Why Grammatology was nonsense.

 

Any time-series whatsoever can be recorded or transcribed to some degree or other. Ideas can be represented by ideographs and a series of ideographs can represent a description, a prescription, a scientific hypothesis, a Cyrenaic hippopotamus or anything else that can be thought of or spoken of or imagined or represented by, or read into, a series of gestures or, indeed, any other phenomena. 

By the Sixties, when David Lewis published 'Conventions', and Derrida published 'Of Grammatology', there were very good phonetic alphabets to capture the exact sounds (phonemes) produced by different speakers of different languages. There was also 'Labonotation' to capture dance or martial arts choreography. Scientific and Commercial time-series had various types of mathematical representations for different purposes. 

Lewis, following Thomas Schelling, understood that all such semiotic systems had no 'naturality'. In other words, there was an arbitrary element in the choice of signs because they were merely conventional. But conventions are merely focal solutions to coordination and discoordination games which arise either in collective action problems or represent 'separating equilibria' which give rise to hedging and income effects. 

Derrida, who like Russell, had started off thinking Husserl might be on to something, and who had spent a year at Harvard in his late twenties and thus could not have been wholly ignorant, nevertheless based his soi disant 'science of writing' or Grammatology on the following absurd premises

1) Alphabetic languages are phonetic.

 They may be. They may not. English, notoriously, isn't. There are phonetic notations and musical notations and Labonotation for capturing the movements of the body. 

2) Alphabetic languages- like Latin or Greek- are superior to Chinese type or ancient Egyptian type languages. This simply isn't true. All that matters is which civilization is expanding for fiscal or technological reasons and which is declining.

3) Speech was considered superior to writing which was regarded as a 'supplement'. Apparently this was because 'presence' was ontologically superior to absence. This is obviously false. We prefer to have things 'put in writing'. What is even more sacred than the Church or the Mosque- both may be knocked down for some Civic purpose- is Holy Scripture. True, Catholics may puzzle over the 'real presence' in the Eucharist, but the rest of us needn't bother. The plain fact is that writing was superior to speaking because it was more considered. That's why Sophists got paid a lot of money to write speeches for people to learn by heart and repeat in the Assembly so as to win their law suit or push through their agenda. The fact is, at some early date, the first performance of a new play had in its audience people who had already ready the text. That is why the comment was made that the actors could safely sink their teeth into the more highly wrought passages without worrying that the audience would not be able to follow what was being said.

4) Aristotle's ideas still matter. They don't. Only pedants gas on about the dude. He had zero influence on anything despite having been Alexander's tutor. The fact is, what posh kids study, or what is taught in seminaries, doesn't matter in the slightest. Academic Credentials can be Zahavi handicaps. They serve a signalling purpose- viz. this dude was rich enough or stupid and sycophantic enough to spend years studying nonsense and could be useful for some mercenary or deeply stupid or sycophantic purpose for that reason. 

The Signifier and Truth

The Signifier is a word or gesture or painting or, in my case, a petulant fart. Either Utility or verisimilitude  or charismatic Schelling focality or some buck-stopped more or less protocol bound juristic process, makes determinations of Truth. But those determinations are immediately overturned by beating, bribes, or it becoming obvious that the thing is stupid shit. 

The “rationality”—but perhaps that word should be abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence—which governs a writing thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos.

Rationality does not issue from a Logos. Rather Logos is a personification of Rationality. We don't say Americans issue from Uncle Sam. We say Uncle Sam is a personification of America. 

True one can say Uncle Sam is an emanation of God. Americans are God's beloved children. He who created all things, created the Yank and will, at the end of days, gather him back into his bosom. But this is merely a manner of speaking. 

Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the desedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos.

Is this stupid cunt talking about the Gospel of John? Does he really think Lord Jesus Christ has been 'de-constructed'? True, the Jews in Israel, had won their third war in two decades. But they were fighting Arab Muslims- not White Christians. 

Particularly the signification of truth.

that is, its 'extension'. But this is undetermined and thus can't be destroyed or created or taken to the Prom.  

All the metaphysical determinations of truth,

are nonsense. What is 'beyond' physics is logorrhoea. Still, if you have a PhD in useless shite, it may be the only thing you can get paid to produce. 

and even the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger reminds us of,

Revealed Religion is fine because even if can't get you into Heaven there are reputational and psychological benefits from investing in it. Heidegger was a spoiled Catholic. After the War, the Centrum had to be rehabilitated so his & Schmitt's shite could be recycled. 

Anyway, maybe that stupid Kraut was plagiarising Okakura. Perhaps, the fucker was trying to become a Shinto, or Zen, or Noh 'shite'. Let him do so by all means. The Japs had gotten with the program. They put on a pretty good Olympics. Some people say they are starting to make quite good cars. That's a bit of a reach. Transistors maybe. Cars? Fuck off!

are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre- Socratic or the philosophical sense, in the sense of God’s infinite under-standing or in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense.

all of these senses only make sense to pedants who teach useless shite. Sadly, as the opportunity cost of acquiring academic credentials rises- because young people have exponentially rising general purpose productivity if they acquire STEM type skills rather than a wholly fraudulent paideia completely unmoored in philology, comparative history, or anything else worth a damn.  

Within this logos, the original and essential link to the phonè has never been broken.

On the contrary, if even the word 'logos' is no longer pronounced as it was, how much more must it be the case with any other term under its ambit where, indeed, some terms have changed in meaning or have been replaced entirely. 

It would be easy to demonstrate this and I shall attempt such a demonstration later. As has been more or less implicitly determined, the essence of the phonè would be immediately proximate to that which within “thought” as logos relates to “meaning,” produces it, receives it, speaks it, “composes” it.

G.E Moore knew of an elderly lady who didn't know what she thought till she heard what she said. But smart peeps keep mum and think without words for the excellent reason that their facial expression may change if they do so. Indeed, when they do speak, it is to disguise what they think. Language is strategic. But even the most abstract thought is a 'game against nature'.   

If, for Aristotle, for example, “spoken words (ta en to phone) are the symbols of mental experience (pathemata tes psyches) and written words are the symbols of spoken words” (De interpretatione, 1, 16a 3) it is because the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind.

He was a pedant. I suppose his pupils took dictation from him. But what one dictates may be utterly mindless. Aristotle himself had noticed that some birds can imitate human speech. 

Producer of the first signifier, it is not just a simple signifier among others. It signifies “mental experiences” which themselves reflect or mirror things by natural resemblance.

Why stop there? Why not embrace a full blown doctrine of signatures or correspondences and then take up Voodoo?  

Between being and mind, things and feelings, there would be a relationship of translation or natural signification;

there could be but there could also be the reverse. Disguising your thoughts or not letting your mind react to things as they would naturally do may be vital for survival.  

between mind and logos, a relationship of conventional symbolization.

Conventions are solutions to coordination or discoordination problems. To be fair, David Lewis's book came out two years after Derrida's. Still, after Dr. Strangelove came out, everybody was talking about Game Theory and wondering whether getting Game Theory wrong would lead to Nuclear Apocalypse.  

And the first convention, which would relate immediately to the order of natural and universal signification, would be produced as spoken language.

Nope. Sign language would come first. Hunters need to be silent. We don't know at what point our Genu evolved vocal chords. It is likely that speech developed slowly in groups which already had other ways to communicate. It was a supplement. For all we know, the scratching of signs predated this. 

Written language would establish the conventions,

Nope. They pre-existed.  

inter-linking other conventions with them.

Writers could write about ways to interlink conventions. But talkers could talk about the same thing. Pointing could work just as well.  

Just as all men have not the same writing so all men have not the same speech sounds, but mental experiences, of which these are the primary symbols (semeia prôtos), are the same for all,

they aren't even for the same person at different times of the day or when considering different contexts.  

as also are those things of which our experiences are the images (De interpretatione, 1, 16a. Italics added) .

Our experiences aren't images. They may arise because of things outside ourselves but aren't reflections. Why did Derrida not know this? 

The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself.

Which is why we are all telepaths.  

It is the stage of transparence. Aristotle can sometimes omit it without risk. 

Aristotle was paid to teach. What is important that you can say you spent years being taught shite. We understand that what you were taught was shite but that's what Paideia or a 'liberal education' means.  

In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense (thought or lived) or more loosely as thing.

No. The sight is closest to visual signs. The ear is closest to sounds. The nose is closest to farts which is what I use to communicate my boredom and general truculence.  

All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind

The voice isn't bound to the mind. That's why it can be recorded and preserved. We can hear the voices of people who died long ago 

or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself (whether it is done in the Aristotelian manner that we have just indicated or in the manner of medieval theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God).

But the thing isn't 'created from its eidos'. It isn't the case that thinking about unicorns causes unicorns to appear.  

The written signifier is always technical and representative.

It may be. It may not- like the Indus Valley script which still hasn't been deciphered.  

It has no constitutive meaning.

It may do. A country can have a written constitution or else it may be constituted through an international treaty.  

This derivation is the very origin of the notion of the “signifier.”

Saussure got this availability cascade of the ground. But there can be a signifier without anything being signified and vice versa. 

The notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified,

No. When a new King is crowned he is the signifier and the signified. This is not the case if he crowned via proxy.

even if, as Saussure argues, they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf.

Nobody bothers to distinguish the sides of leaves.  

This notion remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism: 

only because Derrida says of. But, he is a cretin. Why take his word for it. 

absolute proximity of voice and being,

Which is why, if you are making a phone call you are in two places at the same time.- 

of voice and the meaning of being,

Being doesn't have a meaning. 

of voice and the ideality of meaning.

Meaning is pragmatic. It has no ideality. 

Hegel demonstrates very clearly the strange privilege of sound in idealization, the production of the concept and the self-presence of the subject.

No he doesn't. Derrida is making this shit up. 

This ideal motion, in which through the sound what is as it were the simple subjectivity [Subjektivität], the soul of the material thing expresses itself,

sadly, material things don't have souls which express themselves 

the ear receives also in a theoretical [theoretisch] way,

only in the sense that the receives farts in a theoretical way 

just as the eye shape and colour, thus allowing the interiority of the object to become interiority itself [läßt dadurch das Innere der Gegenstände fur das Innere selbst werden] (Esthétique, III. I tr. fr. p. 16).* . . .

Whose interiority becomes the same as the armchair they are looking at or the parrot they can hear? 

The ear, on the contrary, perceives [vernimmt] the result of that interior vibration of material substances

No it doesn't. External vibrations may be audible not interior ones.  

without placing itself in a practical relation toward the objects, a result by means of which it is no longer the material form [Gestalt] in its repose, but the first, more ideal activity of the soul itself which is manifested [zum Vorschein kommt] (p. 296) .

A disciple of Hegel's published his lectures on Aesthetics. Some question whether Hegel's accurately views are properly reflected. In nuce, Hegel's notion is that 'Beauty is determined as the sensible shining of the Idea'. Sadly, we don't notice a beauty we encounter everyday. There has to be something novel or arresting about it. 

** What is said of sound in general is a fortiori valid for the phone by which, by virtue of hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak—an indissociable system—the subject affects itself and is related to itself in the element of ideality.

It one thing to say that your health improves if you keep saying 'Day, by day, in every way, I'm getting better and better. It is another to maintain that phonemes have magical powers. 

We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with the historical determination of the meaning of being in general as presence,

No we don't. A Hegelian may posit an 'end of history' where every consciousness, properly so called, agrees about everything that matters. But that does not involves phonemes. Also, there is no such thing as phonocentrism. Nobody greatly cares if you mispronounce words.  

with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/existence [ousia], temporal presence as point [stigmè] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, the co-presence of the other and of the self, intersubjectivity as the intentional phenomenon of the ego, and so forth).

Intersubjectivity is easily established between you and your dog or horse. You may not be able to establish it with your wife. This leads to divorce.

Logocentrism would thus support the determination of the being of the entity as presence.

An entity retains being even when it is not present. Logocentrism doesn't support shit. 

To the extent that such a logocentrism is not totally absent from Heidegger’s thought, perhaps it still holds that thought within the epoch of onto-theology, within the philosophy of presence, that is to say within philosophy itself.

It is more probable that Heidegger wasn't doing philosophy. He was babbling nonsense. 

This would perhaps mean that one does not leave the epoch whose closure one can outline.

If one lives long enough, one does do so. Bertrand Russell was born in the Victorian age. He died after the Moon landing.  

The movements of belonging or not belonging to the epoch are too subtle, the illusions in that regard are too easy, for us to make a definite judgment.

No. It is easy enough to say that Russell was born a Victorian. He died in the age of Dr. Strangelove. Still, in fields where there is an objective function to be minimized or maximized,  categoricity of a Hegelian type might be achieved. The British Hegelian tradition can be considered non-metaphysical in this respect. 

It may be convenient for teachers to divide history into 'epochs' or 'ages' but it is folly to think that ideas changed fundamentally over their course. Rather it was a case of old wine in new bottles. People followed the fashion of the period to a greater or lesser extent but they didn't believe fashions greatly mattered. I suppose, one could say- at one time it was fashionable to write high falutin' nonsense. But not everybody did. Those who had something sensible to say could pass down something not wholly ephemeral or fraudulent. Grammatology wasn't one such thing. A pity, but there it is.