Deconstruction (was Re:Summary of the summaries...)

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

>Oh, it's much worse than that.  People claimed that, in
>speech, even or perhaps especially in "private speech"
>such as thought, the totality of the self was immediately
>present to itself.  Not just the totality of the sentence
>- the totality of the _self_.  They created a metaphysical
>privilege for speech, which they associated with breath &
>life & self-presence, & denigrated writing, which they
>associated with absence & death.  This myth infected damn
...
>One symptom of the infection, according to Derrida, is
>that pioneering linguists like de Saussure suppressed
>awareness of the "text-like" characteristics* shared by
>all linguistic productions, including speech.  This
>delayed, for instance, Western recognition of Chinese &
>Mayan writing as logographic rather than pictographic
>symbol systems.  Linguists have not taken Derrida's
>critique (found in his _Of Grammatalogy_) well.  In fact
>they are typically quite hostile towards deconstruction,
>altho a substantive refutation of Derrida's critique
>(or an admission of guilt if, as I believe, his critique
>is correct) would have shed more light on the debate.

Well, so far, so good, but linguistics has progressed just a little since
de Saussure!  Hasn't anyone here heard of discourse analysis, genre theory
and so forth??

Just to be a little bitchy, it always struck me that po-mo and
deconstructionism were a way for Literature graduates to elbow into
linguistics and philosophy without bothering to do the necessary reading
(speaking as an Eng. Lit. grad myself!).

co'o mi'e robin.

P.S. While this deconstructive string is interesting, isn't it about time
someone came up with something that IS about Lojban and ISN'T about djuno?

<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309>