Jacques Derrida

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)