Derrida begins 'Grammatology' with the following 'exergue' - which is the inscription on the reverse side of a coin or medal.
The one who will shine in the science of writing will shine like the sun. A scribe (EP, p. 87)
Scribes can do well for themselves. They may get promoted to the executive cadre.
o Samas (sun-god), by your light you scan the totality of lands as if they were cuneiform signs (ibid.) .
Rulers scanned the accounts submitted to them by scribes. What both these quotations show is that writing appears for fiscal reasons in City States which may develop into Empires.
2. These three ways of writing correspond almost exactly to three different stages according to which one can consider men gathered into a nation. The depicting of objects is appropriate to a savage people;
No. It is appropriate for multi-linguistic trade networks.
signs of words and of propositions, to a barbaric people;
No. Ideograms may be used by a highly civilized people whose spoken languages are not mutually intelligible.
and the alphabet to civilized people. J.-J. Rousseau, Essai sur l' origine des langues.
Or to a nomadic people.
3. Alphabetic script is in itself and for itself the most intelligent. Hegel, Enzyklopiidie.
The Chinese will have overtaken America within a couple of decade. As for Hegel, he wasn't intelligent at all.
This triple exergue is intended not only to focus attention on the ethnocentrism which, everywhere and always, had controlled the concept of writing.
Nonsense! Ethnocentrism would militate for Missionaries not introducing specially adapted scripts for indigenous tribes in far flung parts of the world.
Nor merely to focus attention on what I shall call logocentrism: the metaphysics of phonetic writing (for example, of the alphabet)
which didn't matter at all. The Roman and Chinese Empires were about equal in size, prosperity and territory even though they had completely different types of writing. Indeed, it was the Chinese who had the first 'Guttenberg revolution'. I suppose this is because they invented paper.
which was fundamentally-for enigmatic yet essential reasons
false reasons. Derrida was simply ignorant.
that are inaccessible to a simple historical relativism-nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism, in the process of imposing itself upon the world, controlling in one and the same order: the concept of writing in a world where the phoneticization of writing must dissimulate its own history as it is produced;
Fuck off! The Roman script did not displace the Greek script. On the other hand, Ataturk succeeded in imposing the Roman script and getting rid of the Arabic script in Turkey. It appears this did boost literacy and the spread of new technology and ideas. But, I suppose, the aim was to weaken the power and influence of the Muslim clergy. In no country was the introduction of a phonetic script done by dissimulation. Hangul was introduced by the King of Korea. Previously, the hiragana script had been introduced by the ladies of the Japanese court. They didn't pretend it was the gift of a magic dragon.
. the history of (the only) metaphysics, which has, in spite of all differences, not only from Plato to Hegel (even including Leibniz) but also, beyond these apparent limits, from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger, always assigned the origin of truth in general to the logos:
This is false. Plato has a correspondence theory of truth. Sadly, his 'forms' don't exist. It is a different matter to say that God, the Creator, is the Logos, is the son of such and such carpenter and is also the Pantocrator ruler of the Universe. Sadly, nothing can stop God from lying.
the history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been
nonsense. Truth is important in Accountancy and the Law and Medicine and Science and Engineering. It isn't important when it comes to writing stupid shite.
- except for a metaphysical diversion that we shall have to explain- the debasement of writing, and its repression outside "full" speech.
Nothing of the sort occurred. The phrase 'give it in writing' means that writing was considered superior, because more effortful and deliberate, than speech.
3- the concept of science or the scientificity of science- what has always been determined as logic
Nope. Science is inductive and empirical. Math is deductive. A scientific theory can have a mathematical description though the math might not exist yet.
-a concept that has always been a philosophical concept, even if the practice of science has constantly challenged its imperialism of the logos,
Science is useful. Philosophy isn't. Science told Philosophy to fuck the fuck off long long ago.
by invoking, for example, from the beginning and ever increasingly, nonphonetic writing.
Which can be rendered phonetically easily enough. To be fair, there were some stupid people back in the Fifties who said 'the Chinese can never be great physicists or mathematicians because of the nature of their language.' Nobody is saying that now. We think Chinese people are likely to be better at Math than the rest of us.
No doubt this subversion has always been contained within a system of direct address [systeme allo cutoire] which gave birth to the project of science and to the conventions of all nonphonetic characteristics.
Nonsense! What gave birth to science was spare resources which could be used to find ways to raise productivity or predictive power.
It could not have been otherwise.
It was otherwise. Derrida was simply stupid and ignorant. This is because he studied nonsense at Uni.
Nonetheless, it is a peculiarity of our epoch that,
Scientists had figured out a way to land on the Moon. Meanwhile, this cretin was having kittens about some invention of the ancient Phoenicians.
at the moment when the phoneticization of writing —the historical origin and structural possibility of philosophy as of science,
This stupid cunt didn't know that China had a philosopher- Moh Tzu who was also a technologist. The fact that China was ahead in some philosophical and scientific fields shows that 'phoneticization' simply does not matter.
the condition of the epistémè—begins to lay hold on world culture, science, in its advancements, can no longer be satisfied with it.
Science had never had anything to do with this sort of stupidity. If some one said, 'the Chinks don't got no alphabet. They must be stoooopid.' Scientists said 'fuck off. Them guys invented printing and paper and gun-powder and all sorts of other very useful stuff.'
This inadequation had always already begun to make its presence felt.
Where? Meanly, Derrida won't tell us. I think it was Sartre's fart. He was a sly fucker always sneaking around letting out 'silent but deadly' farts.
But today something lets it appear as such,
Sartre's farts
allows it a kind of takeover without our being able to translate this novelty into clear cut notions of mutation, explicitation, accumulation, revolution, or tradition.
Derrida had no clear cut notions. Nor did Sartre. But he could cut the cheese something fierce.
These values belong no doubt to the system whose dislocation is today presented as such,
a system which presents itself as 'dislocation' isn't a system. It is a fucking car crash.
they describe the styles of an historical movement which was meaningful—like the concept of history itself—only within a logocentric epoch.
The concept of history is that it is useful to know what happened or what was tried in the past. No epoch was 'logocentric'. What mattered was the fitness landscape- which could only be discovered empirically. There's no point using logic to prove the earth is flat if guys who circumnavigate it keep getting richer and richer.
By alluding to a science of writing reined in by metaphor, metaphysics, and theology,
i.e. not reined in at all
this exergue must not only announce that the science of writing—grammatology —
which only exists to the extent that Socioproctology is a real thing.
shows signs of liberation all over the world, as a result of decisive efforts.
I suppose he meant that literature was turning to shit because of the vogue for 'experimental' novels. That fad soon faded.
These efforts are necessarily discreet, dispersed, almost imperceptible; that is a quality of their meaning and of the milieu within which they produce their operation.
Some stupid cunts pulled some stupid stunts. Meanwhile guys like Arthur Hailey were laughing all the way to the bank.
I would like to suggest above all that, however fecund and necessary the undertaking might be, and even if, given the most favorable hypothesis, it did overcome all technical and epistemological obstacles as well as all the theological and meta-physical impediments that have limited it hitherto, such a science of writing runs the risk of never being established as such and with that name.
Because most people learn to write by about the age of five. Similarly, the science of farting receives little in the way of funding from NASA.
Of never being able to define the unity of its project or its object. Of not being able either to write its discourse on method or to describe the limits of its field.
of being utterly shit.
For essential reasons: the unity of all that allows itself to be attempted today through the most diverse concepts of science and of writing, is, in principle, more or less covertly yet always, determined by an historicometaphysical epoch of which we merely glimpse the closure.
No concept of science- or of writing as practiced by guys who gained wealth or power and influence thereby- had anything to do with 'historico-metaphysical epochs'. Sartre, it must be admitted, was a good dramatist and got the Nobel prize. But so did Bertrand Russell and Churchill. It must be said, Russell was influenced by Husserl's Logical Investigations. But, like anal-tickle philosophy, that was a dead-end. Derrida escaped by writing modish nonsense whose great utility for drug addled, or just plain stupid, PhD students was that they could get a sheepskin by writing nonsense. But, this also meant that they were condemned to teaching kids stupider yet.
I do not say the end. The idea of science and the idea of writing—therefore also of the science of writing—is meaningful for us only in terms of an origin and within a world to which a certain concept of the sign (later I shall call it the concept of sign) and a certain concept of the relationships between speech and writing, have already been assigned.
Nope. People with diverse ideas about the origin of everything or any particular thing nevertheless do the same sort of science or the same sort of writing. Some concept which a cretin comes up can't assign shit to shit.
A most determined relationship, in spite of its privilege, its necessity, and the field of vision that it has controlled for a few millennia, especially in the West, to the point of being now able to produce its own dislocation and itself proclaim its limits.
and eat its own shit.
Perhaps patient meditation and painstaking investigation on and around what is still provisionally called writing,
or farting
far from falling short of a science of writing
or farting
or of hastily dismissing it by some obscurantist reaction,
e.g. running away when I fart
letting it rather develop its positivity as far as possible, are the wanderings of a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future
the future isn't ineluctable. You can avoid it by dying.
which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge.
Derrida lived in a world where Time and Space were constantly proclaiming themselves present. This is because Topology was taking roll-call.
((5)) The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.
Not if tomorrow is a holiday. Then it is anticipated in the form of getting very very drunk.
It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity.
Because proclaiming and presenting your turd is only cool if it is of monstrous proportions or shows an uncanny likeness to Donald Trump.
For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue.
Because the future hasn't happened yet. That's why we can't proclaim and present the 84th POTUS. That person hasn't been born yet.
The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing
Books began some time after writing began.
Socrates, he who does not write*—Nietzsche
Socrates did write. Sadly, his disciples don't seem to have bothered preserving his writings. I think it was because he specialized in chick-lit.
However the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others.
It isn't a problem.
But never as much as at present has it invaded, as such, the global horizon of the most diverse researches and the most heterogeneous discourses, diverse and heterogeneous in their intention, method, and ideology.
Stupid cunts, around that time, did gas on about 'linguistic turns' of one sort or another. But guys who went in for STEM subjects made money and changed the world for the better.
The devaluation of the word “language” itself, and how, in the very hold it has upon us, it betrays a loose vocabulary,
Language is totes slutty. I hear she gave Chemistry a beejay behind the bike-shed.
the temptation of a cheap seduction,
like buying Language a couple of Babychams so as to get a leg over- which is what Chemistry did to that retarded bint.
the passive yielding to fashion, the consciousness of the avant-garde, in other words—ignorance—are evidences of this effect. This inflation of the sign “language” is the inflation of the sign itself, absolute inflation, inflation itself.
France's worst hyperinflation was in 1795.
Yet, by one of its aspects or shadows, it is itself still a sign: this crisis is also a symptom.
Having your head chopped off is a symptom of not having a fucking head.
It indicates, as if in spite of itself, that a historico-metaphvsical epoch must finally de-termine as language the totality of its problematic horizon.
Why must it? The answer is that it will be sent to bed without any supper unless it does what this cretin says it must do.
It must do so not only because all that desire had wished to wrest from the play of language finds itself recaptured within that play
Language, like Derrida, played with itself too much.
but also because, for the same reason, language itself is menaced in its very life,
thankfully, Chemistry came to its rescue. That why Language gave it a beejay.
helpless, adrift in the threat of limitlessness, brought back to its own finitude at the very moment when its limits seem to disappear,
people use language. Their 'limits' don't disappear. Their hair may do so. Their teeth may do so, but their limitations tend to become more obvious and dispiriting with the passage of time.
when it ceases to be self-assured, contained, and guaranteed by the infinite signified which seemed to exceed it.
The infinite signified offered to guarantee a Bank loan for me. Sadly, the Manager told it to fuck the fuck off.
The Program 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.
Actually, even dance had been reduced to 'writing' (Labonotation) What was more significant was the increasing importance of writing computer code. Fortran, Cobol & Lisp had been created by the end of the Fifties. That was the program smart kids were getting with. Stupid kids got PhDs in useless shite.
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
that was only the case for court transcripts or the transcription of wire-taps. Otherwise, writing was separate from speech. Many people could write in Greek or Sanskrit or Arabic or even English or French correctly enough without being able to speak the language or understand what was said in it.
(whether understood as communication, relation, expression, signification, constitution of meaning or thought, etc.), no longer designating the exterior surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the signifier of the signifier
which is itself. 'Red' signifies the word 'Red'.
—is beginning to go beyond the extension of language.
Language is intensional. Some 'intensions' (words) have well defined extensions for particular purposes. Others, don't because they are epistemic and radically impredicative. Still, for any useful purpose, we can proceed in a good enough, albeit arbitrary, manner.
In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language.
We know that isn't true because an AI can write our essays for us. But the AI can't comprehend anything- yet.
Not that the word “writing” has ceased to designate the signifier of the signifier,
It never did so. The signifier is designated as a word or a sign or a gesture (e.g. pointing). It is not designated as 'writing' save by metonymy.
but it appears, strange as it may seem, that “signifier of the signifier” no longer defines accidental doubling and fallen secondarity.
Neither of which exist because they are stupid shite.
“Signifier of the signifier” describes on the contrary the movement of language:
No. It is just a word or sign- generally the same one as that which it signifies.
in its origin,
we don't know the origin of language or whether our Neanderthal or Denisovan ancestors had it. What is certain is that it was useful in solving collective action problems involving coordination and discoordination games. David Lewis was on the right track back then by taking over Thomas Schelling's idea for his book 'Conventions'. Sadly, like other philosophers he became stupider and more useless as time went by. Mathematicians sometimes say 'without loss of generality' to mean that a simplifying assumption is not necessary for the the theorem. Philosophy's problem was that it didn't just lose generality, it lost any connection with reality, the moment it introduced an assumption.
to be sure, but one can already suspect that an origin whose structure
For all we know, an origin may have no structure. It is expressed as 'origin' not 'origin of the origin'.
can be expressed as “signifier of the signifier” conceals and erases itself in its own production.
Stuff was always either concealing itself from Derrida when it wasn't loudly proclaiming its own presence. I think this was because he smelled bad. The French, back in those days, didn't bathe very often.
There the signified always already functions as a signifier.
So if you say 'Red' when asked what colour your car is, the colour of your car functions as the word Red. This is why, when asked what colour hair Emma Stone has, your hit the person asking your question with your car.
The secondarity that it seemed possible to ascribe to writing alone
only if we are speaking of a transcript. In that case, a tape-recording would have superior probative value.
affects all signifieds in general,
Thus if I say 'Donald Trump,' he becomes secondary to J.D Vance. That's why Vance calls out the Donald's name when in the throes of passion.
affects them always already, the moment they enter the game.
What game? Wittlesstein's? But Language is about coordination and discoordination games rather than 'following rules'.
There is not a single signified that escapes, even if recaptured,
if you are recaptured, you haven't escaped
the play of signifying references that constitute language.
No. Lots of things which were signified are forgotten. We might come across their 'signifier' in some obscure text but have no clue what the thing used to signify.
The advent of writing is the advent of this play;
No. We know of many cultures where writing was only recently introduced. It did not have any magical effect though, no doubt, total factor productivity rose.
today such a play is coming into its own,
there speaks the voice of paranoia. Put on your tin-foil hats, sheeple!
effacing the limit starting from which one had thought to regulate the circulation of signs,
You can make a profit or curb repugnant activities by regulating the circulation of money or commodities. We may also regulate signs or the use of language in the public interest. But this is does not 'efface' limits. Regulating and enforcing regulations uses up scarce resources. The relevant constraint is economic in nature.
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.
Also the Gents toilet abutting the field of language was vandalized. I think this was because Language refused to go ass to mouth with Chemistry and Chemistry got really angry and took out its frustration by smashing up all the urinals.
This, strictly speaking, amounts to destroying the concept of “sign” and its entire logic.
If this speaking strictly, what is loose talk? Shitting yourself while saying 'ba-ba, ka-ka!'
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.
Very true. It was not by chance that Language refused to give Chemistry a beejay. Everybody knows she has a crush on Geography.
We shall see that this overwhelming and this effacement have the same meaning, are one and the same phenomenon.
As shitting yourself while saying 'ba-ba, ka-ka'. Still, if that's what it takes to get through your viva, go for it.
It is as if the Western concept of language
which is the same as the Eastern or Southern concept
(in terms of what, beyond its plurivocity and beyond the strict and problematic opposition of speech [parole] and language [langue],
i.e. idiolect and 'i-language' (where i means 'ideal speaker', or, more confusingly, 'intensional')
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: 1 more fundamental than that which, before this conversion, passed for the simple “supplement to the spoken word” (Rousseau).
Rousseau was wrong about both masturbation and writing. Neither was a supplement. Both have a function which can't always be substituted for- e.g. giving a sperm donation or submitting a sample of one's writing to a graphologist.
Either writing was never a simple “supplement,”
It wasn't. It fulfilled certain functions better than any thing else.
or it is urgently necessary to construct a new logic of the “supplement.”
i.e. not necessary at all because the thing is stupid and useless. Fuzzy logic, on the other hand, turned out to be really useful. There was a time when Derrida was considered smart and Lotfi Zadeh was considered an eccentric. Then the Japanese started selling dishwashers with fuzzy logic chips.
It is this urgency which will guide us further in reading Rousseau.
It is not urgent to read Rousseau. 'Confessions', I admit, is very readable. But it is foolish to think the guy wasn't as crazy as a bedbug.
These disguises are not historical contingencies that one might admire or regret.
These disguises were created by shape shifting lizards from Planet X.
Their movement was absolutely necessary, with a necessity which cannot be judged by any other tribunal.
They were a figment of the imagination of a shithead teaching worthless shite.
The privilege of the phone
it has no privilege. Parrots can utter 'phones' but they still live in a fucking cage.
does not depend upon a choice that could have been avoided.
People may choose to change how they pronounce words. I began to sound like an American cheerleader after I watched Buffy & Angel.
It responds to a moment of economy (let us say of the “life” of “history” or of “being as self-relationship”).
Economics, as Samuelson pointed out, is ergodic. This means there will be convergent evolution and 'robustness'. A particular moment does not matter. Nor can there be, contra Chomsky, a magical mutation which propagates itself instantaneously across an entire species.
The system of “hearing (understanding) -oneself-speak” through the phonic substance—which presents itself as the nonexterior, nonmundane, therefore nonempirical or noncontingent signifier—has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch,
No. It didn't dominate shit.
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.
This is pure supposition. Maybe, sixty years ago, it represented a tenable view for a layman to hold. But that is no longer the case. The plain fact is, Philosophy is shit. The French should have gotten it out of their High Schools sixty years ago.
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:
It did the reverse. By the time of Euripides, there is evidence that much of the audience had read his play before it was performed. It seems participation in politics was a great driver of literacy in ancient Athens. What is certain is that sophists got paid very well to produce speeches which people could memorize and repeat before the Ecclesia.
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),
Nope. As in the theatre, so too in the courts and assemblies of ancient Greece, people memorized written texts and reproduced them with appropriate gestures and emotions.
technics in the service of language, spokes-man, interpreter of an originary speech itself shielded from interpretation. Technics in the service of language: I am not invoking a general essence of technics
it has no such thing. That's why technologists don't bother looking for it.
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 was no such narrow or historically determined concept in Derrida's day. COBOL or LISP were languages of a particular type. People who could write code were getting paid good money. Some would become very very fucking rich and powerful.
I believe on the contrary that a certain sort of question about the meaning and origin of writing precedes, or at least merges with, a certain type of question about the meaning and origin of technics.
It is the same sort of question as arises when we consider the meaning and origin of farting.
That is why the notion of technique can never simply clarify the notion of writing.
Yet it does clarify it. What Derrida does is obfuscate it or rather to tell grandiloquent, but deeply foolish, lies about it.
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.
Only in the sense that it could be considered a species of farting or hopping on one leg or biting off one's own head.
And as if it had succeeded in making us forget this, and in wilfully misleading us, only in the course of an adventure: as that adventure itself.
Just as biting off our own head can wilfully mislead us in the course of an enema which is that enema itself.
All in all a short enough adventure.
Or long enough enema.
It merges with the history that has associated technics and logocentric metaphysics for nearly three millennia.
There is no such history. Metaphysics has been religious or theological most of the time. But it was just stupid shite taught to affluent kids for signalling purposes.
And it now seems to be approaching 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.
If there are more libraries, it means the 'civilization of the book' is burgeoning not dying. Derrida truly was as stupid as shit.
All appearances to the contrary, this death of the book undoubtedly announces (and in a certain sense always has announced)
again with the fucking 'announcements' and 'proclamations' !
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.
or history as the history of writing itself while masturbating and gazing wistfully at a bowl of pomegranates.
Announces it at a distance of a few centuries.
That is not an announcement. It is a prediction.
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.
It has never been a fucking archon. True, speech under oath, or police caution, is given higher status but a written statement might be equally or even more authoritative.
To affirm in this way that the concept of writing exceeds and comprehends that of language,
is to talk bollocks.
presupposes of course a certain definition of Ianguage and of writing.
Nope. They may be Tarskian primitives- i.e. undefined.
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.
If we do not attempt to fart in a sceptical manner we will giving in to Cosmic inflation after the Big Bang.
For some time now, as a matter of fact, here and there, by a gesture and for motives that are profoundly necessary,
e.g so as to fart the fart of the signifier that is its own signification as the fart of Jean Paul Sartre's fart.
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.
No one doesn't. One has better things to do.
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. 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.”
Did this actually happen back in the Sixties? When somebody farted, did everybody go 'you have written a really smelly one today. Fuck have you been eating?''
One might also speak of athletic writing, and with even greater certainty of military or political writing in view of the techniques that govern those domains today.
One can speak of shitty writing and shitty thinking on the part of shitheads who teach stupid shite.
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.
Nope. Derrida hasn't given us a description of anything. He has simply made some utterly foolish and ignorant claims. He wants us to believe that he had created a new 'Science of Writing'- 'Grammatology'. What he had created was a small cult- similar to Scientology- but only for shitheads teaching worthless shit to fucking retards.
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.
Nope. They speak of copying or recombining elements. Writing is produced by a writer, or LLM based AI, with a certain degree of training in language use. Copying or recombination requires no such thing.
And finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing.
Coding, not writing. A code-monkey is not a writer and a writer is not a code-monkey.
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.
Cybernetics is applied Mathematics. It is built on fundamental theorems of Godel, Turing & Tarski such that it restricts itself to intensions with well-defined extensions. It is useful. It doesn't try to shit higher than its arsehole.
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.
It might do. It might not.
An element without simplicity.
Is not an element. It can be further decomposed.
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 the origin of meaning is not 'experience in general'. The thing arose those evolutionary and co-evolved processes.
This situation has always already been announced.
Again with the fucking announcements!
Why is it today in the process of making itself known as such and after the fact?
Because Derrida is a very special little boy.
This question would call forth an interminable analysis.
Which Lacan would provide- for a fee.
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,
Derrida hadn't heard of Brouwerian choice sequences. Turing used them to good effect when he was in short pants.
By about the end of the Sixties, Category theorists were aware that 'naturality' (non-arbitrariness) was far to seek. Even if you have an objective function to maximize, the choice of the objective is arbitrary. In Math, an ideal is a special type of subset of an algebraic structure. But lots of mathematical objects lack any such thing. Still, a useful approximation may be made.
which in principle renders absurd the so easily admitted notion of the “sensible signifier”),
only if that principle is the headmistress of St. Trinians and doesn't actually exist.
or understood
by crazy people
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.
Or to a fart. This is because nothing has been absolutely linked with anything else.
Within cultures practicing so-called phonetic writing, mathematics is not just an enclave.
It was the same thing as it was for the Chinese.
That is mentioned by all historians of writing;
Nonsense! Historians of Chinese writing know that they had the same type of Math as everybody else. That subject burgeons or declines for economic reasons. The exponential growth of Western Math was caused by the ever increasing utility of math as applied to navigation, transoceanic commerce, as well as industrial applications- e.g. steam engines and thermodynamics.
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
only among shitheads like Hegel.
. This enclave is also the place where the practice of scientific language
which is done in natural language not Wilkins's analytical language or some Liebnizian hieroglyphics from the hypothetical mathesis universalis or characteristica universalis.
challenges intrinsically and with increasing profundity the ideal of phonetic writing and all its implicit metaphysics (metaphysics itself ),
it has none. There is nothing beyond physics because magic isn't a real thing.
particularly, that is, the philosophical idea of the epistémè;
there are many conflicting 'philosophical' ideas about it.
also of istoria, a concept profoundly related to it
and even more profoundly related to fairy tales
in spite of the dissociation or opposition which has distinguished one from the other during one phase of their common progress.
Knowledge advances when and if it can 'pay for itself' by raising total factor productivity. Fairy tales may or may not do so. It is possible that the sagas of half starved Icelandic shepherds were superior to Tolkien.
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.
No. History makes great strides when there is a market it. So does every other type of knowledge. As for presence, nobody needs to appropriate or reappropriate it or get it out of hock with the pawnbroker.
Heidegger was a spoiled Catholic. Them guys might gas on about 'ousia' and the 'real presence'. Jews needn't bother- more particularly if they are atheists.
But beyond theoretical mathematics,
there is nothing- at least in theory.
the development of the practical methods of information retrieval extends the possibilities of the “message” vastly,
Nope. There is bound to be some degradation and added 'noise'.
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.
We don't know how Socrates pronounced certain words attributed to him.
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.
There is still some degradation.
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,
was similar to the adventure of the Chinese. A hundred years from now some French philosopher, in between sucking off robot drivers at truck-stops, may explain that the non-phonetic, non-alphabetic, nature of the Chinese language gave them the advantage. It wasn't the case that our Universities turned to shit because imbeciles can get a PhD in nonsense while the East Asians only fund useful STEM type research.
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.
It hasn't any laws and can't impose shit. However it can pronounce the announcement of its own presence to shitheads.
But this nonfortuitous conjunction of cybernetics and the “human sciences” of writing leads to a more profound reversal.
What it led to is AI's which can churn out Derridaesque crap so illiterate people can become tenured Professors of utter shit. But those same AIs can draft pretty good legal documents or summaries of scientific information of a very useful sort.
Sartre could write well when not strung out on speed. Derrida is but the fart of his fart signifying that the signifier is a fucking shithead.
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