadn't despised frats in college i might never have developed those other understandings.

genovese's books, especially his essays and introductions, are marvelous in laying out this process w/r/t historiography of the slave south.

this is the same as saying that one can be "interestingly wrong" (which i call things all the time) or that someone can make a mistake and be all the better for it (sometimes).

I have a feeling that this is a crucial paragraph. But I have to go to bed now, and I don't yet understand it. I think Kuhn would argue that in paradigm shifts, what's preserved is irrelevant to the shift.

by definition of marx ppl. who sell their labor are alienated from the product of their labor because they cannot lay claim to it, since the labor time itself was sold. so ppl. are alienated from the products of their labor because they are alienated from their own labor-time. (i.e. "sorry honey i can't talk i'm on the clock" -- my time is not my own anymore)

you can't be "alienated" in general, only from something in particular!

also change "something it is not" into "something it was not before" and then there's no problem. i suspect this is totally acceptable given the weirdness of language and translation.

also there's no such thing as a tension between exchange value and use value or any other two qualities of a thing, unless you're speaking metonymically. there can be a tension between tendencies within a thing related to different qualities and how they relate to the rest of the world -- i.e. i can eat this apple or i can sell it for 30 cents. if i sell it, then i am hungry but i can buy a pear and eat that. so the exchange value of the apple becomes the use value of the pear, and in a broad network of exchange then the use value of the pear has some effect on the exchange value of the apple, not to mention its own exchange value. but then as the exchange network transforms and as many pears can be produced as ppl. want then the exchange value of the pear has increasingly *less* to do with its use value and more to do with the labor-time vested in its production. so the argument is that the relationship disappears not because of either quality themselves, but because they come under the sway of different tendencies as the general economic network of exchange transforms.

which has much less to do with philosophy, and more with economics although i could argue that the way these things were arrived at by marx was thru asking hegelian questions (in part).

hey my theory was a theory of knowledge!! a tiny weeny little little concept of a planet can easily be destroyed when the string changes fingers!!

i think it's pretty much built into hegel's idea of antitheticals that it's a mental machinery to produce better theories, and NOT an accurate portrait of how the world stands (or even how certain words work)

I did not understand this post (what in the hell is a "theory of knowledge," and how is this different some plain old theory?), but it seemed to be saying that the destroy-yet-preserves thing ("sublation"/"aufhebung") wasn't meant to apply to actual events in the world. So we wouldn't apply it to Einstein-Newton. This confused me, since in some emails a couple years earlier Mark had used it to analyze tax strikes and gas boycotts.

In any event, soulmate of the ILX fadeout is the ILX vague-out, and I am simply too ignorant of Marx, Hegel, Einstein, and Newton to be specific enough to be intelligible in discussing them. But I still read you as saying that people who sell their labor are alienated (from the products of their labor, and from their labor itself) by definition. So I am alienated from my James Chance review (and its writing style, and the persona that I adopt in it, etc.) no matter what. So to call it "alienated" is not a judgment I or anyone makes, but simply ratifies a pre-ordained fact.

Can Newtonian dynamics really be derived from relativistic dynamics? What would such a derivation look like? Imagine a set of statements, E₁, E₂... E_n, which together embody the laws of relativity theory. These statements contain variables and parameters representing spatial position, time, rest mass, etc. From them, together with the apparatus of logic and mathematics, is deducible a whole set of further statements including some that can be checked by observation. To prove the adequacy of Newtonian dynamics as a special case, we must add to the E_i's additional statements, like (v/c)² << 1, restricting the range of the parameters and variables. This enlarged set of statements is then manipulated to yield a new set, N₁, N₂... N_m, which is identical in form with Newton's laws of motions, the law of gravity, and so on. Apparently Newtonian dynamics has been derived from Einsteinian, subject to a few limiting conditions.

Yet the derivation is spurious, at least to this point. Though the N_i's are a special case of the laws of relativistic mechanics, they are not Newton's Laws. Or at least they are not unless those laws are reinterpreted in a way that would have been impossible until after Einstein's work. The variables and parameters that in the Einsteinian E_i's represented spatial position, time, mass, etc., still occur in the N_i's; and they there still represent Einsteinian space, time, and mass. But the physical referents of these Einsteinian concepts are by no means identical with those of the Newtonian concepts that bear the same name. (Newtonian mass is conserved; Einsteinian is convertible with energy. Only at low relative velocities may the two be measured in the same way, and even then they must not be conceived to be the same.) Unless we change the definitions of the variables in the N_i's, the statements we have derived are not Newtonian. If we do change them, we cannot properly be said to have derived Newton's laws, at least not in any sense of "derive" now generally recognized. Our argument has, of course, explained why Newton's Laws ever seemed to work. In doing so it has justified, say, an automobile driver in acting as though he lived in a Newtonian universe. An argument of the same type is used to justify teaching earth-centered astronomy to surveyors. But the argument has still not done what it purported to do. It has not, that is, shown Newton's Laws to be a limiting case of Einstein's. For in the passage to the limit it is not only the forms of the laws that have changed. Simultaneously we have had to alter the fundamental structural elements of which the universe to which they apply is composed.

Translation: The brake-lever is no longer a brake-lever, since it now belongs to a different mechanism. And if some parts of the new mechanism still seem to come to a stop, this isn't due to what we formerly thought of as braking action.

You can always point to something remaining the same, but for the "preserves" in "destroys yet preserves" to be anything but trivial, it's got to mean more than "well, some things stayed intact." The meteorite that killed off the dinosaurs didn't destroy all the atoms that constituted the dinosaurs, but nonetheless you can't say it preserved the dinosaurs. Some ideas die: Aristotelian motion, celestial wanderers, and so forth. That other things (arithmetic, lights in the sky) survive the destruction isn't necessarily relevant.

When is a genealogy complete? The answer depends on our purposes in undertaking the genealogy. If, say, we want to know how we got from classical physics to quantum physics, we have to go back to the late 19th century. If we merely want to understand quantum physics, we can ignore most that came before 1928. (For relativity, we'd go back further. And no, I don't know what I'm talking about here, but it's the principle, not the dates or the physics, that concerns me.)

he is also pointing out at times that there is an underlying assumption that something is 1 or 0, and that sometimes there are other possible states messing up those nice simple values and undermining the foundations of a system of thought - his undecideables are surely often doing this, aren't they?

I don't know how good this is as a description of what Derrida's doing, but I'll go with it at first.

"Underlying" implies that (1) the assumption is beneath the surface, hence not stated, but (2) nonetheless so deeply pervasive that it informs and supports pretty much all of the relevant behavior.

"There are other possible states messing up those nice simple values." I think that "other possible states" means "possible states other than 1 or 0." E.g., 0.614 might also be a possibility. Or 7.5. Or three 1's and five 0's sitting in a tree k*i*s*s*i*n*g. The problem I have with this assertion is that if the other states are merely possible, but not in effect, then they're not messing anything up or undermining any foundations - but, on the other hand, if the other states are in effect, then we have no right to call "something is 1 or 0" an underlying assumption, since it obviously doesn't inform or support all the behavior in question. Even if we announce in capital letters "SOMETHING IS EITHER 1 OR 0," if our behavior doesn't support this contention, then it's not an underlying assumption of ours.

And furthermore, I would challenge your contention that "there is an underlying assumption that something is 1 or 0." For one thing, very few word pairs actually function as either/or terms. Some that obviously don't are house-home, up-down, loud-soft, hot-cold, good-bad, stable-unstable... and then some that also don't, though sometimes people expect them or want them to, are adult-child, masculine-feminine, essence-accident, absolute-relative... For another, even 1's and 0's don't necessarily have an either/or effect, as you will recall from watching black-and-white TV. So the mere fact that someone is using "binaries" tells you nothing about their assumptions, much less whether the assumptions are "underlying."

I'll say as a hypothesis that people rarely or ever assume 1's and 0's as an underlying assumption, even if lots of people will say an either/or thing and let it hang in their minds for 20 seconds and not take into account all the rest of their actual non-either/or behavior. And these aren't the people who would grip a Derrida's imagination, anyway, at least as evidenced from the little I've read of him. He's interested in Plato and Husserl and those fellows: people who don't start with underlying either/or assumptions, but who rather, to the extent that they engage in either/or thinking, consciously and deliberately work at trying to create and maintain dichotomies (appearance-reality, necessary-contingent) against the dichotomies' tendency to break down, and who make demands on such words as "reality" and "necessary" that we simply don't in everyday life.

the people who would grip a Derrida's imagination

Well maybe I should make that a question. Who/what grips Derrida's imagination? What relevance do critiques of Plato and Husserl have to the understanding of non-Platos and non-Husserls?

But what I'm reacting to is the idea - I'm not sure if this is Alex's or not - that taking one position excludes being able to acknowlege or comprehend the other, knocks the other out of the conversation, with the other only capable of being reintroduced by some difficult theory-based method. -Frank

The problem is that the term appears to become transparent, i.e., the assumption arises that everyone who uses the term will agree on its reference. In some cases, it may just be that the term is underspecified for some users; in other cases, there may be disagreement. I don't think I completely accept the idea that language is a part of the world in the same way that what is not language is part of the world. The possibility of taking different perspectives on an entity or event introduces the potential for conflict.

When I said maybe Derrida is interested in how language does not work, I meant maybe he is interested in how it does not function. I don't know if that makes it any clearer, but 'work' seems to have become bleached of meaning. I was trying to call attention to the fact that language often appears transparent -- the idea that words can stand for what they designate -- when, in fact, it isn't.

My understanding of Wittgenstein is that he's saying that since the negotiation of meaning takes place using language, any clarification of meaning is a clarification of the language, not of the world. But this seems to me like he's trying to have his cake and eat it too. It doesn't seem to jibe with his idea that language is part of the stream of life. Maybe I have Wittgenstein's writings from different periods confused.

There is a paper written by Berlin and Kay on universals in the evolution of color terminology which presents data suggesting that color terms are introduced into languages in a fixed order so, for example, no language will have terms that contrast blue and green before it has terms that contrast black and white (or dark and light). The order roughly corresponds to contrasts made by the visual processing system of primates. Of course, other contrasts can be expressed, just not using basic color terms. (Think J Crew catalogue.)

Because the languages that we know probably have all the basic color terms discussed, the effect that language has upon our construction of the world may be clearer using terms for fruits and vegetables. This is all speculation of course because I don't know when the terms and their referents were introduced into the languages. Even though 'pineapple' is derived from 'apple,' I don't think of pineapples and apples as similar. Similarly, I expect that the French don't think of apples and potatoes as similar. On the other hand, my hunch is that because I learned 'green onion' after I learned 'onion,' I think of green onions as similar to onions. In other words, my hypothesis is that if a complex term for a fruit or vegetable is learned at the same time the basic terms in it are learned, then the complex term will appear transparent; otherwise, the language will force an analogy between the fruit or vegetable referred to by the complex term and the referents of the basic terms it contains. (I think this is something N1tsuh said he likes about reading works in translation.)

There's something Wittgenstein wrote about using (I think) some sort of net to detect variation in a pattern. I think he says something like if the net is fine enough, it can detect every bit of variation. Does anyone know what I am talking about, and if so, could you please refer me to the passage? I can't find it anymore.

"reading this book made me feel good/sad/annoyed/horny/_____"
"no, you only THINK it made you feel good/sad/annoyed/horny/_____"

(i actually had this thought while reading a not-very-smart review of a book which apparently argues that the effects of RSI are "only" psychosomatic, ie caused by stress or anxiety or overwork rather than actual physical misuse of yr limbs)

(ie it seemed to be arguing from a medical position whereby stress or anxiety or overwork, because not physico-chemical in nature, can only cause "unreal" symptoms, which management are therefore in no way responsible for)

Text because in the context Derrida makes that argument he is chiefly concerned with the privileging of 'voice' in certain philosophical contexts. Obviously the privilege of voice is not a constant through the tradition -- e.g. compare with the 'world as book' in medieval thought. This should point out to us that the term 'text' has only a provisional and strategic relevance. If anything, because Derrida's work intends to tell us that there are NO 'magic words', it is an attempt to displace the privilege attached to any such term (cf. 'God'; 'History'; 'Being'). But as Derrida is not simply concerned to say 'there is no truth' or 'truth is lack of truth' (c.f. Lacan, with whom there is a hidden argument taking place well before the publication of _The Post Card_) but instead to think the economy which regulates the substitution of terms in that position (i.e. we can't get out of having an onto-theological guarantee, a magic word, that easily) he knows that 'text' risks becoming such a word, and indeed, for the space of that sentence / article / period in his thought it does. But deconstruction is the repeated taking up of the same / similar problems in different contexts, so must move on. The substitution of 'text' for 'differance', 'restance', 'pharmakon', 'supplement' in the sequence of Derrida's writing should be seen as the attempt to deflect the privilege which might attach to one term.

This paragraph is at odds with itself:

(1) There are no magic words.
(2) There shouldn't be magic words.
(3) We can't get out of having a magic word so easily. "Text" risks becoming such a word.

Maybe you mean "pseudo-magic words." But if they're pseudo, are they a problem? ("There are no guns or bullets." "But there are toy guns." "We must get rid of them, so that they don't shoot anybody.")

But deconstruction is the repeated taking up of the same / similar problems in different contexts, so must move on.

What problems? Why shouldn't privilege attach to a term? (Not a rhetorical question.)

A Derridaen magic word ("différance," "restance," "pharmakon," "supplement," "text") seems to be the dumb twin of what I call a "stupor word," which is a Superword's stupid cousin. A Superword is a word such as "punk rock" that you progressively redefine so as to make it unattainable, so that e.g. no music is quite good enough to be punk rock; when something gets called "punk," the word scampers off so as to escape embodiment. And a lot of interesting music is left in its wake. This is not a problem.

(Superword in action: Hardcore punks aren't real punks since they aren't attacking their primary audience, James Chance isn't a real punk because his attacks on the audience have nothing to do with the audience, people who call themselves real punks aren't real punks since they're identifying themselves with a tradition rather than upending one, people who call themselves "real punks because we're upending punk" aren't real punks since they refuse to acknowledge their complicity in and dependence on the tradition they're claiming to overthrow...)

Stupor words are Superwords that have lost their adventure but trudge on, long after the thrill of wizardry has gone. Plato made his Super(magic)words ("being," "presence," "speech," "reality") hard to embody, since he tried to propel them out of the activities (mere "appearances") that were their home - as if they were Ben Tre, and he needed to destroy them in order to save them. More than two millennia later, John Dewey asked Plato why'd you do it?, and (no response coming) decided, "Plato did it because he was scared." Scared of what? "Uncertainty. The perils of daily, practical existence." As if that's an explanation. (Maybe it is. But if Plato was so scared of uncertainty, why did he try to put "certainty" out of reach?)

Sure, if you give "voice" or "signified" (etc.) really far out definitions, they will be unattainable, always contaminated by "text," and nothing'll be outside the "text." (And the requirement that they be "outside the text" [whatever that means] is not one that most people actually subscribe to or even think about one way or the other.) "Voice" is the stupor word, and "text" is the dumb twin that occupies the terrain that "voice" abandoned. But, not having read "There is nothing outside the text" in context, I'm puzzled as to why Derrida would say it. If anything, far from demystifying "voice" - if that's what Derrida is opposing "text" to - it exalts the word further, sends "voice" to the realm of the pure and the chaste, makes it untouchable. (And Alex does the exact same thing with "natural" in his passage about apples.)

But deconstruction is the repeated taking up of the same / similar problems in different contexts, so must move on.

Which can justify deconstruction's being a one-trick pony - except I challenge the idea that the "repeated taking up of same / similar problems" is necessary, given that the only contexts where such "problems" occur are theology, philosophy, and theory, all of which are quite avoidable. "Voice," "presence," "meaning," et al. are perfectly good words elsewhere, don't become stupor words, aren't eligible for deconstruction. (E.g., "His voice seemed absent from his text." "Well, that's what happens when he writes for Rolling Stone. His words either freeze into stiffness or take on these horrible kind of gonzo antifreeze mannerisms that ultimately seem just as stiff, like they're frozen into some hideous simulacrum of 'liveliness.' However, in other contexts, such as Radio On, his voice flowers." Emphasis added, so you won't claim that I'm claiming that "voice" is context free.)

Two questions here: (1) Does Derrida have any application outside of philosophy? (Possible answers might be: "yes, when he's not doing deconstruction," "yes, when we employ his edification strategies, but for purposes other than deconstruction.") (2) Why does philosophy continue onward, since its current "problems" seem fundamentally irrelevant? (Answer [from the paperback psych shelf] might be: "to feel like you're dealing with your problems when you're not actually doing so.")

Third question: Why is Frank bothering with all this? (Possible answers: "to bring you back to the [mundane] level where you'll try to figure out what's actually troubling you" and "to teach people how to sustain a conversation with me, so I won't be so lonely.")

"Undecidables are threatening. They poison the comforting sense that we inhabit a world governed by decidable categories." That's why I thought he was suggesting that the binaries don't always work. I think he very much likes these undecidables, and I do too.

Why? Because you like to threaten people? Or do you yourself feel threatened by decidable categories? This just seems like posturing.

(Not that I'm unsympathetic towards the posture.)

Surely, it would depend on the situation, whether either a decision or the failure to decide was threatening.

What are you really afraid of?

Derrida as a formalist turn, a making strange, looking awry (well, that's Lacan rilly), insistence that an explanation/justification of a worldview is *not* an endorsement but a critical beginning of a dismantling?

I am drunk.

Easy. Most people don't do philosophy. Of course, this depends on what we mean by "philosophy." But my question is really anthropological/sociological: Why do Martin and Mark and Alex and Sterling do philosophy? What are they trying to achieve? What do they think they're taking care of? "They can't escape it" is no answer.

No. I doubt that Wittgenstein ever said anything like it. Certainly not in his later philosophy, which is what I've read and what I've been quoting and which is the stuff that's supposed to have parallels to Derrida. Show me the passage. In particular, show me where he says that meaning and language are not part of the world. You'd have to have him arguing that social activities aren't part of the world, which he'd never argue.

An example of "clarification" might be showing us how the builder and his assistant conduct their business, e.g. that "Block!" has to do with building walls rather than playing football.

I can imagine someone saying, "This is how atmospheres function" - though the word "function" seems odd - and a second person saying, "No, atmospheres don't function like this, they function like that." But I can't imagine someone saying, "Atmospheres malfunction," unless he believes that God created atmospheres for a purpose but didn't do a very good job of it, hence atmospheres don't work as He'd intended.

Someone can create an analogy, and someone else can say, "Your analogy doesn't work," i.e., it doesn't make the comparison you want, doesn't do what you want it to. Someone can even create a language (say, a computer language) for a specific purpose, which the language can fail to meet. But you can't talk of language itself malfunctioning, or if you do, I don't understand you until you elaborate.

"I can't use language to get people to agree with me." Is that the purpose of language, to force agreement?

"I can't use language to get people to understand me." Is that the purpose of language, to get people to understand me? (This might be how people get the idea of language malfunctioning. But I blame the people, not "language.")

Someone can use language to feel he's engaging with me when in fact he's quite successfully evading my ideas and by doing so is having a richer and fuller life than he would otherwise. Or so an observer who's antagonistic to my ideas might decide. And from his viewpoint, language here is functioning quite well, as it allows for successful evasion, and one that's quite stress-free for the evader, as he's not even aware of having to take evasive action. The observer envies him! But evasion is just one of the functions of language, just one among many uses to which we put words.

(i) This is what machine A, machine B, and machine C do, and from this we can think of other machines that are or might work similarly to A, B, and C, bearing in mind that there are machines that we don't know of, and - of course - machines that haven't been invented yet, whose similarities to A, B, and C may be fewer.

(ii) "This is what all machines do, and any possible machine, or else it's not a machine."

Number ii seems odd, doesn't it? This rope and pulley doesn't work like an internal combustion engine, therefore it must be broken.

It would be possible to reduce the question of whether Faith Hill is country or not to a disagreement about language, but that would be to trivialize the main difficulty, i.e., when each substantive term in the definition of 'country' should be used and the relation of each such term to some subset of terms in the language, depending on how meticulous you wanted to be about it (the degrees of separation). Ditto for terms assigned to Faith Hill. Perhaps you (who am I addressing?) are only interested in whether or not this is possible and don't even care about what people have in their heads when they use the words.

I asked my sister to get me The Politics of Friendship for Christmas, and she did! This is the first book by Derrida that I will ever (try to) read. (Perhaps this is not surprising after all the nonsense I've posted on this thread. But I (think I) learned to ask questions like 'who am I addressing?' from skimming the first essay.)

translate object of desire to "objective knowing" and you get a derridaish answer to why philosophy? a reflexive "inescapable" process whose purpose is in consistantly reframing ontological questions and discovering them? better yet, a toolkit of models for how this might be done?

which is to say that i find myself mired in philosophy to the extent that every time i try to explain/understand something the questions of how i approach it need to be resolved anew?

What I'm trying to do, among other things, is to bring us to specifics, so that the questions stop being "Does language malfunction?" and "Is communication short of perfect?" They are bad questions not just because they're stupefyingly vague, but because they require us to assume that language has a single purpose and that communication has a single purpose. (Do machines malfunction? Sure. But no one expects there to be a model that explains how all machines should function or a single model to explain the malfunction of any and all machines. And if someone says "No machine functions perfectly," that person has simply cut himself adrift from idiomatic English. If someone says "No door handle functions perfectly," he doesn't know what he's saying.)

(Well, you had to be there.)

As clarification has been added to the language, so have the possibilities for humor. For instance, one day assistant B was merely observing, while another assistant, C, who was very stupid, actually did the work. The wall under construction only needed one more stone, a block, as any intelligent workman would have been able to see. The builder called out "Block!" but C didn't hear him well, thought it might have been "Pillar!" and went over and tapped the pillar. Builder A and his usual assistant B found this hilariously stupid, that C could possibly think that the builder would have wanted a pillar. So now when A and B are working together A will sometimes, as a joke, call out "Pillar!" when he obviously needs some other stone. Or A will call "Block!" and B will tap a pillar. (The invention of irony.)

Now, on a later day, when things are back to normal and there is no shortage of squat pillars or of any type of building stone, an observer might conclude that the situation is 1's and 0's (either/or) in relation to pillars: Either the builder calls out "Pillar!" and the assistant brings him a pillar, or the builder calls out something else and the assistant brings something other than a pillar. But the observer's conclusion is wrong, obviously, since as we've seen "Pillar!" can sometimes bring forth two blocks. The observer could further decide that binary assumptions are built into the language, but he would be just as wrong, for the same reason.

"But couldn't we say that originally an unstated binary assumption was built into the language, but that this assumption was overthrown on the day the workmen used blocks as pillars?" The fact that the workmen did start using blocks as pillars would argue against this. An assumption isn't "built into" a language if the people using the language can act contrary to the assumption. "But can't we say that the assumption was built into the language, but on the day the workmen used blocks as pillars, they changed the language so that it would no longer contain the assumption?" Yes, we could say this, but to what purpose (unless our goal is to make our concepts of "built into a language" and "change in a language" so weak as to be useless)? Whether we (stupidly) decide that the assumption was there but overthrown, or that it never was there in the first place, nothing in the original situation prevented the novelty of using blocks as pillars. "Built into" becomes a worthless concept when divorced from the idea of prevention. (And how can we ever decide if the assumption was there or not, and why would we want to? I could one day hit someone over the head with a chair. Perhaps I knew I could do this all along, having seen it done in movies. Or perhaps I had no idea until the day I clonked the guy. But my having given the matter no thought can't mean that I'd previously assumed I couldn't use chairs to clonk people.)

"He hadn't realized until that moment that he could use blocks as pillars!" But this doesn't mean he'd been prevented from realizing such a thing, or hadn't had the capacity. And anyway, for all we know, the idea had been percolating subconsciously. ("He hadn't realized until that moment how much he loved her.")

And the same is true of the stones: They wouldn't be building stones without the activity of building.

By "relation to the world," many theorists seem to think they mean the relation between an utterance ("Slab!") and an object (a type of building stone). Well, that relation would be that when the builder calls out "Slab!" the assistant brings a stone of a particular shape, or at least should bring a stone of a particular shape. (And note the practical and humorous modifications above, so that the command doesn't always bring forth the same type of stone, and sometimes brings forth laughter instead.)

Of course, someone could always refuse to participate in building activities, though his tribe or group might force him to participate anyway, or at least try to force him. But for the tribe or group as a whole, I would say that once they decide buildings are necessary, the choice isn't really between the activity and its abandonment, but rather between the activity and its modification, or between the activity and some other way of building (e.g., different power relationships or other types of buildings, say of mud rather than stone).

It could be turned into a name, perhaps. For example, slabs are kept in one warehouse, blocks in another, and so forth, and when the builder and the assistant are walking by one such warehouse, and the assistant says "slab," the builder might understand from the circumstances that the stones in that warehouse are slabs rather than blocks, etc. (A type of stone being abstracted from the command "Slab!")

But the sound "slab" may develop other uses too: A workman is holding a puppy, and another says "Slab!" though there is no building stone or building activity in sight. So the first workman understands that the second workman wants him to bring over the puppy. (The act of bringing being abstracted from the command "Slab!")

Or the two workmen are inside eating lunch, and one of the workmen says "Slab!" and the other understands from this that the first thinks they should go out and resume building. (So a part of the operation is being used to signify the whole: But note, this usage of "Slab!" doesn't name the overall operation but rather requests or commands that the operation resume. That is, the distinction being drawn isn't between building as opposed to, say, swimming or bicycling or even eating, but building as opposed to taking a break from building.)

And once again we've achieved vacuity, as the point I've just made has no practical consequences. No one uses names outside of activities. The only reason to make the point is to counteract a philosopher who claims it's the object - the slab - that gives the word meaning. No [I reply], only in the activity do the words and stones have meaning. (And my message for Alex is that our "insight" - that only in an activity do the words and stones have meaning - tells us nothing about whether we should revise an activity or leave it as is; nor does the insight provide us with a method or basis for making such revisions or understanding them. How could it?)

But when he did, he whacked her on the head with a chair.

Who says?

Who would argue with that? Why bother even to say it?

"Slab!" may not always communicate as intended, but sometimes it does, and so what either way? Why would we discuss such a topic? (Not a rhetorical question. Nonetheless, I wouldn't expect such a discussion to be anything but dysfunctional.)

"Do people get sick?"

Yes, everyone does at some point.

"Do buildings collapse?"

Yes, some do. But I wouldn't worry about it if your city has good building codes.

"Does he brush his teeth?"

No. He's only brushed them twice in the last month.

"Does he kill people?"

Yes, he's killed two in the last year.

"Do machines malfunction?"

I don't understand what's being asked. I'm sorry.

the subquestion implied by "language does not always communicate what is intended to be communicated" is "why would anyone think otherwise?"

but i think, tho can't at the moment demonstrate "people OF NECESSITY think otherwise" just as knowing that "there is no object of desire" doesn't quench the desire, then knowing "language does not always communicate what is intended to be communicated" doesn't prevent people from acting as though it did. again, this is very Lacanian and I think I should start a Lacan thread as I get more into him. also, this is the "a letter always reaches its destination" story which was lacan's classic disagreement with derrida.

we might go on to examine the way in which the disjoint between what is intended, what is percieved, and what is expressed and how its perception is based on a self-reflexive desire to see what is "really" intended (we could argue that the girl who takes a guy playing it cool as a guy expressing love doesn't just read "love" but "playing it cool to avoid expressing love") is a more accurate way to approach
communication than others.

Anyway how does "But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion,
question, and command?--- There are countless kinds: countless
different kinds of use of what we call "symbols", "words",
"sentences". And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given
once for all; but new types of language, new language-
games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become
obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this
from the changes in mathematics.) " match up with yr opposition to "But can't we say that the assumption was built into the language, but on the day the workmen used blocks as pillars, they
changed the language so that it would no longer contain the assumption?"

I mean wouldn't Wittgenstein say that when the activity changed, the way of living changed, the language-game changed, the "language" changed?

if we, as wittgenstein does, assert that to describe a language is to describe a way of living, then couldn't we argue that all things that aren't thought of that could be aren't thought of because of the way of living? wouldn't that be almost tautological? hence, saying that "all things that aren't thought of aren't thought of because they aren't built into the language" is equally tautological?

then, your opposition to this in fact is a *seperation* of language from activity, of exactly the sort wittgenstein opposed? an argument that language is a "reflection" of activity.

A builder says "slab!" and he is brought a pillar. he assumes the workman has the two reversed. the builder says "pillar!" and he is brought a slab. his assumption is confirmed.

the next day the workman responds to the commands in the opposite way. his "language" is to just bring something whenever asked for anything. his way of living is that he won't get to enjoy the building anyway.

two ways of living, two languages, one activity. is it appropriate to say that the language is not the way of living after all, but simply the lived activity?

i'm happy if i take all the tricks in a game of hearts, you if you lose them because you think its hearts and i think its spades. we don't speak of the game as we play, and we are both happy when we "win". i am happy because i think you are sad, and v.v. activity occurs, "language" (the game of cards) occurs, communication occurs (letters reach destinations, cards are exchanged). but is that "a way of living"?

Wittgenstein is supposed to have asked "Could one play chess without the queen?" (This never never appeared in his writing, however.)

"He's changed" can mean anything from "his mood is a little different" to "he suffers from multiple personality disorder." What you're going to call "change" depends on the context and the conversation, and your particular purposes at the time. And so it is with language "change." Sorry if this is a boring response, but there's nothing general to be said about whether languages change, beyond the fact that it's sometimes useful to say that they do, and other times irrelevant to say so.

You're missing the thrust of my objection, which is to the idea that something is "built into" a language that prevents people from creating or imagining alternatives. Whether we decide that the change is in the language or it creates a new language is irrelevant to my point, though I'd think the changes would have to be big and many before we say the language is a new one.

Middle English and Modern English are different languages (I would say), but if we ask "What day did the changeover occur?" we're being ridiculous.

I want to clarify why it has to be a meaningful difference: When I lift up my phone receiver, I either get a continuous dial tone or a stutter tone. The stutter tone means that I've got a message in my Voicemail. If instead, the stutter tone occurred at random, unrelated to whether I had a message, then the difference wouldn't be meaningful, even though it was a difference.

Back in Why Music Sucks #7, Mykel Board pointed out that some people when speaking English say "spot" with a puff of air after the t, like the t in "tuff," other people barely pronounce the t at all, practically ending on the o, and yet others pronounce the t without a puff of air, so it's almost a d, but the meaning of "spot" doesn't change thereby. In Hindi, however, meaning differs depending on whether or not there's a puff of air. (Of course, for English speakers the puff may be meaningful in a different way, as it may indicate something about the speaker's class or region of origin.)

But our having to add the second "meaningful" to our sentence only shows how empty the basic idea is, despite its being right.

"He says he brushes his teeth."
"No, that's wrong. We're lucky if he brushes once a week."

The word "Yes" not only confirms some information ("He's a killer"), it registers a value judgment (killing one person is sufficient to make you a killer). But not only might different people make different judgments here, the same person might make a different judgment in a different situation, e.g., of a soldier in frequent combat: "They say he's a heck of a killer." "Naw. I doubt that he's killed more than two people in the entire operation."

"Yes" is usually a statement of affirmation or approbation, though it can also mean "What do you want?" (you answer the doorbell, you see a stranger, you say, "Yes?") or "You've gotten my attention" ("Frank." "Yes?" "Are you ready for supper?") or "Continue, I'm still paying attention" (though "Uh-huh" is the usual form here) or "It's been accomplished" (basketball announcer Marv Albert: "He drives right, he shoots... Yes!")

Now, speaking generally of "Yes" in its noun form "assent," I can say "Assent is discourse-dependent" and "Assent is contextual," except that if I did so, everyone would look at me like I was an idiot for stating the obvious. How can you have assent without a conversation? What would someone be assenting to if there were no conversation? -Of course, there can be tacit assent (which is harder to prove in court, and is useful for passive-aggressives), but nonetheless there must be some arrangement that one is assenting to. The statement "Assent is a discursive property" isn't even a platitude or a truism, it's so unnecessary. It's moronic, despite being correct. All it means is that you affirm or disaffirm, approve or disapprove, and confirm or disconfirm within particular contexts and discourses.

"There is no objective assent." What could such a sentence mean?

I'm leading up to this: In most instances the words "true" and "false" run very close to "yes" and "no" in their usage. ("They say he's a killer." "That's true. Six years ago he shot his neighbor." "He claims to brush his teeth." "That's not true. We're lucky if he brushes more than once a fortnight.") And like assent, truth is discourse-dependent and context-dependent - and again, this means no more than that you judge things to be true and false within contexts and conversations. And this is an insight that ought to have no interesting consequences, since it offers no guidance as to whether you should judge something true in a particular situation, nor does it guide you in how you judge discourses relative to each other.

However, despite this insight's apparent superfluity, it causes contention. Say it, and you can be seen as standing for instability, or for freedom (depending on what buttons it presses in the listener). Deny it, and you're standing for firmness, or rigidity. To my mind, this contentiousness is filibuster, but my saying so doesn't end my interest in the matter, since filibusters don't occur at random, without cause. And different people will participate in the filibuster for different reasons (everything from identity politics to compulsive self-justification), so there's no single answer to "What are they evading via the filibuster?"

This does not equal "people OF NECESSITY act as if it did." Surely you don't mean this. At most you can say "People of necessity act as if it should," or "people of necessity act as if it could." (Not that you should say this.) My point is that the obviousness of "language does not always communicate what is intended to be communicated" makes it a completely dysfunctional sentence. I think that before you discuss whether the sentence is right or wrong, or whether people believe it or not, you need to explain why we're not mentally ill in discussing the sentence in the first place. WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? How is this not a filibuster?

OK, let's imagine a neighboring tribe that has the identical building language up to where the words "true" and "false" are introduced, but here the language diverges. "True" doesn't mean "Yes, I'm telling you to bring me a slab" but rather "It's a good thing that you bring me the slab" [or block or whatever]. And tapping a slab would translate not as "Did you say 'Slab!'?" but as "Would it be a good thing for me to bring you a slab?" Now, in some situations, the assistant will, at the start of the work day, tap upon hearing the first 30 or so commands, despite his having heard perfectly. This is to establish the conventions for the day: If for these 30 the builder says "true" whenever he opens his hand, then the convention is established that "true" and the open hand are interchangeable. So "true" will mean both "Yes, I said 'Slab!'" and "It's a good thing that you bring me the slab." If, however, during these first 30, he sometimes says "true" but folds his arms (to indicate "It would be good for you to bring the slab, but it's not what I'm instructing you to bring"; in order to do this, he might deliberately call "Slab!" when a block is what he needs), we'd translate that as "The building plan calls for a block in this situation, so that's what I'm instructing you to bring me, because I'll get in trouble if we don't put a block here, but you and I both know that a slab in this spot would make a better building" or "would make the building fall down, which would be fine with me - 'cause it's ugly as shit - except that I'd be punished." So for this day, "true" and open hand would not be interchangeable.

On such days, "open hand" is an affirmation but "true" is the approbation.

So the language has developed two different types of assent, one (opening the hand) whose opposite is "disconfirmation," another ("true") whose opposite is "dissent."

But let's pause for a moment, in order to forestall vacuous questions like "Is understanding ever complete?" We make different demands on the words "understanding" and "complete" in different situations. Suppose that in observing a young child being taught the commands of the building language, I see that the child has grasped that he's to bring something upon hearing any of the commands "Slab!" "Pillar!" "Block!" and "Beam!" but hasn't yet figured out that he's to bring different types of stone in response to the respective commands. So he may bring a block upon the command "Slab!" or he may bring a leaf, or a hat. I would say that so far his understanding is partial. And then, a couple of days later, I see that he brings a slab whenever he hears the command "Slab!" and a block whenever he hears the command "Block!" and so forth. And I say, "Now his understanding is complete." And if someone were to say, "No, he doesn't yet understand irony," I would give that person an irritated look for saying something irrelevant, for basically changing the subject. Yet I myself, in some other circumstances, might say that a workman misunderstood a command because he didn't understand that it was ironic.

A trouble I have understanding your posts is that you treat "language" and "other activities" as if they were nonproblematic terms, but I never know what you consider a linguistic activity and what you consider something else. You have to give examples, describe something, say what's linguistic about it, describe something else, say how it's not linguistic, and so on. Otherwise I'll never understand you.

Now, an assistant might not understand what's going on here, might not understand that "Pillar!" means "mindfuck is commencing," but his confusion doesn't turn his earlier understanding of the command ("Pillar!" means to bring a pillar) into a misunderstanding.

Before the psychotic builder had moved to the village, such mind games had been unknown. We could say, therefore, that the workmen's understanding of the building language had been incomplete up to the psycho's arrival, as the workmen hadn't yet understood the language's potential to be used for sadistic and humiliating purposes. And furthermore, we could say that anyone's understanding of a language is necessarily incomplete, since there's no way to understand all the ways the language could be used. But I wouldn't want to say either of these things, since they stretch the use of "understanding" and "complete" beyond functional limits.

And my own understanding is incomplete, in that I don't understand what people are trying to accomplish when they do stretch words in such a way (which seems to me what Alex is doing).

But as I said, I don't know what you mean by linguistic and nonlinguistic. In Wittgenstein's building language, neither the vocalization "Slab!" nor the particular stone is part of the language unless there's a building activity for each to be part of - and once there is, then they're both part of the language, the stone as much as the word.

What I mean is something like this. In the process of trying to explain something to someone, you often end up clarifying it for yourself. The process of putting thought into sentences seems to make thought clearer. This is because you're trying to pin a conventional meaning on what you're saying in order to be understood. You think about what you mean. Or maybe you're only making stuff up to fit the language.

Mime seems to be a commentary on movement. If you explained to someone what Charlie Chaplin did in some movie, hearing the explanation more than once would probably not be funny. I often laugh more than once at stuff like that and feel dopey. But maybe I don't have to. What if we didn't "think" with language but with mime?

That probably doesn't help. I should probably think more before I post.

if i say "all quadratic equations either have zero as a root or two roots -- one negative, one positive" would you say this is so obvious as to be disfunctional? or would you take it as a reminder to check for a zero root before asserting a given quadratic has two roots?

"language does not always communicate what it is intended to" is not even MY point, but rather something that people do think often, in the context of activity, so maybe if a builder asks for a slab and is angry when he is given one the worker things "ah, but language does not always communicate what it is intended to" instead of having a brain meltdown.

you use the aristotelian concept of motion, i use the newtonian one. we're talking about a ship moving at a certain speed and neither of us notice the other's distinct concept of motion. are we speaking the same language? then we start talking about planets, and we DO notice. has our language ceased to he the same?

suppose only i notice and you are getting confused. then i say "we're not speaking the same language" do you then reply "well, of course not because no two people speak language exactly the same. why are you speaking disfunctionally?" or do you reply "i see, we are using words for different ideas"?

two of these men are insane, one is sane. where the sane man draws the line matters a great deal to how he acts anyway. where do difft. people draw the line? where do YOU draw the line? how do you change where the insane men don't draw the line, or do you?

derrida was a philosopher because he wanted to understand what made books make him feel certain ways, i think. lacan because he wanted to make people more "sane," cornell west is a pragmatist philosopher because he wants to use it to approach how race works in america.

why are you?

The idea of reflexive breathing seems daft enough to bring us back to the position that reflexivity is what language brings to such acts as breathing. But more complex acts might not be as easily dismissed.

When you are running a marathon, for instance, surely you monitor yourself quite carefully, adjusting your speed, slowing down if you think you can't keep this up, or speeding up if you think you can outrun someone or whatever. We don't need to fictionalise a voice in someone's head in order to regard this kind of self-monitoring as self-reflexive, do we?

Isn't an action taken to regulate itself a self-reflexive act? (Consider: you start puring water from the kettle into a cup and notice just in time that you have tipped it at an angle that is likely to fill the cup quicker than usual, so you lift the kettle sharply to make sure you don't spill anything. Isn't this a self-reflexive act?)

Sterling: frank why do you insist on looking for ANSWERS in what are *reminders to ask questions*?

Just another example of why I consider this thread dysfunctional. Which isn't meant to imply I'm not having a blast on it, a lot of the time, with my builders and their potent little slabs. Nothing I'm reading, however, makes me doubt my hypothesis that you guys are engaging in a filibuster. But only you guys can answer the questions that I'm actually posing you (what are the impulses, problems, experiences that led you to Derrida et al., and what are such conversations as these acting as a stand-in for?). But I doubt that you'll accept the premise of my question, which is that this is a filibuster.

Let us start, since we are already there, from the problematic of the sign and of writing. The sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, the present thing, "thing" here standing equally for meaning or referent. The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence. Whether we are concerned with the verbal or the written sign, with the monetary sign, or with electoral delegation and political representation, the circulation of signs defers the moment in which we can encounter the thing itself make it ours, consume or expend it, touch it, see it, intuit its presence. What I am describing here in order to define it is the classically determined structure of the sign in all the banality of its characteristics - signification as the différance of temporization. And this structure presupposes that the sign, which defers presence, is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and moving toward the deferred presence that it aims to reappropriate. According to this classical semiology, the substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both secondary and provisional: secondary due to an original and lost presence from which the sign thus derives; provisional as concerns this final and missing presence toward which the sign in this sense is a movement of mediation.

In attempting to put into question these traits of the provisional secondariness of the subshtute, one would come to see something like an originary différance; but one could no longer call it originary or final in the extent to which the values of origin, archi-, telos, eskhaton, etc. have always denoted presence - ousia, parousia. To put into question the secondary and provisional characteristics of the sign, to oppose to them an "originary" différance, therefore would have two consequences.

1. One could no longer include différance in the concept of the sign, which always has meant the representation of a presence, and has been constituted in a system (thought or language) governed by and moving toward presence.

2. And thereby one puts into question the authority of presence, or of its simple symmetrical opposite, absence or lack. Thus one questions the limit which has always constrained us, which still constrains us - as inhabitants of a language and a system of thought - to formulate the meaning of Being in general as presence or absence, in the categories of being or beingness (ousia).

full text

(1) Derrida is talking about signs (the word "sign" raises no difficulties - we all know what a sign is, right?) and about what signs do. He's giving us something like a theory of signs. What he says can be applied to any and all signs.

(2) Derrida is talking about signs (the term still raises no difficulties; when he says "sign" we know what's a sign and what isn't) in relation to particular assumptions that some people make about signs, and in relation to a particular problematic that arises from these assumptions. (A "problematic" is a set of problems and assumptions that are bound together; e.g., if you assume that mind is fundamentally different from matter and that matter is only knowable to the mind via sense impressions, you create a problem in determining what part of your experience of an object comes from the object and what part is added by your mind. Abandon those assumptions, and the problematic disappears.) Derrida is not necessarily endorsing the assumptions or the problematic; he's just showing where the problematic leads us. So this passage is not a commentary on signs but on a particular problematic.

(3) To theorize about signs in general - in the abstract - is both futile and unnecessary, since not every sign does the same thing in all circumstances or does the same identical type of thing as every other sign. For example, clouds are a sign of rain, and "One Way" is a traffic sign, but clouds and traffic signs act differently as signifiers, despite their both being called signs. Derrida knows this, and knows that he's here dealing with a particular problematic that - at most - relates to only some signs, even if the problematic refers to "the sign." As in No. 2, he's showing where the problematic leads us, but he's not endorsing it.

I've seen too little Derrida to know where he stands; my guess is that most people read him as doing No. 1, he actually wavers between 1 and 2, with maybe some 3 thrown in, but if we want we can ignore 1 and 2 and read him as only pertaining to 3.

No, the sign is not usually said to be put in place of the thing itself. Almost no one says this or even assumes that there need be a thing, the exceptions being some - not all - of the philosophers/theorists who've specifically addressed this type of issue. And what these philosophers say about the relation between sign and thing has no bearing on how they actually use signs.

Millions of people stop at stop signs every day, and not a one believes that the stop sign is put in place of a command to stop rather than being the command itself.

Or think of the command "Slab!" in our building language. It is the command, not a substitute for one. Or (J.L. Austin's example) think of the vow "I do" in a marriage ceremony. It's a marriage vow itself, not something that takes the place of a marriage vow. Or think of "2 x 4 = 8," which sure seems to me to be a calculation, not something that's put in place of a calculation.

Smoke is a sign of fire, but the smoke isn't put in place of the fire, but rather leads us to the fire.

"Call me at the first sign of trouble." For the "usual" assumption to be right, the trouble would have to be a meaning or a referent, and the first sign of trouble would have to be put in the place of it. This contention is nonsense. Literally.

Of course, stop signs, "Slab!," "I do," "2 x 4 = 8," smoke, and the first sign of trouble don't stand alone. They need circumstances to live in. ("Only in conjunction with that is it a brake-lever, and separated from its support it's not even a lever; it may be anything or nothing.") But I don't see where "absence" and "deferral" are relevant to that particular point, as nothing's absent or deferred (except for most of the trouble, one would hope). I mean, you can try to act as if circumstances - traffic laws, for instance - are absent, don't exist, but you won't get far.

However, if you assume that all signs must signify a thing - one thing! not five or six! - then it's the "thing" that's absent or deferred, since in many instances I wouldn't even know what sort of "thing" to look for, much less how to find it. But this just shows that the assumption is terrible.

We can decide, temporarily, not to call traffic signs, wedding vows, and so forth "signs" (despite the fact that we normally do call at least some of them signs) and that by "sign" we only mean something that really is put in place of something else. But if all we're doing here is pointing out that the word "elephant" isn't itself an elephant, and that the word "crying" isn't crying, I don't know what we're accomplishing. And anyway it's not obvious to me that we say "the elephant is crying" only as a substitute for presenting the reader or listener with an actual elephant. E.g., an elephant could already be quite present, standing in front of us crying, and I could say "the elephant is crying" as a way of directing your attention to his tears (because who wants to go out to dinner with a sad elephant!).

In reading the previous paragraph, what did you consider absent that you wished had been present? What was deferred that you wished hadn't been put off?

True, there was no actual elephant, merely words that represented him. But is this a problem? Did you miss him? There also wasn't a waterfall; not even the word "waterfall." And there wasn't $4,000. Now that's a problem! I could use the $4,000, and I bet that you could too. There wasn't even practical advice on how to make $4,000. Jeez!

Think of actual situations where something's being absent or deferred might be of interest. Does Derrida's text connect to any such situation?

In starting with what "is usually said," he seems to be engaging a straw man.

Welcome to ILX! As I said, this thread is a filibuster. And what's most poignant about the filibuster isn't that you guys refuse to state Derrida's ideas but that you also refuse to state your own, while concealing your own refusal from yourselves. There's a double filibuster, actually, one of omission and one of commission. The two filibusters walk hand in hand. The verbose nonstatement of your ideas allows you to avoid facing their potential insubstantiality or irrelevance, and in avoiding this, you also avoid addressing whatever impulses, insights, and problems led you to discuss Derrida in the first place and which the Derrida discussion allows you to evade.

unsurprisingly the discourse between Alex, Mark and The Pinefox is zipping around rather above my head, and asking them to take little baby steps everywhere so I can keep up would be completely unreasonable

No, Martin, their failure to take baby steps is a failure to think, and you should demand that they take them. This thread has been great for the hairstyle part of the intellect, for working out one's personality and one's relations to others. But so far we're no more discussing ideas than people nodding their head and saying "Ah so" are speaking Chinese. And I never buy your charming assertions of being out of your depth. On the Buffy and the Shout For The Moderator threads (for instance) you're smart as a whip. It's when a thread deals with capital-I Ideas that you suddenly forget the kindergarten basics of communication. And that goes for the rest of you, too: You're whipsmart when talking of David Banner and Confederate Flags, inarticulate when the subject is Great Ideas. And what's needed isn't deep erudition but a willingness to engage in "oh oh oh, look look look, see Spot run" basics, which you're all capable of doing should you choose to. Don't talk of Undecidables unless you also talk about actual decisions and actual indecision. Don't say "this is no longer what it appears to be, an apple, but is in fact all sorts of things at once, and not as distinct from - say - a pear, when you get down to certain basic levels of analysis" and then not give the analysis or say what makes it basic. You need to state an idea in a thousand words rather than alluding to it in one. If by Derridaean analysis something is open to revision, propose an actual revision. Otherwise you haven't made a point.

But I'm sure other people have more interesting answers.

What if the "point" of philosophy IS disfunction though, "the hairstyle part of the intellect, for working out one's personality and one's relations to others" and all that. What if what we call philosophy qua philosophy is a study in ways to be an asshole? To cut the rhetorical grounding out from others arguments, practice not just for asking questions but shutting them down (coz there's too many to ask 'em all, obviously!). You shut things down the way Wittgeinstein and Austin taught you, by making them so "natural" they drown in the commonsense of common language, a deluge of disparate concretes. The "euro" school shuts things down by denaturalizing them to the point of incomprehension.

When we "end up" in philosophy its never because we start there, but because we start with *different* conceptions of the world, because those conceptions *don't* relate, and coz we're working out a mutual language anyway, and trying to find a shared field to lay those conceptions out on and stack 'em against one another.

You of all ppl. should know that "working out one's personality and one's relations to others" is about as complex and fundamental as it gets.

Also, I think Derrida is pretty, and therefore has the compulsion of truth that prettiness brings, that the idea of language and meaning as comparative intervals of sorts of distinction, thought resonating in the traces the written word leaves as it passes through -- that's just lovely.

But is it a good summary of what Derrida actually thinks, and if so (or even if not), how do we apply it? For an idea to have much import, it must make a difference. Right?

One thing I'm taking as common to Wittgenstein and Derrida (and me) is the idea that for an event to be meaningful there must be a meaningful difference between the event's occurring and its not occurring. (Would this be "comparative intervals of sorts of distinction"? I find that phrase opaque, especially the word "intervals" and the modifier "sorts of." Why not just "language and meaning as comparative"?)

Note that the idea applies not only to "language" but to any phenomenon, to meteorites and hiccups and contagion and mouthwash as much as to words and sentences. And note also, as I've previously said, that in most contexts the idea would be a platitude that barely met its own criterion for being meaningful. It only achieves its import as an objection to a certain type of theory or model of "meaning." If you think it can play some other role as well, you have to say what that role is, and give a specific and intelligible example of its playing the role. Otherwise it's just another piece of the filibuster.

One role that I don't think the idea plays is that of itself contributing to a theory or model of "meaning." I'll explain:

Let's imagine a theory or model of meaning that asserts that for a statement to be meaningful it must somehow "stand for" something nonlinguistic called its "meaning" (and from there we desperately and fruitlessly try to specify, in the abstract, what category this "meaning" should belong to: sense impressions? intentions? neural impulses? objects in the world?). As a retort to this theory - but not as a theory or model itself - we say, "No, for a statement to be meaningful there must be, at a minimum, a meaningful difference between the statement's occurring and its not occurring, and this is true whether or not the statement can be said to relate to or depict something 'nonlinguistic.'"

But - I need to ram this point home - what makes our retort meaningful is that it contrasts with and contradicts the idea that for a statement to be meaningful it must somehow stand for something nonlinguistic. Without the previous theory, our retort would be vacuous.

Another way to state the retort is: "If you say X, you have said nothing whatever unless there is at least one Y that it contrasts with." And Y must contrast with at least one Z, and so on. To use the stream-of-life metaphor, there must be something upstream for X to contrast with (and something upstream for that to contrast with) and there must be consequences downstream, a ripple effect, something that would not have occurred but for X. (The stream metaphor has its limits, of course. There are circles as well: E.g., there'd be no child if there were no parent, but there'd also be no parent if there were no child. So when the child is born, it gives birth to the mother's identity as a mother.)

"But then, if your retort is right, we have to go infinitely upstream and infinitely downstream to find the meaning of X, and we never can." No. The retort is not a theory of meaning, and it says nothing about what constitutes "the meaning of X." Nor does it assume that anything needs to be designated as "the meaning of X" or that a phrase such as "the meaning of X" is even necessary. The retort is just a mundane observation: We don't find something meaningful if there's nothing relevant for it to contrast with. The retort's function is to demonstrate that the theory of meaning is a bad one. But the retort isn't itself the basis for an alternative theory.

To see an infinite regress in the retort you have to be a mugwump. That is, you have to commit yourself simultaneously both to the theory ("in order to be meaningful, a statement must ultimately arrive at a one-to-one relationship to something nonlinguistic that is 'its meaning'") and to the retort that demolishes the theory. That is, if you assume that a statement must refer to some superautonomous, stand-alone, nonlinguistic phenomenon, then you will be journeying forever upstream in futile search for it, finding never-ending distinctions and relationships in its stead. But if you don't make this assumption, you will only look as far upstream as will meaningfully enrich your understanding. In fact, looking too far upstream can be counterproductive, might well be just another filibuster. E.g., to understand "planet" now we don't need to know how people used the word 3,000 years ago and what distinction they were making; to understand how the middle ear works, we don't have to know that it evolved from the upper jaw; to understand the Kosovo conflict we don't have to know what actually happened in the 14th century and what that was a reaction to - though we do need to pay attention to what people are now saying about what happened in the 14th century, bearing in mind that when they claim that the conflict has its roots in the 14th century, they're just making excuses. (Of course, there are plenty of good reasons to learn about 1,000 B.C., or the evolution of hearing, or the 14th century. But not every bit of knowledge depends on our doing so.)

The mugwump shuffle is what I call "The Bearded Man Fallacy."

(1) God is not a bearded man in the sky.
(2) There is no bearded man in the sky.
(3) Therefore, there is no God.

(1) A statement need not arrive at a one-to-one relationship with a stand-alone, nonlinguistic phenomenon to be meaningful. All it need do is contrast with something.
(2) No statement can arrive at a one-to-one relationship to a stand-alone, nonlinguistic phenomenon, given that the need for contrast makes this impossible.
(3) Therefore, all meaning is deferred.

"But Frank, it's not that stupid." Yes, it's every bit that stupid. But my question is whether it is what Derrida is saying (rather than merely what Johnson, De Man, et al. seem to think he's saying), or - even if Derrida does sometimes say "all meaning is deferred" - whether it has much to do with his work. From my uninformed perspective I don't see the guy writing about all meaning. Instead, he starts with specific texts - by Husserl, Rousseau, Plato - and bangs away at their assumptions about, say, meaning, speaking, presence. He may then, for all I know, extrapolate absurdly from these texts, making vague, vacuous, and ridiculous statements about "western thought" and "everyday language." But, as far as I know, he never seriously tries to demonstrate that the assumptions of those texts are the assumptions of much else.

In general (and to repeat what I wrote in the Performing Rites thread), "meaning" and its variants are nonproblematic terms used in requests for further information or in attempts to remove confusion. E.g., you want to know the consequences or implications of something ("Get out of here, you blithering idiot, you're fired." "Does this mean I don't get a letter of recommendation?"), you want clarification ("When you say 'He killed her,' do you mean that he caused the end of her life by shooting her, stabbing her, poisoning her, or something of the sort; or do you mean he made her double over with laughter?"), you want the definition of an unknown word ("What do you mean when you say 'We glocked them'?"), you want to know what distinction is being made ("It's hot in Denver." "You mean in comparison to how it normally is in Denver? Or do you mean in Denver as opposed to San Francisco? Or in comparison to what you were expecting this morning, when you dressed and, as it turns out, overdressed, which is why you feel hot now? Or what?").

When "meaning" becomes more complicated, this isn't due to any deferral, but rather to its uncovering a conflict. E.g.:

"Could you direct me to the Church of Christ?"

"Which denomination do you mean?"

"Young man, there's only ONE Church of Christ. I don't go for that Unitarian or Quaker or Congregationalist hocus pocus. Those people aren't real Christians."

So in this instance, the question "What do you mean?" - which was possibly a request for definition, clarity, knowledge - reveals a battle instead, one that in various times and places has caused bloodshed, murder, warfare, executions. "What do you mean?" can provoke a battle as soon as it touches value judgments and personal and social differentiation. But in touching such things it can just as easily provoke a fun and varied dance. Or provoke something that's both battle and dance (cf. the conversations on ILM about what counts as hip-hop).

"Thought resonating in the traces the written word leaves as it passes through" - this phase has an elegiac atmosphere. But what is it mourning? Are phenomena supposed to do something other than have consequences and leave traces? To really care about "thought resonating in the traces the written word leaves as it passes through" you have to be committed to the bad idea that words must stand for nonlinguistic things, and you must yearn for these things within the depths of your restless and unsatisfied soul. But few people have such a yearning. In fact, the "nonlinguistic thing" isn't merely a bad idea, it's a straw man.

Yet the attack on this straw man has associated itself with much activity, and I wouldn't assume that all this activity is worthless, though I tend not to know a lot about it. Though someone's stated theoretical justification or explanation for an action may be silly or irrelevant, that doesn't necessarily make the action itself silly or irrelevant. There can be a lot else going on of which the theory does not speak.

Well, yes. My problem isn't that so much of this thread is hairstyle, but that it's mere hairstyle. So Omar declares himself to be a Deleuze man but leaves it at that. He displays his colors, declares his gang affiliation, but gives us no idea what the affiliation means, what ideas his being a Deleuze man commits him to and what actions it requires of him. The working out of personality and relations on this thread is truncated, incomplete, stops short; whenever it approaches the putative subject matter of this thread, it quails, quakes, and flees.

So, what's an Undecidable, and what makes you like it?

I don't think I'm being an asshole in asking you to apply that idea to particular thoughts and particular words. How else are you to explain it? How else am I to understand you?

E.g.: "I think I'll have some lunch." How does "I think I'll have some lunch" resonate in the traces the written word leaves as it passes through? The thought lives in a world of distinctions all right: I, as opposed to someone else, will, as opposed to won't - but also "I'll" as opposed to "I will," which identifies me as Ed Casual rather than Ed Formal - have lunch as opposed to having dinner but also as opposed to continuing to play checkers instead of eating (and maybe "I think I'll have some lunch" is heard by Maid Teresa as a command, so she'll have to make Ed Casual a sandwich now, which means she won't have time to dye her hair as she'd planned), and so forth.

Now, what does "trace" have to do with this? Is "lunch" tracing something? Is it leaving a trace? And what does it mean to say that this particular thought ("I think I'll have some lunch") resonates in the traces left by "lunch," "some," et al. as they pass through?

And also, what would be the difference between my believing that "I think I'll have some lunch" resonates in the traces left by "lunch," "some," et al. as they pass through and my not believing that "I think I'll have some lunch" resonates in the traces left by "lunch," "some," et al. as they pass through? How does my having or my not having such a belief change me? If I didn't believe it, what would I believe instead? What if I had no opinion?

Apparently "la déconstruction, c'est l'Amérique" because as a country, "il ne cesse pas de se défaire et de se reconstruire". Actually, from what I could glean, Derrida was much more upbeat about America than Debray was.

Not in the little Derrida I've read. It's more like showing how a text collapses its own explicit (so not "underlying") polar assumptions. So "signifieds" fail to be free of being "signifiers," "original thing that something's supposed to be a trace of" ends up being derived from its trace, and so forth. If anything turns out to be "underlying," it's the collapse, not the bipolarity. (And if I had the time right now, I'd go into why I think Derrida himself is being inconsistent - a mugwump - in believing that anything is "underlying," as I'd have expected him to dispense altogether with the idea that metaphysical preconceptions can actually underlie anything, or that there is a realm of the "underlying.")

In any event, this Derrida "deconstruction" (if that's what Derrida means by "deconstruction") only works on texts that really are attempting to create and sustain bipolar dichotomies, so I'm baffled when people claim to be deconstructing texts that don't do this. It seems like a scam: You claim that a text makes underlying bipolar assumptions (though the text doesn't claim this), then you show how the text itself collapses the assumptions that you projected onto it in the first place. Wouldn't it be smarter, and more honest, simply to note that paired opposites ("inside-outside," "foreground-background," "words"-"space between the words," "independent-dependent," "base-superstructure," "presence-absence," "signified-signifier") function not as bipolar opposites but as relative terms on a continuum? But then you'd have nothing to deconstruct.

I'll repeat something I wrote upthread: In the Derrida I've looked at, he analyzes thinkers who are explicitly working very hard to create bipolar opposites; he's not taking the average Tom, Dick, and Harry and "uncovering" their underlying bipolar assumptions.

Jacques Derrida gets a job at Carphone Warehouse and one day as he is working behind the counter, a customer comes in and asks some questions about the tariff he's on.

"This tariff yeah, I get 500 free messages a month, right?"

"Yes, this is correct."

"Do I get free minutes?"

"No, I am afraid not."

"Do I get picture messages?"

"No, that is not included in the plan, either."

"Do I get a free upgrade when the new model comes out?"

"No."

"Do I get internet access from this phone?"

"No, just the messages."

"So I don't get..."

Jacques becomes frustrated with this line of questioning and interupts with:

"Look, there is nothing outside of the texts!"

The Pinefox is really sur l'argent this time.
-- Omar, Thursday, 27 September 2001

that is so sweet -- thank you, Omar.

Derrida is so 20th century.

Bodrick that was horrible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V46yRvm8Nk#t=2m57s

XD

oops, click this: http://bit.ly/q2rbFq

it's nice that bodrick III and burt stanton weighed in on this thread
cool contributions, bros

“I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another, without sacrificing the other other, the other others”

olde ILMe at its beste

A masterclass from Kogan.

To me Derrida is no more than just an overrated jerk who writes melodically dead emotionally dry books.

A few more beatings administered with Wittgenstein's slabs here: Po-mo vs Futurism vs Modernism

I'm kind of mad Derrida exists, in retrospect, because I think my complete failure to get anything out of trying to read him in college soured me on reading a lot of critical theory I would have liked more.

Has Derrida written on film or literature?

Sometimes the pomo tendency to dwell upon the impossibility of meaning feels to me like an inverted objectivism -- building a "philosophy" around a bad natural tendency (nihilism, selfishness) rather than around aspirational aims. Then again, maybe I'm not typical in being naturally nihilistic, a lot of people don't seem to be.

I read a speech by Derrida wherin he explained that a lot of what 'deconstruction' did was in response to 68 and in general to French society at the time. I'm not sure I'd call it 'nihilistic' or 'selfish', they were writing in a society with a whole lot of ingrained, unquestioned truths and meanings.

to be clear I was associating nihilism with postmodernism and selfishness with Ayn Rand's "objectivism" but that seems fair.

D after not so much the "impossibility of meaning" but its inexhaustibility. been said before, but deconstruction is often (willfully) misconstrued as a critical technique of demystification. it's not something a critic does to a text, its something a text does (maybe even something a text does to a critic)--and at best a critic can trace its movements.

“I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another, without sacrificing the other other, the other others”

I went and read the longer paragraph. It seems to me you could just as well say in general that "I cannot do anything, without sacrificing the other others, the other others." On an absolutist idea of moral responsibility, nothing I do is going to answer more than a tiny number of the hypothetical calls that can be made on me. The fact I can't respond to any particular moral call, without sacrificing all the other calls, sounds less paradoxical and more just tragic if you regard it as one way of filling in the more general claim. I could fill it in with any kind of non-moral actions as well, which makes it seem less like an aporia for the concept of moral responsibility (the only way to respond to a moral responsibility is to sacrifice ethics), rather merely a fact about how infinitely short we invariably fall.

merely a fact about how infinitely short we invariably fall.

yeah, i agree, but this is a major theme of deconstruction. all discourses are approximate; the thing itself always escapes, etc

but the tragedy of our failure to achieve pull presence also has a positive dimension, because full presence would be stasis, death. the "opening" of... derrida often says language but martin hagglund has argued that you can just as easily say "time," so like, lived experience/existence... is the only thing that makes it possible/legible

you're reading The Gift of Death, right? that was my intro to Derrida and still probably my favorite by him. definitely in his tragic mode there--though maybe he always is.

close second, after the early foundational texts, is probably The Animal That Therefore I Am. contains a bonus and quite decisive critique of Lacan as well.

I feel like I've read a lot of Derrida but I still need to make my way through about a dozen of his books I have laying around. My only complaint is the creep of a "program," a performative contradiction, into the great amount of writing he produced--though I'm sure he'd be the first to admit his own work can only reflexively struggle against what it's so often about.

I'm kind of mad Derrida exists, in retrospect, because I think my complete failure to get anything out of trying to read him in college soured me on reading a lot of critical theory I would have liked more.

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Tuesday, January 13, 2015 9:40 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea, i got sucked into derrida big time in college and it was a shame because in retrospect i remember significantly more from the critical feminist theory and critical race theory stuff i read, and all that has had much more of an impact on how i think about the world than anything derrida wrote ever did.

gloria anzaldua, cherrie moraga, linda martin alcoff, and charles mills are all more worth the time than derrida, at least for me

good for you

I'm kind of mad Derrida exists, in retrospect, because I think my complete failure to get anything out of trying to read him in college soured me on reading a lot of critical theory I would have liked more.

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Tuesday, 13 January 2015 14:40 (1 hour ago)

sad that you are still hurting

lol.

i guess here's where i say i like deleuze more. is there good derrida to read abt ontology

i he's sort of opposed to ontology on principle.

i think, etc.

i always got the impression you had to be a big lit head with a minor in etymology to do derrida, that's my blockage. does he have anything to say about univocity / the nature of being? i guess if there's a nietzschean streak in derrida somewhere i would go there.

you'd probably want to read his stuff on Heidegger. Aporias, maybe. or: http://english.columbia.edu/files/english/content/geschlecht2.pdf

but i think you may be disappointed? if i know D at all he'd be concerned to show how univocity or the nature of being are themselves founded on deconstructable oppositions (no univocity without equivocity, etc). he doesn't go in for big master concepts like that.

To me Derrida is no more than just an overrated jerk who writes melodically dead emotionally dry books.

― Gombeen Dance Band (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 13 January 2015 12:50 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

deconstruction is often (willfully) misconstrued as a critical technique of demystification.

― ryan, Tuesday, 13 January 2015 15:11 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's some worthy intent in people who claim derrida etc is 'not that difficult' and can be taught to the average liberal arts undergraduate, it's just that it gets sold as a sort of readily deployable praxis for demystifying social relations and then they get all of these wounded solipsist responses when it fails on those terms

even if they do have the aptitude and talent for it they probably don't have the grounding in western philosophy that would be typical in france and absent that a lot of derrida becomes a bit kitsch

it's just that it gets sold as a sort of readily deployable praxis for demystifying social relations

yes this is a nice way of putting it.

that's not to say that Derrida can't be used that way, but if so you're sort of only engaging with half of his project.

✓

regarding "emotionally dry" there's a moment in Deconstruction and Pragmatism where Richard Rorty calls Derrida "sentimental" and that he "believes in happiness." or something like that. anyway in Derrida's contribution later on there's a remarkable moment where he (sort of) cops to it.

it's sort of a touching moment brought about by Rorty's own, sometimes forced, plainspokenness.

the "emotionally dry" bit is from a running "artists who are overrated" joke, initially about the Rolling Stones.

i find JD almost always a warm, human writer. i do feel that to abstract his "ideas" from his work is precisely a subtraction

i think that's certainly true. i think one of the best ways to "use" Derrida, or at least how I try to use him, is less to read him as producing a body of work than as something like an essayist in the vein of Emerson or Montaigne. So im more likely to seek out an essay or book by him because im interested in, say, Friendship or Death or whatever, than i want to produce a definitive account of "Derrida."

the first part of that which i never c&ped does sound a lot like the acutely enervated hatred that people who have given up on derrida etc tend to express

Album after album I sat through, with reactions that would range from actually enjoying a song or two to straining to keep my eyes open to looking up and praying for God to take me now. But I still don't see what everyone else does in The Rolling Stones.

i was going to say something smartarse about people who respond to an artist's reputation as a personal attack but then i remembered i started the "tell the Beatles to fuck off" thread so i'll shut up

That was funny though... and justifiable.

i think that's certainly true. i think one of the best ways to "use" Derrida, or at least how I try to use him, is less to read him as producing a body of work than as something like an essayist in the vein of Emerson or Montaigne. So im more likely to seek out an essay or book by him because im interested in, say, Friendship or Death or whatever, than i want to produce a definitive account of "Derrida."

― ryan, Tuesday, January 13, 2015 10:07 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, this is the impression i have and what i remember from the little i've read.

I reviewed @petesalmon's new Derrida biography for @tribunemagazine: "[Salmon] places Derrida within a sort of theatre of reason, as a player concerned as much with dismantling the scenery and stage machinery as with delivering lines of his own." https://t.co/sD5BuY4fdJ

— a gnarled woodland spirit (@dynamic_proxy) December 12, 2020

i was thinking about getting that book. half because i liked the cover.

Quite good stuff on theory (both the thread and in some of the replies) as it's functioning in social media via conversations and thinking stuff out together, and why that might be a good thing than a having a 'rockstar' theorist to get guidance/rely on in the public sphere.

I have various thoughts about this but one that I think is important is that social media absolutely produces a higher level of collective intellectualism on the left (whatever we think the left is) & that might be preferable to a few high profile intellectual stars. https://t.co/lkiEkJiZBl

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) April 29, 2023

Tom Gann 100% is a rockstar theorist to get guidance on/rely on tho? Obv his reach is lesser than that of someone using traditional media in the 20th century, but feels to me like to buy into what he's saying in this thread you kinda have to ignore that follower counts exist?

and likewise ofc traditional public intellectuals would also claim to have developed their thoughts in conversation with other thinkers as Gann would with mutuals - the contribution of tweets by randoms to this, is it more substantial than that of randoms in the q&a section of a lecture?

There is nothing like the reach of Graeber or Fisher to this, never mind someone like Derrida. These people (not just Gann but a few others with followers of a few thousand) have not written books (I think Gann was going to co-write something on Corbyn and the project around but 2019 was a massive defeat and the thing was let go). Nothing has been written about them. They are not name dropped.

It just doesn't function in the same way.

It's still a hierarchical system of looking towards thought leaders tho, just in a smaller room. Like come on how often do Gann tweets get posted on here? How is that not what he's talking about?

if anything you can say that it's a move from the old rockstar model to microniches of ppl who are rockstars to smaller groups, which is p much what's happening in all of culture and on the right as much as the left

I've seen him be challenged quite a bit by serious posters. I don't feel he is dropping things and people are nodding away. It feels like a shift in dynamic.

And in that sense it's quite community like. Inevitably some posters have more followers but actually what I see is a lot of posters with few followers making strong points.

Crucially there are no careers being made, not many books are being produced. Maybe the odd talk.

It all feels very fragile too, what with the disintegration of twitter.

rockstar academics of the 20th century were also challenged by their peers, all the time, I mean that's what their entire shtick revolved around

for there truly to be an end to the rockstar dynamic we would have to be in a situation where Gann getting challenged on something by some random person would hold the same weight (and attract the same eyeballs) as him getting challenged by one of his serious poster mutuals - this is impossible within social media, even if Gann were to act identically in both situations, because the algorithm is designed against it.

at any rate the smaller this becomes, the lower the follower counts, the more it will resemble discussion groups of the kind we had throughout the 20th century

NS does have a patreon I contribute to, which is not "a career" I agree but also not more than many other microniche celebs have

You are focusing way to much on Gann. Sure he has put it all together (in response to Bastani) but still the more I think about it the more it feels right.

"rockstar academics of the 20th century were also challenged by their peers, all the time, I mean that's what their entire shtick revolved around"

Not really true. They constantly lectured, wrote books, toured. Their enemies would challenge them because they have a different politics. The challenge on twitter are by people who roughly come from the same place. The observers like me come away better informed about these things. Or get things to think about, in turn. This is positive.

On twitter I see really good threads by a random from time to time. That perhaps has decreased but you see a lot of ppl that have a background in theory using it to disseminate their understanding of the world in tweets. That's a real shift from ten years ago where it felt like a thing from above with little challenge.

So a lot more engagement with different thinking via people. It just feels more organic than before.

"NS does have a patreon I contribute to, which is not "a career" I agree but also not more than many other microniche celebs have"

Lol please - their platform is a massive struggle.

I mean for Gann you can substitute any number of leftist influencers - I honestly do not see what you're describing, in terms of "really good threads by a random" being served up to me - again, due to algorithm, what I'll get is mostly the bigger names in leftist circles and then ppl who know/are mutual with these names.

I'm also puzzled that you don't think 20th century academics were challenged by other academics coming from roughly the same ideological place, I think this was a common ocurrence and in fact also a good piece of marketing.

I used to see quite a lot of threads by random people (mostly in Anarcho left circles tbh) that were coming from a politics, and explaining stuff. They didn't even have a public name. They were just as solid and interesting as anything served by Gann or Hatherley. When I came on twitter that was pretty powerful to watch.

Yeah I guess there were public debates between intellectuals but a lot of the time it would be people from different sides of the political spectrum on TV. But I'm sure that there was a lot of yes, two people from similar sides in a conversation.

FWIW "rock star" is not a very precise phrase, even as a loose analogy.

For a very few people like Jacques Derrida it makes sense. He really did have an aura, a global following, an ability to awe people by arriving on stage, as a celebrity artist would do.

But very few others were in that bracket.

If you're using a "rock" analogy then most people were playing the Camden Falcon and Bull & Gate.

Derrida vs Foucault was reasonably famous beef in its era

That's France for you though.

tend to agree with Daniel, it seems disingenuous of Gann to imagine that there are no notional authorities in the Twittersphere or that the platform works against hierarchy

my wife used to complain about how the entrance exam to becoming a librarian in France had a bunch of literature and philosophy in it and almost nothing about the actual work of being a librarian

I nodded along while secretly thinking "hell yeah now there's a REAL country"

xpost

i'm not in the corner of british left theory twitter you guys are talking about but i do find twitter in general to be extremely non-hierarchical. very frequent on left policy/econ twitter for completely random accounts by citizens with no academic credentials, institutional affiliation or media background to become prominent in the discourse and engage with the big dogs. not sure it's possible (or desirable) to get less hierarchical than that imho

In politics that are ofc many randos that have a better read (or just more informative) on the politics than many journos too. More voices being platformed and then they getting to sone kind of notoriety is pretty good.

well yes Twitter has been excellent for showing up how lacking a lot of professional journalists are

i wish i could have seem jacques derrida the rock star. what was his vibe, holy fool or something?

So here is Gann being challenged (in the comments) and putting his hands up and going "ok". Someone else makes a better comment on the video he is dunking on too, i.e. that video could explain more about capital and why it operates in this way.

Does anyone really think this? Really? Yet again great, serious, non-patronising work from the legends of the British labour movement. Equally, what are you going to do about it? https://t.co/beR7IEC8aU

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) May 24, 2023

i feel we shd actually start a thread to discuss and explore uk attempts to fashion a useable uk left media (something gann for all his faults is very much working on)

(and something derrida has little to do with) (bcz dead but also anyway)

i mean maybe it's already the novara thread? except these days that's properly for dunking on bastani and mason

I like Tom but one time I disagreed with a lazy joke he made about the group menswe@r of all things and he was furious with me for "intruding on a private conversation" by which he meant "commenting on my Twitter thread when I don't know who you are" - and I went off him a bit then.

xp isn't that the novara thread?

i think we shd separate the bastani-dunking from the important thinking!

"I like Tom but one time I disagreed with a lazy joke he made about the group menswe@r of all things and he was furious with me"

I think I remember that awful joke. He is at his worst when pulling a long 90s 'theory' (I don't think it's not nothing but I don't feel it's especially interesting thing to hold onto).

At the moment Novara's grifting is kind of where left media is. Worth a thread when something emerges from the ashes of 2019.

i guess the good thread i'm suggesting would be a place to brainstorm ways *out* of the current impasse

just to return to the thread subject for a moment

Derrida and Ornette Coleman, 1997 pic.twitter.com/8voR1TXPAF

— Winter Pallaksch (@albernaj) May 24, 2023

thank you for saving the revive

That appears to be a photo taken of famous people together that I would never have expected to be together but makes me happy all the same.

i have always felt that JD was a charlatan

does JD = Jacques Derrida or Johnny Dean from Menswear

i remember being kind of amused to learn that his primary theoretical contribution was misspelling the word "difference", lol. i know lots of extremely smart people who find his work appealing, but i've never met somebody who can sufficiently convey what it's about without ending up sounding pretty ridiculous. and i have a lot of time for heady theory.

i don't know what menswear is, is it like the men's wearhouse?

Johnny Dean (born John Hutchinson Dean; 12 December 1971) is a British musician, frontman and figure of the 1990s Britpop era. He was the frontman of Menswear (stylized Menswe@r) and is currently working on a solo, synthpop project called Fxxk Explosion.

lots of british people on this board who persist in having the most arcane discussions imaginable about disputes between obscure media figures. but i'm pretty sure this is a thread about jacques derrida

i don't know what jd is about really but reading him sure is a pleasure

i think it's more helpful to think of derrida and other continental philosophy "rock star" types as idea artists more than anything

différ@nce

JD's unknown pleasures

Happy to have infested the Jacques Derrida thread with discussion of Menswe@r, let's tie this all together.

I have a philosophy degree because the lead singer in Menswear said that mods were existentialists in an article in Melody Maker. Looked up Existentialism after reading that and went to a bookshop and got some Sartre. https://t.co/xDmR1AEdUy

— Marcas Ó hUiscín (@MarkHoskins) June 4, 2019

pdf of the interview/conversation w Ornette:
https://www.ubu.com/papers/Derrida-Interviews-Coleman_1997.pdf">chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.ubu.com/papers/Derrida-Interviews-Coleman_1997.pdf
You can read it w/o dl, though it's a little blurry around the edges, maybe appropriately--although I like Open Culture's take & quotes:

The interview took place in 1997, “before and during Coleman’s three concerts at La Villette, a museum and performing arts complex north of Paris that houses, among other things, the world-renowned Paris Conservatory.” As I mentioned, the two spoke in English but, as translator Timothy S. Murphy—who worked with a version published in the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles—notes, “original transcripts could not be located.” Curiously, at the heart of the conversation is a discussion about language, particularly “languages of origin.” In answer to Derrida’s first question about a program Coleman would present later that year in New York called Civilization, the saxophonist replies, “I’m trying to express a concept according to which you can translate one thing into another. I think that sound has a much more democratic relationship to information, because you don’t need the alphabet to understand music.”
As one example of this “democratic relationship,” Coleman cites the relationship between the jazz musician and the composer—or his text: “the jazz musician is probably the only person for whom the composer is not a very interesting individual, in the sense that he prefers to destroy what the composer writes or says.” Coleman goes on later in the interview to clarify his ideas about improvisation as democratic communication:

[T]he idea is that two or three people can have a conversation with sounds, without trying to dominate or lead it. What I mean is that you have to be… intelligent, I suppose that’s the word. In improvised music I think the musicians are trying to reassemble an emotional or intellectual puzzle in which the instruments give the tone. It’s primarily the piano that has served at all times as the framework in music, but it’s no longer indispensable and, in fact, the commercial aspect of music is very uncertain. Commercial music is not necessarily more accessible, but it is limited.

Translating Coleman’s technique into “a domain that I know better, that of written language,” Derrida ventures to compare improvisation to reading, since it “doesn’t exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible.” For him, the existence of a framework—a written composition—even if only loosely referenced in a jazz performance, “compromises or complicates the concept of improvisation.” As Derrida and Coleman try to work through the possibility of true improvisation, the exchange becomes a fascinating deconstructive take on the relationships between jazz and writing. (For more on this aspect of their discussion, see “Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation,” an article in the open access journal Critical Studies in Improvisation.)

The interview isn’t all philosophy. It ranges all over the place, from Coleman’s early days in Texas, then New York, to the impact of technology on music, to Coleman’s completely original theory of music, which he calls “harmolodics.” They also discuss globalization and the experience of growing up as a racial minority—an experience Derrida relates to very much. At one point, Coleman observes, “being black and a descendent of slaves, I have no idea what my language of origin was.” Derrida responds in kind, referencing one of his seminal texts, Monolingualism of the Other:

JD: If we were here to talk about me, which is not the case, I would tell you that, in a different but analogous manner, it’s the same thing for me. I was born into a family of Algerian Jews who spoke French, but that was not really their language of origin [… ] I have no contact of any sort with my language of origin, or rather that of my supposed ancestors.

OC: Do you ever ask yourself if the language that you speak now interferes with your actual thoughts? Can a language of origin influence your thoughts?

JD: It is an enigma for me.

Indeed. Derrida then recalls his first visit to the United States, in 1956, where there were “‘Reserved for Whites’ signs everywhere.” “You experienced all that?” he asks Coleman, who replies:

Yes. In any case, what I like about Paris is the fact that you can’t be a snob and a racist at the same time here, because that won’t do. Paris is the only city I know where racism never exists in your presence, it’s something you hear spoken of.

“That doesn’t mean there is no racism,” says Derrida, “but one is obliged to conceal it to the extent possible.”

You really should read the whole interview. The English translation was published in the journal Genre and comes to us via Ubuweb, who host a pdf. For more excerpts, see posts at The New Yorker and The Liberator Magazine. As interesting a read as this doubly-translated interview is, the live experience itself was a painful one for Derrida. Though he had been invited by the saxophonist, Coleman’s impatient Parisian fans booed him, eventually forcing him off the stage. In a Time magazine interview, the self-conscious philosopher recalled it as “a very unhappy event.” But, he says, “it was in the paper the next day, so it was a happy ending.”

I did part of my MA with a Derrida specialist, who led six of us through some of the thornier parts of his oeuvre. It was a trip tbh and I think about it often. I think of Derrida a bit like I do Lacan: it's like a high-wire act and I experience something approaching jouissance when I'm reading it, then I look away and it's not gone as such but something like gone.

A mate, who now works at Leeds via Goldsmiths, wrote a long piece about that very Ornette interview.

God, that sounds so pompous. Anyway, I don't think I could be arsed to read Derrida today but glad I went there.

what, sound pompous on a derrida thread? impossible.

Haha. Fair point.

He taught at NYU at least one semester while I was there. I didn't try to get into his class. Probably should have.

i guess the good thread i'm suggesting would be a place to brainstorm ways *out* of the current impasse

― mark s, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

One day I will read something on TV from a left journal with absolutely no mention of politics.

https://jacobin.com/2023/05/succession-television-devestating-critique-ultrarich-review/

I'm a bit bemused at myself that I only posted twice on this thread over the years and in both cases tried to say something by implication rather than fully spelling it out, but honestly there's not much to tell. Anyway: so I was a grad student in English lit at UC Irvine in the early nineties, switched over to working in the library system there through 2015, and as such was in the mix of Derrida being here for his spring quarterly visits until his passing. I always heard his lectures were crowded/overbooked affairs and actually being in grad school made me realize how my eyes quickly glazed over on a lot of things in the general field, so I admit I never bothered with said appearances, but it was interesting/bemusing to sense him as presence in the air. I essentially saw him in person only a handful of times over the years, never spoke with him directly, but he seemed either affable in conversation with others or lost in thought on his own, which I chose not to disturb, tempted though I was to ask him about a certain Scritti Politti song. Ultimately my strongest memory of him was walking past him casually one morning on the footbridge connecting the campus to the mid-size open air mall across the street, and I like imagining he was going over for a burger or something. (Plus, to add another memory, per my earlier comments, TAs coming in to put lots of books for his course on reserve, and indeed a number of them were his.)

Are you able to confirm a bit of apocrypha about his time there - that over his office door was a "French Only" sign?