>
> Bitch wrote: Jerry, you are a smart guy. Is it really that hard to figure out the whole
> thing about writing/speech in Derrida's stuff?
JM: Thanks for the compliment, but in fact I think there is something about my "stupidity" that gives me insight here. I don't mean this ironically. I think I am something like Sartre's category of "the idiot of the family" and often my complete confusion over something leads me willy-nilly to an occasional insight into ideological flim-flam. This is a confession that I hope you will not use against me, and is not meant to undermine what I say.
And well, yes, I find it nearly impossible to understand Derrida's writing/speech difference... at least in the way he puts it. Quite frankly I think Derrida is empirically wrong, but since I am not quite sure what he might have argued if he had believed in argument, I can't say for sure. I think he is saying something analogous to the following:
"The earth is at the center of the universe because post-Einsteinian physics has showed us that the universe is radically "de-centered."" (Substitute the words "writing" "post-Saussure" "linguistics" and "orality" in the proper places in this sentence and you get something like the "writing/speech" difference.)
You can make sense of such a statement if you wish. It connotes something poetic, in its slipperiness of meaning. And if all you wish to do is write poetry that is fine. But as terms for analysis, this stuff when worked on by Derrida and his followers, amounts to a kind of acrostic game, that denotes not very much, as far as I can see.
Maybe there is something wrong with me having to do with my dyslexia (which is after all quite extreme) and therefore I don't understand this way of thinking. This is a possibility that I have considered and written about in my journals. (Again I will appreciate if you don't use this confession against me, except in good fun. ) In other words, in the way that some people with language deficits are unable to use prepositions properly or at all, my deficits make me unable to comprehend much of what Derrida seems to be saying. I am not using this as a "stop" argument but as a considerate possibility for you simply to dismiss me. But in my limited experience there are a lot of "smart" people like me. And I doubt that Derrida himself would much like the biological style of this explanation.
>bitch wrote: So hard to figure out why
> people use the word text and talking about "reading" a videogame. Your
> argument re text/reading is just freakin' sloppy.
>
>
If you are using the notion of "reading" a video game as a way to metaphorically get a hold of how to understand a video game, then I say it might, possibly give you insight, depending on how insightful you are. (I am assuming you are not reading the formal language that actually underlies the video game. )
But the "argument" is that everything in the "world" is a text and really we can't get beyond texts. (I use the word "argument" in quotes, because it is more an assumption than an argument, though the assumption is assumed to have been "shown". as in the phrase "Derrida has shown...") If the argument was something like, "everything in the world could be 'taken' as-a-text" (soft-deconstructionism) or even "the human brain somehow (we don't know how) makes everything in the world into a text", then there might be something we can begin to argue about. For example: When does it make good sense 'take' a video game as a 'text,' in Derrida's sense? Or do we actually perceive a video game as a 'text' or even as a 'narrative.' My answer to these questions would be an emphatic, sloppy, slippery, 'sometimes "yes" sometimes "no".
I would also argue that as a matter of accounting for human experience, "making" our experiences into "texts" (deconstruction) or into "narratives" (many post-structuralists) is very prejudicial to people who do no such thing. Sometimes it helps us to understand certain aspects in how we experience the world and sometimes it doesn't.
Further, I would like to claim we have very little knowledge of human behaviors such as creating "texts" and making "narratives" and there is a certain intellectual hubris in the methods and theories that make claims to "show" or "decode" the texts and the narratives, in the way they do.
Post-structuralists of all types are very much opposed to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. But they don't realize how much their claims about understanding those human behaviors and experiences we call "texts" and "narratives" so closely resemble the knowledge claims of the sociobiologists. Claims of certainty, or even for "absolutist" uncertainty, where there are no foundations for such knowledge are almost by definition "ideological."
And the notion of ideology brings me back to the point of why I care at all. Why did Engels write polemics against Feurbach, and classical philsophy, even though Feurbach was long dead? Because he thought the fate of German classical philosophy, and the ideology that surrounded it, made some sort of difference.
So contrary to Woj. below, ideology does make a difference when allied to powerful institutions. This is not necessarily "idealism," though it can be. It depends how you think ideology works within an institution. Thus it is possible that the ideology inherent in post-structuralism, has helped to make some intellectuals more comfortable in their disengagement, and that the institutions where they work magnifies this ideology and their separateness.
But there is another intellectual reason this concerns me. In thinking about my own intellectual project, which involves how "the notion of law" is established in ancient city-states, I have to think about such notions as "ideology", and how ideology is related to ways of expression in language; I have to think of how the division is made between "politics/non-politics", the rule of law/ exception, public/private, polis/kinship, etc.
Now if you will recognize, all of these "antinomies" are the stuff of pomo "critique" in one place or another. Whether you look to the absurd writings of Agamben or the amusing writings of Zizek, or Derrida on Plato, when I use the terms that I intend to use, they have already been marked off by the various deconstructionists, Lacanians, etc. But my own views are pragmatic at times, non-theoretical, descriptive, limited, and historical. I think Chomsky's view of both language and ideology are reasonable. I am informed heavily by both Marx and Thucydides, if you think that is possible. Thus in order to even talk about the fact that certain city-states were founded on both the suppression of kinship "positive" and "negative" reciprocity , and at the same time the creation of a "non-political" exception to "law" for those very kinship systems, I have to deal with how all of these notions and concepts I wish to use have been obscured and mystified by previous writers.
So, yes, Doug it is also a part of my intellectual life to flesh out these arguments in my huffy (not too, I hope) and puffy (alas, yes) way.
Jerry Monaco
Woj: This reminds me of an old story about a man asking his atheist father whether he should marry the woman he loves, since she insists on having a wedding in a church. "Of course you should marry her in a church, if that is what she wants" replied the father, "you do not believe that there is anything real in this church mumbo jumbo."