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» babble   » right brain babble   » humanities & science   » Love of Wisdom: Jacques Derrida #1, The Moment of The Example

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Author Topic: Love of Wisdom: Jacques Derrida #1, The Moment of The Example
blueskyboris
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posted 30 October 2005 04:37 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Jacques Derrida wrote: "The first part of this book, "Writing before the Letter," sketches in broad outlines a theoretical matrix. It indicates certain significant historical moments, and proposes certain critical concepts.

These critical concepts are put to the test in the second part, "Nature, Culture, Writing." This is the moment, as it were, of the example, although strictly speaking, that notion is not acceptable within my argument. I have tried to defend, patiently and at length, the choice of these examples (as I have called them for the sake of convenience) and the necessity for their presentation [my bold]."


The passage above is from Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology*, which was first published in 1967. I'm interested in exploring the bolded section of the text. What did Derrida mean or what may he have meant by "This is the moment...of the example, although strictly speaking, that notion is not acceptable within my argument"?

Those interested in participating in or reading other Love of Wisdom debates should visit www.blueskyboris.com. Please feel free to continue a previous debate if it interests you, no matter how old.

*Page 1XXXIX, Translation: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, John Hopkins University Press, American edition, 1976.

[ 30 October 2005: Message edited by: blueskyboris ]


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skdadl
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posted 30 October 2005 06:56 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Small correction: De la grammatologie was first published in 1967. Gayatri Spivak's translation is either 1974 or 1976 -- will double-check my copy if I can ever find it.

I take "strictly speaking, that notion is not acceptable within my argument" to be a fairly routine expression of Derrida's standard resistance to making positive (as in positivist) statements of any kind without immediately deconstructing them. Choosing texts or passages as examplary is itself positive, as would be any critical reading of them.

At the same time, as anyone who reads the first section of the Grammatology learns, Derrida recognizes the absurd impossibility of writing without that positive moment, so he takes the task on anyway, stating and then erasing all the way.

The Grammatology is a tour de force and formally very beautiful, I believe. Between the two major sections of the book lies that one superficially puzzling essay on the dating of Rousseau's essay, which I think is both brilliant and also a joke, a bit of nose-thumbing at the classical scholars who do that sort of work -- just not as well as Derrida can when he sets his mind to it, which he usually doesn't.

A proper Derridean cannot, of course, believe in masterpieces. But let's say that the Grammatology is a masterpiece, and then promptly put that under erasure.


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skdadl
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posted 30 October 2005 06:57 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
PS: A proper Derridean can't even claim to be a Derridean, of course -- can't even believe there are such things.
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blueskyboris
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posted 30 October 2005 09:35 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
I take "strictly speaking, that notion is not acceptable within my argument" to be a fairly routine expression of Derrida's standard resistance to making positive (as in positivist) statements of any kind without immediately deconstructing them.
Expand upon what you understand "deconstruction" to mean.

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Brett Mann
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posted 31 October 2005 12:15 AM      Profile for Brett Mann        Edit/Delete Post
Wittgenstein wrote once that anyone who truly understood what he was writing and saying would realize it was nonsense. I take this not as a self-critical comment by the venerable philosopher, but a statement about the limitations of words and logical thought.

I am deeply suspicious and deeply ignorant of Derrida and deconstrutionists/structuralists. The core assumption and chief object of this philosophical movement seems to be an insistence of the "constructed" nature of all of our experience. A philosophy which denied the existence of an objective reality was attractive to burgeoning social movements globally at the time which were seeking to reverse social injustices with projects to reform society in such a way that the roots of injustice, aggression and so forth would die aborning.

The deconstructionist movement which insists on the relativeness of everything falls apart on shoals of logic - their position too must be only a relative one, and not the last word on the subject.

Each national culture I believe has its own strengths and weaknesses inherent to it - the French love and mastery of logic led Derrida and his crew into lofty realms of abstract thought which increasingly look like attempts to escape human reality rather than illuminate it. At least Wittgenstein was playful. Maybe Derrida was too, but I sure don't get that impression. It's a huge chore, but enlighten us, Skdadl.


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Rufus Polson
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posted 31 October 2005 03:13 PM      Profile for Rufus Polson     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by blueskyboris:
Expand upon what you understand "deconstruction" to mean.

Can one understand "deconstruction" to mean something? Surely any explanation would have to be followed by an assurance that actually, it didn't mean that at all.
I think if I were going to take this sort of approach, as a lover of the ancients I'd call myself a Heraclitean instead. Very little new under the sun . . .


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skdadl
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posted 31 October 2005 03:36 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Oh, for pity's sake. It would be such a good thing if people didn't get impressed in the first place, so that they then got intimidated in the second place, only to end up resentful in the third place.

It's just writing, people. You can read it, and you can follow it, and make of it what you will. I certainly do.

looney, I am no expert Derridean, am given to a much more conservative and traditional kind of poetics, but I think that it is the German philosophy part of Derrida that stumps so many people, much more than his playful French side -- and he did have that as well. Me, I have not read Heidegger and don't intend to. I think if you want to plumb the depths you probably have to, but life is short, and Derrida is useful to simple students of poetics such as I on easier levels than that.

boris, your somewhat peremptory request is, of course, an absurd assignment to set for someone typing ad lib to a discussion board, but I can give you a superficial short answer.

A very much reduced, practical application of deconstruction would simply entail putting everything into context, especially historical context. That is everything, as in everything. Every significant term in every sentence you write.

Much as I admire Derrida (and I really do -- wonderful man), in terms of my own work I have found Edward Said to be a more practical model of deconstructive practice, of the part of deconstructive practice that seemed revelatory to me. He starts with literary (or, from his avocation, operatic) classics and then just starts to take them apart, bit by bit, as if he were knitting backwards to correct an error. And by the time he's finished, you can see worlds upon worlds behind the finished works he has read.

That is literary, as distinct from philosophical, deconstruction.

Sorry, looney, but your use of the term "relativism" I think is just convenient gossip. Derrida and Said were not relativists. They were intelligent.


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jeff house
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posted 31 October 2005 06:11 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
The problem with someone who fears making any point with certainty is that it becomes hard to justify action.

I can oppose racism only if I am certain it is wrong, not if every proposition which occurs to me about it must immediately be subjected to a grinding critique, even before acting.

Thinking about thinking is fun, but won't save the world.


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Brett Mann
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posted 31 October 2005 07:49 PM      Profile for Brett Mann        Edit/Delete Post
Thanks Skdadl, that was helpful and interesting. I think when I wrote about the relativist connection a voice was saying, wait a minute - are deconstructionists necessarily relativists? So I stand corrected. I have not read Heiddiger or Wittgenstein, or very many philosophers at any length. I'm more like a diletante, picking up gossip and impressions second hand. I thought with a chuckle last night that reading deconstructionists at length would be like some kind of punishment. But I'm sure that they can be much more interesting and accessible than I am presuming, so thanks again for your efforts.
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Catchfire
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posted 31 October 2005 08:05 PM      Profile for Catchfire   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
That's true Jeff, which is why skdadl mentioned Said. If I could, I would add Shoshana Felman, Helčne Cixous, Eve Sedgwick and Barbara Johnson to that list. Derrida is theorist. He's having fun saying serious, and seriously brilliant stuff. We can talk about phamakon for as long as the day is, but you're right, it's not going to get us anywhere.

People like Said and Felman have taken Derrida and made it practical—skdadl's key word. If we look at the Derridean notion that language is inherently unstable, and look how Western metaphysics use this language to describe the male/female dynamic (or in Said's case, the West vs. the Oriental), we can unravel a linguistic dichotomy that attempts to subordinate one side to the other; that is, the male as a positive state and the female as its negative counterpart. The famous Felman example unpacks men's reason vs women's madness and locates madness (a gendered 'female' trait—hysteria actually stems from the latin word for uterus) as a male projection of narcissm and sexual anxiety. Through Derrida, Felman and Said recover the meaning of language that has subordinated a culture or sex.

Wow. Sorry, I just really get excited about this kind of thing. Probably uneccessary. Sorry.


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Vigilante
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posted 31 October 2005 08:28 PM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
What's great about Derrida is that he give us a symbolic form of anarchy to think with. For me it's essential to accompany this with an actual existing form of material anarchy. The fact that a great number pomos have tried to appy this within a liberal governmental context shows the inconsistancy within the discourse.

Jeff is of course wrong about the racism point. Racism and the discourse has been based on the false pretense of being in the right. The way to oppose it is to show its connection with such things as master morality and thus deligitamise it.

And the sadly commatose anti-globalization movement is an example of a postmodern movement taking action.


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jeff house
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posted 31 October 2005 09:41 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
"Of course" Vigilante's comments are deeply wise, rredolent of a lifetime of struggle with these issues.

Still, I don't think I am wrong. Showing "the connection to the master morality" doesn't tell you anything about whether "the master morality" should be opposed or not.

Many of Derrida's intellectual forebears, such as Heidegger and Bataille, were Nazis and fascists in the 1930's if not later. In fact, this whole "master morality" bit comes directly from Bataille, and Kojeve.

That's not just coincidence. It has to do with the replacement of unstable reason with "decisionism", the idea that acts need no justification because no such justification can exist.

Furthermore, I think it is a terribly bad idea to ascertain the social use of something, it's connection with power, and then decide if it is wrong or not.

Racism is wrong, to me, because it blinds the racist to the reality of an individual human being, and wrongs the sufferer. If racists were a tiny minority with limited employment because of their views, I would not start to champion their cause.

The idea that any idea's correctness can be decided based on its connection to "the master morality" leads to vast oversimplifications. The Iraqi resistance is poorly connected to the master morality of American globalism. Do I support it because of that? No way. I'll oppose the US invasion, but I won't support a bunch of people bombing school buses and beheading innocent people, either. I'll go with the master morality on that.

[ 31 October 2005: Message edited by: jeff house ]


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byzantine
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posted 01 November 2005 02:21 AM      Profile for byzantine        Edit/Delete Post
Quote: Many of Derrida's intellectual forebears, such as Heidegger and Bataille, were Nazis and fascists in the 1930's if not later. In fact, this whole "master morality" bit comes directly from Bataille, and Kojeve.

Oh, so close! Go back a little farther (1850-1890 or so).
Perhaps I haven't taken the class yet where they teach us lawyers to wax all ad hominem. On the other hand, it looks to me like pathetically smarmy and sloppy thinking.
By the way, here's an idea for you: Deconstruct "race." You will find the absurdity inherent in the construct a much more effective tonic against racism than simply claiming and then accepting that "racism is bad."

Oh OK, and I apologise for getting smarmy myself. Please disregard the attitude and take the points.


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skdadl
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posted 01 November 2005 08:22 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Like, yeah, eh? Actually, I try to honour both moments -- querying both the literal intelligence of a notion and its morality. I think that either is on shaky ground without the other; ethics seems to me especially vulnerable, given its inevitable arbitrariness.

The loose smear-by-association is pretty much beneath contempt. A child could probably demonstrate that few intellectuals of the middle and later C20 were more than a degree or two removed from some fascist thinker or other.

But anyway, I have never seen any evidence of "moral relativism" in either Derrida or Said, and to me that is not what deconstruction is about. I don't really care about the language games some professional hacks and disciples made of their work. As I say, I just read and judge for myself -- good, not good; useful, not useful.

looney, I would admit that a lot of literary commentary is not easily accessible unless you've read what the commentator has read, is writing about -- that's just kind of a given. On that score, though, Said is a lot more helpful, more given to being a guide and a teacher, than is Derrida, who is always working both as critic and as philosopher.

And Catchfire, don't apologize! That was terrific, and in such a short space. You're way ahead of me in your reading (and your concision). Good reading list. As I recall (long time since I've read her), Gayatri Spivak herself remained a very independent commentator, even though she was Derrida's translator on the Grammatology -- no disciple she.

One last practical observation: It's worth remembering what French intellectuals of the sixties were rebelling against, the crushingly rigid positivist traditions of French classical education, when figures like Derrida and Foucault first broke out. I think there are no parallels in anglo-American education/culture, certainly none that persisted that late. In many ways, certainly in aesthetics and literary studies, the French and the Germans were behind modernist developments, partly because of their classical traditions and partly because intellectual life in those two countries was so totally politicized and polarized all through the twenties and thirties. It's possible to see French post-modernism as catch-up some of the time, I think. Some of it sounds more difficult than it really is.


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Vigilante
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posted 01 November 2005 01:54 PM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
The point about deconstructing race is a good one.

It's unfortunate that Jeff takes apart in the smearing of people like Heiddeger(not sure about Bataille). A conscious decision to become a Nazie back then was about as conscious as a hitler youth.
I consider this to be a sort of last gasp cheap shot due to the fact that people like Nietzsche and Heiddeger and the pomos kicked the intellectual shit out of enlightenment discourse. Also by Master Morality I meant it in the Nietzschean way, something which predates those names you threw.

You also make an interesting point about disiphering things from power. I think that when you get right down to it. That is how life continues and ends. Part of what predicates our existance for example is a holocaust of neanderthals. Also hunter-gathering(which is the most egalitarian system humans ever had) is predicated on power and domination. It's not a nice thing, but it's how we have to live. When you understand this, you realize that power sets the rules for the ethics we construct. Our job is to mediate this as well as possible.


quote:
Skdadl:
One last practical observation: It's worth remembering what French intellectuals of the sixties were rebelling against, the crushingly rigid positivist traditions of French classical education, when figures like Derrida and Foucault first broke out. I think there are no parallels in anglo-American education/culture, certainly none that persisted that late. In many ways, certainly in aesthetics and literary studies, the French and the Germans were behind modernist developments, partly because of their classical traditions and partly because intellectual life in those two countries was so totally politicized and polarized all through the twenties and thirties. It's possible to see French post-modernism as catch-up some of the time, I think. Some of it sounds more difficult than it really is.

Hmm, I think it was more specifically a backlash against Hegelian/Marxian dialectics which dominated all of Europe. The Frence pomos believed in a reinjection of the power of the individual and the power of spontinuity in general. Nietzsche's will to power for instance was taken and reconfigured for revolutionary politics. Interestingly, dialectics never took off in North America as far as I know, pomo on the other hand is far more dominant in US/Canada acamdemia.


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skdadl
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posted 01 November 2005 02:13 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Two things, Vigilante: I have no trouble at all holding Heidegger himself responsible for his choices, which were wrong and which represented a fully conscious, adult betrayal of individuals he knew and of humanity in general. He was not just a kid being inducted into the Hitler Youth.

What I was objecting to was guilt by association. That I do consider a smear.

Second, I was talking about a historical context that the postmodernists themselves have not much talked about, were not necessarily much interested in admitting as a formative influence, that they would probably have considered banal -- which is, of course, what makes it interesting.

You are taking them at their word (although you are also overgeneralizing about intellectual influences beyond a level I would find useful). And that's ok: the intellectual influences people want to claim are obviously part of what makes them tick.

But a good deconstructor -- Said, for instance -- would look at historical and biographical contexts as well, especially those that remain unacknowledged by his subjects, and the fact is that the French had a lot of intellectual catch-up to do.

I honestly don't think that German intellectual traditions had a profound influence on many of the French writers of the sixties and seventies, although they obviously did on Derrida.


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jeff house
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posted 01 November 2005 04:38 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
The problem is that there are tendencies in the thought of any political thinker, which, if developed, may lead to negative consequences.

Derrida, was born in 1930. So, he was 15 years old in 1945. Of course he is not himself pro-Nazi! He was Jewish after all, and the Vichy government was pretty discredited.

That's how he differs chronologically from Heidegger and Bataille. But to the extent that his thought is derived from them, his thought may contain similar dangers.

Derrida himself is dead, so the only danger is that people will adopt his thought holus-bolus, relying on his reputation as a "Jewish saint", as one of his hagiographers has recently proclaimed him.

In my opinion, the main danger in Derrida's thought is quietism. Since we must deconstruct everything, the moral basis of action for changechange becomes questionable.

In Heidegger, and in numerous others such as Carl Schmitt, the absence of a moral basis for action contains its opposite: decisionism, or the idea that since nothing is justified, any act is equally acceptable.

So, I believe that Derridean quietism contains profounder dangers than are immediately obvious;
I am sorry of some people are offended by this, but I think it is the only responsible way to think about philospophy.


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Catchfire
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posted 01 November 2005 07:16 PM      Profile for Catchfire   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Jeff, with respect, that's absurd. Derrida is indebted to Heidegger in the same way that Marx is indebted to Hegel. I don't think you would criticize Marxist ideals because of what some avid Hegelians, say Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, believe. This "guilt by association" attack, as skdadl put it, is weak, to say the least.

But, to engage with your assertion that:

quote:
Since we must deconstruct everything, the moral basis of action for change becomes questionable.
You should know that Derrida, contrary to poular belief, does not posit that all language has no meaning. Rather, he believes that metaphysical residues cling to every gesture of language and we, as critics, must try to get see the entire entity. Derrida says "Il n'y a pas de hors-textes" but this does not necessarily mean, as it is often translated, "there is nothing outside the text." There is no inside/outside dichotomy in the original French: The "text" is already outside itself, and there is nothing beyond that.

Its hould be clear, from the deconstruction work of Said on race, Felman on feminism, and Sedgwick on queer theory, that definitive statements not only can be made, but demand to be made once the construction of a subordinating discourse has been unravelled. Your 'quietism' clearly is not an attribute of any worthy critics indebted to Derrida, and certianly not a quality of Derrida himself. I would attribute what you call 'quietism' more an effort to dissolve potentially harmful binary relations: that is, a black/white discourse that I think most progressives seek to eradicate.


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Brett Mann
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posted 01 November 2005 10:18 PM      Profile for Brett Mann        Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by Vigilante:
...And the sadly commatose anti-globalization movement is an example of a postmodern movement taking action.

The poor movement should have come to a full stop.


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Brett Mann
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posted 01 November 2005 10:31 PM      Profile for Brett Mann        Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by Catchfire:
.

If we look at the Derridean notion that language is inherently unstable, and look how Western metaphysics use this language to describe the male/female dynamic (or in Said's case, the West vs. the Oriental), we can unravel a linguistic dichotomy that attempts to subordinate one side to the other; that is, the male as a positive state and the female as its negative counterpart. ... Through Derrida, Felman and Said recover the meaning of language that has subordinated a culture or sex.


This "linguistic dichotomy" is hardly unique to Western traditions. The Chinese concept of Yin and Yang, explicitly identifying the feminine with the "dark and receptive" and the masculine with the "creative and light-giving" predates western linguistic sex distinctions I believe and suggests a much more global and transcultural basis for this type of early sex discrimination than conspiratorial power politics.


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blueskyboris
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posted 02 November 2005 09:44 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Thank you for your responses everyone.


skdadl

quote:
Oh, for pity's sake. It would be such a good thing if people didn't get impressed in the first place, so that they then got intimidated in the second place, only to end up resentful in the third place.

It's just writing, people. You can read it, and you can follow it, and make of it what you will. I certainly do.


In other words: brush those chips off your shoulders!

quote:
boris, your somewhat peremptory request is, of course, an absurd assignment to set for someone typing ad lib to a discussion board, but I can give you a superficial short answer.
The ancients believed successful ad-libbing to be a sign of good blood and upbringing.

quote:
A very much reduced, practical application of deconstruction would simply entail putting everything into context, especially historical context. That is everything, as in everything. Every significant term in every sentence you write.
Interesting. I have read many descriptions of "deconstruction" and this is the most clear description so far.

quote:
Second, I was talking about a historical context that the postmodernists themselves have not much talked about, were not necessarily much interested in admitting as a formative influence, that they would probably have considered banal -- which is, of course, what makes it interesting.
BSB giggles.

quote:
I honestly don't think that German intellectual traditions had a profound influence on many of the French writers of the sixties and seventies, although they obviously did on Derrida.
Foucault was heavily influenced by Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger... and Derrida studied under Foucault.


Catchfire

quote:
If we look at the Derridean notion that language is inherently unstable, and look how Western metaphysics use this language to describe the male/female dynamic (or in Said's case, the West vs. the Oriental), we can unravel a linguistic dichotomy that attempts to subordinate one side to the other; that is, the male as a positive state and the female as its negative counterpart.
So a deconstuction seeks to destroy logocentric, oppressive binaries by analyzing the living-context of all text/discourse. Black/white, gender/gender, good/bad, good/evil - gone.

quote:
It's possible to see French post-modernism as catch-up some of the time, I think. Some of it sounds more difficult than it really is.
Some of the time, yes.

quote:
You should know that Derrida, contrary to poular belief, does not posit that all language has no meaning.
Jacques Derrida didn't consider himself "po-mo" either.

quote:
Rather, he believes that metaphysical residues cling to every gesture of language and we, as critics, must try to get see the entire entity. Derrida says "Il n'y a pas de hors-textes" but this does not necessarily mean, as it is often translated, "there is nothing outside the text." There is no inside/outside dichotomy in the original French: The "text" is already outside itself, and there is nothing beyond that.
Or to put it another way: Text is the result of living beings. All texts, including the texts of logic, were written. So when a text is 'recontexualized' - deconstructed from its "dead" logical form as a mere text - we gain a better understanding of its value than we would get by just reading it as an argument.


Vigilante

quote:
I consider this to be a sort of last gasp cheap shot due to the fact that people like Nietzsche and Heiddeger and the pomos kicked the intellectual shit out of enlightenment discourse.
Nietzsche, Heidegger, nor Derrida used the label "post-modern".

quote:
Hmm, I think it was more specifically a backlash against Hegelian/Marxian dialectics which dominated all of Europe.
Partially. It's no secret that many French Marxists switched to Nietscheanism during Foucault's ascendence, but that does not mean we should downplay France's overall development in relation to other nations.

Looney

quote:
This "linguistic dichotomy" is hardly unique to Western traditions. The Chinese concept of Yin and Yang, explicitly identifying the feminine with the "dark and receptive" and the masculine with the "creative and light-giving" predates western linguistic sex distinctions I believe and suggests a much more global and transcultural basis for this type of early sex discrimination than conspiratorial power politics.
However, no one knows which came first: the logocentrism of the Chinese text or the oppression inherent in "ying and yang".

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blueskyboris
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posted 02 November 2005 09:47 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Derrida wrote: This is the moment, as it were, of the example, although strictly speaking, that notion is not acceptable within my argument. I have tried to defend, patiently and at length, the choice of these examples (as I have called them for the sake of convenience) and the necessity for their presentation.

When I see this quote I currently interpret it the following way: Derrida is arguing that the concept, "example", does not exist as an objective component of Being. Instead, it's merely a tool of communication. It is radically arbitrary. It is used out of the sake of convenience.

From this interpretation it is easy to understand what "the moment of the example" might mean: "Example" is merely a manifestation of action. It's a moment of unfolding of a will to power, a becoming - nothing more.

So when Derrida writes about "the necessity for their presentation" he is writing about specific, unique moments of willing, a moment of willing that could identically be described as a moment of example, that will never be repeated. For example, my writing of this sentence is the result the various powers that intersected to make it necessary that I write this sentence to communicate an example of what Derrida may of meant. The previous example-sentence was fundamentally unique.


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skdadl
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posted 02 November 2005 10:12 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Y'see, boris, I have a problem with that, with any restatement of Derrida's project that remains so abstract.

I do not believe, eg, that reading Rousseau was a random or arbitrary act on Derrida's part. I believe that he settled on Rousseau as exemplary, however much he would have wanted to hedge any such admission.

I, of course, being a lesser being of no pretensions at all, have fewer problems thinking of Rousseau -- or Derrida, for that matter -- as exemplary, and I am so glad that Derrida made that choice. It's a great reading of Rousseau.

I mean, the best answer to anyone still struggling with what seems to me the irrelevant issue of relativism is to look at the works Derrida chose to read. Plato, Rousseau, Husserl, Freud, even Ponge, etc. You don't choose such texts by accident.


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skdadl
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posted 02 November 2005 10:15 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by Catchfire:

But, to engage with your assertion that: You should know that Derrida, contrary to poular belief, does not posit that all language has no meaning. Rather, he believes that metaphysical residues cling to every gesture of language and we, as critics, must try to get see the entire entity. Derrida says "Il n'y a pas de hors-textes" but this does not necessarily mean, as it is often translated, "there is nothing outside the text." There is no inside/outside dichotomy in the original French: The "text" is already outside itself, and there is nothing beyond that.

Its hould be clear, from the deconstruction work of Said on race, Felman on feminism, and Sedgwick on queer theory, that definitive statements not only can be made, but demand to be made once the construction of a subordinating discourse has been unravelled. Your 'quietism' clearly is not an attribute of any worthy critics indebted to Derrida, and certianly not a quality of Derrida himself. I would attribute what you call 'quietism' more an effort to dissolve potentially harmful binary relations: that is, a black/white discourse that I think most progressives seek to eradicate.


I wouldn't attempt to improve on that. In fact, I am now studying it.


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blueskyboris
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posted 02 November 2005 10:29 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Skdadl
quote:
Y'see, boris, I have a problem with that, with any restatement of Derrida's project that remains so abstract.
And support of abstraction as Truth is in opposition to Derrida in what way?

quote:
I do not believe, eg, that reading Rousseau was a random or arbitrary act on Derrida's part. I believe that he settled on Rousseau as exemplary, however much he would have wanted to hedge any such admission.
No, no, I wasn't clear: I'm arguing that Derrida was arguing against "example" as a logical form that transcends the messiness of non-logical being. Derrida therefore used Rousseau as an exemplary example out of the sake of convenience - as an unique intersection of powers that was Derrida when he was writing Of Grammatology. And this makes sense, because oppressive binaries are rooted in the static is/isn't form of logic, not the contexualization of power.

[ 02 November 2005: Message edited by: blueskyboris ]


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lotte
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posted 02 November 2005 02:59 PM      Profile for lotte        Edit/Delete Post
I think that what Derrida means by 'examples' not being acceptable within his argument falls back to the notion of structures lacking a center. That is, while giving a certain example in order to illustrate a particular idea, this whole idea changes as it is tied to this example. Furthermore, yet another example similarily changes the particular idea again as it is ties to this new example. This goes on infinitely regardless the ammount of examples used. The 'whole' as in the entire idea can never be illustrated due to the changing nature of it resulting from each example.

Have a nice reading.


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jeff house
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posted 02 November 2005 04:20 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
This "guilt by association" attack, as skdadl put it, is weak, to say the least.

IF I were to adopt, from an earlier thinker, the idea that "all readheads are liars", it would not be guilt by association for you to point out that, in the past, that idea has had dangerous ramifications.

"Guilt by association" refers to the idea that association alone cannot be a basis upon which guilt is determined. The prohibited reasoning goes: I know Skdadl, she is involved in nefarious doings, therefore I must be involved in nefarious doings also.

That is far different from me saying "I agree with Skdadl that redheads are untrustworthy."
In the latter case, if Skdadl had killed a few redheads, would it be fair to point out that "Skdadl's doctrine about redheads has not been rectified in Jeff's thinking about the subject"? And "It carries certain dangers, independent of Jeff's personal qualities "?

I don't believe that it makes sense to think about theoreticians in isolation, as if they are not at least partially dependent upon others thinkers.


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byzantine
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posted 02 November 2005 06:09 PM      Profile for byzantine        Edit/Delete Post
Wow. Just admit you don't know what you're talking about and move on.
By your logic, rocket propulsion doesn't actually work since the scientists who build rockets today were influenced by scientists who were also Nazis in the 1940s and who pioneered the technology. Make sense? No? Neither does your smear of Derrida. And, for the record, just because Heidegger and Bataille were wrong about one thing it doesn't follow that they'd be wrong about EVERYTHING: another example of sloppy and facile reasoning.

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jeff house
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posted 02 November 2005 06:14 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Actually, I think the refusal to deconstruct the fundamentals of Derrida's thought result from sloppy and uncritical reasoning.

I guess having a mere Master's degree in political thought, I should bow out of the debate in deference to my superiors.

But maybe Derrida's thought is somewhat different from the concepts underlying "rocket propulsion".

[ 02 November 2005: Message edited by: jeff house ]


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jrootham
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posted 02 November 2005 06:20 PM      Profile for jrootham     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Jeff, I have a suspicion that you have an argument and didn't express it clearly the first time.

Exactly which ideas that Derrida picked up from Heidigger et al. are dangerous?

It was not obvious from your first post, thus, the drive-by complaint.


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jeff house
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posted 02 November 2005 07:56 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Basically, Derrida adopts Heidegger's rejection of the Enlightenment, he rejects the idea that clear standards exist for the critique of a given society.

So, you will seldom find Derrida saying: "The existence of inequality is unacceptable!".

Instead, he will tell you that "nothing exists outside of the text."

A common idea in Derrida involves deconstructing and overcommoning "binary" oppositions. The idea is that you show how the two opposites are not so opposite in fact, they are more like two sides of the same coin. (One of the posters oabove chastises me on the grounds that I am being "binary"!)

It should be clear that such a philosophical orientation is conducive to compromise with power. To give the easiest oversimplification, chose the binary "worker-capitalist". Obviously, analysis which wishes to reduce the conflictual, binary element here, is less likely to give rise to struggle than the older, more opposed binary relationship.

That's mostly a straw man, because the old Marxist model of class conflict is not believed in much anymore. But what about "equality" as in my example, above? Take the binary "Equal society/unequal society". Isn't there a risk of quietism to be found among those who thing this opoposition is too stark? That there is a lot in common between the two?

I think so. Incidentally, a very interesting book on this topic with a chapter on Derrida is "Heidegger's Children" by Wolin.


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Catchfire
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posted 02 November 2005 08:58 PM      Profile for Catchfire   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Derrida deconstructs equality
quote:
Democracy means, minimally, equality. . . There is no democracy except as equality among everyone. . .but an equality which can be calculated, countable: you count the number of units, of voters, of voices, of citizens. On the other hand, you have to reconcile this demand for equality with the demand for singularity, with respect for the Other as singular, and that is an aporia. How can we, at the same time, take into account the equality of everyone, justice and equity, and nevertheless take into account and respect the heterogeneous singularity of everyone?
Sounds fairly reasonable to me, Jeff. The balance most progressives seem to struggle for.

Your reading of Derrida's philosoophy is far too simplistic. Again, like I said above, Derrida's goal is not to say that nothing can be said, but that we cannot break language down to simplistic binaries. No reasonable critic would ever deconstruct "equal society/unequal society" and say that there's no difference between them. She would instead look to see which side was privileged in meaning. Your 'worker/capitalist' model wouldn't work, however, because 'worker' is not the opposite of 'capitalist.' We can take 'worker' and 'bourgeoisie' though, and since in a capitalist society, bourgoisie are privileged a deconstructionist would show how that privilege is illogical: an aporia. In fact, it doesn't even take a deconstructionist to do that: deconstruction is first and foremost a form of literary criticism. Your criticism of Derrida doesn't wash.

Oh, and the Wolin book you're thinking of is The Heidegger Controversy which contains an interview of Derrida that Derrida claims was "execrably translated" and is no longer published in subsequent editions by the MIT Press and not published at all in the Columbia Press. His criticism of Derrida's apologizing for Heidegger's Nazi past is something that I have not the expertise or knowledge to reckon with, but Derrida's politics that have been explicitly expressed are certainly right in line with most thinkers on this board.


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Erik Redburn
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posted 02 November 2005 09:53 PM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
"Democracy means, minimally, equality. . . There is no democracy except as equality among everyone. . .but an equality which can be calculated, countable: you count the number of units, of voters, of voices, of citizens. On the other hand, you have to reconcile this demand for equality with the demand for singularity, with respect for the Other as singular, and that is an aporia. How can we, at the same time, take into account the equality of everyone, justice and equity, and nevertheless take into account and respect the heterogeneous singularity of everyone?"

Looks like a fatuous muddle to me. "An equality" can be "calculated" -by votes is it? Is That what he thinks we generally mean by equality and/or democracy? (not the same things exactly, but dependent in part on each other) And what does he mean by "others" and "singularity"? Is that a criticism, a supposed contradiction, or his tacit support for a suddenly..."heterogenous" singularity? We have democratic elections, and individual civil rights (among others) and they balance each other out without negating each others affect. At least in theory. The fact they often fall short isn't necessarily an inherent contradiction between these humanist ideals, but more often a result of those who have no intention of accepting them in practice. Dismissing them as flawed or futile pursuits would most certainly make things worse. Neo-cons prove that all the time. Simple.

Philosophy has two valid pursuits: to search for better ways of understanding human meaning within commonly observed realities; or to refine our understanding of the linguistic concepts we use so we can escape the pit falls and limits they often present (or are said to present) themselves. If a philosopher can at no point explain what theyre actually getting at or coming From then they're probably just another elaborate hoax. Bertie Russell and Emannuel Kant may have been bores but they at least tried to be methodical and consistent.


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Erik Redburn
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posted 02 November 2005 10:37 PM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
VGLT: The point about deconstructing race is a good one.

Too bad post-modernist deconstruction had about as much to do with the seminal battles over racism as you and I did. The wars were largely won by the likes of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson, who didn't need elaborate theories to combat what they knew in their hearts and minds and shared experience was wrong. And they didn't do it for post-modernist rationales either, but because they Cared about others who suffered as they had.

It's unfortunate that Jeff takes apart in the smearing of people like Heiddeger(not sure about Bataille). A conscious decision to become a Nazie back then was about as conscious as a hitler youth.
I consider this to be a sort of last gasp cheap shot due to the fact that people like Nietzsche and Heiddeger and the pomos kicked the intellectual shit out of enlightenment discourse. Also by Master Morality I meant it in the Nietzschean way, something which predates those names you threw.

And that's even more anti-humanist bunk, Nietszche and Heidegger couldn't kick their way of their own worn socks. Whatever clever things they wrote, they remain favourites of closet authoritarians for the obvious reason they were indeed such themselves.

You also make an interesting point about disiphering things from power. I think that when you get right down to it. That is how life continues and ends. Part of what predicates our existance for example is a holocaust of neanderthals. Also hunter-gathering(which is the most egalitarian system humans ever had) is predicated on power and domination. It's not a nice thing, but it's how we have to live. When you understand this, you realize that power sets the rules for the ethics we construct. Our job is to mediate this as well as possible.

Hunting for food wasn't about a "will to power" either, it was a physical necessity for most of our prehistory and was generally done with a high degree of reverence for the critters they ate -if more recent hunter-gatherers are in fact representative examples. If that respect wasn't shown then the clan would either starve or drift into another probably healthier clan's territory. That's how natural balances were once maintained, not by elitist pretensions about "mediating" others lives.

[ 02 November 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]


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Brett Mann
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posted 02 November 2005 10:56 PM      Profile for Brett Mann        Edit/Delete Post
Even if deconstructionism is limited to the area of literary criticism, I still have trouble with it. And the trouble is this - it appears to me that the beginning premise of deconstructionism is that what an author is actually saying is not what he or she thinks they are saying. The deconstructionist has a more valid understanding of the writer's meaning than the writer him- or herself. I find this pretentious, absurd and offensive. Hopefully someone will correct my shaky grasp of deconstructionism if I am fundamentally wrong on this point.
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jeff house
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posted 02 November 2005 11:14 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Oh, and the Wolin book you're thinking of is The Heidegger Controversy which contains an interview of Derrida that Derrida claims was "execrably translated"

Actually no. But I WAS thinking of not just Heidegger's Children, but also a second Wolin Book, The Seduction of Unreason.

They can be found here:

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7136.html
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7705.html


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Catchfire
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posted 02 November 2005 11:21 PM      Profile for Catchfire   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Once again, if you simplify Derrida, you miss the point. Erik: Derrida does not say that equality and singularity cancel each other out. He asks how can we achieve a balance between them. I'm sorry you don't understand terms like "the Other" and "singular," but maybe you should look them up before you call a canonical critic and theorist a "fatuous muddle."

People are quickly starting to realize that positivist claims are untenable. I can easily say "racism is wrong" without much problem, but deconstruction allows me to say isalmophobia is wrong without being branded an anti-semite. It allows me to criticize Bush's war in Iraq without being accused of supporting Saddam Hussein. I can show that "racism" is a much more complicated term that cannot be broken down into a wrong/right binary, but rather contains a spectrum, a hypertext of metaphysical clusters of meanings that is lost when you try to simplify it. The criticism of Derrida here seems to be that he achieves nothng with his philosophy. Pins that say "Stop Racism Now," while admirable and absolutely useful, are hardly going to solve the problem all by themselves. If "racism" is deconstructed, as it has been by countless people who have never heard of Derrida, then the nuanced, sensitive nature of race relations can begin to be understood. And that, I think, is what we as progressives want—what Derrida wanted—understanding.

And looney, I'm sorry you think that removing authorial intention is pretentious, but it is hardly unique to deconstruction. Literary theory for about half a century revolves around this point. Not to say it doesn't matter at all, but that there can be much more learned from what an artist doesn't say as there is from what she does. The entire field of cultural studies is based on this premise. Of course, there's probably a nugget of truth behind your statement that literature and cultural studies critics are pretentious: I think it's on the admission requirements...

[edited to add:]I'm sorry, Jeff, but I thought that Wolin's famous criticism of Derrida was only in The Heidegger Controversy. I didn't realize that he criticized him in the other two books of the trilogy too (which, I admit, I haven't read.) Which chapter is the one you are talking about?

[ 02 November 2005: Message edited by: Catchfire ]


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jeff house
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posted 02 November 2005 11:46 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Sorry, I think it was spread over several chapters, but I don't have the books in my hand to tell you.

Here's a summary/review which articulates some of the points quite well:

quote:
It is Derrida and deconstructionism's relations with contemporary politics that especially fascinate Wolin. He is seemingly bored by traversing the familiar ground of Derrida's oft cited maxim, "There is nothing outside the text.'' Citing Foucault and the recently departed Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, Wolin notes that, "Derrida is the master ventriloquist who in sovereign fashion determines which textual meanings become unrevealed and how''.

But in the political realm, Derrida becomes more intriguing and disturbing. Wolin couples Derrida's view that law and justice never coincide ("general maxims -- be they moral, constitutional, or legal -- are intrinsically incapable of doing justice to the specificity of the individual case'') with his preparedness to sanction "a violent act of revolutionary founding'' because it creates a pristine abyss.

Derrida's rejection of the modern natural law tradition, which Wolin notes is the firmament on which our democracy is based, is particularly dangerous in these troubled times. Derrida leaves us with a "political existentialism in which, given the 'groundless' nature of moral and political choices, one political 'decision' seems as good as another''.


http://home.iprimus.com.au/ltuffin/barnsderrida.html

I might point out that Derrida's comment about the general law being inadequate to the specifics of any case, is one which was intrinsic to the legal thought of Carl Schmitt, the legal philosopher who set out the legal foundations of the Third Reich. Derrida's comment doesn't make him a Nazi. It makes him a person whose philosophy is dangerous.


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Vigilante
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posted 03 November 2005 12:41 AM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Jeff:
Basically, Derrida adopts Heidegger's rejection of the Enlightenment, he rejects the idea that clear standards exist for the critique of a given society.

GAAAAASP!!! How horrifyingly terrible! I mean its only a discourse with a trajectory that ended with holocausts and instrumentalist,hegemonic techniqies that enslave us to this day and continue to get worse. Horkheimer and Adorno explained this well.

quote:
Eric:
Looks like a fatuous muddle to me. "An equality" can be "calculated" -by votes is it? Is That what he thinks we generally mean by equality and/or democracy? (not the same things exactly, but dependent in part on each other) And what does he mean by "others" and "singularity"? Is that a criticism, a supposed contradiction, or his tacit support for a suddenly..."heterogenous" singularity? We have democratic elections, and individual civil rights (among others) and they balance each other out without negating each others affect. At least in theory. The fact they often fall short isn't necessarily an inherent contradiction between these humanist ideals, but more often a result of those who have no intention of accepting them in practice. Dismissing them as flawed or futile pursuits would most certainly make things worse. Neo-cons prove that all the time. Simple.

It's quite hilarious that there are still people who feel that democracy and rights are the answer to balancing the individual and social. Besides the fact that it was the masters who eventually granted the rights(which is hardly organic or reciporical) One cannot talk about the rise of rights and democracy without talking about the evolution of the military and economic complexes of the world. These masters made it ok to give people a bit more freedom of movement. Thought we are still enslaved to increasing amounts of biopolitical forms of disclipline and servailance. The fact that as Paul Virilio points out, modern day cities are FUCKING CONSTRUCTED TO CONTROL MOVEMENTS OF REBELLIONS(narrow halways ect) should tell you how much control people really have. It's all about the military, capital and the techniques that accompany this that still control us. Nope, the balance between individual and social is not even close to being met.

quote:
Philosophy has two valid pursuits: to search for better ways of understanding human meaning within commonly observed realities; or to refine our understanding of the linguistic concepts we use so we can escape the pit falls and limits they often present (or are said to present) themselves. If a philosopher can at no point explain what theyre actually getting at or coming From then they're probably just another elaborate hoax. Bertie Russell and Emannuel Kant may have been bores but they at least tried to be methodical and consistent.

Well that's how philosophy started. Problem is people like Hegal, Stirner, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and ultimately Derrida(throw in Einstein and Hiesenberg as well on a scientific level) have more or less destroyed that idea. The search for truth and meaning is on some macro level is over dude. As Gilles Deleuze points out, one must leave philosopy a philosopher. It's back to the individual baby.

quote:
Too bad post-modernist deconstruction had about as much to do with the seminal battles over racism as you and I did. The wars were largely won by the likes of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson, who didn't need elaborate theories to combat what they knew in their hearts and minds and shared experience was wrong. And they didn't do it for post-modernist rationales either, but because they Cared about others who suffered as they had.

I doubt pomos would give a shit if an individual or collective uses or doesn't use postmodernism to free or better their condition. Besides you are aware that what afro-americans were taking on what enlightenment positivist based racism right? I supose you believe todays enlighteners have it right, RIGHT.

quote:
And that's even more anti-humanist bunk, Nietszche and Heidegger couldn't kick their way of their own worn socks. Whatever clever things they wrote, they remain favourites of closet authoritarians for the obvious reason they were indeed such themselves.

Well gee the fact that you and Jeffrey don't go after the substance of what these people said but try to smear their work with Nazieism shows how affective their critique was. As for authoritarians liking N or H. One can say the same thing about Marx(just look at Babbles Fidel) So please quit with the fallacies. As for them being authoritarians, well Heidegger was somewhat conservative, however being one of the first to critique authoritarian techniques saves face for him from my view, and as for Nietzsche, he was pretty existentialist in outlook, go read his view on the state as well as his critique of enlightenment science.

As for Jeff saying, Derridas ideas are dangerous, HELO...all ideas have the danger in them. What Derida does is dencentralize them, and strip away the binery mode of thinking, which gave us such lovely categories as good/evil, rational/irrational(economic enlightenment science version of good/evil) that led to large amounts of deaths in the world of humans and non-humans, to make them less so. The less governmentality driven ideas are the better. Look at what people have done in Marx's name.

[ 03 November 2005: Message edited by: Vigilante ]


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Erik Redburn
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posted 03 November 2005 12:46 AM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by Catchfire:
Once again, if you simplify Derrida, you miss the point. Erik: Derrida does not say that equality and singularity cancel each other out. He asks how can we achieve a balance between them. I'm sorry you don't understand terms like "the Other" and "singular," but maybe you should look them up before you call a canonical critic and theorist a "fatuous muddle."

People are quickly starting to realize that positivist claims are untenable. I can easily say "racism is wrong" without much problem, but deconstruction allows me to say isalmophobia is wrong without being branded an anti-semite. It allows me to criticize Bush's war in Iraq without being accused of supporting Saddam Hussein. I can show that "racism" is a much more complicated term that cannot be broken down into a wrong/right binary, but rather contains a spectrum, a hypertext of metaphysical clusters of meanings that is lost when you try to simplify it. The criticism of Derrida here seems to be that he achieves nothng with his philosophy. Pins that say "Stop Racism Now," while admirable and absolutely useful, are hardly going to solve the problem all by themselves. If "racism" is deconstructed, as it has been by countless people who have never heard of Derrida, then the nuanced, sensitive nature of race relations can begin to be understood. And that, I think, is what we as progressives want—what Derrida wanted—understanding.


Um, two things. I don't accept any philosophical author as 'canonical' and therefore beyond the comprehension of those who haven't read tiresome tomes of it. I just note that some of his thinking looks awfully bound with complex jargon for what looks to be essentially simple ideas. I can do all that critiquing already without reading a word of Derrida. Either/or reasoning is a flaw in reasoning that any critic of Dubya can see. I have read some of his stuff but found it mostly gave me a headache so I never bopthered going too far with it. I've also heard many assertions made by those who claim to follow his works that sound downright...muddled. That's just my POV though. Some post-modernist ideas I hear sound reasonable enough, if overly long winded. Context in the end is whatever any author wants it be, and whatever the reader wants to accept.


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Erik Redburn
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posted 03 November 2005 01:05 AM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
VGL: "It's quite hilarious that there are still people who feel that democracy and rights are the answer to balancing the individual and social. Besides the fact that it was the masters who eventually granted the rights(which is hardly organic or reciporical) ..."

This is why I find it so easy to be rude to you dude, youre unable to even address what the other guy's saying before youre off to Mount Olympus again. Makes me proud to be poor white trash. The "individual and social" as concieved by the original humanists were not some grande existential mystery to be pondered over eternally but simple issues of ongoing practical tradeoffs. Life carried on before and after these incovenient rituals and mutual obligations, as imperfect as it always is. Your inability or refusal to even distinguish between one kind of 'master' or another, or rather one kind of leader or another, while asserting the authority of your own particular folk heros makes your second point even more moot. Democracy was Not 'handed to us' by our lairds and ladies, it was fought for every inch of the way, as everything worthwhile usually is, with many reverses along the way. That happens too. They gave ground when they had too and eventually found new ways to exploit their remaining advantages. The losses of the past thirty years have only underlined their original value though, even if never quite "achieved" in a perfectly Platonic sense. Enjoy your illusions.

[ 03 November 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]


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Vigilante
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posted 03 November 2005 01:47 AM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
First of all Erik the simple problem with individual and is a question of governmentality. The fact that the practical tradeoffs that you talk of happened in the context of mass society(something based on holocausts of verrious existances) shows how flawed this aproach was. Also the construct of humans was originally concieved by the masters for themselves. The fact that humanists want to continue this anthropocentric concept in the area of liberation says something. And I don't compare and contrast which master is better for the simple fact that I want all of them gone as an anti-authoritarian. And I hardly worship the pomos as much as I simply find them usefull. And as for the people who engineered the fight for democracy, they were mostly the 3rd estate types. Their results can be seen in todays CEOs. The so called losses that you speak of can be tied to capital, something that they engeneered to begin with. The Trading class.
It was a movement of resentment, and resentment will never get you freedom.

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byzantine
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posted 03 November 2005 12:44 PM      Profile for byzantine        Edit/Delete Post
The Adorno/Horkheimer point was the best one made in this thread, especially since certain posters, some with, gasp, Masters degrees (though apparently not in philosophy) are, like GW Bush, very keen to bring up the Nazis.
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skdadl
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posted 03 November 2005 01:18 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
The yawning chasm between social-scientific and literary thought -- it is endlessly amazing to me. It is also the reason I bow out of this discussion, in the interests of maintaining my sanity.

One point, looney: As Catchfire has noted, the question of intentionality was raised in Anglo-American modernist aesthetics a long time ago, first in British poetry and criticism as early as the 1920s and then in the essays of the American New Critics from the 1940s on.

If anything, it was the modernists who puritanically excluded the author's intentions from their ultra-formalist analyses, as they did, eg, most historical context. It was those who critiqued formalism and modernism, from the mid1960s on, who began to argue for more subtle uses of biographical and historical context, who in fact reintroduced them into critical discourse, Said being a prime example.

Anglo-American formalism (the so-called New Criticism) was, however, one of those traditions I referred to above that the French missed out on in the interwar and war years, that they only began to learn about in the fifties and then played catch-up with. Your raising of the issue of intentionality was an ironic confirmation of my point -- by the time Derrida met the rigid American New Critical view of intentionality as fallacy, he was already ready to leap over it.


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Cueball
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posted 03 November 2005 01:55 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by Erik the Red:

This is why I find it so easy to be rude to you dude, youre unable to even address what the other guy's saying before youre off to Mount Olympus again.


Best flame on the thread belongs to the side I am not on. Can we do better folks?

Jeff, it is about a subtle every shifting discourse not about absolute oppositions that "cancel" each other out, or meanings that are relativistically nullified.

It is like Quantum physics, it is useful to know that sub-atomic particles are "fuzzy," and that their calcuable speed and trajectories depend on the relative position of the observer, but this does not mean that we can not calculate probable velocities using Heisenberg's uncertainty principle or on the macro scale use Newtonian physics to calculate orbits and launch craft into space.


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jeff house
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posted 03 November 2005 04:56 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Perhaps the best demonstration of the dangers in Derrida's thought is the extent to which Vigilante thinks D. is right about the Enlightenment.

Sometime I'll start a thread about Derrida's legal theory, and the dangers which lurk therein.

Meanwhile, those interested might read Derrida's quote on law, above, and then ask the question:
when the law doesn't cover a given case, does that allow the state to more easily declare a "state of exception" or that a given situation like terrorism is "not covered by law"?

Those tantalysed by the previous post on Schmitt should read "Between the Norm and the Exception" by Scheuerman.


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Vigilante
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posted 03 November 2005 06:08 PM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
Well I read the iprimus peace and it is every bit the enlightenment based pile of trash that I expected. Smearing pomo discourse with Le Pen(WHAAAA I'M HURT) Really. And the double standard of linking it to authoritarians. Look up the National Bolshevics sometime, should all Marxian based discourse be smeared. Heck there are people who call themselves national anarchists. Am I implicated or anarchism implicated? Fuck the best ideas can be turned to screwed up things. As I said the point is to decentralize and contextualize them as much as possible.

As far as law goes. It is unfortunate that Jeff(a specialist in this regard) does not want to imagine a world without the law. Go read Max Stirner's conception of the criminal sometime in relation to the sacred(The Ego and His Own is online).

Really Jeff, your enlightenment ideological fetish makes you look sillier with every post.


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byzantine
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posted 03 November 2005 07:36 PM      Profile for byzantine        Edit/Delete Post
You know, this thread has actually brought up some interesting philosophical issues, despite the fact it was trolled early on.
Consider this: you have one side essentially dismissing philosophy since Nietzsche b/c it's "dangerous" not to believe in the absolute truths the Enlightenment purported to offer. This reminds me of religious commentators who link morality and the Bible, essentially arguing that only the ten commandments keep people from killing each other and fucking their neighbours. Take away the ten commandments and what? According to them, the collapse of society as we know it. Jeff makes the same argument viz. enlightenment philosophy. I don't see it as being true though, in either case.

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Vigilante
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posted 03 November 2005 07:43 PM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
Yep. As I said, the rational/irrational binery was the materialist/science fetish based evolution of good and evil. Something they claim to have gotten over with something better.
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Brett Mann
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posted 03 November 2005 09:25 PM      Profile for Brett Mann        Edit/Delete Post
Vigilante, you've got to learn to spell. A little work on syntax wouldn't hurt at times either. I'm trying fair-mindedly to winnow out your valid insights from your apparently contradictory positions and overemotional ranting. When I have to put so much effort into reading someone who I suspect is quite wrong to start with, dealing with amateurish spelling is too much to ask.

Skdadl, am I correct in understanding that when you say Derrida "jumped over the divide" that he in fact decides to take authorial intention into account? If so, my failure to understand what kind of reasoning would lead to such a position (denying authorial intent, that is) was misplaced.


I see from this discussion that my thinking must belong to the old unenlightened Enlightenment era. I am quite sure that good and evil are real, given conditions of human life. Jeff is quite correct to be deeply suspicious of any philosophical approach which tends to blur, rather than illuminate this distinction. Language exists to help us understand reality, and philosophy exists partly to understand language and the ways we use it.

This is far from just an abstract question - I routinely meet people my age, well-educated, middle class usually, whose reasoning abilities seem to have been impaired when it comes to discernment of real good and evil, and I suspect that a philosophical climate bred in deconstructionist thinking has contributed to this degeneration of moral reasoning ability.

I think it quite possible, from my poorly read perch, that deconstructionism will eventually seen as something of a fraud, and a harmful one at that. In the arena of literary criticism, deconstructionism may have much to offer. As a map towards a more just and enlightened future, I think it is not only useless, but misleading. In fact I smell blood in the water. Could this thread be the beginning of a movement which shines some much deserved light on the whole enterprise of deconstruction and its real life consequences?


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jeff house
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posted 03 November 2005 10:11 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Take away the ten commandments and what? According to them, the collapse of society as we know it. Jeff makes the same argument viz. enlightenment philosophy. I don't see it as being true though, in either case.

I never mentioned the Ten Commandments, of course.

But I do think that the denial of the Enlightenment, and the celebration of human subjectivity alone as a source of values, presents dangers..

That's not "the collapse of society as we know it". So please don't say I said that. Dangers can be confronted and tamed, but not if their existence is denied.

I think human equality is an Enlightenment value, just as I think that the rights protected in the Charter are "Enlightenment-based" rights.

Take a look again at what Derrida wrote about "general maxims of law" being unable to do justice in any specific case. That's the rule of law he's chattering about, you know. He doesn't believe in it.

I do. And I think Derrida's remarks, based as they are on Schmitt and Heidegger, are dangerous.
The rule of law isn't "The Ten Commandments", but it's a pretty important value to be casually dismissing.


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Cueball
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posted 03 November 2005 10:45 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by jeff house:
Perhaps the best demonstration of the dangers in Derrida's thought is the extent to which Vigilante thinks D. is right about the Enlightenment.

That is simply reiteration. Not a response. We all already know that you think Derrida is dangerous, because it is possible question Enlightnement morality.

I find that your whole mode of thinking is dangerous, in exactly the manner where you apply the same mode of absolutist moral values that your presumed enemies do, Mao, Stalin, Hitler et al, and they also believed that they had the absolute right to insitute "change." What you do not see it that you apply the same mode to "Social Democracy." It is that mode, which is in question. It is the means, not so much the end objective, which has spawned the real terrors of the left.

Communist's believed that they had the absolute right to enforce their moral/poltical code without question upon the world, while constructing their utopia. The fact that their utopia was never achievable meant that thier "means" were the only visible evidence of their morality, as the end never arrived, and their means where often truly attrocious.

Simplistic, I know, but it is the gist of the dillema.

But such a mode can be applied to any idea. What is most remarkable of course, is that the people obessessed with such modes, are so often only conciouse of the minor differences they have with their enemies, as opposed to their general similarities, just as with racists, who identify the colour of the skin as a major differnce between people, while ignoring the fact that in all other general aspects people look very much the same, two legs, two arms, two eyes, nose fixed in the center of the face etc.

Look at yourself, your are critiquing Vigilante as having "dangerous" thought, because his thoughts might not lead to actionable change. The acccusation is that he might be politcally inert, essentially. There are far worse things than being ineffectual. I wouldn't call it dangerous.

Only organizations like Mao's Red Guard would insist that people participate in the political process, on the side of what they believe is holy and right, and accuse them of dangerous thought, if they did not.

I think a world social discourse based on the idea, "when in doubt do no harm," would be far superior to having all these Trostkyist's, like Chenny, Mao, Nixon, Stalin, Bush and yourself running around trying to remake the world in terms of their (and your) absolutist moralities.

Back to my previous point, just because meanings are contextual does not mean that they do not have "meanings," generally so, and therefore carry the possibility of a positive politcal direction.

In the instance being able to deconstruct racism, one can not only be opposed to it, but also go one better, and subvert it.

[ 03 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Brett Mann
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posted 03 November 2005 11:44 PM      Profile for Brett Mann        Edit/Delete Post
Are people morally free to ignore politics? I think not. In many cases such indifference breeds the kind of ignorance that is in fact physically dangerous to me, my family and you, dear reader. For a ready example, consider the level of ignorance, all too prevalent, that allows some people to believe that ballistic missile defence actually protects them rather than taking them a giant step closer to nuclear annihilation.
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Erik Redburn
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posted 04 November 2005 12:33 AM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
CB: I find that your whole mode of thinking is dangerous, in exactly the manner where you apply the same mode of absolutist moral values that your presumed enemies do, Mao, Stalin, Hitler et al, and they also believed that they had the absolute right to insitute "change." What you do not see it that you apply the same mode to "Social Democracy." It is that mode, which is in question. It is the means, not so much the end objective, which has spawned the real terrors of the left.
.................
Look at yourself, your are critiquing Vigilante as having "dangerous" thought, because his thoughts might not lead to actionable change. The acccusation is that he might be politcally inert, essentially. There are far worse things than being ineffectual. I wouldn't call it dangerous....

But that clearly hasn't been the case in reality -why? Because the many humanist values which inform and direct 'social democracy' are actually far less utopian than what Vigilante advocates. Humanism evolved by steps, sometimes compromising with existing orders, sometimes revolutionary in action, but always -always- involving several different sets of values balanced against each other through practical and immediately achievable means, recognizing that what went before couldn't just be erased either. Vigilante wants to erase five to ten thousand years of history because he's fixated on one single theoretical value or one set of supposedly irreconciable oppositions, and he basically admits he doesn't care how many would have to die to achieve it. That is the essence of all the really major dystopian horrors. Not that it matters much anyhow because he obviously doesn't know what he's talking about in the first place, everything he says about 'man in his natural state' seems to be filtered through some highly romanticised academic prism. Another classic sign.

CB: It is like Quantum physics, it is useful to know that sub-atomic particles are "fuzzy," and that their calcuable speed and trajectories depend on the relative position of the observer, but this does not mean that we can not calculate probable velocities using Heisenberg's uncertainty principle or on the macro scale use Newtonian physics to calculate orbits and launch craft into space.

And if thats all thats behind it, that's fine. But hardly revolutionary. Not like it hasn't always been known that ideas are attached to others, that historical and mythical values are often attached irrationally, or that words have more than one meaning and meaning varies with context. That's pretty much another given when it comes to any literature.

What gets my teeth on edge is when I hear 'everything is a construct' or somesuch. Not true, not even with psychology. I'd like to ask someone much better read on these theories what exactly they mean by That, but I never get a straight answer when I confront these directly. Even if Derrida is himself a bit of fakir at times, maybe it doesn't matter anymore than Freud and Jung over-emphasizing the influence of old Greek myths on childhood development. Maybe the analytical techniques are more important than the creators own intentions or ideas. Or is that a post-modernist thought too?

[ 04 November 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]


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Erik Redburn
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posted 04 November 2005 12:51 AM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by byzantine:
You know, this thread has actually brought up some interesting philosophical issues, despite the fact it was trolled early on.
Consider this: you have one side essentially dismissing philosophy since Nietzsche b/c it's "dangerous" not to believe in the absolute truths the Enlightenment purported to offer. This reminds me of religious commentators who link morality and the Bible, essentially arguing that only the ten commandments keep people from killing each other and fucking their neighbours. Take away the ten commandments and what? According to them, the collapse of society as we know it. Jeff makes the same argument viz. enlightenment philosophy. I don't see it as being true though, in either case.


Your views on 'the enlightenment' and humanism must have been informed by a post-modernist too, as that has almost nothing to do with what Jeff said. I'd go as far as agreeing that the idea of moral order being evident in 'mother nature' was a dangerous wrong turn of sorts, but then like any new ideas the original authors and compilers only stray so far from what went before. I believe the rule of Less arbitrary laws, a gradually expanding democratic franchise, and shared ideals of free speech helped people to overcome these more negative potentials regardless. That and probably the negative over-reaction experienced during the French 'terror' and later during the Russian and fascist counter-revolutions. People seem to learn quicker from direct experience than relying on layers of philosphical debate. Even Vigilante dude might see that.


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Cueball
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posted 04 November 2005 02:04 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by Erik the Red:

And if thats all thats behind it, that's fine. But hardly revolutionary. Not like it hasn't always been known that ideas are attached to others, that historical and mythical values are often attached irrationally, or that words have more than one meaning and meaning varies with context. That's pretty much another given when it comes to any literature.


That is just an encapsulation, and example. But think back about what a stink the calssical physicists made when things started going that way. Even Einstein neve forgave himself for helping to invent it.

But actually I don't think that it has always been known that "ideas are attached to others, that historical and mythical values are often attached irrationally," it may seem that is completely obvious to everyone, now that all their has bee all this crticism but, for instance, in the case of the Bible, many people didn't see it as irrationally attached to mythology, they saw it as an iviolable object truth. The word of god.


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byzantine
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posted 04 November 2005 03:45 AM      Profile for byzantine        Edit/Delete Post
Quote: "Your views on 'the enlightenment' and humanism must have been informed by a post-modernist too"

No, they were informed by reading books that often made MY head hurt. The difference between us is, I kept reading.
(Post)modernity can't be wished away, head pulled under covers, urine trickling down leg, crying "give me something inexorable and written in stone to hold onto, mommy I'm scared of the big bad philosophy man!"


From: saskatchewan | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged
Erik Redburn
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posted 04 November 2005 05:18 AM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by byzantine:
Quote: "Your views on 'the enlightenment' and humanism must have been informed by a post-modernist too"

No, they were informed by reading books that often made MY head hurt. The difference between us is, I kept reading.
(Post)modernity can't be wished away, head pulled under covers, urine trickling down leg, crying "give me something inexorable and written in stone to hold onto, mommy I'm scared of the big bad philosophy man!"



I read plenty Byzantine, I just got better things to think about than sophomore philosophy. Another apparent mistake, their notions don't direct political history either, Marx was right about that. If you ever think of a way to address what the other person's actually arguing I might just tune in again.


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Erik Redburn
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posted 04 November 2005 05:28 AM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by Cueball:
That is just an encapsulation, and example. But think back about what a stink the calssical physicists made when things started going that way. Even Einstein neve forgave himself for helping to invent it.

But actually I don't think that it has always been known that "ideas are attached to others, that historical and mythical values are often attached irrationally," it may seem that is completely obvious to everyone, now that all their has bee all this crticism but, for instance, in the case of the Bible, many people didn't see it as irrationally attached to mythology, they saw it as an iviolable object truth. The word of god.


That's true too. I'd imagine there's always been some tacit awareness of ambiguity among the more literate, but for most the rest -brimstone or lightening clouds, holy gospel or heresy. At least in the West. (That BTW was just a crude metaphor, just for the sake of convenience)


From: Broke but not bent. | Registered: Feb 2004  |  IP: Logged
byzantine
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posted 04 November 2005 12:02 PM      Profile for byzantine        Edit/Delete Post
Quote: 'I think a world social discourse based on the idea, "when in doubt do no harm," would be far superior'

I like that idea as well. The problem of course, as I think you correctly identified, is that the people most likely to do harm are those that are also the most sure of themselves and their ideological foundation.


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Vigilante
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posted 04 November 2005 04:11 PM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Eric the Red:
But that clearly hasn't been the case in reality -why? Because the many humanist values which inform and direct 'social democracy' are actually far less utopian than what Vigilante advocates. Humanism evolved by steps, sometimes compromising with existing orders, sometimes revolutionary in action, but always -always- involving several different sets of values balanced against each other through practical and immediately achievable means, recognizing that what went before couldn't just be erased either.

Nowhere have I talked about utopian ideals. I leave that to the humanists who are stuck on their orderly based fixiated ideas. And as for what you're saing about compramising, I am harken back to Camus when he said(not exact quote), "the good of society has always been the friend of tyrants".

quote:
Vigilante wants to erase five to ten thousand years of history because he's fixated on one single theoretical value or one set of supposedly irreconciable oppositions, and he basically admits he doesn't care how many would have to die to achieve it. That is the essence of all the really major dystopian horrors. Not that it matters much anyhow because he obviously doesn't know what he's talking about in the first place, everything he says about 'man in his natural state' seems to be filtered through some highly romanticised academic prism. Another classic sign.

Well 11 000 to be exact. And it is hard to really predict what face death will take in this regard for the simple fact that there has never been a direct return to subsistance.A best case scenerio is that what happened in Chiapas would happen on a worldwide scale. But who's to know. Certainly the aura of death(a fear that civilization has exploited well) should not ward us off in this regard). There has however been an attempt to reorganize the techniques of our opression in accordance with mass society. I refer you to Mao and Stalin as what the worst case scenerios are in that regard. And I don't talk about the man as much as I talk about US and what we've done to ourselves, and life as such.

quote:
I believe the rule of Less arbitrary laws, a gradually expanding democratic franchise, and shared ideals of free speech helped people to overcome these more negative potentials regardless. That and probably the negative over-reaction experienced during the French 'terror' and later during the Russian and fascist counter-revolutions. People seem to learn quicker from direct experience than relying on layers of philosphical debate. Even Vigilante dude might see that.

As I said, people like Eric have an inability to look at the greater material events that led to democracy. The fact that it was sparked by resentment based traders who ended up becoming masters themselves and paved the way for people like Sam Walton to exist today. Also the the fact that the techniques of democracy have never been under our control. As for direct experiance, I think I probably have a much better idea of it then you do seeing as I don't lived by any fixed fetishized values(but my own)

And a point to Jeff, no one should believe in the rule of law. It is believe it or not based on the same objective based catagories that drove bible based thinking. And the dumbest thing you can do is to place your automomy in so called objectified categories. People should relealize that no matter what the social context, people still have their own freedom and subjectivity to work with. It's a pitty someone like you can't fathom a world without such an abastract concept, delivered to us by capitalists and technocrats alike who simply wanted a bit more freedom of movement for themselves.

[ 04 November 2005: Message edited by: Vigilante ]


From: Toronto | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Erik Redburn
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posted 04 November 2005 06:40 PM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Democracy doesn't cure cancer either, does that make it responsible for it? Democracy is not the cause of the Walmart empire dude, lack of democracy is.
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blueskyboris
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posted 06 November 2005 11:17 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
lotte
quote:
I think that what Derrida means by 'examples' not being acceptable within his argument falls back to the notion of structures lacking a center. That is, while giving a certain example in order to illustrate a particular idea, this whole idea changes as it is tied to this example. Furthermore, yet another example similarily changes the particular idea again as it is ties to this new example. This goes on infinitely regardless the ammount of examples used. The 'whole' as in the entire idea can never be illustrated due to the changing nature of it resulting from each example.
Which illustrates the non-objective, contradictive nature of 'example'.

Jeff House

quote:
Actually, I think the refusal to deconstruct the fundamentals of Derrida's thought result from sloppy and uncritical reasoning.
You've used this crucial point as a cheap rhetorical counter. Derrida's text deserves to be deconstucted, just like all other texts, but such an assertion already assumes the legimitacy of deconstruction.

quote:
It should be clear that such a philosophical orientation is conducive to compromise with power. To give the easiest oversimplification, chose the binary "worker-capitalist". Obviously, analysis which wishes to reduce the conflictual, binary element here, is less likely to give rise to struggle than the older, more opposed binary relationship.
Indeed.

quote:
That's mostly a straw man, because the old Marxist model of class conflict is not believed in much anymore.
Rhetorical oversimplification.

Catchfire

quote:
Again, like I said above, Derrida's goal is not to say that nothing can be said, but that we cannot break language down to simplistic binaries. No reasonable critic would ever deconstruct "equal society/unequal society" and say that there's no difference between them. She would instead look to see which side was privileged in meaning. Your 'worker/capitalist' model wouldn't work, however, because 'worker' is not the opposite of 'capitalist.' We can take 'worker' and 'bourgeoisie' though, and since in a capitalist society, bourgoisie are privileged a deconstructionist would show how that privilege is illogical: an aporia. In fact, it doesn't even take a deconstructionist to do that: deconstruction is first and foremost a form of literary criticism. Your criticism of Derrida doesn't wash.
This criticism of Derrida is partially warranted, especially when one considers his prose style. That said, Derrida was very careful to support Marx's "ruthless criticism of everything existing", which means Derrida supported Marx's criticism of oppressive text and Marx's analysis (contextualization?) of political history philosophically.

If "racism" is deconstructed, as it has been by countless people who have never heard of Derrida, then the nuanced, sensitive nature of race relations can begin to be understood. And that, I think, is what we as progressives want—what Derrida wanted—understanding.

I agree.

Eric the Red

quote:
Too bad post-modernist deconstruction had about as much to do with the seminal battles over racism as you and I did. The wars were largely won by the likes of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson, who didn't need elaborate theories to combat what they knew in their hearts and minds and shared experience was wrong. And they didn't do it for post-modernist rationales either, but because they Cared about others who suffered as they had.
Oversimplification. Both deconstruction and common action have affected the "race battles'. To say otherwise is an example of the "ivory tower fallacy".

quote:
I have read some of his stuff but found it mostly gave me a headache so I never bopthered going too far with it. I've also heard many assertions made by those who claim to follow his works that sound downright...muddled.
Which is why it is best to read the text and not listen to random assertions.

Looney

quote:
Even if deconstructionism is limited to the area of literary criticism, I still have trouble with it. And the trouble is this - it appears to me that the beginning premise of deconstructionism is that what an author is actually saying is not what he or she thinks they are saying. The deconstructionist has a more valid understanding of the writer's meaning than the writer him- or herself. I find this pretentious, absurd and offensive. Hopefully someone will correct my shaky grasp of deconstructionism if I am fundamentally wrong on this point.
The deconstructionist's analysis of a text is not "more valid" than the original author. The deconstructionist, if (s)he has deconstructed properly, might be able claim a greater depth of knowledge of the original author's meaning, because validit is a hierarchical term. "Validity" is hierarchical when we should be reading both the original author and deconstructionsist. In fact, to read a deconstuctionist analysis without reading the original author is, by necessity, impossible.

Vigilante

quote:
Besides the fact that it was the masters who eventually granted the rights(which is hardly organic or reciporical) One cannot talk about the rise of rights and democracy without talking about the evolution of the military and economic complexes of the world.
Yes, but the masters granted rights based their agreement with the idea of rights. You can't go in circles like this, Vigilante.

We are not going to return to Stalinist and Maoist type regimes - that's for sure. Rights are a universal form-in-power applicable vis-a-vis the state. If rights had been deployed in Bolshevik Russia - vis-a-vis the state - we might not be sitting here having this capitalist-text encapsulated political discussion.

[ 06 November 2005: Message edited by: blueskyboris ]


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blueskyboris
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posted 06 November 2005 11:21 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Derrida clearly believes that 'example' is the result of convenience, not form. He believes that there is no objective basis for 'example'.

Can anyone suggest how 'example' might be form-based, as opposed to power-based? I have a hard time imagining a world existing without the "necessity of example", which leads me to believe that there is something universally fundamental about it.

Can anyone provide an example of a people-world where 'example' would not exist?

[ 06 November 2005: Message edited by: blueskyboris ]


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Cueball
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posted 06 November 2005 05:18 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by blueskyboris:
The deconstructionist's analysis of a text is not "more valid" than the original author. The deconstructionist, if (s)he has deconstructed properly, might be able claim a greater depth of knowledge of the original author's meaning, because validit is a hierarchical term. "Validity" is hierarchical when we should be reading both the original author and deconstructionsist. In fact, to read a deconstuctionist analysis without reading the original author is, by necessity, impossible.

Overegoisation. Actually, Derrida would more likely say that the original authors "intent" is meaningless.

*snarfle*

By which I mean irrelevant. And of course flip the pancake and assert same about the deconstruction.

This assertion that a deconstuction can be done "properly" itself implies a hierarchical gradation set against some kind of "objective" scale that does not recognize that it is located in the discourse.

"That pan is just about hot enough."

I don't see why someone the (hypothetical deconsructer) might say that they have a "greater {note hierarchical assertion} depth of knowledge of the original author's meaning," since that meaning is detached from the intent of the author, and exists only in the text.

Why would it be relevant to assert such about something (the author) which is irrelevant to the text?

"Get me that spatula, Davidson, I didn't make you my cabin boy for nothing!"

quote:
Yes, but the masters granted rights based their agreement with the idea of rights. You can't go in circles like this, Vigilante.

We are not going to return to Stalinist and Maoist type regimes - that's for sure. Rights are a universal form-in-power applicable vis-a-vis the state. If rights had been deployed in Bolshevik Russia - vis-a-vis the state - we might not be sitting here having this capitalist-text encapsulated political discussion.


Hocus Pocus. The critque of "rights" comes from the recognition that by according "rights" to people you are establishing that certain acts exist outside of the realm of rights. By their definition they imply limitation.

If one thinks about the comon situation where someone would assert their rights, it is easy to see how these rights act themselves out in performance.

It is common for someone to say: "I am within my rights." Quite clearly the expression of limitation.

One has a "right to remain silent." What is more disempowering than being told you may be silent, when the obvious implication is that speaking will get you into trouble. You are being told to shut up. People for instance have the "right to peacful assembly," while on the other hand the police have the power to use force.

If you look at almost any situation, wherein the discourse of rights enters the social realm it is in regards to situations where people are coming into conflict with the state, the rich, and the police. One does not say for intstance "I have right to a cup of coffee" except when one is being denied a cup of coffee.

The common theme is that there are persons with powers above and beyond your "rights" to act against you, and the discourse only appears really when power has been used against you.

Also one should be very clear about the evolution of the discourse of rights, which occurred in the Soviet Union, as a discussion of the norms of "Sociaist Legality," whose chief propnent was Nikolai Buhkharin who Stalin had pen the Soviet consitution and then arrested and then shot. There are essentially two periods of Soviet history, the first, up until the death of Stalin was, if you will, the Bolshevik period, and then the Cold War period after.

While it is true that the state acted pretty much outside of the norms of "Socialist Legality" up until the end of the Bolshevik period, after that time law, and the application of law, became quite well regulated as something we in Canada would recognize as law, where judges made decision based on the written code, not on the basis of political convnience, while police and prosecutors, where actually required to investigate, collect evidence and otherwise prove their cases.

Notice that A. Solesenytsyn and N. Shcaransky are still alive, a most unlkely circumstance were they have had their run-is with the state in the Bolshevik period.

So in fact rights were "deployed in Bolshevik Russia - vis-a-vis the state" and "we are" nonetheless "sitting here having this capitalist-text encapsulated political discussion."

[ 06 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Erik Redburn
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posted 06 November 2005 10:33 PM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:I think that what Derrida means by 'examples' not being acceptable within his argument falls back to the notion of structures lacking a center. That is, while giving a certain example in order to illustrate a particular idea, this whole idea changes as it is tied to this example. Furthermore, yet another example similarily changes the particular idea again as it is ties to this new example. This goes on infinitely regardless the ammount of examples used. The 'whole' as in the entire idea can never be illustrated due to the changing nature of it resulting from each example.

Which illustrates the non-objective, contradictive nature of 'example'.

But of course everything is "non-objective" to some degree so we're back to square one again. Analogies are just analogies, meant to be understood as such, as you even imply yourself. That doesn't collapse the whole field of understanding 'examples' in infinite regression. Given the impossibity of encapsulating every relevant detail or exception within any single statement in the first place, most questions can usually just come back to which is the the best proximity of said reality for the understood task at hand. The strength of an analogy in actual argument is how closely it Does describe the essential issue at hand, how well it fits with other bits of data and experience that everyone can then agree on that is. The strength of a metaphor in literature is how well it evokes a certain mood or thought, accuracy doesn't come into it beyond honest expression.

Jeff House

quote:Actually, I think the refusal to deconstruct the fundamentals of Derrida's thought result from sloppy and uncritical reasoning.

You've used this crucial point as a cheap rhetorical counter. Derrida's text deserves to be deconstucted, just like all other texts, but such an assertion already assumes the legimitacy of deconstruction.

That's just pure sophistry. Critics and writers and competing philosophers have been 'deconstructing' language since long before Derrida invented the term, so it therefore doesn't amount to an admission of his essential correctness either. Youre confusing a smaller case item with a larger case one then reasserting your own authority it. If all men are deconstructionists does than mean all deconstructionists are men? (joke there somewhere I think)

Eric the Red

quote:Too bad post-modernist deconstruction had about as much to do with the seminal battles over racism as you and I did. The wars were largely won by the likes of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson, who didn't need elaborate theories to combat what they knew in their hearts and minds and shared experience was wrong. And they didn't do it for post-modernist rationales either, but because they Cared about others who suffered as they had.

Oversimplification. Both deconstruction and common action have affected the "race battles'. To say otherwise is an example of the "ivory tower fallacy".

All statements are over simplifications in someway. I was just pointing out that King, Parks, Medgar Evers etc fought the civil rights wars informed by their own religious convictions and the immediate experience of what thet KNew was wrong. They did it with zero help from any academic deconstructionists that I know of. Deconstructionism has played a role combatting racist constructs since then, that goes without saying. Now, what's this 'ivory tower myth' you mentioned? That one's a new one to me.


quote:I have read some of his stuff but found it mostly gave me a headache so I never bopthered going too far with it. I've also heard many assertions made by those who claim to follow his works that sound downright...muddled.

Which is why it is best to read the text and not listen to random assertions.

Such as this? Of course we should read all the texts if that's something we want to study, but I don't have to memorize the whole Bible and half the classic commentaries on it to know it's got some problematic teachings within. I might even feel free to speculate a little on how these teachings have influenced its even more problematic history. (even if that history too is subject to different readings) If students of a particular school of thought have trouble explaining just what they were taught then I can only ask why. If something doesn't Really mean what they originally say it means (and words Do have legitimate recognised meanings that go beyond what each of us may "intend", otherwise yes could easily be taken as no) then maybe they should just find a more accurate way of putting it OUT in the first place, without being so obscure. Out of respect for the intelligence of people here who say it does have some good stuff in it, I can leave it at that too.


From: Broke but not bent. | Registered: Feb 2004  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
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posted 06 November 2005 11:42 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Surely they could, but that wouldn't be so much fun for Jaques Derrida, would it? It is the play of the ideas, and circular twisting layered logic games that make it entertaining. I think a lot of people take Derrida too seriously, for at heart he was a clown, and an entertainer. Most of all he made fun of himself.

People get way too caught up in the apparent seriosity of clever academes, and look to deep, and then start asking questions such as "can anyone provide an example of a people-world where 'example' would not exist?"

When it seems to me that Derrida was saying that this is that world, where "example" does not exist, for example, since an example is detached from what it is supposed to represent, but does not because the "example" takes on its own meaning in the text once released from its presumed intent and the meaning it was intended to reproduce, when at best it is a vague simalacrum, I think, but "vague simulacrum" is "such a mouthful in Manhattan," isn't it Mephistopheles?

Especially when translated from French, eh?

Anyway, back on point, yes I consider it very possible that people have been deconstructing text throughout history, without really knowing that is what they are doing, but Derrida breaks through by idenifying it, and giving it a name, so that you can say that "critics and writers and competing philosophers, have been 'deconstructing' language since long before Derrida invented the term," and we, you and I know more or less what we are saying -- not to mention the fact that people are much better at doing things once they know what they are doing, don't you think?

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


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blueskyboris
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posted 07 November 2005 12:05 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Overegoisation.
Yes, I agree that the use of "overegoization" is overegotistical.

quote:
Actually, Derrida would more likely say that the original authors "intent" is meaningless.
Why? If the original intent of the author is in line with the deconstruction? (I anticipate another empty reply)

quote:
*snarfle*
God bless you!

quote:
By which I mean irrelevant. And of course flip the pancake and assert same about the deconstruction.
Irrelevant in relation to what?

quote:
This assertion that a deconstuction can be done "properly" itself implies a hierarchical gradation set against some kind of "objective" scale that does not recognize that it is located in the discourse.
Really? So if I point to that ham sandwich and say "Hey, Cueball, that's a ham sandwich!" and you have healthy eyeballs and smell, will you not be able to communicate to me that you think it also a ham sandwich?

Also, what you think Derrida would say, without quoting text, is mere opinion.


quote:
I don't see why someone the (hypothetical deconsructer) might say that they have a "greater {note hierarchical assertion} depth of knowledge of the original author's meaning," since that meaning is detached from the intent of the author, and exists only in the text.
Er, because the deconstructor is handling the text in relation to the historical cannon. You know, Derrida was a student of Foucault, the guy who did 5 or so studies where he attempted to reconstextualize the power relations of the last two thousand years. Pretentious, I know, but....

quote:
Why would it be relevant to assert such about something (the author) which is irrelevant to the text?
Because it gives the reader a better understanding of the author's intent in relation to power relations. Therefore, the intent of the author is still important, but the deconstruction gives us insight into what created the intent in the first place.

quote:
Hocus Pocus. The critque of "rights" comes from the recognition that by according "rights" to people you are establishing that certain acts exist outside of the realm of rights. By their definition they imply limitation.
Hocus Pocus Part II: True, but another type of rights exists within the realm of rights, hence implying unversiality. A worker's state, even if positive, would have to coordinate itself to accomplish transindividual or transmallcommunity projects. This is one of the functions of the state. Therefore, rights are simultaneously universal and capitalist economic dependent (unlimited and limited)

quote:
If one thinks about the comon situation where someone would assert their rights, it is easy to see how these rights act themselves out in performance.
And? The axioms of logic act themselves out in performance, but that does not mean they are any less universal.

quote:
It is common for someone to say: "I am within my rights." Quite clearly the expression of limitation.
Again, and? This limitation, which can also be expressed as a "relation to other people", is unlimited in the sense that it is applicable to all people.

quote:
One has a "right to remain silent." What is more disempowering than being told you may be silent, when the obvious implication is that speaking will get you into trouble. You are being told to shut up. People for instance have the "right to peacful assembly," while on the other hand the police have the power to use force.
Listen, I am not denying that certain rights are political by definition. I am only asserting that there is a universiality to rights in the sense that they can be applicable universially.

quote:
The common theme is that there are persons with powers above and beyond your "rights" to act against you, and the discourse only appears really when power has been used against you.
I disagree. This discourse also appears when someone asserts that "rights" are always a negative result of power-economic relations.

quote:
Also one should be very clear about the evolution of the discourse of rights
The discourse on rights started well before Stalin, thanks.

quote:
So in fact rights were "deployed in Bolshevik Russia - vis-a-vis the state" and "we are" nonetheless "sitting here having this capitalist-text encapsulated political discussion.
Not from the beginning. The rights of Stalinist Russia were deployed after the fact; after Stalin liquidated his democratic opponents.

From: Nova Scotia | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
Erik Redburn
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posted 07 November 2005 12:09 AM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
CB: Surely they could, but that wouldn't be so much fun for Jaques Derrida, would it? It is the play of the ideas, and circular twisting layered logic games that make it entertaining. I think a lot of people take Derrida too seriously, for at heart he was a clown, and an entertainer. Most of all he made fun of himself.

People get way too caught up in the apparent seriosity of clever academes, and look to deep, and then start asking questions such as "can anyone provide an example of a people-world where 'example' would not exist?"

When it seems to me that Derrida was saying that this is that world, where "example" does not exist, for example, since an example is detached from what it is supposed to represent, but does not because the "example" takes on its own meaning in the text once released from its presumed intent and the meaning it was intended to reproduce, when at best it is a vague simalacrum, I think, but "vague simulacrum" is "such a mouthful in Manhattan," isn't it Mephistopheles?

Especially when translated from French, eh?

...............


Actually That I almost understand and can agree with. The description is not really the described, a photo of a tree is Not a tree, but the description too often does take on other unintended meanings, outside its original context. That it? Anyhow, he did have a sense of humour about it which I've seen before, always good in philosophical hairsplitting debates, if not downright Necessary at times...

Re your second point, people haven't Always been deconstructing throughout history, you're right. Some underlying Truth was once assumed behind The Word. I just meant that this Does have a history that goes back Some ways before him. Literary criticism for example relies on the understanding that what's said isn't exactly meant as stated, particularly in a language like English. And politically motivated sophistry was fought from the 'enlightenment' all the way back to Socrates. Not as comprehensive as what Derrida was getting at perhaps, but the vaguarities of language and meaning have been issues for ages.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]


From: Broke but not bent. | Registered: Feb 2004  |  IP: Logged
Vigilante
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posted 07 November 2005 02:54 AM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
Hmmm....blueskyboris's response to me tells me that s/he does not really understand that particular conditions in Russia at the time, not to mention how the state and operates on a logical level. The fact is the idea of rights is based on a non-reciporical dynamic between people.

It's interesting that you think the state should grant these "rights" even though it is based on dispossesion.

quote:
The discourse on rights started well before Stalin, thanks.

Yes but not before governmentality made that discourse possible. And the only thing that sustains the idea of rights is this very fact.

And hasn't universality become empty enough already.

One more note to Erik, you should consider the fact that the big D is fundamentally predicated on imposed identities going back to its inception. It can either be repackaged old ideas or new ones(the imposition is the same). Is it any wonder that during the birth and rebirth of this phenomena, slavery was present in both events. The door is also always open to exclusion of others(slaves as metioned, women, children, ect). Its brother "rights" is no different.

For true lasting on autonomy on a social and individual level, we need to go beyond these imposed categories.


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Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 10:24 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by blueskyboris:
Yes, I agree that the use of "overegoization" is overegotistical.

Overegoization: I was refering to the self (ego) of the author in the relationship to the text. I hoped you might see that.

But now that you have attached the meaning that you have apaprently attached to my text, I wonder if you haven't very subtly and cleverly deduced a more accurate meaning to my use of the word, and what it is saying about you. You might be right, after all my intent is irrelevant to how it is recieved.

Nonethless, you have asked for reference to a text by a Derrida, which talks about "intent," you have also gone on to talk about "signature," and its relationship to the text, though you have not called it that.

Yes, I could go and find that text, I could go to my shelf and pick it out, and bring it over to the keyboard, and I could labouriously type in that text into this computer, and assert that it is signed by Derrida, and that this fact in itself has some kind of substantive relevance to the discourse, which I believe, in fact it does, and that I agree with my understanding of Derrida, in which I think the Derrida has applied his signature to this idea that the signature might be relevant to the text, but even then, it seemed he was confused on this point, (and rightly so I might add) but this exercise seems pointless to me since I feel that I am plainly and clearly reflecting my understanding of the text which seems somehow to have become a meta-landscape for the expression of the meaning you have attached to the word which I offered as a begining to my last post, and so I see no reason to re-assert what I have asserted, and instead ask you, except in the form of "signature," how is it that the intent of author is relevant to the text, as such that a potential deonconstuctor would even consider it interesting to suggest that they can stand outside the discourse and assert that they have "greater knowledge of the meaning of a text" than the author especially in the light of the fact that the clown whose "signature" drips redodently over this thread (almost as much as your assertion that you have access to some means of grading peoples simplifications) spent most of his time deconstructing his own texts, even as he wrote them, so why should I bother, when I could as easily ask, since references to THE CANNON seem especially valuable to you, but not to me, wherein any text signed by the Derrida, is it suggested that the authors intent is relevant to the text, aside from the signature, and if so find such a reference for me, because I can't bother to do the obverse, since I have already expressed my reading quite clearly?

Or perhaps, since you purport that free discussions are of interest to you, perhaps you could present your own opinion on what you think the Derrida's view of this might be, of even your own view (Lardy lardy, now there's an idea!) seperate from that singature, instead of retreating into THE CANNON of singatures -- "where's your blanky Linus?" -- and asserting your superior knowldege of said cannon as a mode of derisively expressing your need to assert the root word, of the word, which I began my last post, primarily by implying that other people are stupid, and have nothing of value to add, by asserting over and over again that what they say is simplistic?

What kind of discourse is that? It certainly has nothing to do with what I see in Derrida. I find your use of the Socratic mode in a discussion of Derrida to be amusing -- is that the joke you intend?

Please. Thank you.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 10:30 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
The discourse on rights started well before Stalin, thanks.

Yes it did. It began when the Romanovs formally regulated Serfdom, more or less -- curtailing their "rights" to move about freely, etc. They were made slaves to be bought and sold like chattel. Interesting that "rights" would begin to have a notional value exactly when tyrrany was being given an adminstrative form.

quote:
Not from the beginning. The rights of Stalinist Russia were deployed after the fact; after Stalin liquidated his democratic opponents.

You asserted that they were not applied.

quote:
Rights are a universal form-in-power applicable vis-a-vis the state. If rights had been deployed in Bolshevik Russia - vis-a-vis the state - we might not be sitting here having this capitalist-text encapsulated political discussion.

I can read you know. Do you agree now that rights were applied in Bolshevik Russia, and that as such your original statement was an "oversimplification."

I see you have some vague notions about Soviet and Russian history. I suggest you read "Let History Judge" by Roy Medvedev. It is a good place to start. Also, "Ten Days that Shook the World," by John Reed really captures the intial excitement and fervor of expectation which accompanied the October Revolution.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


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blueskyboris
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posted 07 November 2005 10:57 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Vigilante
quote:
Hmmm....blueskyboris's response to me tells me that s/he does not really understand that particular conditions in Russia at the time, not to mention how the state and operates on a logical level.
This is authoritarian, contentless dribble... in short, it is the appeal to authority fallacy.

quote:
The fact is the idea of rights is based on a non-reciporical dynamic between people.
And? If the dynamic is benign its non-reciporical nature is irrelevant (Don't make me shake the doctor example at your general direction)

quote:
It's interesting that you think the state should grant these "rights" even though it is based on dispossesion.
Grant? "Granting" assumes that a cancerous relationship still exists. If "rights" were merely a safeguard vis-a-vis the state, and the state were merely a coordinator for transindivdual/small community projects, and if individual members were armed, the state individual relationship could only ever be benign. This, of course, assumes the political-economic liquidation of the military and is hence hopelessly idealistic.

quote:
Yes but not before governmentality made that discourse possible. And the only thing that sustains the idea of rights is this very fact.
And? Are you denying that tran-communal projects are benifical? If not, you must concede that some sort of transcommunal coordinative mechanism will be needed. That mechanism is known as the state.

quote:
For true lasting on autonomy on a social and individual level, we need to go beyond these imposed categories.
Yes, let us discard false wisdoms brought about by imposition, including the idea that all rights and state are evil. The capitalists reused much of the landclass' machinery - benignly...let us do the same in the next.


Cueball

quote:
Overegoization: I was refering to the self (ego) of the author in the relationship to the text. I hoped you might see that.
Only an individual can use a word, my dear.

From: Nova Scotia | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 11:03 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by blueskyboris:
Vigilante
This is authoritarian, contentless dribble... in short, it is the appeal to authority fallacy.

The mode of "this is authoritarian, contentless dribble... in short, it is the appeal to authority fallacy."


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 11:04 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by blueskyboris:
Vigilante
Only an individual can use a word, my dear.

Discourse precludes communication.


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blueskyboris
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posted 07 November 2005 11:10 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Cueball
quote:
how is it that the intent of author is relevant to the text, as such that a potential deonconstuctor would even consider it interesting to suggest that they can stand outside the discourse and assert that they have "greater knowledge of the meaning of a text" than the author
Please refrain from putting words into my mouth, please. I said nothing about the deconstructionist text stepping outside of the discourse, which is impossible if God does not exist. I merely asserted that the deconstructionist will have a greater understanding - via his or her own text -of the author's textual-political background and perhaps his/her intent than the author (assuming the author is not a deconstructionist).

I'm not denying that the bias of my text affects my interpretation/analysis of other texts and the background texts of those texts. Texts? Nor am I frying eggs in a Teflon frying pan. I am merely asserting that a deconstructionist, by definition and intertext communication, will know the background of the author's intent (if the author gave it, of course) in relation to the power-intersections that created that intent/text.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: blueskyboris ]


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blueskyboris
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posted 07 November 2005 11:14 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Discourse precludes communication.
Such a linear assertion denies the complexity of discourse. Discourse and communication form a never-ending circle of text-intercourse.

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Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 11:31 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Any suggestion that the deconstructor, has potentially more or less knowledge about the "meaning" of the text, is inconsistent with the analysis, since the authors intent, and therefore the author, sits in relatively the same position to the text, as the deconstructor, theoretically, once it is released into the discourse.

Historical ability to derive meaning may be relevant to the discovery made during deconstruction, but the variables relating to the potential deconstructions impacting the deconstruction are for all intents and purposes theoretically equal.

By asserting that a deconstructor might possibly be able to determine, if they did their deconstruction "properly," "greater knowldedge of the meaning of a text" than anyone, including the author, your theoretical deconstructor is denying their place inside the discourse because they are asserting that they have an objective standard by which to determine their qualtive understanding of the meaning.

Text's by Derrida are repleat with instances of self-deconstruction, which he repeatedly admits are also are inconsistent with the analysis, as per your example of example, where he uses the term example as a mode of suggesting that this is a world without example, as opposed to what is apparently your attempt to give and "example" a "fundamental" status.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
blueskyboris
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posted 07 November 2005 11:35 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Vigilante
quote:
Yes it did. It began when the Romanovs formally regulated Serfdom, more or less -- curtailing their "rights" to move about freely, etc. They were made slaves to be bought and sold like chattel. Interesting that "rights" would begin to have a notional value exactly when tyrrany was being given an adminstrative form.
Don't forget the de facto right of consensus in tribe societies. Everybody had their say because it was only right.

quote:
You asserted that they were not applied.
Yes, but I did not say how. If they had been applied early on, when the committees were still revolutionary, I assert that "rights" would have been effective. And as you keep writing, rights are historical manifestations of malignant power.. Stalin was a example of this maligancy... Bottomline, early on: the Bolshevik left did not believe in rights; the anarchist contingent didn't believe in rights; and the communist right was busy liquidating the two. And by the time Stalin took power, we had returned, in mangled "communist" form, to the authoritarian lack of rights of the citizen vis-a-vis the state. The Jewish question, so to speak, was revitalized, because no one had rights.

quote:
I can read you know. Do you agree now that rights were applied in Bolshevik Russia, and that as such your original statement was an "oversimplification."
I don't consider Stalinist Russia Boshevik. I consider it Stalinist. Stalin killed the Bolsheviks.

I suggest you provide quotations from the Ten Days instead of authoritarianizing the thread yet again.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: blueskyboris ]


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Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 11:37 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Why would I do that when I was just insulting you?
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Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 11:44 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by blueskyboris:
Such a linear assertion denies the complexity of discourse. Discourse and communication form a never-ending circle of text-intercourse.


Oversimplification.

The notion of discourse as "a never-ending circle of text-intercourse" precludes communication, because communication implies, and can be used, and is used, in a uni-directional form such as "I will communicate your message to joe," or I communicated to him that...."

This condition of allowing for a uni-directional transmission of message, even a pure one that can be purely recieved as message with intent intact means that it sits outside the discourse, and therefore is invalid within it.

Therefore discourse precludes "communication," as is the case with your idea about individuals and words, whereas we use words, both the speaker and the reciever, use the same word. It is always the case.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


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blueskyboris
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posted 07 November 2005 11:46 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Any suggestion that the deconstructor, has potentially more or less knowledge about the "meaning" of the text, is inconsistent with the analysis, since the authors intent, and therefore the author, sits in relatively the same position to the text, as the deconstructor, theoretically, once it is released into the discourse.
Are you telling me that I know the historical context of my text better than the text with an in-depth political understanding, historical understanding, pyschological understanding, etc? Relative to what?

quote:
Historical ability to derive meaning may be relevant to the discovery made during deconstruction, but the variables relating to the potential deconstructions impacting the deconstruction are for all intents and purposes theoretically equal.
You are apparently forgetting that text can save via memory and that memory records experience. Therefore, if two texts have unequal experience in text-type X, they are going to be unequal.

quote:
By asserting that a deconstructor might possibly be able to determine, if they did their deconstruction "properly," "greater knowldedge of the meaning of a text" than anyone, including the author, your theoretical deconstructor is denying their place inside the discourse because they are asserting that they have an objective standard by which to determine their qualtive understanding of the meaning.
Again, I am not asserting the "objectivity" of the deconstructionist's text. I am merely asserting a greater degree of knowledge of the author's intent.

quote:
Text's by Derrida are repleat with instances of self-deconstruction, which he repeatedly admits are also are inconsistent with the analysis, as per your example of example, where he uses the term example as a mode of suggesting that this is a world without example, as opposed to what is apparently your attempt to give and "example" a "fundamental" status.
Yes, I am exploring the limits of this argument and its relationship the OP quote. That said, inconsistencies do not bar the communication between texts.

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blueskyboris
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posted 07 November 2005 11:55 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
The notion of discourse as "a never-ending circle of text-intercourse" precludes communication, because communication implies, and can be used, and is used, in a uni-directional form such as "I will communicate your message to joe," or I communicated to him that...."
Oversimplification.

Walk into any social gathering and you will realize that social communication, at least, is multi-directional. Add the intra-circulation of text within individuals and the randomness of community communication and you have a stew pot of complexity. In fact, the only truly uni-directional communications are authoritarian, because they reject argument and informal communication in favour of authority-driven uni-directional poo-poo.

quote:
This condition of allowing for a uni-directional transmission of message, even a pure one that can be purely recieved as message with intent intact means that it sits outside the discourse, and therefore is invalid within it. Therefore discourse precludes "communication."
Pish-posh. I can gather the meaning of your communication without stepping outside the discourse, as I am doing now.

If you say "I am holding a yellow banana" I am not likely to interpret you as saying "Puck magnets are lovely" because I am "outside the text". I interpret you the same because I am inside the discourse and the intent is simple, not complex.


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blueskyboris
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posted 07 November 2005 11:56 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
The banana example is contexually benign politically.
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Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 12:00 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by blueskyboris:
Are you telling me that I know the historical context of my text better than the text with an in-depth political understanding, historical understanding, pyschological understanding, etc? Relative to what?

No. I am proposing to you that both author and deconstructor have and equal relationship to the discourse, and the text, even in its historical context, especially given that knowledge of history itself is transmitted generally through text, and though it may be the case that the deconstructor may be able to determine how a text relates to the moment of discourse at present, that does not mean that the author themselves can not decostruct themselves, theoretically anyway, in the moment of discourse in which they exist.

This is why I brought up the exmaple of Derrida using "example" to reveal that there is no "example," as a means of showing the mode of deconstruction in practice, not so much explaining it abstractly, as an example to be learned.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


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Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 12:10 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by blueskyboris:
Walk into any social gathering and you will realize that social communication, at least, is multi-directional.

No. It is more than that it is a unified flowing and transmuting whole: discourse.

So, I think, your idea that "commumiction" although relatively well concieved as multi-dircetional, still allows for the potential for uni-directional, and therefore potentially hierarchical relationships, because it is possible for one persons to tell someone else something, without recognition of the inter-textual relationship between the persons.

It is possible to "communicate an order to someone," but not to "discourse an order to someone," because the one way communication allows for "orders" but relations in the disourse are defined by mutuality, and orders depend on a potential for lack of mutuality, while communication provides a space for that.

I think.

Come to think of it, it is highly unlikely that "word" exists as "used" by an "individual," since a word, for instance the word "word," requires a reciever to have meaning in the discourse. Once it is liberated from its intent and enters the discourse it is free to have meaning, and often gets lost and forages around and finds a new meaning.

Such was the case with my dear departed friend overegoization.

Words change, but I think it is highly unlikely they exist until recieved. At least as far as you should be concerned.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


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Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 01:09 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Originally posted by blueskyboris:
Don't forget the de facto right of consensus in tribe societies. Everybody had their say because it was only right.

Romanticization? Which tribal societies? Where? From which text mediated source did you discover the notion of "right of consensus" existed, or was thought about as "rights." Or is this just some kind of hypothetical anthropolgical assertion?

If so, how is it proved? This is truly wild!

Frankly, my sense is that "rights" come into existance precisely because of sociological changes in society, and the accumulation of centralized power and the adminstration thereof, and the need for people to know what is and is not allowed, so that they are properly able to function in the context of society, productively, rather than worrying if they are going to be "smoked" for stepping over unseen, and unknowable barriers or running into unknown prohibitions (such as looking at the boss the wrong way) detemined willy-nilly by whomever has the most power.

I see no reason why someone would need to assert (or even to come up with a word so as to be able to assert) that they had "their say because it was only right," in a consensus decision making process, because having your say would be the norm, and if it were not the norm it would not be a consensus decision making process.

It is only when power inequalities are being asserted that the need for "rights" and terms to describe them become actionable in the social context.

quote:
I don't consider Stalinist Russia Boshevik. I consider it Stalinist. Stalin killed the Bolsheviks.

You can make up any definition you like in order to weed out the exception I have shown.

I find this fascination with a few stray months, and the actions and decision of a few individuals, at the begining of the last century, as the prima facie pivotal moment of Russian communism and the great history of the Russia social movements to be reductionist and misleading.

If only Victor Serge had shot Stalin when he had the chance? If only...

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


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byzantine
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posted 07 November 2005 02:50 PM      Profile for byzantine        Edit/Delete Post
Deconstructing the "yellow banana" example, methinks I see a cock-measuring contest in progress.
On the upside, we've almost stretched a philosophy thread to 100 posts. Go Team!

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Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 02:53 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Derrida most certainly did a some cock-measuring in his time.
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Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 02:54 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
I thought it was very much in the spirit of the thing, no?
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byzantine
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posted 07 November 2005 03:03 PM      Profile for byzantine        Edit/Delete Post
Well, I wasn't exactly complaining. Look at Plato vs. Aristotle for example. Philosophy's always been about cock-measuring (with apologies to Judith Butler, Kristeva, et al.).
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Cueball
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posted 07 November 2005 03:17 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Really? I know many women who like to measure dicks, there is no reason to think that these philosopher women should be different?

Actually, my ex is a big time dick measurer, and actually will be going to the L'ecole Normale Superieure next year, she thinks.

For my part I was actually annoyed that people, even ones I disagreed with, were being repeatedly being told by the higher powers here that they were being "simplistic." I certainly don't think that Erik or Jeff of Looney can simply be dismissed as "simplistic."

I felt the kind of demagoguery being displayed here in the name of anti-hierarchical forms of discourse was truly striking, and also amusing given the highly socratic, question and answer mode in which the message was being transmitted.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


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blueskyboris
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posted 10 November 2005 11:47 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Cueball
quote:
No. I am proposing to you that both author and deconstructor have and equal relationship to the discourse, and the text, even in its historical context, especially given that knowledge of history itself is transmitted generally through text
I will agree that the author and deconstructor are equal in the discourse in the sense that they both exist in the discourse, but I will not agree that they have an equal understanding of the specifics of the discourse from their perspective or the overall discourse itself (if there is an overall).

quote:
No. It is more than that it is a unified flowing and transmuting whole: discourse.
LOL. No, no, no ma/mon amis! It's a non-unfied flow of continuity!

quote:
your idea that "commumiction" although relatively well concieved as multi-dircetional, still allows for the potential for uni-directional, and therefore potentially hierarchical relationships, because it is possible for one persons to tell someone else something, without recognition of the inter-textual relationship between the persons.
Yes.

quote:
It is possible to "communicate an order to someone," but not to "discourse an order to someone," because the one way communication allows for "orders" but relations in the disourse are defined by mutuality, and orders depend on a potential for lack of mutuality, while communication provides a space for that.
Yes.

quote:
Come to think of it, it is highly unlikely that "word" exists as "used" by an "individual," since a word, for instance the word "word," requires a reciever to have meaning in the discourse. Once it is liberated from its intent and enters the discourse it is free to have meaning, and often gets lost and forages around and finds a new meaning.
The evolution of the dictionary attests to that fact.

quote:
Such was the case with my dear departed friend overegoization.
Departed?

quote:
Words change, but I think it is highly unlikely they exist until recieved. At least as far as you should be concerned.
The root of wordness exists not in the content of words, but in how they are generated and received - in my humble opinion as of now.

quote:
Romanticization? Which tribal societies? Where? From which text mediated source did you discover the notion of "right of consensus" existed, or was thought about as "rights." Or is this just some kind of hypothetical anthropolgical assertion?
The Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Indians.

quote:
If so, how is it proved? This is truly wild!
Why don't you wiggle it, just little bit. Come on Cueball: wiggle it, just a little bit.

quote:
It is only when power inequalities are being asserted that the need for "rights" and terms to describe them become actionable in the social context.
And it is only through the idea of the rightness of consensus that "rights" and "inequalities" can even be spoken of.

quote:
You can make up any definition you like in order to weed out the exception I have shown.
Stalin's murder of the Bolsheviks is not a definition.

quote:
I find this fascination with a few stray months, and the actions and decision of a few individuals, at the begining of the last century, as the prima facie pivotal moment of Russian communism and the great history of the Russia social movements to be reductionist and misleading.
Do you operate a balloon business?


Byzantine

quote:
On the upside, we've almost stretched a philosophy thread to 100 posts. Go Team!
Yeah, it doesn't happen very often when such a narrow topic is offered.

Cueball

quote:
y? I know many women who like to measure dicks, there is no reason to think that these philosopher women should be different?
Only hierachical women! Egalitarian women are happy with a dick, a tongue, and a sensitive clit.

quote:
I felt the kind of demagoguery being displayed here in the name of anti-hierarchical forms of discourse
Demagogues and billards. Demagogues and billards. Mobstir much? "Cueball" is strikingly hierachical in its white domination of the board - wouldn't you say? Colours spin this way and arch that way through the discourse, but one thing is certain: Cueball will be there with insult instead of counter-argument.

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Cueball
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posted 10 November 2005 02:23 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
I will repeat: your discovery of an unintended meaning of my word-creation: "overegoization" was spot on. It shows anyone is capable of remarkable deconstructive achievements, even when the odds are are stacked against them. And best of all the discovery that my use of the word "overegoization" might be a suggestion that you were egotestical, (to be overly focussed on "self") when I was talking about something completely different, proves that the meaning you have deduced is actionable in the discourse!

Just great!

Now: Do you actually think I value your supportive assertions, as in "Yes." I don't.

Your segementation of my ideas, (rendered as whole thoughts by me as an expression of thesis in paragraph form,) as a series of "provable" axioms ala Witgenstein, is in direct contradiction to the manner of discourse suggested by Derrida, whom you chose as the subject of this topic.

What about a whole counter thesis, or meta-thesis in response? Not possible apparently. Your accent rets upon your ablity to segment and then prove, apparently.

It occurs to me that your need to assert the correctness, or incorrectness of my thoughts as respondent to yes or no dichotomies, is the essence of your confusion here on the subject of the discourse, and parralels your need to assert that you can deconstruct the "true" meaning of an author's work better than they because of your privilaged position in the discourse, which means of course you assert that you stand outside of it.

Your need to assert and then defend the idea that "the deconstructionist, if (s)he has deconstructed properly, might be able claim a greater depth of knowledge of the original author's meaning," becuase without this possibility you would be unable to assert any kind of hierarchically justifed privilage, within the method of deconstruction suggested by Derrida --heirarchies you pretend to oppose.

But you need that ability to assert heirarchy in order to be "right," as opposed to the "wrongness" of others.

Have you ever read a text of a discussion where Derrida responds to any point with a simple pompous "Yes" or "no," as if he some special relationship to the discourse, where he is empowered with the ability to discern the absolute truth, in the form of "right" or "wrong," "Yes" or "no" -- as you have repeatedly to near every respondent to the thread you began?

I think it is unlikely that you have. Think about it.

[ 10 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


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Vigilante
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posted 10 November 2005 02:40 PM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
It's unfortunate that Bluesky is forcing a fundamentally bad idea(rights) on band, tribe based society. This is the same logic as what the capitalist/civilized Hobbesians were doing by forcing the idea of scarcity(brought on by capitalism and civilization as such as Marshall Sahlins pointed out in "the original affluent society) on primitive social life(crude brutish short nonesense) Blue is more or less doing the same thing, only the fetish is with rights.

Your use of the Iroquois as an example really doesn't hold water for the simple fact that the Iroquis were already a Chiefdom, and as you(if you've read any Diamond) the chiefdom form of organization is well on its way out of the egalitarian, reciporical based form of social organization. The inequalities that cause rights to pop up are already apparent.

quote:
And it is only through the idea of the rightness of consensus that "rights" and "inequalities" can even be spoken of.

Again this has no basis in reality. Go to any surving consesus based tribe or band and you will see there is no such idea. The inequalities are a priori.


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Cueball
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posted 10 November 2005 02:50 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
He likes to be right.
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blueskyboris
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posted 11 November 2005 02:55 PM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
And best of all the discovery that my use of the word "overegoization" might be a suggestion that you were egotestical, to be overly focussed on "self" when I was talking about something completely different, proves that the meaning you have deduced is actionable in the discourse!
Overegoization is a "word-creation" of yours, eh? Wow, I'm glad you think you created over, ego, iz, and ation.

quote:
Your segementation of my ideas, rendered as whole thoughts by me as an expression of thesis in paragraph form, as a series of "provable" axioms ala Witgenstein, is in direct contradiction to the manner of discourse suggested by Derrida, whom you chose as the subject of this topic.
Idea>s<, plural, are segmented by definition.

Your interpretation of post-modernist jingle-jangles as "the manner of discourse suggested by Derrida" is mere opinination.

quote:
and parralels your need to assert that you can deconstruct the "true" meaning of an author's work better than they because of your privilaged position in the discourse, which means of course you assert that you stand outside of it.
No, it only suggests that I may have a priviledged position of power within the discourse. I have not stepped outside of the text. You seem to want to equate hierarchy with soul-based objectivity.

quote:
becuase without this possibility you would be unable to assert any kind of hierarchically justifed privilage, within the method of deconstruction suggested by Derrida --heirarchies you pretend to oppose.
You are putting words into my mouth. I have not justified malignant privilege. I have merely pointed out that experience allows for greater degrees of knowledge in relation to other people's experiences.

quote:
Have you ever read a text of a discussion where Derrida responds to any point with a simple pompous "Yes" or "no,"
I responded with a simple no without support? Don't think so, bub.

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blueskyboris
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posted 11 November 2005 03:10 PM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
It's unfortunate that Bluesky is forcing a fundamentally bad idea(rights) on band, tribe based society.

This is the same logic as what the capitalist/civilized Hobbesians were doing by forcing the idea of scarcity(brought on by capitalism and civilization as such as Marshall Sahlins pointed out in "the original affluent society) on primitive social life(crude brutish short nonesense) Blue is more or less doing the same thing, only the fetish is with rights.


No, I am suggesting that the idea of "rights" is a non-egalitarian extension of tribal consensus. Humanity did, afterall, live in small bands (tribes, 20-50 people) for millions of years.

quote:
Your use of the Iroquois as an example really doesn't hold water
I never meant for my example to "hold water".

quote:
for the simple fact that the Iroquis were already a Chiefdom, and as you(if you've read any Diamond) the chiefdom form of organization is well on its way out of the egalitarian, reciporical based form of social organization. The inequalities that cause rights to pop up are already apparent.
I disagree. Cheifdoms only become non-egalitarian when the Cheif and council take to political action without consensus. If they merely lead after a consensus has been reached the egalitarianism is left intact.


Whisper: I like to be right.


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Cueball
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posted 11 November 2005 04:09 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
You are putting words into my mouth. I have not justified malignant privilege. I have merely pointed out that experience allows for greater degrees of knowledge in relation to other people's experiences.

And you read some books to learn this? We have a whole thread on this subject now?

And besides that is not the position you were defending. Again and again you have been asserting things such as:

quote:
Again, I am not asserting the "objectivity" of the deconstructionist's text. I am merely asserting a greater degree of knowledge of the author's intent.

Two things:

1) I asked you WHY someone who is Dencostructing a text would WISH to assert that they had superior knowledge of the intent of the original author?

My point being that if the "intent" of the author is irrelevant to the text, once it is released in the discourse, so that everything exists whithin the text, why would a person even want to assert such superior knowledge of the meaning of the text, since the such a grading would have no purpose to the deconcstruction, since the author is no longer relevant to th text.

Their job is to interpret the text, solely, not grade their knowledge of the authors intent, in comparison to the knowledge of the author. The author should be irrelevant to the deconstructor -- that is without getting into the issue of the meaning of "signature."

2) Of course there are variables of different people's experience, knowledge, etc. etc.

That is why much earlier on in this thread that I made the point that I was speaking theoretically, aside from such "variables." In other words, if knowledge and experience are equal so to speak -- not possible of course, but just for the sake of theory, you know? Look for it above, if you like, somewhere up there.

My point was that there is theortically no differnence between the authors relationship to the text, and a deconstrucors relationship to the text, once the author releases text into discourse, because the meaning lies within the text and the authors intent no longer has a relationship to the text.

If you accept the principle that the authors intent is irrelevant to the meaning of the text, because the meaning resides solely in the text, and eliminate the variables of knowledge and experieince then there is no theortical greater/lesser differential between the position of the author, and that of the deconstructor in terms of there relationship to the text.

(Note: Positioning in relationship to the discourse, not knowledge about the discourse. In other words though the positions from within the discourse are certainly different, but there is no way to qauntify the value of the positions from which different knowledge set might be applied. They are theoretically equal.)

Both, theortically speaking, have an equal position to the text. Equally privilaged, if you will. Therefore, theoretically speaking, aside from personal variable both should be capable of making an accurate deconstruction of the text. Theoretically, all variables being equal.

And this Derrida does, again and again. Deconstructing himself as he speaks and writes. If Derrida really believed that the author was somehow hampered in regard to making a deconstruction of their own work, why does he insist on doing it?

Derrida the deconstructor, deconstructs Derrida the author's deconstructions. Deconstructor and author are both equal in experience and knowledge in this rare case.

He examples his method, quite nicely with the example of the example above.

quote:
Idea>s<, plural, are segmented by definition.

Axiomatic crap. More of what I was talking about actually, because you have chosen to not understand that I was talking about a set of interlinked ideas, summarized into a thesis. You have no counter thesis, just little fly spots of conudrums? Fine. Suit yourself.

[ 11 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


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blueskyboris
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posted 12 November 2005 05:03 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Cueball
quote:
And you read some books to learn this?
You are much too binary, Cueball. I learned through books and experience.

quote:
We have a whole thread on this subject now?
Indeed, so stop gunking it up with insults.


quote:
1) I asked you WHY someone who is Dencostructing a text would WISH to assert that they had superior knowledge of the intent of the original author?
I didn't say "superior"; I said greater. For example, a plumber has a greater knowledge of sinks and pipes than a doctor and a doctor has a greater knowledge of human disease and health than a plumber. Neither is necessarily "superior", because both professions are necessary and both professions require the culimination of a minimum amount of experience to successfully perform their respective tasks. And just like the deconstructor in relation to the author, neither is superior to the other when either asserts their greater knowledge. The deconstructor, who has a knowledge of the author's stated intent and the deconstruction, has a greater amount of knowledge by virtue of being a reader of the author's intent and a deconstructor.

quote:
since the such a grading would have no purpose to the deconcstruction, since the author is no longer relevant to th text.
If you could provide some quotes were Derrida asserts that the author is no longer relevant to the text, that would be great.

quote:
Their job is to interpret the text, solely, not grade their knowledge of the authors intent, in comparison to the knowledge of the author.
Interpret in relation to what/whom? Why would I read a deconstructionist text if I can't compare it to the author's intent?

quote:
The author should be irrelevant to the deconstructor -- that is without getting into the issue of the meaning of "signature."
If there is nothing but the text, and the text-deconstructor deconstructs the author's text, how can the author be irrelevant? True, the author is no longer objectively central to the discourse, but that does not mean that as the locus of power his/her intent is meaningless.

quote:
In other words, if knowledge and experience are equal so to speak -- not possible of course, but just for the sake of theory, you know?
If they are equal, then yes, your theory is correct. But they never are, so...

quote:
My point was that there is theortically no differnence between the authors relationship to the text, and a deconstrucors relationship to the text, once the author releases text into discourse, because the meaning lies within the text and the authors intent no longer has a relationship to the text.
But the author was the text! Again, the author's intent, as an endpoint of an expression of locus of power, does not become irrelvant. It becomes secondary, because the author still has memory of the intent (memoirs), knew what at least a portion of what that intent was like while writing, and has a knowledge of his/her personal history.

quote:
If you accept the principle that the authors intent is irrelevant to the meaning of the text,
While I agree with Foucault that power should not be described using an author-story narrative, I do not agree that the intent of author should be expelled from the discourse as illegitimate. Instead, it merely reduces the importance of the intent in relation to the incredible complexity that created the intent in the first place.

quote:
Positioning in relationship to the discourse, not knowledge about the discourse.
Now you are stepping outside the text. How can one be positioned in relationship to the text without knowledge of the discourse?

quote:
In other words though the positions from within the discourse are certainly different, but there is no way to qauntify the value of the positions from which different knowledge set might be applied. They are theoretically equal.)
Again, I disagree. Inter-subjective communication within the discourse allows for the legitimate valuations that are pleasurable and the illegitimate valuations that are exploitive.

quote:
Both, theortically speaking, have an equal position to the text. Equally privilaged, if you will. Therefore, theoretically speaking, aside from personal variable both should be capable of making an accurate deconstruction of the text. Theoretically, all variables being equal.
If all variables are equal your argument is sound. However, they never are, so...

quote:
And this Derrida does, again and again. Deconstructing himself as he speaks and writes. If Derrida really believed that the author was somehow hampered in regard to making a deconstruction of their own work, why does he insist on doing it?
I would counter that Derrida was merely showing the power of deconstruction in relation to knowing one's intent well. For example, most authors of fiction, history, popular political works do not constantly deconstruct their own intent as they write. They merely write, interpret the surface of their intent, and then move on. Derrida, however, deconstructs other texts, his own deconstruction, the deconstruction of his deconstruction, etc, for a greater knowledge of his power-intent in relation to the text he is deconstructing: the result of another power-intent - a locus of power. The artists have been deconstructing their intent for quite some time.

I really can not overemphasize it enough that Derrida supported Marx's Critique of Everything Existing as a radically emancipatory action.

[ 13 November 2005: Message edited by: blueskyboris ]


From: Nova Scotia | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4790

posted 12 November 2005 08:49 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Since you seem to be unable to auhtorize yourself, and by natural extension myself as capable of engaging in a competent discussion I will, as you have asked, assist you by authorizing, (for the sake of convenience) my thesis of intentionality through the Derrida text:

quote:
What holds for the addressee holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or the producer. To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a kind of machine that is in turn productive, that my future disappearance in principle will not prevent from functioning and from yielding, and yielding itself to, reading and rewriting. When I say "my future disappearance," I do so to make this proposition more immediately acceptable. I must be able simply to say my disappearance, my nonpresence in general, for example the nonpresence of my meaning, of my intention-to-signify, of my wanting-to-communicate-this, from the emission or production of the mark. For the written to be the written, it must continue to "act" and to be legible even if what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, whether he is provisionally absent, or if he is dead, or if in general he does not support, with his absolutely current and present intention or attention, the plenitude of his meaning, of that very thing which seems to be written "in his name."

Signature, Event, Context

Or are you suggesting that this text above suddenly changed its meaning upon Derrida's death?

It is perhaps the case, but merely in the aspect that the Derrida's signature has a meaning in itself, which asserts itself over the text, in such a manner that you would apparently dispute it were it signed by the Cueball, as opposed to legitimized by the Derrida, but of course, as I have suggested before, the absence of a value for the (author) "authorizer," would obviate the potential for "authority" in general, and as such make unavailable to you the position within the discourse you wish to assign to yourself.


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4790

posted 12 November 2005 09:09 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
Now you are stepping outside the text. How can one be positioned in relationship to the text without knowledge of the discourse?

True, I should have written "position within the discourse" my appolgies. But this is the danger of your process of segmentation and comapartmentalization of the meaning I intend, within the context of the whole. Clearly, this was not consistent with the rest of my idea, so you should have been able to indentify the error, and move beyond it to the larger idea. Instead you are caught on it skipping, like a needle on an old vynal record, unable to hear the song, despite the scratch.

As you do here:

quote:
If all variables are equal your argument is sound. However, they never are, so...

Ignoring that I postulated that Derrida deconstructing himself as an author, is just such case where author and deconstructor has equal knowledge of the discourse, as the author:

Cueball

quote:
Derrida the deconstructor, deconstructs Derrida the author's deconstructions. Deconstructor and author are both equal in experience and knowledge in this rare case.

You tend to read for "error" not "meaning," and that is essentially my problem with your manner, which I find agrivating, and also leads to errors in your argumentation.

For instance, above you are correcting me for trying to assert that "greater knowledge" is different than me saying "superior knowledge," an observation that is needlessly semantic, in that both assert hierarchical implications of an objectivity, which I assert must sit outside of the discourse, because in order assert something is greater or smaller, superior or inferior, better worse, one must have an objective scale upon which to measure such.

But I am glad you agree, and of course it is very hard not to agree with my assertion based on a theoretical model of positioning "within the discourse," (thank you very much) aside from variables of knowldege, that in an abstract sense it is not possible to determine wether or not the position of "Deconstructor" or the position "author" affords more insight into the meaning of the text, in and of itself, and such is dependent on other variables.

So, and for the last time, to go back to the original text you have signed, and based on your observation that people bring differing values of knowledge to their observations of the discourse, that your original statement would have been a more accurate reflection of Derrida's ideas, had you said:

quote:
"The deconstructionist... ...might be able claim..." different "...knowledge of the original author's meaning, because validit(y), (and in fact 'greater' as well) is a hierarchical term.

What is not heirarchical about greater?

What is not binary about the "greater/lesser" schematic?

[ 12 November 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
blueskyboris
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 7764

posted 13 November 2005 03:01 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
What holds for the addressee holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or the producer.
In other words, the intent of the addressee and the intent of the producer are both texts to begin with and to end with. Nothing exists beyond the text.

quote:
all texts are machines that produce well beyond the original intent of the author and the intent of the author
The intent of the author is secondary to the creation and continuation of the text.

quote:
To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a kind of machine that is in turn productive,
The text is alive. It continues forward through the 'machinary' of signification.

quote:
that my future disappearance in principle will not prevent from functioning and from yielding, and yielding itself to, reading and rewriting.
The text will continue beyond my absence, future disagreement with past intent, or death.

A great example of this is Wittgenstein One and Wittgenstein Two. The Tractatus continues to function and yield.

quote:
When I say "my future disappearance," I do so to make this proposition more immediately acceptable. I must be able simply to say my disappearance, my nonpresence in general, for example the nonpresence of my meaning, of my intention-to-signify, of my wanting-to-communicate-this, from the emission or production of the mark. For the written to be the written, it must continue to "act" and to be legible even if what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, whether he is provisionally absent, or if he is dead, or if in general he does not support, with his absolutely current and present intention or attention, the plenitude of his meaning, of that very thing which seems to be written "in his name."
Ha! Ha! I got to you provide a snippet of Derrida's intent!

In the quote above Derrida is very careful to list the reasons why the author "no longer answers for the text": death, absence, future disagreement with past intent. However, nowhere above does Derrida say that the original intent of the author is no longer valid in relation to the text. His main goal is to show that the text is always independent of author's original intent as a locus of power: both as a genesis of intent and a machine operating beyond intent.


quote:
Clearly, this was not consistent with the rest of my idea, so you should have been able to indentify the error, and move beyond it to the larger idea. Instead you are caught on it skipping, like a needle on an old vynal record, unable to hear the song, despite the scratch.
Yes, by choice.

quote:
For instance, above you are correcting me for trying to assert that "greater knowledge" is different than me saying "superior knowledge," an observation that is needlessly semantic, in that both assert hierarchical implications of an objectivity, which I assert must sit outside of the discourse, because in order assert something is greater or smaller, superior or inferior, better worse, one must have an objective scale upon which to measure such.
No. I am making a distinction between 'negative greater' and 'positive greater'. Superiority is a word used by the linear hierarchies. For example, in the military a person of higher rank is known as "your superior". Similiarily, in the old aristocracies those of higher blood were thought of as "superior by birth". These are negative relations, I think you will agree. However, positive inequalities exist as well. An adult has a greater knowledge of life than a child. A lifeguard has a greater knowledge of water-rescuing techniques... etc.

You must learn to be non-binary about binary relationships. Not all binaries are evil or should be ruthlessly critiqued. If I am drowning, I certainly want the inequality known as the lifeguard to jump in the water and save me.

Derrida, I have read, supported "responsibility". He could only have done that if he believed in positive binaries. Responsiveness (aka responsibility) can only happen if one is always paying attention to minute details, which, along with the radical subjectivism of action, is the main thrust of deconstruction.

[ 13 November 2005: Message edited by: blueskyboris ]


From: Nova Scotia | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
Vigilante
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8104

posted 13 November 2005 05:48 AM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
quote:
blueskyboris:
No, I am suggesting that the idea of "rights" is a non-egalitarian extension of tribal consensus. Humanity did, afterall, live in small bands (tribes, 20-50 people) for millions of years.

I find this logic interesting. Again tribal consensus was based on reciprocity. Rights as I said are based on non-egalitarian astablished realities. And humanity is one of these reified enforced constructs.

quote:
I disagree. Cheifdoms only become non-egalitarian when the Cheif and council take to political action without consensus. If they merely lead after a consensus has been reached the egalitarianism is left intact.

Well let's look at the differences between band/tribe and chiefdom via Jared Diamond(not exact wording or total wording)

Band Tribe Cheifdom

Relgion: no no yes

Economy

Food production: no no-yes yes-intensive
Division of Labour: no no yes
Exchanges: reciporical reciporical redistributive
("tribute")

Control of land: Band Clan Chief
society
stratified: no no yes,by kin

Slavery: no no small-scale

Luxery goods for elite: no no yes

Government: egalitarian egalitarian centralized
decision or big-man
making

Monopololy of force: no no yes
and information

pg 268-269(Guns Germs and Steel) ect

While some Chiefdoms may have been less bad as others, one must keep it really when it comes to the logic of how they function.


From: Toronto | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
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Babbler # 4790

posted 13 November 2005 07:42 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
"...for what he seems to have signed..."
From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4790

posted 13 November 2005 07:51 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
quote:
A great example of this is Wittgenstein One and Wittgenstein Two. The Tractatus continues to function and yield.

Apparently so.


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
blueskyboris
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 7764

posted 15 November 2005 01:47 PM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Vigilante
quote:
I find this logic interesting. Again tribal consensus was based on reciprocity. Rights as I said are based on non-egalitarian astablished realities. And humanity is one of these reified enforced constructs.
While I agree that "rights" is the result of non-egalitarian power relations, I deny that "humanity", as a reality, is merely a reified construct of hierachically constructed logocentrism. It's better to say that "humanity", when used in reified discourse, is a reified enforced construct. Humanity as a reality, however, exists as blood, emotions, interrelations, friendships.... common, egalitarian threads.

quote:
While some Chiefdoms may have been less bad as others, one must keep it really when it comes to the logic of how they function.
Again, your argument rests on the assumption that inequalities X, Y, and Z invalidate the political equality known as consensus. If there was indeed political consensus in the Iroquois tribe/cheifdom, such a reality points, logically, to earlier forms of consensus existing in bands and tribes.

[ 15 November 2005: Message edited by: blueskyboris ]


From: Nova Scotia | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
Vigilante
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Babbler # 8104

posted 15 November 2005 06:37 PM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
Well humanity as it has been constructed through discourse is based on universality. And anyone who takes the post-structural shit seriously should no that universality is an empty concept. If you've read the likes of Agamben or Mouffe&Laclau, they trie to concieve of a multiple oneness. Agamben calls it immanent multiplicity. I think that is something that should explored. Though this idea of oneness should not be reified in any way or based on governentality(been using that word too much lately)The anti-globalization movement(ie movement of movements)was a good analogy for this.
The label humanity(which really goes back to the masters labeling themselves and then the word dialectically going from one to some to all-Hegalian logic) The false pretence of the word remains. Though abviously we are an animal with to eyes, a nose, mouth ect, that in so far should be awknowleged. But not in a way of reified identies and concepts. If someone wants to be a wolf and live with them for eg, so be it.

As for your second point, if you're trying to say that dialectical trails of the old are enough to justify applying something like rights to consenses than you are quite mistaken. Consesus is something very difinitive in my book. Some would use your logic to call the way Nunuvot runs as a government a consensus(something I find quite laughable) Consensus was invalidated when the farmers killed of the hunter/gatherers. If there is such a consensus, the Chief or King or State head has a lot more of it then the rest, due to the fact that him or her getting in there was not a consensual act to begin with.


From: Toronto | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
blueskyboris
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posted 17 November 2005 09:45 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
I'd like to thank everyone who has earnestly participated in this thread - Vigilante and Cueball especially...

Vigilante

quote:
Well humanity as it has been constructed through discourse is based on universality.
Granted, "humanity" as a political construct has been constructed based on the inequality of "universal rights". However, wouldn't you say that there is something objective that links all humans together? I am arguing from a humanist, scientific stance of course.

quote:
And anyone who takes the post-structural shit seriously should no that universality is an empty concept.
I give authoritarian umbrella terms like structuralist, post-structuralist, post-modernist, and modernist ZERO importance in my internal discourse. I think you should do the same. Please describe, using plain language, what you mean by "post-structuralist".

quote:
If you've read the likes of Agamben or Mouffe&Laclau, they trie to concieve of a multiple oneness. Agamben calls it immanent multiplicity. I think that is something that should explored.
Indeed.

quote:
Though this idea of oneness should not be reified in any way or based on governentality(been using that word too much lately)
Wait, wait, wait. Do you mean reified by governmentality or reified by universality? The two, in my mind, are very different.

quote:
The anti-globalization movement(ie movement of movements)was a good analogy for this.
The label humanity(which really goes back to the masters labeling themselves and then the word dialectically going from one to some to all-Hegalian logic)
Interesting. But the masters labeling themselves "humanity" suggests common traits among the masters, does it not? And this ability to identify common traits suggests univesality among masters, does it not?

Look, I am not going to deny the political development of the word "humanity". I agree with Foucault. However, I can't help seeing, as I walk down any street on the planet, simliarity...similiarity...similiarity... between the texts known as humanity.

quote:
The false pretence of the word remains.
Do you suggest an alternative term to replace it?

quote:
Though abviously we are an animal with to eyes, a nose, mouth ect, that in so far should be awknowleged. But not in a way of reified identies and concepts. If someone wants to be a wolf and live with them for eg, so be it.
You don't like talking about our commonalities, do you? It makes you uncomfortable.

quote:
As for your second point, if you're trying to say that dialectical trails of the old are enough to justify applying something like rights to consenses than you are quite mistaken.
Maybe.

quote:
Consesus is something very difinitive in my book.
Could you explain what you mean by consensus?

quote:
Some would use your logic to call the way Nunuvot runs as a government a consensus(something I find quite laughable)
I would say it is closer to consensus than our democracies, but, no, not a consensus.

quote:
Consensus was invalidated when the farmers killed of the hunter/gatherers.
Then you admit that consensus once existed. Excellent.

quote:
If there is such a consensus, the Chief or King or State head has a lot more of it then the rest, due to the fact that him or her getting in there was not a consensual act to begin with.
Kingdoms and states are obviously not run by consensus; nor did I assert that they are. Chiefdoms, however, can be run by consensus. If the political actions carried out by the Chief are decided beforehand by consensus, then the Chiefdom in question can be said to be run by consensus.

From: Nova Scotia | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
Vigilante
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8104

posted 17 November 2005 10:40 PM      Profile for Vigilante        Edit/Delete Post
quote:
blueskyboris:
Granted, "humanity" as a political construct has been constructed based on the inequality of "universal rights". However, wouldn't you say that there is something objective that links all humans together? I am arguing from a humanist, scientific stance of course.

Well I think there probably is a link though I would hardly call it objective.

quote:
I give authoritarian umbrella terms like structuralist, post-structuralist, post-modernist, and modernist ZERO importance in my internal discourse. I think you should do the same. Please describe, using plain language, what you mean by "post-structuralist".

Well for me it is simply taking critical analysis of things sybolically and materially on a power centered level. From that the term universality has been defined in a very authoritarian molar based way is why I reject the term. A postanarchist by the name of Todd May concieves of contingent universality, a term similar to the other terms mentioned and I can be open to that. However trying to do it in an "objective way" is a no no for me.

quote:
Wait, wait, wait. Do you mean reified by governmentality or reified by universality? The two, in my mind, are very different.

Well the two are not mutually exclusive for my mind. I saw a show on tribes where when the host was leaving, the tribal chief convied that all humans no matter the color or such are the same. There was no centralized discourse that had to teach people like him this. So again this idea of being one should not have to have a label of any kind.

quote:
Interesting. But the masters labeling themselves "humanity" suggests common traits among the masters, does it not? And this ability to identify common traits suggests univesality among masters, does it not?

Well I don't give a rats ass about the commanality of the masters, I want them destroyed.

quote:
Look, I am not going to deny the political development of the word "humanity". I agree with Foucault. However, I can't help seeing, as I walk down any street on the planet, simliarity...similiarity...similiarity... between the texts known as humanity.

Not dissagreeing with this.

quote:
Do you suggest an alternative term to replace it?

I'm sugesting that it be contextualized and seen in constant multiplicity. It need not be somthing that is reified or enforced on anyone. No majorities or minoriteis.

quote:
You don't like talking about our commonalities, do you? It makes you uncomfortable.

It's more I don't like things to be reified or labeled.

quote:
Could you explain what you mean by consensus?

Well consensus in its core form is done in a non-hierarchical way with perhaps an informal leader or guru(though I would advise against this)
The key is that there are reciporical relations and exchanges.

quote:
I would say it is closer to consensus than our democracies, but, no, not a consensus.

Well the point is it isn't, and their are many Inuit who yearn for the days of Bands when it was far more of a reality.

quote:
Then you admit that consensus once existed. Excellent.

As Tim Alen would say, Ugh?

quote:
Chiefdoms, however, can be run by consensus. If the political actions carried out by the Chief are decided beforehand by consensus, then the Chiefdom in question can be said to be run by consensus.

But the reciporical dynamic is not there(which was torn apart is not there, thus the contradiction shows. And all leaders(however well meaning they might be) are in privilaged positions over others which are always harmfull in the end. And the instrumentality that tends to play apart in Cheifdoms coming to be is what makes Cheifdoms become states. The point is to get life back to a relative moving dynamic(which would best be done through autonomous affinity based localization) Of course not all will do the consensus thing and some will be more authoritarian then others, but that authoritarianism should at least be kept to itself and not foisted on others.


From: Toronto | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Erik Redburn
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5052

posted 17 November 2005 10:42 PM      Profile for Erik Redburn     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Oh ok, one more to satisfy my more pedantic urges.

The fundamental error in Vigilante's view is the essentialism lurking behind his refusal to ever admit a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, and a rose is a rose is a rose even under another name -whatever. Chiefdoms, Tribes and Bands are not discrete or uniform organic entities, anymore than post primitive/tribal societies are, but are mostly just descriptive conveniences for the sake of certain generalized comparisons.

The differences even between the Iroquois/Hodenasaunee confederancy and other Native American "Chiefdoms", like the Taino Arawak, Chibcha or Haida, are almost as accute as those between feudal, modern and so-called post-industrial societies elsewhere, and this category often overlaps with tribal and imperial civilizations. (NW Coast cultures settled without needing actual agriculture, while Colorado River cultures planted crops inbetween seasonal hunts)

If your primary interest lies in the interplay and balance (or lack thereof) between genders say, you might classify things in an entirely different way, using matrilineal and/or agricultural versus patrilineal and/or pastoral societies as the usual analytical baseline, with hunter/gatherer, classical, feudal, imperial and modern societies as subclasses of their own. The same cultures might then fall into entirely different sub-groupings and these would be just as valid -as long as the other cultural exceptions and cross-currents were also recognised.

Where Vigilante keeps getting it wrong is he Assumes one fatal step (agriculture apparently) automatically progresses to another higher level of inequity or social control -not so. Some chiefdoms remain so for millennia, others lead quickly to nascient city or micro-states, others again break down into more 'primitive' tribal forms of social organization again. Some chiefdoms like the Iroquois had a higher level of social equality than some pre-agricultural tribes, based partly on their matrilineal basis, partly on their productive locale, and partly on conscious political agreements made by the semi-mythical Hiawatha and others.

His repeated argument that many if not most of us 'moderns' might just survive a return to hunting-gather (or fishing) societies is on the other hand pure bunkem. Hunting and gathering -outside of a very few favoured climes like our own West Coast- can only support about one twentieth of the population per square mile/K that simple agrarian societies can, maybe one one thousands of what industrial societies now do. Not that it really matters as it'll never happen like that. I have some real problems with what I hear from some self described "post-modernists" BlueskyBoris, but I do see it as having some analytical utility within limits.

One other thing I'd agree with you is that "rights" do matter and have an effect that goes beyond whatever our original "middleclass" bourgeois intended themselves. Due process, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the legality of unionized workplaces, graduated income taxes, public education, the right to universal pensions and healthcare, etc etc -all of these helped large groups of people rise above their original "stations" in life and none of these were exactly welcomed by the elites of the times -also why most of this is under attack again by large segments of our own elites.

[ 18 November 2005: Message edited by: Erik the Red ]


From: Broke but not bent. | Registered: Feb 2004  |  IP: Logged
blueskyboris
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 7764

posted 19 November 2005 05:07 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Vigilante
quote:
Well I think there probably is a link though I would hardly call it objective.
I don't see why. The "Objectivists" are guilty of oversimplification, not "Objectifying".

quote:
Well for me it is simply taking critical analysis of things sybolically and materially on a power centered level. From that the term universality has been defined in a very authoritarian molar based way is why I reject the term. A postanarchist by the name of Todd May concieves of contingent universality, a term similar to the other terms mentioned and I can be open to that. However trying to do it in an "objective way" is a no no for me.
Again, I agree with the authoritarian analysis of the word "universiality". However, I think you are guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

As for "objectivity", it is only politically damaging in relation to politics. In relation to objects and non-political inquiries it is benign. If I point to this chair and ask you what I am pointing at you will tell me that I am pointing at a chair. The object has been communicated inter-subjectively by the use of reason and language. If I ask you to define THE objective political position that everyone should follow, you will fail, because politics is subjective by definition. Politics is the interplay of power between different Xs.

quote:
Well I don't give a rats ass about the commanality of the masters, I want them destroyed.
If a time existed when there were no masters, and that time was dominated by consensus based community, it follows that the masters must have commonality and form communities, because their dominance is resultant of a time of political equality.

quote:
I'm sugesting that it be contextualized and seen in constant multiplicity. It need not be somthing that is reified or enforced on anyone. No majorities or minoriteis.
"It" can only be contexualized and seen in constant multiplicity if "it" has a name.

quote:
It's more I don't like things to be reified or labeled.
This is where you and I disagree. Politial inequality are not the result of reason or of labels. Labels and reason are the result of class based inequality stemming from the current means of production.

quote:
Well consensus in its core form is done in a non-hierarchical way with perhaps an informal leader or guru(though I would advise against this)
The key is that there are reciporical relations and exchanges.
Agreed.

quote:
Well the point is it isn't, and their are many Inuit who yearn for the days of Bands when it was far more of a reality.
Its a hodge podge of representitive democracy, pork barrel politics, and residual, but politically powerless, manifestations of consensus politics.

quote:
But the reciporical dynamic is not there(which was torn apart is not there, thus the contradiction shows. And all leaders(however well meaning they might be) are in privilaged positions over others which are always harmfull in the end.
Yes, in the end. However, for the meantime the actions of the Chief, if in accordance with the consensus - which is reciprocal - yields a consensus based political outcome.


quote:
And the instrumentality that tends to play apart in Cheifdoms coming to be is what makes Cheifdoms become states. The point is to get life back to a relative moving dynamic(which would best be done through autonomous affinity based localization)
Yes.

quote:
Of course not all will do the consensus thing and some will be more authoritarian then others, but that authoritarianism should at least be kept to itself and not foisted on others.
Spoken like an anarchist.

From: Nova Scotia | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
blueskyboris
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 7764

posted 19 November 2005 05:12 AM      Profile for blueskyboris   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Erik the Red
quote:
I have some real problems with what I hear from some self described "post-modernists" BlueskyBoris, but I do see it as having some analytical utility within limits.
I agree.

quote:
One other thing I'd agree with you is that "rights" do matter and have an effect that goes beyond whatever our original "middleclass" bourgeois intended themselves. Due process, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the legality of unionized workplaces, graduated income taxes, public education, the right to universal pensions and healthcare, etc etc -all of these helped large groups of people rise above their original "stations" in life and none of these were exactly welcomed by the elites of the times -also why most of this is under attack again by large segments of our own elites.
How this reality relates to Marx and his analysis is an interesting question, don't you think?

From: Nova Scotia | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
Michelle
Moderator
Babbler # 560

posted 19 November 2005 04:46 PM      Profile for Michelle   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post
Longity long long.
From: I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged

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