Re: not playing so nice

First off, thanks to John O for the nice long post.

Just a caveat -- this is my reading of Derrida, and it's been awhile. I had a very hard time with _Grammatology_ too and it took me a long time to work through it. There's nothing wrong, in my opinion, with reading it and not getting half of it. I'm sure I didn't for all the time I took with the text.

Responses below.

Luke Smith wrote:

> If employing faculties of reason means that "speech and thought habits lend themselves to ethnocentrism," this would suggest that someone is only acquainted with the contexts of their own speech and thought habits, and not others? or, if they are acquainted with others, they are not capable of working within that other context. And then, you’re also saying that such differences in context matter a lot?

I don't think "logocentrism" has anything to do with "employing the faculties of reason." I don't think "employing the faculties of reason" was even addressed -- at least, I don't remember it being addressed.

I think the problem is that you're defining the word by its roots and I think Derrida's definition, while possibly tangentially related to its roots, is pretty different from this.

It's not that people are "only acquainted" with their own speech and thought habits, it's just that they have them. The specific habit I'm referring to, though, is the habit of defining "truth" in terms of your own landscape and calling it "the Truth" for all times and places.

> Well, I guess people could be that petty and provincial, or differences in environment could lead to differences in reasoning techniques that are irreconcilable. Probably, that's a debate for psychologists, but then...

It's not a matter of being "petty and provincial," although I think Derrida does expose some pettiness and provinciality in many of the texts he discusses in _Grammatology_. The words "petty" and "provincial" imply a uniqueness about the whole process. I think the point is that it's not - that we all tend to think this way without really noticing, and even if we don't, our language predisposes us to (that's
the really important observation). I'll go into more detail about what I think this means below.

> How does Derrida escape "presence?" How does anyone, even someone who acknowledges it exists, presumably unlike the provincialist who thinks his beliefs are not based on a history/environment unique to himself? The inescapability of "presence," if it's true, would be quite an indictment of the way people think -- inevitably, though.

No one said anything about "escaping presence." Of course we can't "escape presence." Maybe if we were comatose? Anyway, from what I remember of the argument, though, Derrida demonstrated in text after text after text that speech was privileged over writing -- it was considered "real" communication while writing is considered "secondary" or even somewhat dysfunctional communication.

I even ran into this recently in the "Introduction" to William Blake's _Songs of Innocence and Experience_. A Child asks a Piper" to "pipe a song about a lamb." So the Piper pipes it to the Child's delight. Then the Child asks the Piper to sing the songs, and the Piper does -- again to the Child's delight. Finally, the Child asks the Piper to write the songs down so other children could enjoy them.

In order to do this, the Piper has to mar the beautiful, natural setting by "breaking a hollow reed" to make a pen, then stain "the waters clear" (presumably a watercolor ink; Blake painted in watercolors) to write. Writing introduced a disruption in nature that wasn't present with simply music and singing; it's a debased sort of communication that messes things up.

Derrida, from observations like these, concluded that we privilege speech over writing, because we privilege presence over absence. But by defining everything in terms of presence, we tend to locate meaning in the _here and now_ of our current existence, which of course could be radically different from someone else's here and now.

This defining even extends to political categories, so that marginalized people groups are placed outside of the _here and now_. It's wired into our very language structures. Part of Derrida's response to Saussere's semiotics, if I remember it, was that when we confront a pair of binary opposites -- up/down, right/left, male/female, above/below, white/black, presence/absence, normal/odd -- we not only
understand one half primarily in relationship to the other half, but we privilege one half of the pair over the other. If you look at the above pairs, in fact, the first member, in our thinking and speech, is almost always privileged over the second member. Up is better than down, white better than black, male primary over female, presence better than absence.

This is how logocentrism, the tendency to locate meaning in presence of some sort, supports ethnocentrism.

There's a lot more to all of this, but this is the best I can do off the top of my head. These are some of the basic observations I agree with, too. Where you go with these observations -- what conclusions you draw from them and what you advocate -- well, that's another matter. Derrida was advocating a "Grammatology," wanting to invert our privileging of speech over writing so that we privilege writing
over speech (at least temporarily), hoping that this would also undermine our tendencies toward ethnocentrism.

Sounds a bit messianic, of course, and I think he backed off of this later on...from what I've heard.

Jim

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Received on Mon Aug 11 23:27:31 2003