Tahir Wood wrote:
> BTW it is worth mentioning that the arbitrariness of the sign was
the
> one insight -- dodgy as it is -- that poststructuralism took from
> linguistics. You take that away from them and the whole edifice
> collapses, from Lacan to Derrida to Barthes to Althusser and the
rest
> (perhaps not Zizek), as well as a generation of French
> semiotician-linguists from Benveniste to Greimas to Rastier and many
> many more.
====================
The edifice, so-called, no more stands or collapses on the arbitrariness of the sign than Marx's political economy collapses when one dispatches
the labor theory of value [a term KM never used]]
Tahir: I'm sure you will explain the parallel to me between these concepts that I am not seeing now. As to the first proposition above, yes I am very certain on the basis of my own studies of post-strucuralism circa late 80s that the arbitrariness of the sign is absolutely crucial to the authors I mentioned. Why do you think they are always going on about signifiers instead of learning some of the linguistics of the last 50 years or so? The reason is that they still think they are onto a good thing with that shit. As for the LToV, my understandiing is firstly that Marx's notion of surplus value, which turns on a critique of Ricardo et al is central to his thought. Secondly Marx was not an advocate of "political economy" as you say; he was a critic of it.
> Now I don't mean to say that the arbitrariness of the sign is
'false'.
> What it is, at its most useful, is a speculative proposition. It
affords
> the opportunity for reflection on its own truth and falsity alike.
But
> if you lose the speculative sense of a proposition like that, as
> Saussure himself most certainly did, you are into the terrain of
dogma
> and ideology.
================
So we should rather just accept the tentativeness and speculatory aspects of the hypothesis in humility or are you still stuck on casting
aspersions on a school of thought you don't like even though, by your own admission you can't prove it is false?
Tahir: This is pretty immature stuff, but I'll try to help a little: Firstly, I don't think you got the point about the speculative proposition. It is a term that dervies from Hegel (Preface to the Phenomenology) and it is key to his exposition of dialectical thought. As such it is not something that we accept or reject, whether in humility or otherwise, if we understand its proper function. The proposition that the sign is arbitrary (together with its opposite, the motivation of the sign) in Saussure, would be speculative in this way if kept in tension with its dialectical opposite. But it hasn't been so, amongst the followers of Sussure, and especially not amongst the post-structuralist followers. Instead it has been taken as an assertion on its own, an assertion of fact. When propositions that are truly speculative are taken up in this way, i.e. obscuring their speculative nature, they become dogmas.
> In linguistics there is more than a tendency to move back from the
> post-structuralist abyss and the various imbecilities of
postmodernism
> that flow from the dogma of the arbitrary sign. This broad movement
> draws on, inter alia: Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception;
> Gestaltist and cognitivist psychology; the catastrophe theory
semantics
> (and math) of Rene Thom, Jean Petitot and Wolfgang Wildgen;
Cassirer's
> Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; and, more recently the autopoiesis of
> Maturana and Varela. See the recent work of Yves-Marie Visetti
(2004),
> Visetti and Pierre Cadiot (2002) and Alexander Kravchenko (2006;
2007)
> for some examples. In American linguistics, some of the Cognitive
> Linguistics school can be regarded as a roughly cognate development,
> e.g. Langacker et al. Saussure finds very little space in all of
this.
> BTW the most emphatically anti-Saussure and anti-poststructuralist
> school is the 'intergrationist linguistics' group that is clustered
> around the Oxford professor Roy Harris, but that is another story
for
> another day.
=================
Well one could make the argument, I won't attempt it here because an email list is not conducive to graduate seminar level discussion/debate, that M-P and M and V are even more problematic for left conservatives regarding the words/worlds dynamics....
Tahir: No idea what you are talking about here. None at all. I know what a left conservative is (I think) - it is normally someone who supports the state cap regimes. But it could conceivably apply to those people - no-one we know of course - who claim to be left business observers and who vote for capitalist parties. That would be a second form of 'left conservativism' too I guess. But your point eludes me.
>
> I hope that the requirement of names, dates, facts, etc. has been
> satsified here. But it is not always needed. Sometimes people really
> need to be able to respond to the propositional content of the
arguments
> presented rather than the presence or omission of their favourite
brand
> names.
==================
Looks like you've done some advertising of brands yourself. Ian
Tahir: Yes but only when I feel like it, not when someone tells me I must either do that or shut up.
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