Re: deconstruction

[Mark Vines <vinesm@wholefoods.com>]

la bob. spuda mi di'e

> > speech is a structured temporal sequence of signifiers,
> > in which meaning is deferred until the sequence is
> > reasonably complete.
>
> Yes.  The full meaning of `I sent the book to ....' is not
> known until I complete the sentence.  Is this what you mean?

Yes.

> I have to wait until part of the utterance is complete
> before it means something.  Is this what you mean?

Yes.

> Are you contrasting English with Lojban, which has a
> shorter lookahead (on account the parser used was limited)?

No.

> My question is, why is this important?  Why should I spend
> time being concerned with this?

Primally, if And is going to attack deconstruction, I'm
going to defend whatever I find in it that I feel is worth
defending.  Especially since gratuitous attacks on
deconstruction are so often found in the media & in
ordinary conversation, yet deconstruction is seldom
defended in such discourse.  I'm just trying to restore
some balance to the debate.

> In my epistemology and metaphysics, signs, such as marks
> on a computer screen, do not do anything on their own.

In the rhetoric of deconstruction, the mark on the computer
screen (or the sound in a stream of speech) is a thing, &
the sign "is" not the thing itself.

> So they cannot themselves be part of a dialectic.  The
> part that can be part of a dialectic is the mental
> process the signs generate in the mind of a reader.

That's the part that deconstructionists mean when they say
"sign".

> However, many people metonymically refer to signs as
> standing for both the signs and what they induce.

Lord knows, I certainly do.

> > Things are not signs in & of themselves; they're only
> > signs when they're read that way.
>
> Right.  The map is not the territory.

That is unrelated to the point I was trying to make, or
that deconstructionists made & I tried to summarize, which
might be whimsically phrased:  "The map is not a map,
except that map-reading makes it so."

> Are you really trying to claim that people thought
> `I sent the book to ...' was a `complete sentence'?

Oh, it's much worse than that.  People claimed that, in
speech, even or perhaps especially in "private speech"
such as thought, the totality of the self was immediately
present to itself.  Not just the totality of the sentence
- the totality of the _self_.  They created a metaphysical
privilege for speech, which they associated with breath &
life & self-presence, & denigrated writing, which they
associated with absence & death.  This myth infected damn
near all of Western philosophy, as well as movements like
science & Marxism which grew out of Western philosophy;
you can trace the infection from one text to another thru
the centuries, & many deconstructionists have done so.

One symptom of the infection, according to Derrida, is
that pioneering linguists like de Saussure suppressed
awareness of the "text-like" characteristics* shared by
all linguistic productions, including speech.  This
delayed, for instance, Western recognition of Chinese &
Mayan writing as logographic rather than pictographic
symbol systems.  Linguists have not taken Derrida's
critique (found in his _Of Grammatalogy_) well.  In fact
they are typically quite hostile towards deconstruction,
altho a substantive refutation of Derrida's critique
(or an admission of guilt if, as I believe, his critique
is correct) would have shed more light on the debate.

*(such as lookaheads & the temporal deferring of meaning)

> By metonymy, do you mean that figure of speech that
> uses a part to signify a whole, an effect for a cause,
> a container for the thing contained (I am paraphrasing
> Webster's)?  Do you mean for example, saying, "I saw
> three sail" to mean, "I saw three sailing ships"?

Yes.

> By metaphor, do you mean that figure of speech that,
> in effect, suggests simularities between otherwise
> different things or actions?

Yes.

> OK.  So why is this analysis of different forms of
> rhetoric so important?
>
> You say it is "...one of the greatest intellectual
> achievements of the century."

No, I said Derrida's essay "Plato's Pharmacy", which uses
that technique, is one of the greatest intellectual
achievements of the century.  I also used the acronym IMO,
which means "in my opinion".

> but you have not given me any reason to understand
> why it is important.

That's true.  I haven't.

> (Well, you have used a rhetoric of persuasion that is
> based on a claim to your authority;

I don't claim any authority in this matter; I claim only
to have an opinion, based on my own investigation.

> this sort of rhetoric is convincing to you, for obvious
> reasons, but not to me.  To persuade me, you need to
> adopt a different form of rhetoric.)

I hope to persuade you only that some of the attacks on
deconstruction may be unjustified, & that you shouldn't
assume otherwise.  The attackers are vocal, numerous &
_almost_ unopposed, but I hope you will reserve judgment
unless & until you investigate the matter for yourself.

> To return to my question: why is it important enough for
> me to spend time following this form of discussion rather
> than, say, Bailey, "The Tactical Uses of Passion", or
> Conley, "Rhetoric in the European Tradition"?

Maybe it isn't.  But if you find Bailey's & Conley's works
to be of value, & if it were the object of unremitting
& unfair hostility in hundreds of discussions that you
encountered in one forum after another, you might be
inclined to defend their works as a way of restoring some
balance to the debate.  That's all I'm trying to do
where deconstruction is concerned.

co'omi'e markl.