exam summaries Flashcards
Friedreich Nietzsche, 1873, “Truth and Lying in a Non-moral Sense”
Concepts are metaphors which do not correspond to reality.
Important for Derrida in the 1970s.
It deals largely with epistemological questions of truth and language, including the formation of concepts.
Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal.
Although all concepts are human inventions (created by common agreement to facilitate ease of communication), human beings forget this fact after inventing them, and come to believe that they are “true” and do correspond to reality.
Thus Nietzsche argues that “truth” is actually:
A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
Ferdinand de Saussure, 1916, “Course in General Linguistics”
Sign is composed of signifier and signified. There is no substance in language. All language consists of differences. In language there are only forms, not substances- all apparently substantive units of language are generated by other things that lie outside them, but these characteristics are actually internal to their make-up. A form is something external that shapes material into a particular identity or substance. All elements of language have identity only in so much as they are produced by a network of differences, and each element will consist of further differentiations, endlessly.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955, “The Structural Study of Myth”
His theory about the structure of myth helps support Lévi-Strauss’s more basic theory about human thought. According to this more basic theory, universal laws govern all areas of human thought:
If it were possible to prove in this instance, too, that the apparent arbitrariness of the mind, its supposedly spontaneous flow of inspiration, and its seemingly uncontrolled inventiveness [are ruled by] laws operating at a deeper level […] if the human mind appears determined even in the realm of mythology, a fortiori it must also be determined in all its spheres of activity.
Out of all the products of culture, myths seem the most fantastic and unpredictable. Therefore, Lévi-Strauss claims, if even mythical thought obeys universal laws, then all human thought must obey universal laws.
The Savage Mind: bricoleur and engineer
Lévi-Strauss developed the comparison of the Bricoleur and Engineer in The Savage Mind. “Bricoleur” has its origin in the old French verb bricoler, which originally referred to extraneous movements in ball games, billiards, hunting, shooting and riding, but which today means do-it-yourself building or repairing things with the tools and materials on hand, puttering or tinkering as it were. In comparison to the true craftsman, whom Lévi-Strauss calls the Engineer, the Bricoleur is adept at many tasks and at putting preexisting things together in new ways, adapting his project to a finite stock of materials and tools. The Engineer deals with projects in their entirety, conceiving and procuring all the necessary materials and tools to suit his project. The Bricoleur approximates “the savage mind” and the Engineer approximates the scientific mind. Lévi-Strauss says that the universe of the Bricoleur is closed, and he often is forced to make do with whatever is at hand, whereas the universe of the Engineer is open in that he is able to create new tools and materials. But both live within a restrictive reality, and so the Engineer is forced to consider the preexisting set of theoretical and practical knowledge, of technical means, in a similar way to the Bricoleur.
Roland Barthes, 1957, “Mythologies”
Myth is a type of speech- it is a system of communication. Myth is not a concept, an object, or an idea. It is a mode of signification of form. You can think and understand it, without actually knowing what it is. Using Saussure’s notions of signifier, signified, and sign, he describes how myth is similarly constructed. Saussure’s based level sign (linguistic system), is then paired with a signifier, which together constitute a new sign- thus forming a myth (metalanguage).
Roland Barthes, 1967, “The Death of the Author”
Barthes’s essay argues against traditional literary criticism’s practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated.
Jacques Derrida, 1968, “Différance”
Thought and our perception of reality are governed by similar processes as Saussure’s ideas about language. Traditional philosophy held that we see actual presences and substances in the world and that our ideas have presence and substance that guarantees their truthfulness.
Ideas are like units of language- they are generated by difference. They have no substance apart from the networks of differences (each bearing the traces of other elements and other differences) that generate them as effects.
Those processes, as in language, do not have a palpable presence of their own. Like forms, they are empty non-present and non-substantive.
When we think of anything, we cannot grasp it in the present moment because that present moment is always passing away. Any present moment bears in it the trace of past moments and future present moments. The differences between these “presents” constitute our conception of the present.
Space functions in the same way- any spatially locatable object of thought or idea has an identity or presence of its own only by differing from other things. To bear the trace of other things is to be shadowed by “alterity”/otherness.
What the concept of difference leads to is a sense that everything in existence is relationally connected. We can sort it out into parts, but we should not assume those parts are pure and original or that they are pure identities- they are the effects of other processes of relation and differentiation. This means that all things are signs and that all things are “textual”- all parts refer to or signify other parts.
Philosophical concepts too, like signs in language, are given identity by their differences from one another.
Jacques Derrida, 1968, “Semiology and Grammatology”
Invention of the science of semiotics.
Going beyond Saussure, this displacement of sign/signified/signifier is a pattern of all thoughts, not just vocal utterances of language. It is essentially the pattern of consciousness, and semiotics can be applied to all we know. Saussure amits to the exigency of a ‘Transcendental Signified’.
‘Transcendental Signified’: would refer to no signifier. Would exceed the chain of signs. Would no longer itself function as a signifier. The theme of such a concept took form through the lens of an idea of pure, transparent unambiguous translatability.
From the moment that one questions the possibility of a transcendental signified, one recognizes that every signified is also in the position of signifier. Thus the distinction between signifier and signified becomes problematic at its root.
This is an operation that must pass through the difficult deconstruction of metaphysics. It will never cease to impose upon semiological science the entirety of this fundamental quest for a ‘Transcendental Signified’ and a concept independent of language.
Communication presupposes subjects (with identities and presence are assumed in the signifying process) and objects (signified concepts).
In essence, everything is textual.
One can use semiology to deconstruct concepts and reconfigure new ones.
Play of differences: the syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself.
Differences are the effects of transformations. Différance is incompatible with the static.
Différance: the production of differences. It is structural- producing systematic and regulated transformations.
There is no presence before and outside semiological différance.
Subjectivity- like objectivity- is an effect of différance: an effect inscribed within a system of différance.
Spacing is temporization. Inuition, perception, consummation- the relationship to the present, the reference to a present reality, to a being- are always deferred. They are deferred by the very principle of difference.
All conceptual oppositions of metaphysics- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present- become nonpertinent.
They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of a value or meaning suppossedly antecedent to différance, more original to it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of the ‘Transcendental Signified’.
Michel Foucault, 1969, “The Archaeology of Knowledge”
The premise of the book is that systems of thought and knowledge (“epistemes” or “discursive formations”) are governed by rules (beyond those of grammar and logic) which operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought and language use in a given domain and period.
Most prominently in its Introduction and Conclusion, the book also becomes a philosophical treatment and critique of phenomenological and dogmatic structural readings of history and philosophy, portraying continuous narratives as naïve ways of projecting our own consciousness onto the past, thus being exclusive and excluding. Characteristically, Foucault demonstrates his political motivations, personal projects and preoccupations, and, explicitly and implicitly, the many influences that inform the discourse of the time.
Foucault argues that the contemporary study of the history of ideas, although it targets moments of transition between historical worldviews, ultimately depends on continuities that break down under close inspection.
The history of ideas marks points of discontinuity between broadly defined modes of knowledge, but the assumption that those modes exist as wholes fails to do justice to the complexities of discourse. Foucault argues that “discourses” emerge and transform not according to a developing series of unarticulated, common worldviews, but according to a vast and complex set of discursive and institutional relationships, which are defined as much by breaks and ruptures as by unified themes.
Foucault defines a “discourse” as a ‘way of speaking’. Thus, his method studies only the set of ‘things said’ in their emergences and transformations, without any speculation about the overall, collective meaning of those statements, and carries his insistence on discourse-in-itself down to the most basic unit of things said: the statement (énoncé).
During most of Archaeology, Foucault argues for and against various notions of what are inherent aspects of a statement, without arriving at a comprehensive definition. He does, however, argue that a statement is the rules which render an expression (that is, a phrase, a proposition, or a speech act) discursively meaningful. This concept of meaning differs from the concept of signification: Though an expression is signifying, for instance “The gold mountain is in California”, it may nevertheless be discursively meaningless and therefore have no existence within a certain discourse. For this reason, the “statement” is an existence function for discursive meaning.
Being rules, the “statement” has a special meaning in the Archaeology: it is not the expression itself, but the rules which make an expression discursively meaningful. These rules are not the syntax and semantics that makes an expression signifying. It is additional rules. In contrast to structuralists, Foucault demonstrates that the semantic and syntactic structures do not suffice to determine the discursive meaning of an expression. Depending on whether or not it complies with these rules of discursive meaning, a grammatically correct phrase may lack discursive meaning or, inversely, a grammatically incorrect sentence may be discursively meaningful - even meaningless letters (e.g. “QWERTY”) may have discursive meaning. Thus, the meaning of expressions depends on the conditions in which they emerge and exist within a field of discourse; the discursive meaning of an expression is reliant on the succession of statements that precede and follow it.
In short, the “statements” Foucault analysed are not propositions, phrases, or speech acts. Rather, “statements” constitute a network of rules establishing which expressions are discursively meaningful, and these rules are the preconditions for signifying propositions, utterances, or speech acts to have discursive meaning. However, “statements” are also ‘events’, because, like other rules, they appear (or disappear) at some time.
Foucault’s analysis then turns towards the organized dispersion of statements, which he calls discursive formations. Foucault reiterates that the analysis he is outlining is only one possible procedure, and that he is not seeking to displace other ways of analysing discourse or render them as invalid.
Michel Foucault, 1969, “What is an Author?”
The work considers the relationship between author, text, and reader; concluding that:
“The Author is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses: (…) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”
Michel Foucault, 1971, “From Truth and Power”
“Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regimes of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish between true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and proceedures accorded value in acquisition of truth, the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.” (1668)
Roland Barthes, 1977, “From Work to Text”
Readerly and writerly are terms Barthes employs both to delineate one type of literature from another and to implicitly interrogate ways of reading, like positive or negative habits the modern reader brings into one’s experience with the text itself. These terms are most explicitly fleshed out in S/Z, while the essay “From Work to Text”, from Image—Music—Text (1977) provides an analogous parallel look at the active and passive, postmodern and modern, ways of interacting with a text.
Readerly text
A text that makes no requirement of the reader to “write” or “produce” their own meanings. The reader may passively locate “ready-made” meaning. Barthes writes that these sorts of texts are “controlled by the principle of non-contradiction” (156), that is, they do not disturb the “common sense,” or “Doxa,” of the surrounding culture. The “readerly texts,” moreover, “are products [that] make up the enormous mass of our literature” (5). Within this category, there is a spectrum of “replete literature,” which comprises “any classic (readerly) texts” that work “like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and] safeguarded” (200).[7]
Writerly text
A text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism: “… to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text” (4). Writerly texts and ways of reading constitute, in short, an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts. A culture and its texts, Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their given forms and traditions. As opposed to the “readerly texts” as “product,” the “writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages” (5). Thus reading becomes for Barthes “not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing,” but rather a “form of work” (10).
The Author and the scriptor
Author and scriptor are terms Barthes uses to describe different ways of thinking about the creators of texts. “The author” is our traditional concept of the lone genius creating a work of literature or other piece of writing by the powers of his/her original imagination. For Barthes, such a figure is no longer viable. The insights offered by an array of modern thought, including the insights of Surrealism, have rendered the term obsolete. In place of the author, the modern world presents us with a figure Barthes calls the “scriptor,” whose only power is to combine pre-existing texts in new ways. Barthes believes that all writing draws on previous texts, norms, and conventions, and that these are the things to which we must turn to understand a text. As a way of asserting the relative unimportance of the writer’s biography compared to these textual and generic conventions, Barthes says that the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text. He also argues that, in the absence of the idea of an “author-God” to control the meaning of a work, interpretive horizons are opened up considerably for the active reader. As Barthes puts it, “the death of the author is the birth of the reader.”[8]
Jacques Derrida, 1978, “Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences”
“Structure, Sign, and Play” identifies a tendency for philosophers to denounce each other for relying on problematic discourse, and argues that this reliance is to some degree inevitable because we can only write in the language we inherit. Discussing the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Derrida argues that we are all bricoleurs, creative tinkerers who must use the tools we find around us.
- Although presented at a conference intended to popularize structuralism, the lecture is widely cited as the starting point for post-structuralism in the United States. Along with Derrida’s longer text Of Grammatology it is also programmatic for the technique of deconstruction.
- The essay begins by speculating, “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ‘event,’ if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—structuralist—thought to reduce or suspect.”
- The ‘event’ involves changes in structuralism, structure, and particular “the structurality of structure”, which has hitherto been limited, writes Derrida, through the process of being assigned a stabilizing “center”.
- The “center” is that element of a structure which appears given or fixed, thereby anchoring the rest of the structure and allowing it to play. In the history of metaphysics specifically, this function is fulfilled by different terms (which Derrida says are always associated with presence): “eidos, archè, telos, energia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.”
- Whichever term is at the center of the structure, argues Derrida, the overall pattern remains similar. This central term ironically escapes structurality, the key feature of structuralism according to which all meaning is defined relationally, through other terms in the structure. From this perspective, the center is the most alien or estranged element in a structure: it comes from somewhere outside and remains absolute until a new center is substituted in a seemingly arbitrary fashion. “The center”, therefore, “is not the center.”
- The ‘event’ under discussion is the opening of the structure, which became inevitable “when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought” and the contradictory role of the center exposed.
- The result of the event, according to Derrida, must be the full version of structural “freeplay”, a mode in which all terms are truly subject to the openness and mutability promised by structuralism. Derrida locates the beginning of this process in the writings of earlier philosophers, who continued to use the pattern of metaphysics even as they denounced it in others.
