In, 'Of Grammatology' Derrida writes-
By a slow movement whose necessity is hardly perceptible, everything that for at least some twenty centuries tended toward and finally succeeded in being gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself be transferred to, or at least summarized under, the name of writing.
This movement was neither slow nor was its necessity not obvious rather than 'hardly perceptible'. The explosion in literacy- even amongst languages which previously had no written form- was driven by religious, economic and military considerations. Nationalism or sub-nationalism was often driven by a literacy program in a mother tongue. A new science of phonetics involving a scientific notation was developed to allow accurate transcription of ideolects. Bernard Shaw's 'Pygmalion' demonstrated this. Upper class actresses were now able to speak in the accent of a costermonger. There was a fashion for 'dialect novels' in the mid-nineteenth century. Rising affluence meant that new types of consumers for reading matter were entering the market.
By the way, many things never succeeded in being gathered under the name of language. This is why my farts haven't won me the Nobel prize for literature. Also, though we can 'say it with flowers' or gifts of jewelry, neither flowers nor jewelry have ever been part of language.
By a hardly perceptible necessity, it seems as though the concept of writing no longer indicating a particular, derivative, auxiliary form of language in general (whether understood as communication, relation, expression, signification, constitution of meaning or thought, etc.),
There were plenty of hieroglyphs and other symbols which had not derived from spoken language. We now use emojis when texting. Are they part of language? Yes, but they may be a passing fad.
no longer designating the exterior surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the signifier of the signifier—is beginning to go beyond the extension of language.
Writing does not go beyond the 'extension' of language even if, as in Derrida's case, it is gibberish.
In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language.
Nope. I can write in a language I don't comprehend- Ο Πίνδαρος ρουφάει πολύ- while some of my own poetry is incompehensible even to me.
Not that the word “writing” has ceased to designate the signifier of the signifier,
It has neve done so. The signifier of the signifier is just the signifier unless there is a double entendre or some sort of encryption. That has to do with intention or reception. It has nothing to do with writing.
but it appears, strange as it may seem, that “signifier of the signifier” no longer defines accidental doubling and fallen secondarity.
It never did so. Suppose I say 'Silence!' This signifies the need for silence but it may be I have some other intention- e.g. the wish to humiliate the speaker. There is no 'doubling' or 'secondarity' here even if someone is transcribing my words as I speak.
“Signifier of the signifier” describes
the fart of the fart?
on the contrary the movement of language:
e.g. its moving to California to become a movie star
in its origin, to be sure, but one can already suspect that an origin whose structure can be expressed as “signifier of the signifier” conceals and erases itself in its own production.
Which is why it is the fart of the fart which conceals and erases itself even at the moment of its first release from the anus.
There the signified always already functions as a signifier. The secondarity that it seemed possible to ascribe to writing alone
could also be ascribed to speaking rather than doing
affects all signifieds in general, affects them always already, the moment they enter the game.
but only in the manner of a fart of a fart which erases its own concealment by being very fucking smelly.
There is not a single signified that escapes, even if recaptured, the play of signifying references that constitute language.
Only in the sense that no fart is not the summation of all that can be said or thought.
The advent of writing is the advent of this play;
No it isn't. The advent of writing had to do with a more complex type of commerce and administration. Writing is costly. It has to pay for itself though, no doubt, some may make of it a leisure activity. But that still produces utility.
today such a play is coming into its own, effacing the limit starting from which one had thought to regulate the circulation of signs,
This cunt couldn't regulate shit.
drawing along with it all the reassuring signifieds, reducing all the strongholds, all the out-of-bounds shelters that watched over the field of language.
There were no such 'shelters'. Nobody is watching over 'the field of language' when we say things like 'you iz my cute and cuddly itty baby! Yes, you iz!'
This, strictly speaking, amounts to destroying the concept of “sign” and its entire logic.
No. Strictly speaking this is nonsense.
Undoubtedly it is not by chance that this overwhelming supervenes at the moment when the extension of the concept of language effaces all its limits.
That would only happen when saying 'X exists' causes an X to actually come into existence. At that point language would cease to represent aspects of reality. It would create reality. But, even so, only if any user of language can say 'Let there be Light' and cause a universe to come into existence, would it be the case that language has effaced its limits. Otherwise it is some supernatural power which is doing the heavy lifting.
We shall see that this overwhelming and this effacement have the same meaning, are one and the same phenomenon.
No we won't. The thing is silly and utterly false.
It is as if the Western concept of language
which, for Saussure, owed a lot to Sanskrit
(in terms of what, beyond its plurivocity and beyond the strict and problematic opposition of speech [parole] and language [langue],
there is nothing problematic here. Speech is particular and predicated of a speaker. Language is general. It may be a universal which can be predicated of a particular set of agents. We say 'Eliot speaks English'. We don't say 'English speaks Eliot'.
attaches it in general to phonematic or glossematic production, to language, to voice, to hearing, to sound and breadth, to speech) were revealed today as the guise or disguise of a primary writing:
The notion of the Logos is ancient. 'In the beginning was the word'. The Bible, like the Quran and the Veda is held by the orthodox to be uncreated and eternal.
1 more fundamental than that which, before this conversion, passed for the simple “supplement to the spoken word” (Rousseau).
It was no such thing in Rousseau's time. Saying 'lock up that Swiss cunt' would achieve nothing. You actually need to procure a lettre de cachet signed by the King and one of his Ministers.
Either writing was never a simple “supplement,”
It wasn't. However, there were certain esoteric traditions which held that the highest truths should not be written down. One does not put a naked sword into the hands of a child.
or it is urgently necessary to construct a new logic of the “supplement.”
Otherwise the sky will fall on our heads.
It is this urgency which will guide us further in reading Rousseau.
Why read the cunt save for the pleasure of his prose style? He died long ago and was a crazy as a coot.
These disguises are not historical contingencies
they don't exist. Rousseau was mad. Get over it.
that one might admire or regret. Their movement was absolutely necessary, with a necessity which cannot be judged by any other tribunal.
The whole world judged Rousseau to be as stupid as shit. Nobody emulates his practice of handing over his infants to the local orphanage. Also they don't give themselves a hernia jerking off.
The privilege of the phone does not depend upon a choice that could have been avoided.
It has no privilege. It is just a sound. Either people listen to you or what you say doesn't matter.
It responds to a moment of economy (let us say of the “life” of “history” or of “being as self-relationship”).
Why say anything so foolish? Even animals can produce sounds. If this get them fed, well and good. Otherwise they should move on.
The system of “hearing (understanding) -oneself-speak” through the phonic substance—which presents itself as the nonexterior, ((8)) nonmundane, therefore nonempirical or noncontingent signifier—has necessarily dominated the history of the world
Deeds matter. Hearing or saying things don't matter unless they result in deeds.
during an entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, the idea of world-origin, that arises from the difference between the worldly and the nonworldly, the outside and the inside, ideality and nonideality, universal and nonuniversal, transcendental and empirical, etc .
Useless shite. Metaphysics was cool when it was part of theology and Bishops and Cardinals lived large. Now that shite is taught only to retards.
With an irregular and essentially precarious success, this movement would apparently have tended, as toward its telos, to confine writing to a secondary and instrumental function:
No. Writing would prevail because letters could be sent over vast distances. Books could 'speak' to people millennium after millennium.
translator of a full speech that was fully present (present to itself, to its signified, to the other, the very condition of the theme of presence in general),
Presence doesn't matter unless you want others to smell your farts. Derrida may have heard of the telephone.
technics in the service of language, spokes-man, interpreter of an originary speech itself shielded from interpretation.
Nothing is shielded from interpretation. I am welcome to interpret all hermeneutics as the fart of a fart which is offering beejays to hobos.
Technics in the service of language: I am not invoking a general essence of technics
which is unknowable
which would be already familiar to us and would help us in understanding the narrow and historically determined concept of writing as an example.
There is no need. Writing is both a substitute and a complement to speech. Two businessmen have a face to face meeting and then one sends the other a draft contract. The other guy suggests some alterations. There is a second meeting and a final draft is agreed. It may come into operation even before anything is signed (indeed, the businessmen may decide not to put anything down in writing) but verbal assent is enough to create a contract.
I believe on the contrary that a certain sort of question about the meaning and origin of writing
different scripts have different origins and functions.
precedes, or at least merges with, a certain type of question about the meaning and origin of technics.
That question is easily answered. Do smart stuff otherwise other peeps will do that smart stuff and grow stronger than you and thus will be able to take over your territory.
That is why the notion of technique can never simply clarify the notion of writing.
This cunt can't clarify shit.
It is therefore as if what we call language could have been in its origin and in its end only a moment, an essential but determined mode, a phenomenon, an aspect, a species of writing.
By the time this cunt was writing this, natural language was distinguished from computer and logical languages. Grammatology was useless. Montague grammar was useful. Lots of money could be made in finding a way to get machines to use 'natural language'.
And as if it had succeeded in making us forget this, and in wilfully misleading us,
not to mention mischievously shitting on our tits
only in the course of an adventure: as that adventure itself. All in all a short enough adventure.
Tintin would refuse to go on any such adventure. It would be too fucking boring.
It merges with the history that has associated technics and logocentric metaphysics for nearly three millennia.
Fuck off! Metaphysics was shit. Science and Technology weren't.
And it now seems to be approach-ing what is really its own exhaustion; under the circumstances—and this is no more than one example among others—of this death of the civilization of the book, of which so much is said and which manifests itself particularly through a convulsive proliferation of libraries.
Books get better if the market for good books increases. But books were increasingly having to compete with TV and Cinema and internet porn. There are now students at Ivy League Colleges who have never read an entire book.
All appearances to the contrary, this death of the book undoubtedly announces (and in a certain sense always has announced) nothing but a death of speech (of a so-called full speech) and a new mutation in the history of writing, in history as writing.
Not really. Books might change as the market changes. They may become 'multi-media' or focus more on gay vampires and sexy werewolves.
Announces it at a distance of a few centuries. It is on that scale that we must reckon it here, being careful not to neglect the quality of a very heterogeneous historical duration: the acceleration is such, and such its qualitative meaning, that one would be equally wrong in making a careful evaluation according to past rhythms. “Death of speech” is of course a metaphor here: before we speak of disappearance, we must think of a new situation for speech, of its subordination within a structure of which it will no longer be the archon.
That happened long ago to most vernaculars. An English or French peasant was at the mercy of those who knew Latin.
To affirm in this way that the concept of writing exceeds and comprehends that of language, presupposes of course a certain definition of Ianguage and of writing.
No. Both are welcome to be Tarskian primitives. We may say such and such text 'exceeds' the language of its own day. It is only now that we can understand its true import.
If we do not attempt to justify it, we shall be giving in to the movement of inflation that we have just mentioned, which has also taken over the word “writing,” and that not fortuitously. For some time now, as a matter of fact, here and there, by a gesture and for motives that are profoundly necessary, whose degradation is easier to denounce than it is to disclose their origin, one says “language” for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity, etc. Now we tend to say “writing” for all that and more: to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible; and also, beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself.
This is false. We speak of 'body language' not 'body writing'.
And thus we say “writing” for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing.”
This is not the case in English.
One might also speak of athletic writing,
One doesn't because one isn't a French twat.
and with even greater certainty of military or political writing in view of the techniques that govern those domains today.
That just means writing about politics or the military.
All this to describe not only the system of notation secondarily connected with these activities but the essence and the content of these activities themselves.
It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell.
They are not speaking of natural language but a code which it is difficult to decipher or to elements describable by chemical formulae.
And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing.
No. Speech recognition, Large Language Models and Natural language programming are a small part of the field.
If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts—including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.
No. Everybody already knew about the 'Turing Test'. Cybernetics is expensive. It can't focus on talking nonsense. Either it pays for itself or it will wither on the vine attracting only retards.
Even before being determined as human (with all the distinctive characteristics that have always been attributed to man and the entire system of significations that they imply) or nonhuman, the grammè—or the grapheme—would thus name the element.
To whom? Either this is a word people find it useful to have in their vocabulary or it isn't worth a tinker's fart.
An element without simplicity.
The thing is useless.
An element, whether it is understood as the medium or as the irreducible atom, of the arche-synthesis in general, of what one must forbid oneself to define within the system of oppositions of metaphysics, of what consequently one should not even call experience in general, that is to say the origin of meaning in general.
but which is useless in every particular and utter nonsense in general.
This situation has always already been announced.
What had been announced and universally accepted was that metaphysics was shit. Theology died when the Vatican decided that Faith is founded on a Mystery.
Why is it today in the process of making itself known as such and after the fact?
Nothing of the sort was happening. Husserl's phenomenology depended on a transcendental ego- which the French, speaking generally, rejected. But he himself had come to see his shite was shit. By the late Thirties he was writing- “Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science -- the dream is over'. On the other hand the 'Philosophy of Science'- i.e. Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn etc.' had taken off in a big way though it too turned out to be useless.
This question would call forth an interminable analysis. Let us simply choose some points of departure in order to introduce the limited remarks to which I shall confine myself. I have already alluded to theoretical mathematics; its writing—whether understood as a sensible graphie [manner of writing] (and that already presupposes an identity, therefore an ideality, of its form, which in principle renders absurd the so easily admitted notion of the “sensible signifier”), or understood as the ideal synthesis of signifieds or a trace operative on another level, or whether it is understood, more profoundly, as the passage of the one to the other—has never been absolutely linked with a phonetic production.
Nor have road signs. So what?
Within cultures practicing so-called phonetic writ-ing, mathematics is not just an enclave.
It is a separate discipline. But this is also true of cultures which don't have phonetic writing.
That is mentioned by all historians of writing; they recall at the same time the imperfections of alphabetic writing, which passed for so long as the most convenient and “the most intelligent” writing.
It still is.
This enclave is also the place where the practice of scientific language
Science may use mathematical representations. But Science is separate from Mathematics.
challenges intrinsically and with increasing profundity the ideal of phonetic writing
No Scientist or Mathematician ever did so. What was remarkable was that there would be 'good enough' computer speech recognition by the mid Seventies. By the early Nineties this was commercially available. Still, because of my thick Indian accent, I had difficulty getting it to work. This is no longer a problem- presumably because lots of Indians are using such devices and thus the software has been trained to understand me. I suppose you could say 'i-language' as 'ideal language' was a failed research program. But no mathematician showed this must be the case.
and all its implicit metaphysics (metaphysics itself ),
Godel was so metaphysical he revived Anselm's ontological argument. Different mathematicians subscribe to different philosophies. Some are Platonists, others are Intuitionists but, as a whole, the subject is pragmatic enough.
particularly, that is, the philosophical idea of the epistémè; also of istoria, a concept profoundly related to it in spite of the dissociation or opposition which has distinguished one from the other during one phase of their common progress
Sadly, even an utter cretin like Foucalt could gas on about such things. Did you know that Newton had a penis? So did Einstein. This proves physics is trying to rape me.
History and knowledge, istoria and epistémè have always been determined (and not only etymologically or philosophically) as detours for the purpose of the reappropriaton of presence.
This has never been the case. People gas on about History and Epistemology because they are getting paid a little money as glorified child-minders. It is true we like 'reappropriating' and cuddling with the presence of our sweetheart or our baby. But that is about Eros or Oikeiosis. I suppose one or two people really want to be in the presence of God or Satan or the Great Spaghetti Monster but most of us are in no hurry to do so.
But beyond theoretical mathematics, the development of the practical methods of information retrieval
which may be based on theoretical mathematics
extends the possibilities of the “message” vastly, to the point where it is no longer the “written” translation of a language, the transporting of a signified which could remain spoken in its integrity.
No. That is all that can be usefully done.
It goes hand in hand with an extension of phonography and of all the means of conserving the spoken language, of making it function without the presence of the speaking subject.
Programming machines to talk can be very useful. Utility is all that matters.
This development, coupled with that of anthropology and of the history of writing, teaches us that phonetic writing, the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West,
phonetic writing originated in the Middle East. China, at one time, was ahead of the West in science, technology, administration, commerce and political philosophy.
is limited in space and time and limits itself even as it is in the process of imposing its laws upon the cultural areas that had escaped it.
Nope. The Japanese could translate and learn from the most diverse languages with such speed and efficiency that they were soon making first rate contributions to STEM subjects. Indeed, by about 1905, a Japanese author had written a best-seller in English viz. 'the Book of Tea'.
But this nonfortuitous conjunction of cybernetics and the “human sciences” of writing leads to a more profound reversal.
We now know that Computer Science was useful to human beings. 'Human sciences' were shit.
This raises the question- why, at a time when Information Technology was taking off, did anyone bother with the nutter Derrida? I suppose the answer is that stupid people could easily write like him and thus form their own citation cartel and thus push for academic advancements. Universities too found it useful to cheat students by getting them to pay for credentials in nonsense. They could cross-subsidize the laboratories and sports teams. Still, one might say that Derrida's shite could fit into the Chomsky type 'i-language' approach. But that approach was utterly useless. Only 'e-language' exists.
The other point about Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze etc. is that it might be worth backing them to split the French Left and to undermine nutters like Althusser. But, after Mitterand came to power and pumped and dumped the Commies, there was no point in keeping up the charade that these nutters weren't as stupid as shit.
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