permaculture

["souscayrous" <souscayrous@wanadoo.fr>]

        I entered this discussion at an obtuse angle.  I then compounded this
dull-witted tactic with following posts.  In an attempt to capture the
playful dance of deconstruction at the end of meaning, I even deliberately
split my last posts (the fragmentation intended to convey the very fracture
of meaning the posted quotes expressed).  There was to have been a third
post that night, an Hegelian sublation of thesis-antithesis; it was never
finished.

        >> Because 'the intelligible face of the sign remains turned to the 
word
and
      >> the face of God' (Jacques Derrida)

>sorry, communication didnt happen - while i am conviced you do have an
>understanding of the meaning, to me it is a handful of random words
>(colloquial: gibberish)

>(chances are, most of you had a similar experience with my recent post...
>what a foggy world we are in!)

>cheers
>georg


        No Georg, I had no problem with your post.  I liked very much your 
'ivory
tower verbal somersaulting', as I did Toby's 'looks like utter nonsense
written by bright men who live only in their heads' and Sean's rather more
direct, 'I can't be bothered deciphering their pompous linguistic
posturings'.  I have done deconstruction a disservice, but then, George
Steiner and I are not deconstructionists;

        "I have already alluded to the self-serving jargon which infects all 
but
the (rare) best of post-structuralist and deconstructive rhetoric."
        (George Steiner, Real Presences, p128)

        However;

        "...the low quality of deconstructive work being turned out by 
academic
mills cannot be held to invalidate the case itself (deconstruction)..."
        (p129)

For me, this is the crux and again Professor Steiner says it far better than
I;

Because;

"The deconstructive denial of 'logocentrism' is expounded in wholly
logocentric terms.  'Meta-criticism is still criticism...The central dogma
(of deconstruction), according to which all readings are misreadings and the
sign has no underwritten intelligibility, has precisely the same
paradoxical, self-denying status as the celebrated aporia whereby a Cretan
declares all Cretans to be liars. Immured within natural language,
deconstructive propositions are self-falsifying."
(p129)


But because deconstruction is self-denying and self-falsifying does not make
it wrong. Indeed no one has 'proven' it wrong and I believe such an aim to
be impossibility.  Derrida is simply continuing a philosophical insight that
goes back explicitly to Nietzsche and implicitly in the poetry of Rimbaud
and Mallarmé. It is the death of God, the end of the belief in progress, the
fracture of the self, the end of meaning and indeed my inflated,  'all words
lie'.  Here lies the impasse.  This is my exit from academe.

        That is the latest news from the 'ivory towers', the 'academic 
mills'.  I
loathe the negativity of deconstruction, the act of taking apart, of
de-construction.  Far rather the effort after creation.  At the end of the
Nineteenth Century, during the original fin de siecle, not the meagre,
millennium angst we have just experienced, a movement, art for arts sake,
flourished to counter the nihilistic zeitgeist.  I have been fortunate to
find a few acres here in the South of France where I would begin my own
counter to negativity.

        John wrote;

Suggestions for delving into living in languaging experientially - including
(naturally! :-) much about living systems, so good PC learning in any case:

I write.  I find literary criticism recursively destructive.  I find I like
doing.  Today I sawed firewood.  I am beginning to 'body forth'
(Shakespeare's fortuitous phrase), to literally embody my language.  Here's
John again

        My languaging is not separate from my being and doing (my manner of 
being);
they are inextricably intertwined

It sounds that we are speaking about the same thing, perhaps the same thing
agreed previously when I said 'we are at one regarding the primacy of how
over what.  It is how we dally along the path and not to what the path leads
that matters.  This ultimately carries the weight of our life.' But I would
reference my source as Heidegger and his insights into our interaction with
the world, famously, and graphically expressed in his example of the use of
a hammer;

The process of hammering does not simply have knowledge about the hammers
character as a tool, but it has appropriated this tool in a way which could
not possibly be more suitable. In dealings such as this, where something is
put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the 'in-order-to' which is
constitutive for the tool we are employing at the time.  The less we just
stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the
more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly
is it encountered as that which it is -  as tool...No matter how sharply we
just look at the 'outward appearance'of Things, in whatever form the
appearance takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand. If we look at
things just 'theoretically' we can get along without understanding
readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating
them, this activity is not a blind one. It has its own kind of sight, by
which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its own Thingly
character.
(Being and Time, 1927)

I believe that by acting in the world, by sawing wood, I will gain a new
understanding of saw.  A saw will no longer be a serrated metal edge with a
handle used to saw wood, but a weight in my palm, a weight and balance my
hand knows from experience, so that when I turn to the next log to cut I
find the saw already in my hand exactly at the place where the cut is to be
made. There is something like this in Tolstoy, I think Anna Karenina, where
the land owner joins his labourers in the field as they scythe the wheat and
finds the balance of the tool in his hand after several days and discovers
his only true joy in this simple labour.
The word 'theoretically' in the above quote would strike both at the sterile
world of deconstruction but also at science. Science treats the world as an
array of Things to be studied, and misses their whatness (quiddity).
Science treats the world as Things and thus we have technology.  Now the
world has become a vast array of material for humankind to use as it needs
(See Heideggers 'Question Concerning Technology') There are more fundamental
ways of understanding the world.  I do have a different understanding of
saw, now it has a toe and a heel, a draw and a release, and it also has a
rhythm that does not leave me breathless and sweating, but cuts through the
largest timber, again and again, before I must pause.

I would have my language deepen through doing, my being replenished as I do
more, the two (being and doing) coalescing.  Language is being (Being to
Heidegger and for him humans are literally the clearing of Being where
language happens) and thus my succession of posts.  How we say something
does matter because it expresses our relationship to the world.  I have been
terse and playful, now I am prolix and clarifying, these are the rhetorical
modes I begin with, it will be interesting, possibly illustrative how they
develop over time as I develop the land for me and my family and eventually
for the local community.  There were other havens after academia but I think
it is only in nature that we gain the profoundest knowledge, simply because
only in nature do we come up against something which is other.



Souscayrous


PS Toby and Sean:

>The disciplines of epistemology, deconstructionism, and many other fields
>about "knowing" often speak in convoluted phrasings, yet when I rephrase
>them into simple language, the ideas seem straightforward.
>Take Souscayrous's quote from George Steiner:

>> 'A semantics, a poetics of correspondence, of decipherability and
>> truth-values arrived at across time and consensus, are strictly
inseparable
>> from the postulate of theological-metaphysical transcendence.'

>I really will never be sure what that means, but perhaps it's something
like
>"The true meaning of words can't be grasped if we separate them from how
>they transcend physical form and link us to the divine." Of course, I could
>be way, way off; and with more work I could make the translation cleaner
and
>more elegant, but my point is, this stuff can be made much more easy to
>grasp. I fear that the writers want to be viewed as deep thinkers, so they
>gussy-up the language immensely, mistaking difficult writing for hard
>thinking

        >I'm trained as an editor, and I'd say that
>Steiner and Derrida have greater need of one than
>does an ESL student. I was taught to chuck as
>much as possible--these guys put no constraint on
>the number of syllables they use. I was taught
>techniques for gaining distance from my writer's
>vanity--these guys spend all day preening prose
>in front of the mirror. I was taught to prefer
>effective communication--but for all their
>purported wisdom, these guys sure make it
>difficult to extract anything intelligible from
>their writing. They sound like they say a lot,
>but the rest of us are left guessing.

>Ivory tower as pathology


What is your mania for contraction? It reminds me of the film Amadeus, where
the Emperor on hearing the first performance of a Mozart symphony goes up to
the composer and congratulates him on a fine piece of music.  Then, trying
to find something intelligent to say about a subject he clearly has no
knowledge of airily waves an arm and says "Too many... umm", when a courtier
pipes up "notes" the Emperor exclaims "Yes, too many notes, take some out".
Derrida and Steiner said it that way because that was the way they said it.
You may précis it for your own uses but it does not clarify anything.
Rather study their work, their reason for using this form of rhetoric and
then criticise.  Hands up those who have read 'Of Grammatology'?  Or any of
Derrida's work. I recommend the edition using Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks
translation and long and useful introduction.  This book is fundamentally
important, even if you don't agree with it, as I do not. I would also ask
that 'language leftists' be retired, it doesn't describe anything and
certainly not Ortega y Gasset who was not a language philosopher and was far
from the left. It is piece of tired journalism that would dismisses much of
modern philosophy with nothing more than a weak alliteration.