Jacques Derrida's "Of Grammatology" (Part 1/2)

[@YellowWallArt777]

You're my 2023 Teacher of the Year, congratulations! 👏👏🎉🎉🎉 You made a lot of texts more accessible to me while I was struggling against time, illness, deadlines, expectations, exams, God-knows-what-the-hell professors... my brain couldn't handle all of them at once without your help, thankyou and God bless you! 💝

[@elel2608]

6:59 logo centrism-speech, truth, law -all relates to the word of God 9:20 is there a science to writing? 13:30 signified itself is part of the text 18:22 signified is real? They’re both subject to ordering principles in a society 21:01 if you write something down, you will lose cognitive potential? 22:42 speaker is godlike in giving life to words in their thoughts-weld thoughts and speech-write-might be interpreted in another way 24:30 bad and good writing - specific (written) vs universal (speaking) 27:00 Socrates poster boy for logocentrism 30:43 science- 31:49 not located in the logos but comes about from the logos 38:21 speaking represents an abstract thought in brain..all language, including speaking, is writing 41:10 arche writing …no exteriority

[@SK-le1gm]

In the elaborate footnotes of the novel “infinite jest”, there is a fleeting reference to “Militant Grammar Riots at MIT”. I think that David Foster Wallace was referring to this. Thanks 🙏🏽

[@adamqadmon]

Which footnote is it?

[@digitaurus]

Thank you for an excellent piece. I am currently working through "Of Grammatology' and have found your discussion very valuable. Derrida realised that the low-level structural representations outlined by Saussure for la langue are not grounded. The internal mental representation ('signified') of, for example, a word (a signifier) are a set of values ('valeurs') emerging from the relationship between that word and its neighbours (i.e. other word signifiers). So la langue is like a house of cards, with the signs dependent on each other for their meaning and with no reference to the outside, the 'natural' world or indeed any world at all. Fundamentally, at this level of representation at least, Saussure's model of language is NOT logocentric and does away with the need for the logos. For people who work with computers this is no big deal; the 'signified' is just a data structure being used to represent some feature. But Derrida was a philosopher and the idea of a signified that just contained references to other signifiers (the signifieds of which in turn just pointed to yet more signifiers) seems to have blown a gasket in his mind and led to an obsession with "differance", the endless deferral of meaning, and so forth. Derrida accuses Saussure of shying away from the non-logocentic implications of his own model and in this I think he is probably right. Certainly, Saussure's characterisation of speech v-a-v writing is muddled and unnecessary for his theory. In Saussure's defence, it is possible Saussure wasn't as dogmatic in person as his interpreters made him on the page and in life the man was clearly troubled and concerned that he hadn't yet thought it all through. It is also possible, as Derrida implies, that this mistaken mindset prevented Saussure from pursuing his ideas to their logical conclusion.

[@MikiDeFacto123]

This has been very accessable, having Derrida's obscureness in mind. Thanks for the explanations and bringing these ideas closer

[@matth464]

Can't wait to let to listen to this David, hope you have been well!

[@TheoryPhilosophy]

I've been as good as I can be locked up in my basement apartment haha

[@santiagogarrido3907]

This is great, thanks! Looking forward to part 2

[@limoreperetzwoloshin8860]

Chinese is not a phonetic language, yet the written materials had great and wide influence over a long time and space

[@adaptercrash]

The blackholes of grammar and we aren't sure they work and it's all about your mind and how you perceive reality.

[@kenjohnson6326]

Is there a confusion here with signifier and referent? Or do the terms just dance around, taking position when the music stops? Anyway, someone, clarification, please.

[@digitaurus]

In Saussurian linguistics there are no referents. A sign consists of a signifier (for example, the letters TREE) and a signified, which is the internal mental representation of the sign. The clever bit is that Saussure outlines how the signified is formed - and that formation (the data structure, if you like) relies solely on other signs. Think of signs as like a house of cards where the signs gain meaning from each other's properties. This is the 'bipartite sign'. A lot of people have since got very over-excited about this - including Derrida who points to the "endless deferral of meaning" (think house of cards - which card is responsible for holding up the structure?). Some people "corrected" Saussure by creating a 'tripartite sign' which includes the referent as a third component of the sign, an idea that completely misses the point of Saussure's model. Derrida claims that the logocentric view - the idea that language is grounded i.e. it refers to things in a real world ('referents') - is central to Western philosophy and is for now also necessary for us (it is embedded in this epoch, in our way of seeing the world) - and that therefore Saussure's elimination of the referent is a contradiction at the heart of structuralism. Derrida claims that Saussure hid this contradiction behind the statement that speech was more 'natural' than writing and Derrida demolishes this idea by demonstrating that speech is just another form of writing.

[@Nephelokokkygia1215]

@@digitaurus You said that Derrida claims that because the logocentric view is central to Western philosophy, that Saussure's elimination of the referent is a contradiction. How does logocentrism being central cause Saussure's contradiction?

[@digitaurus]

@@Nephelokokkygia1215 I may be at risk of saying the same things as before in slightly different ways here, for which forgive me. Also, I accept that Derrida is really tricky to pin down (deliberately, apparently) so interpretations may vary ... If one accepts that logocentrism is a requirement of Western philosophy, and that is a big 'if', then the problem is that Saussurian structuralism has no means to incorporate that 'centre' within it. Saussurian structures are ungrounded representations and there is no means to ground them - no way to include a 'referent', sometimes called a 'transcendental signified' in translated versions of Derrida's writings. The statement that Saussurian structures are ungrounded representations is factual, so I agree with Derrida there. We know a lot more about these kinds of representation these days because we have actually been using them for some time in computers to create "language models". The large language models (ChatGPT and all that jazz) are the latest iterations of this line of work which actually goes right back to the 1950s. I think you can see at a glance that a model like GPT-4 is ungrounded: it is just trained on text and 'works' by predicting the next token (roughly, a word) in a string given the context (the words so far). It "knows nothing of our world", if I can quote an ELO song from my youth. Derrida is, I think, claiming that Saussure was uncomfortable with this complete detachment from reality and disguised it by explicitly linking one half of the sign, the signifier, to reality as a 'sound image' i.e. something that is physically produced by a human in the real world. Saussure claims that these sound images are 'natural' signifiers of language and that writing is supplementary. Derrida is, quite rightly I think, having none of this; in 'Of Grammatology' he offers a pretty clear and convincing argument, in my mind at least, that speech is just a form of writing. This is actually pretty easy for us to see in the 21st century as speech is now readily digitised and spat back out as text, or vice versa, without any fundamental distinction between the two. I am spending a lot of time thinking about this precisely because the AI that is taking the world by storm is an ungrounded Saussurian model. It "knows nothing of our world". Does this make these models irredeemably flawed, as Derrida seems (?!?) to be saying? Or does Western thought have to drop logocentrism and embrace ungrounded language? Many of our culture wars have emerged from academics leaning in to the last idea.

[@Han-rp6zm]

Richard Feynman once said: "IF YOU CANNOT EXPLAIN TO ME WITH CLARITY WHAT YOU KNOW, THEN YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING." That is a lesson Jacques Derrida NEVER learned; and I know, because I took a course with him at Yale

[@Oscar.Vasquezzz]

Society knows itself to the extent that science understands the deepest parts of the ocean, or farthest reaches of space. We will never have clarity, but I think we know much more than nothing. Truly it is the thinking that you can clearly translate the infinite possibilities of thought and self into “what one knows” that is impossible

[@kenjohnson6326]

Great example that, the grass, clarifies something important for me, and I'm now looking forward to hearing more. Still, I thought the signified and signifier (concept) were the sign, and the sign is supposed to designate the "real" referent -- the thing in the world.

[@forgottenclown9115]

According to Saussure the signifier is the word (tree) the signified is the mental representation there of (🌳). Together they make a sign. Contrary to Pierce Saussure doesn't have referents. Instead he has differentiation. Signs simply have to differ one from another, to get meaning.

[@magpiecritic3083]

Please be my professor! Ur the best at explaining

[@olegtriers8882]

Great, important work!

[@annablabka8653]

Thanks!

[@1Dimee]

Thanks King

[@ashraykant4424]

Thank you 🙌

[@shannonm.townsend1232]

Felicitous!

[@enricamartinengo2070]

Wonderful

[@psicotiquinha]

omg thank u

[@UR-025_STC]

That was fantastic! Thx

[@sonalisarbadhikary2260]

Brilliant ❤️

[@kakistocracyusa]

Lots of time spent on Cliff's Notes depth here.

[@elel2608]

2:13 speaking is another form of writing; speech is more privileged 3:53 deconstruction - binary isn’t real? The two objects are contingent on one another

[@mdemaria.1371]

Ganhou um inscrito.

[@lostintime519]

is Chomsky a king or a peasant? P.s. Great video, thank you.

[@alexsidney4796]

hello the past. I thought it was pronounced like archaeology.

[@forgottenclown9115]

Jack the Reader

[@stephenhogg6154]

'Demonstrating that a binary opposition isn't real'. So, what is?

[@stephenhogg6154]

@@broomheadjames I take exception to the use of ‘real’ in this context, because it seems to naively reinscibe the kind of simple binary (of ‘reality and illusion’) that is being denied. It uses a simple opposition to deny that simple oppositions exist.

[@أحمدالأفغيري]

Great. 😍

[@satishmeetei839]

Now I see why people say Derrida speaks so much nonsense.

[@saulorocha3755]

You’re probably talking of Chomsky. Don’t worry, it’s just intellectual jealousy. French philosophers they do talk nonsense sometimes, but so does Chomsky.

[@eewls]

more like "oof gramatology"

[@moments8838]

with all due respect you are simply repeating Derrida's terminology however writing vs speech have very specific meanings . whats more you're misinterpreting Derrida and hence misrepresenting him.Logo means 'words of God' seriously? Logo has a wider meaning in the context of western philosophy

[@TheoryPhilosophy]

Do you have a time stamp where I said it was the word of God? I'm curious because I feel like I contextualised that comment but maybe not