A quip about theory and philosophy
Theory looks at the genesis of terms. We exist in speech. We commmune by means of communication. Philosophy is a science that naively accepts the plausibility of terms. Theory rather identifies the mutability of speech (parole) and denies that there is any use in arguing about the meaning of terms. We can show how a term has changed; how the notion has affected the course of history and how social events in turn redefined the notion. What we are no longer capable of doing (a loss for which we should grieve) is supposing that there is real meaning out there, that our terms can be finalized in some sort of purified reference to the things out there which they describe. An epoche with regard to meaning.
Note: epoche is greek for something like 'abstention.' Husserl popularized the notion with his 'phenomenological epoche,' or 'phenomenological reduction.' He bracketed the existence of the outside world, that is, suspended judgment about it, and set about to ask what we can do with the phenomena themselves. Theory does something similar. It brackets the signified and attacks, yes attacks, the signifier. One opponent whimmed into nonexistence, and the other bombarded and dissociated. It's no wonder there's no one left to fight. (Perhaps there's something to be said in favor of naivete?)
Note: epoche is greek for something like 'abstention.' Husserl popularized the notion with his 'phenomenological epoche,' or 'phenomenological reduction.' He bracketed the existence of the outside world, that is, suspended judgment about it, and set about to ask what we can do with the phenomena themselves. Theory does something similar. It brackets the signified and attacks, yes attacks, the signifier. One opponent whimmed into nonexistence, and the other bombarded and dissociated. It's no wonder there's no one left to fight. (Perhaps there's something to be said in favor of naivete?)
posted by Tongue-tied Lightning at 12:17 PM
2 Comments:
Yes - empty words.
Reading Foucault's "The Order of Things" (which was, interestingly, a best-seller in its day - and put Foucault on the intellectual map). I thought this quote might be interesting in relation to the distinction between philosophy and semiology. And I'm getting deja-vu right now.
"Let us call the totality of the learning and sills that enable one to make the signs speak and to discover their meaning, hermeneutics; let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to distinguish the location of the signs, to define what constitutes them as signs, and to know how and by what laws they are linked, semiology: the sixteenth century superimposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude. To search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. To search for the law governing signs is to discover the things that are alike. The grammar of beings is an exegesis of these things. And what the language they speak has to tell us is quite simply what the syntax is that bings them together. The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their resemblance. And that resemblance is visible only in the network of signs that crosses the world from one end to the other. 'Nature' is trapped in the thin layer that holds semiology and hermeneutics one above the other; it is neither mysterious nor veiled, it offers itself to our cognition, which it sometimes leads astray, only in so far as this superimposition necessarily includes a slight degree of non-coincidence between the resemblances. As a result, the grid is less easy to see through; its transparency is clouded over from the very first. A dark space appears which must be made progressively clearer. That space is where 'nature' resides, and it is what one must attempt to know. Everything would be manifest and immediately knowable if the hermeneutics of resemblance and the semiology of signatures coincided without the slightest parallax. But because the similitudes that form the graphics of the world are one 'cog' out of alignment with those that form its dicourse, knowledge and the infinite labour it involves find here the space that is proper to them: it is their task to weave their way across this distance, pursuing an endless zigzag course from resemblance to what resembles it."
(from part 1, chapter 2 "The Prose of the World", the end of section 2 "Signatures")
Post a Comment
<< Home