Jacques Derrida

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.