spurs

Nietzsche or reveal what he was secretly up to. Derrida proceeds as though this carefully constructed web of loosely connected words and meanings were fortuitous, and just happened to correspond remarkably well with what Derrida wished to say about Nietzsche's style. Technically, his argument doesn't depend on any of these chance associations, and if they cannot be said to be merely ornamental or secondary in the text it is because they are bent into the service of an implicit metaphor of the truth as an ocean and style as that which cuts through and moves along her surface. Though the rock that breaks the waves is the only meaning attached to éperon, Derrida ensures that nautical imagery contaminates the entire lot. The rock is linked to the prow of a ship, which like a spur moves the boat forward, while like the rock it divides the oncoming waves. Derrida sets up an allegorical space that isn't quite Nietzsche's, and when he finally arrives at Nietzsche's metaphor of Truth as a woman truth will necessarily appear as a siren, and it will become both dangerous and foolhardy rushing straight toward her, as is done by philosophers and scientists without style, who lack any appreciation of distance and the play of surfaces. The veil that conceals, which was previously attached to 'sail', and the verb 'to spurn', which was attached to 'spur', have already been used to inscribe ideas of femininity and seduction into the association cluster built around éperon and voile. As new sets of associations are added, the old ones are not abandoned, but become more heavily motivated. The density of connection between the words and images Derrida chooses to bring together (the style/ stiletto that cuts the waves and dances like them, the veiled/ sailing woman truth, who glides along the surface and beckons forward with what she hides and promises, etc) and the astounding correspondence between the entire nexus and the vision of truth and philosophy presented by Nietzsche's writing all seem to belie the idea that their encounter is fortuitous. Through cross contamination and the folding of images into one another, not to mention a choice of objects (woman and ocean) that already present inexhaustible sets of associations, Derrida makes what is arbitrary seem necessary. Though the basic coherence of the image of the philosopher and his relation to truth is never abandoned, and the strong connection to Nietzsche's original texts is never lost, the number of ideas and images present in that one idea of the truth as woman/ siren proliferates to the point that they cannot all be held in mind at the same time, though they are all present in one another and do all work together to create a single tonality. Ideally, as with Kant's sublime, comprehension should break down, not because of the difficulty or obscurity of the ideas involved, but because of the number of parts that need to resonate all at once for the whole to function.

some thoughts on Derrida and Heidegger

Hm, I just finished a paper on Derrida where I end up being a bit critical. And I'm afraid of doing that because (a) I really don't feel confident enough with Derrida to be certain I know what he's saying, and (b) he's far too slippery to be able to get a solid grip on, and whatever I say about him is almost guaranteed to mischaracterize him. I think I might send you a copy of the paper, but I'll say a few words here because this is where we get to share our thoughts and because I can't really expect you to read a long paper now or anytime soon, especially considering how negligent I've been in replying to you.

So the short version of my concern with Derrida is, effectively, that he seems to assume that ordinary language is inescapably metaphysical, and I don't buy that. And his own language seems only to engage with a metaphysical tradition. For instance, for Derrida, a proper name is an impossible ideal of univocity, a word that takes up its meaning into itself, and this ideal is impossible because the iterable structure of language means that every word can be repeated in ever new contexts, and so can never be fully "proper." Sure, good point, and I think that the iterability of language is something that's worth exploring and insufficiently explored in the analytic tradition. But for all that, we still have proper names. "David" is one. "Kevin" is another. In calling "David" a proper name, I'm not latching myself on to some sort of metaphysics of presence, I'm just distinguishing the way this word is used from the way a word like "horse" is used. That distinction has its ordinary uses, and I'm not sure I see how it's ineluctably metaphysical.

I guess what I'm saying is that ordinary language isn't always already caught up in metaphysics, but rather that metaphysics arises naturally from ordinary language. If a Socratic questioner were to push an ordinary person to explain just what he meant by a "proper name," that questioner might push our ordinary person into a position of making claims about univocity and all the rest. But that's not the same thing as saying that those claims about univocity were always already implicit in the way that person was using language.

Sorry, I'm short on time as usual, and I don't think I'm going to be able to flesh these thoughts out in detail. But maybe I will send you my paper, and you can feel free to respond to either the long paper or these shorter thoughts.

In other news, I just yesterday read Heidegger's "What Are Poets For?" I have to confess to having limited patience for later Heidegger, all the while knowing that I should be finding this stuff more interesting and that lots of people I respect (Derrida not least of all) think it's terrific stuff. I think part of the barrier for me is that Heidegger's writings are like these vacuum tubes that suck even the slightest breath of humour from the air, and I can't help but think, if this guy is trying to get at the meaning of life, how can he approach it without a sense of humour? Despite the difficulties I find with Derrida's writing, I'm able to persevere because he makes me smile.

But that's maybe beside the point. The thing that I found most astonishing was the context for the piece. He first wrote it in 1946, and opens by characterizing ours as a "destitute time." In what way is 1946 Europe destitute? Could it have anything to do with a genocidal fascist German regime that devastated the continent through war and slaughtered millions in unspeakably cruel ways? Well, not in so many words. The real problem, it seems, is technology. And while of course a few million dead isn't a great thing, the underlying root cause is a technological mindset that's most closely linked to the bourgeois capitalists who defeated this genocidal fascist German regime that Heidegger was uncomfortably closely allied with. And the solution to all our problems, it seems, is to get rid of these bourgeois capitalists and get back in touch with our roots the way that Heidegger is trying to.

He wrote all this in 1946. The gall!

Besides which, I think this techno-phobia that a lot of European intellectuals of Heidegger's generation share (Wittgenstein not least of all) is a bit short-sighted. It feels like grandparents complaining about how they didn't need iPods back in their day, and that vinyl worked just fine. I mean, I grant that there are a lot of things about the modern world that concern me, but I also feel a clear-headed critique of the modern world can't come from a place of totally not understanding it, and not wanting to. It reminds me of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, in which he launches an ill-advised and somewhat comical rant about Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson that shows that he's really unable to find anything interesting about pop culture, and so is unable to find anything interesting or intelligent to say about it.

Of thinking, thoughts and poo-metaphors

I wasn't going to write again until tomorrow, but sometimes it is hard not to respond to challenges. The best I can do is to write as little and as quickly as possible until tomorrow, when I'll have more Locke to discuss.

Well, my last post, talking as it did of 'ideas' (one could have as easily said 'thoughts' ) in animals, though determined by Locke, will, no doubt, add fuel to the poo-metaphor discussion. The relationship between thinking in thought will be a long, drawn-out discussion throughout the fall at least, imagine. You seem to acknowledge that something happens in the mind that isn't necessarily consciousness speaking English, French or German, but to radically deny that we should use a word to describe this or refer to it in any way. I never imagined that 'thoughts' sat there as pre-formed concretions, but it is interesting to think of thought in terms of digestive metaphors... rumination, digesting information, data being processed like food, another way of transforming that which has been taken in from outside the body and transforming it into something useful, breaking it into its constitutive parts and making it part of us. Anyway, the point of me trying to switch from the noun 'thought' to the gerund 'thinking' was to indicate that I was not talking about a 'thing', but about this 'what goes on'. You talk about behaviorism, and I respect the desire not to project something into the heads of children and animals and then take your own projections as observable truth. Because something seems plausible (that an infant acts for the reasons I attribute to it or views the world as I imagine it might) has no necessary truth (and this is what Proust is talking about in condemning the formal logic of the philosophers as opposed to the necessary truths revealed by desire). I tried to get a course of my own design to teach for next summer and entitled the course 'savages, noble and otherwise', making it about a continuing fascination with the state of nature, particularly as a speculative access to our own Id, as an impossible attempt to separate what is innate in us from what is acquired (they chose to go with someone else's class on monsters instead). I bring this up only because I can't pretend that what goes on in my own mind is as alien to me as what goes on in the head of an infant or an animal. We all know what is meant when someone talks about the 'mood' or the 'atmosphere' of something, and clearly there are lots of different moods and atmospheres, beyond a couple of words like 'dark' or 'sinister', the specifics of mood haven't been pinned down. We can recognize and enjoy a mood, but it's extremely difficult to talk about it. Does the fact that this is a non-verbal experience mean it isn't worth analyzing our own experience of mood and attempting to explain it? Should it be treated as non-existent, and covered over prudishly like something that shouldn't be displayed in public? Is the general atmospheric feeling I get from Dostoyevsky as opposed to Kafka like a an excrement that should be released in a private place and buried or flushed away? Think how hard it is to explain your reaction to music, or the paucity of our vocabulary in talking about scents. Should dwelling on experiences of this sort not count as thinking? Or only so far as we specifically refer to it as "that indescribable odor I noticed when I walked past a certain place that seemed somehow familiar and whose origin I couldn't quite place"? Because in our thoughts, we don't constantly have to spell things out for ourselves like that, and it isn't language that we use if we start searching through our memories trying to find another context for that smell so as to be able to figure out what it is and why it is so familiar (and perhaps why the sense of recognition gives us pleasure - now that I seem to be slipping into Proust again).

Perhaps we can know of the world only what we can be accessed through our experience, and it makes no sense for metaphysics to speculate on God, essences, or anything purely transcendent. Perhaps we can no nothing of our own thought processes what we are actually conscious of, and speculating about an unconscious mind (other the observable biological autonomic system) is creating another internal transcendent space and opening the door to a new metaphysics of mist and air. But can we know nothing of our own experience only what has already been inscribed in language? We didn't create the world, we didn't create the conscious mind, but, though we have inherited language and it has largely shaped who we are, it IS something created by us and something we continue to create. Unlike platonic essences or the working of our unconscious, experiences we haven't yet given an adequate linguistic expression to are directly accessible to us and we can express them.

As to Derrida, I'm beginning to feel you read him as much as I do, and all I can say is I agree with you. I sometimes read other people's discussion of a Derrida I don't recognize who seems to want to destroy any possibility for rational discourse or meaning of any sort, and at times these descriptions seem bound to a wider reading of Derrida than I can lay claim to and to make use of quotes I don't remember from texts I have read. Nietzsche sometimes receives this treatment as well, though not to the same extent. It will be interesting to bring this up again when looking back over 'otobiographies: the ear of the other', which is largely about Nietzsche's reception, including his being co-opted by Nazi sympathizers. Hopefully we'll get around to both reading and writing enough by Derrida in the coming year to be able to with more justice figure out what portrayal of Derrida does him justice, whether he is a reasonable and attentive observer of necessary ambiguities and the role of language and metaphor in though or whether he is the nihilistic debunker of reason of any sort. I still think that his falling out with Foucault over Descartes, and the fact that he distrusts Foucault's fondness for madness as much as he does Rousseau's fondness for the state of nature points to someone who is deeply attached rational discourse - though his love for Mallarme and Blanchot might suggest someone who enjoys obfuscation as much as clarification.

Locke, Descartes, animals

I started to read your two new posts, but decided I should first write what I opened this up to write. Not that I have anything particularly well planned out in mind, but I'm reading Locke's "essay concerning human understanding", and I've been thinking vaguely about the fact that you recently mentioned a philosophical interest in animals (thus the pork trilogy... by the way, I'm currently writing 'Notes from the underground' - not like the Borges character who writes Don Quixote, but maybe I'll explain elsewhere at some point) - I will react to your most recent posts next time - probably tomorrow.
Anyway, animals is an incredibly popular theme at the moment (and kind of always has been I guess - which is not to accuse you of trendiness, but rather to say over the past few years I've encountered the theme often, so there is a lot of reading and writing that will necessarily get mixed into anything I say (complicating and confusing the issue rather than making it clearer or more carefully thought out I fear). At any rate, who Locke is arguing against much of the time (and this won't be my only Locke entry... I'm not going to make this a one book = one post thing), who he is arguing against in certain cases isn't entirely clear to me, though I know that his stress on there being no such thing as innate ideas and the issue he takes with an image of animals as machines is targeted at the 'cartesians'... and of course, having only read the two things everybody reads by Descartes, I have no idea where a lot of what is attributed to 'cartesians' comes from, and whether it accurately presents what Desartes thought and wrote. And then, was it the Cartesians or someone else who insisted, for example, that the soul always thinks? I should have an edition with decent annotations and footnotes, but that's neither here nor there. I kind of love John Locke, both in terms of the content of his reflections and his dry way of ridiculing the ideas he disagrees with... I feel like Victorian nonsense is already present in the nonsense he makes to refute (pages and pages on the pointlessness of imagining the soul can think separately from the mind, that thought is possible without memory or consciousness, etc, or similar pages on innate ideas - God and Worship, the fact that something cannot simultaneously be and not be [once again, I have a vague interest in who initially argued this]). Of course, while reading, you periodically think that certain examples are poorly chosen, and you look ahead to Kant and psychoanalysis for complications and counters, but I sat down to write about those passages where he mentions animals... and combine them with more interesting thoughts on animals, because what I object to in Locke probably won't be particularly revelatory.
At any rate, Locke objects to the supposition that animals don't have ideas, and wants to insist that they do have ideas gained by perception and that the difference lies in their inability to further reason beyond the gathering and remembering of ideas. I think I'm sort of nitpicking when I read and, though it isn't his main argument, though he doesn't really develop it, I keep adamantly objecting to wayward comments of his (especially knowing that others have actually studied animal behavior and neurology and have a competence I don't), but Locke seems to try to attribute to animals only simple ideas, which following his own descriptions would be absolutely useless. Perhaps it is nitpicking and perhaps it is a serious internal contradiction in what he writes, but simple ideas are basically nothing but sensory impressions, not yet subject to any reworking or processing into complex or abstract ideas - it is precisely abstraction that Locke says animals lack, and yet, I'm sure he wouldn't deny that my cat knows what packages contain her treats, even when the packages are slightly different in size and color, and sealed so that no smell comes out of them. How would this be possible if she hadn't formed some abstract notion of 'package', which is something more than the vague association of door with outside and dish with food? How could animals get by if they couldn't identify a 'type' despite variations, or combine sensory impressions and recognize a certain visual impression as matching olfactory and auditory impressions and thus comprising a single complex unity? An 'Idea', basically meaning a sensory impression that is added to memory, has no value whatsoever if it is not abstracted, if it is not removed from its context and made to fit a 'more or less' pattern so that different trees, for instance, can be seen as having something in common, so that various cans of food in spite of their differences can be grouped into a single category of 'cans of food'. Without abstraction, it is impossible to imagine what possible purpose sensory impressions could serve. If every impression were self-contained and without relation to other impressions, if shades of green couldn't be seen as having a certain similarity, which suggests a process of comparison.
And to go off subject a bit, speaking of innate ideas, I remember when I was a kid being told that the yellow and black on bees was a natural warning sign and meant danger, and I had trouble believing that, thinking, how would animals know that those colors meant that, especially if I don't? As a kid I already had a notion of symbols being conventionally determined, and so I wondered how symbols could possibly arise in nature and what their point would be if they weren't universally recognized (man being a possible threat who coexisted in the same environment, if black and yellow meant 'back off', shouldn't he be born with that knowledge, rather than having to learn from his experience with bees that they could, in fact cause pain).

Locke brings up the subject of anthropomorphizing only in his discussion with God (where he assumes that only idiots could imagine God as being person-like), though if anyone were to object that attributing ideas to animals is anthropomorphizing, beyond his dismissal of innate ideas which sort of cuts off the only other possible explanation for animal behavior (given the admitted vagueness of what is meant by saying animals have ideas). Nevertheless, Locke does talk about experience as being the only reliable guide for establishing principles, and of course, a process very similar to anthropomorphism is necessary in dealing with other people. I have to 'Kevinize' everyone I deal with to some extent, project my own way of thinking and feeling as a sort of template on which to construct my image of the person I'm dealing with, alterations are made accordingly, some are generally assumed based on past experience of other people, and yes, purely formal rules can be applied that don't require any sympathy or empathy, but for the most part an assumption of similarity is vital for social interaction. That this should be a starting point in dealing with other animals is logical. 'Infants, foreigners and animals' would be a nice title for something or other, grouping together those whose opacity is assured for lack of a common language and whose behavior isn't necessarily subject to all the same cultural conditioning and codes as ours. I'm trying to think back to a discussion I had a year ago - about a book on animals and humans (I don't remember the author or even the title), I remember talking about the way we experience lunatics on a subway platform, the danger inherent in not understanding how or what he is thinking or being able to predict their actions. It is generally unlikely they are going to do anything violent, even the ones screaming and gesticulating violently, though with those, suspicion of violence is actually connected to codes being used which normally signify intended violence. But there's fear even with the harmless ones that just mutter and talk at people or to themselves, merely because we no longer have any way of predicting what they will say or do. I'm getting a bit incoherent myself, off the subject of animals in thinking about the mixture between formal rules and projection of self as how we deal with others and animals. On seeing an animal in the woods, one may think to oneself according to rules learned from others "X does not attack humans", or "X only attacks humans under such and such conditions", but it is testing the limits of our ability to project and imagine some sort of subjective experience of the world that makes animals interesting.
I remember being in a class on 'primate behavior' more than a decade ago. For some reason we one day saw a bit of a documentary... A snake bit a lioness and her cubs, I think, and the cubs died. The narrator talked about how after the lioness recovered, you could see her being particularly fierce in attacking the jackals or whatever, jackals having eaten her cubs after they had been poisoned, when she was still too weak to intervene. A kid in the back of the class objected saying, "how do you know she was really remembering the murder of her cubs - maybe she was just particularly hungry because she had been lain up and hadn't eaten much during her illness". I remember the kid was a swaggering jock who I particularly disliked, but when he asked that, I do remember thinking "we don't" and he was right for asking.
Why am I reminiscing about all this? I don't know. Have you read Derrida's "The animal that therefore I am"? (The title in French is "l'animal que donc je suis", and the 'suis' can be read as "I am" or "I follow" - typical French word play). Me being a kind of worshipper of cats, it is kind of nice to read Derrida's philosophical confrontation with his cat.

Wittgenstein and deconstruction

I'm working right now at a thesis chapter that deals with Derrida and ordinary language philosophy. "Signature Event Context" offers a reading of J. L. Austin that's very flattering in its attention, but also quite critical. It spawned a nasty spat between Derrida and John Searle, which is unfortunately one of the rare moments in which continental and analytic philosophy talked to one another. My chapter discusses Derrida's criticisms of Austin and asks whether these criticisms can apply to the appeal to ordinary language more generally, and to Wittgenstein in particular. Some people (Stanley Cavell and Martin Stone) take Derridean deconstruction to be sharply at odds with what Wittgenstein is trying to do, while others (Simon Glendinning and Henry Staten) find deep parallels between Wittgenstein and Derrida. I'm not yet sure which side I'm on, and I'm not sure to what extent I need to pick sides: there can be deep affinities as well as important differences. To a large extent, my uncertainty comes from my uncertainty about Derrida. That is, I don't feel at all confident in my understanding of Derrida, so I'm not sure where I stand with him. I just read a paper by Martin Stone that I think gives a strong reading of Wittgenstein, but offers a Derrida I'm not sure I recognize. I thought you'd be a worthwhile person to run all of this by since you know Derrida far better than I do. And because you'll certainly be approaching what I say from a more Derridean angle: people like Cavell and Stone, and even Glendinning, are more steeped in the analytic tradition and Wittgenstein than they are in Derrida and continental philosophy, so I worry that they might be giving me a skewed perspective.

If I want to talk about Stone on Wittgenstein and Derrida, the place to start is probably with Wittgenstein's famous discussion of rules. Wittgenstein is one of the first philosophers to give sustained attention to the question of what rule following consists in. This is particularly striking given that rule following seems to be implicit in so much philosophy: a great deal of our thinking about ethics and rationality, for instance, seems to rely on the notion of following rules. For Wittgenstein, rules also feature prominently not only in our thinking about mathematics, but in our thinking about thinking more generally: what is it to understand a concept if not the understanding of the rules according to which that concept can be applied in future instances? (As you'll see, this isn't meant to be simply a rhetorical question.)

Wittgenstein closely associates rules with interpretation. One example of a rule that Wittgenstein discusses is a signpost. Supposing you see a sign that says "Vancouver" with an arrow like this "->". The standard way of reading that signpost would be to take it to tell us that Vancouver is on the road to the right. But why do we take the arrow "->" to signify "right"? Couldn't we just as well read it as pointing to the left? (At one point he asks why we couldn't just as well take a pointing arm to signify the direction indicated by following the outstretched finger up to the shoulder.) One answer that Wittgenstein's imagined interlocutor proposes is that when we see the arrow, we interpret it as pointing to the right. But Wittgenstein finds a regress in this kind of answer: couldn't the interpretation itself be open to interpretation? That is, whatever this interpretation consists in--whether it's a mental picture, a written instruction, a spoken or thought word--is just as open to alternative interpretations as the original arrow.

(I should pause here to note that this is one of the similarities between Wittgenstein and Derrida that strikes me as really interesting. Both are very interested in what Derrida might call "the materiality of the sign." That is, both of them are highly sensitive to our philosophical tendency to avoid difficulties by imagining certain abstract processes like interpretation or meaning to take place in some inexplicably spiritual and exact medium that's free of all the ambiguities of normal sign use. And both of them combat this tendency by insisting that we treat these abstract processes in just the way that we might treat written or spoken signs.)

If rules in general are subject to interpretation, and interpretation itself is subject to further interpretation, it would seem that any course of action could count as following a particular rule on some interpretation of that rule, and that there's no absolute authority that can determine which is the correct interpretation. One climax in Wittgenstein's discussion of rules comes at §201 of the Philosophical Investigations: "This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here." This passage, and the stuff around it, has been subjected to volumes upon volumes of scrutiny, and there's still wide disagreement about exactly what's going on here.

One very influential reading, most famously advanced by Saul Kripke, takes Wittgenstein to be offering us a "skeptical paradox" and also a "skeptical solution" to his skeptical paradox. The paradox is that rules would seem to require interpretations to fix their meanings, but since interpretations are equally open to this requirement, there's no absolutely correct interpretation of a rule. The "skeptical solution" is that rules (and rule-based practices, such as meaning, understanding, interpretation, and so on) don't have absolutely correct interpretations, but nor do they need them. What makes an interpretation correct is the agreement of a community on how to follow that rule. And this answer isn't a cop-out since communities are constitutive of rules. That is, there's no such thing as a rule if there isn't a community that agrees on how to follow that rule: "It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on.—To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)" (PI §199).

I think this reading is wrong, and wrong in a way that's important to my thesis, because I think it arises precisely from a failure to take Wittgenstein's appeal to ordinary language into account. The point, I think, is precisely that we don't make an interpretation every time we follow a rule. For instance, I don't actually interpret a signpost with an arrow as pointing to the right and not to the left. If we look at how we ordinarily use a word like "interpret," we don't apply it to any and every case of rule following. Rather, we apply it in cases where there's ambiguity or room for doubt. If the sign is badly scratched up so that I have trouble discerning which way the arrow's pointing, I might find myself interpreting the sign as signalling that I should go left or right. But in ordinary circumstances I don't do any interpreting.

This isn't meant to offer a solution of any kind to the "skeptical paradox," but rather to suggest that this paradox only arises if we misuse and metastasize the ordinary meaning of "interpret."

Stone offers something like this reading of Wittgenstein on rule following, but he also uses it as a way of contrasting Wittgenstein with Derrida. Derrida, he thinks, takes much the same position as Kripke, arguing that every application of a rule (use of a sign, meaningful expression) requires interpretation, noting that there is no endpoint to the chain of interpretations of interpretations, and arguing for an essentially skeptical position on the possibility of definite meaning.

Before I'd read Stone, I was inclined to suggest that Derrida and Wittgenstein actually converge on their understanding of rules and signs, but if Stone's reading of Derrida is correct, then I'll have to change my inclination. Stone has a fair amount of textual evidence to back up his reading, but it doesn't sound like the Derrida I think I've read. Let me lay out what I think is the right line to take on rules and signs, and it's the line I think Wittgenstein takes and I less confidently think Derrida takes. You can tell me (a) if you think it's the right way to read Derrida, and (b) if you think it's right.

I said before that I don't read Wittgenstein as embracing a skeptical position about meaning because he wouldn't grant that every act of rule following involves interpretation. One danger of saying that is that it can risk making Wittgenstein out to be some sort of conservative (both admirers and detractors have read him this way). On one hand, we all follow signposts in the same way because the question of how to interpret them simply cannot arise, and on the other hand, we might follow all sorts of more politically charged social institutions in the same way for similar reasons. But I don't think Wittgenstein is trying to draw some sort of line and say that we cannot interpret the sign differently, or that it's impossible to doubt certain rules. His point is rather that, for the most part, we do not, and I think part of what's important about his philosophy is precisely that he draws our attention to the fact that there's no foundational reason for us not to doubt rules, interpret them differently, and so on. At one point, he gives the famous example of the child who's taught the rule "add 2," and starts writing out "2, 4, 6, 8..." as his teacher expects, but then gets to 1000 and continues "1004, 1008, 1012..." No matter how much cajoling and prompting his teacher gives him, he simply cannot be brought to follow the rule as the teacher expects. Part of the point to this allegory, I take it, is that there's no absolutely compelling reason that the teacher can give that will make the student see what he means: as Kripke says, every rule is always open to alternative interpretations.

However, I don't take Kripke's moral from this allegory. I think what we're supposed to learn is that we're able to do things like follow rules because we share a certain sense of what rule following consists of with others (and what teaching is, what speaking and meaning are, and so on), and that the bedrock for these shared practices isn't some rational justification--and also isn't the shared practices of a community--but what Wittgenstein calls Übereinstimmung: we just happen to be attuned with others in particular ways. He draws out the fact of this attunement by pointing out the impossibility of reaching agreement with someone who happens not to be attuned with us. It's not that a community grounds agreement, but that attunement is a necessary condition for the possibility of there being a community in the first place.

So on this reading of Wittgenstein, it's not that every rule or meaningful utterance stands in need of interpretation, and the interpretation stands in need of further interpretation, and so on. It's rather that there's nothing that could definitively halt this regress of interpretation if it were to start. That's all I'd taken Derrida to be saying as well. I'd taken his deconstructive readings to be playful exercises that undermine the aspiration to ground the meaningfulness of signs in their reaching out unambiguously to intended objects. By showing the ways in which signs can be alternatively interpreted, he wants to interrupt a certain Platonistic or idealistic conception of the relation of signs to the world. But that doesn't mean he wants to replace that conception with one in which everything is always open to (and demanding) interpretation.

That was maybe not the most elegantly presented discussion. I hope it wasn't too long-winded or unclear. And I hope it was thorough enough that you have some sense of the debate I'm trying to position Derrida in.

Language and thought

Wow, lots of interesting stuff from you recently. There's actually something in my own reading that I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on, but first I should respond to some of what you said. Most pressingly, I suppose, I should answer for what I said about thoughts and poo.

First of all, you say you don't recognize yourself in my characterization of thoughts sitting in the head like poo in the bowels, there yet unformed, and then given shape as they leave the body. Maybe it was the provocative way I put it? What I meant is that you seem to have a model of the relationship between thought and language such that thought is something that exists in the head independently, and language is a tool for putting those thoughts across to others, and that this tool can shape or distort the original thought. At one point in the post I was responding to you describe language as a "vehicle for thought." If language is a vehicle for thought, that suggests that thought is a kind of substance, something that can be transmitted but that requires a medium in which to be transmitted. Later on, your write: "Thoughts have to be coded before they can be communicated, and when they are decoded by someone else, they never quite match what they started out as." Here the metaphor isn't a vehicle but a code. A code is something that can be transmitted between two people, but what the code encodes is a message that exists independently of the code. Unpacking the metaphor, you seem to think of thought as a something that isn't quite language but enough like language that it can be "encoded" in language. It's these sorts of things that made me associate you with my poo analogy.

Actually, I think the code metaphor is quite telling: a literal code is a language that is translated from another language. If we follow the metaphor out, thought itself must be a kind of language in order to be encoded. And if so, do we have any better model for the kind of language that thought is than language itself?

It occurs to me that I don't have to reach as far as Wittgenstein to object to this model of the relationship between language and thought. Isn't this really one of the main targets of Derrida's work in the 60's and 70's? In "Signature Event Context," Derrida tries to deconstruct the notion that communication consists essentially of transmitting encoded thoughts from one mind to another, and in particular that writing is simply an extension of this transmission that allows us to communicate with people who aren't present. You know Derrida better than I do, so I'll let you judge whether you think he'd find your characterization of language as "something that couldn't possibly cause any objection."

In your defense, you insist that we can't simply say that thought = language and condemn children and others who don't think to thoughtlessness. I don't think I want to say anything as crude as that. But I do want to say that our concept of thought is closely tied to our concept of language, so that we're only able to ascribe thoughts to infants and animals by virtue of giving words to those thoughts. I think it's unproblematic to say that the infant wants its mommy even if it can't yet cry "mama." The mistake, I think, comes in then reifying this "thought," and thinking that there's a something in the infant's head which is the thought-that-I-want-mommy, and which we're identifying when we say the infant wants its mommy. That leap--from saying the child wants its mommy to saying that there's a definite thought in the child's head to the effect that it wants its mommy--then leads us to suppose that when the child learns to speak and says "I want mommy," it then too has a thought in its head, only now it's able to put that thought into words.

What I'm saying when I question your characterization of language is that I question this leap from how we talk about thoughts to the ontology of thoughts. Ascribing thoughts to infants, animals, and even other talkative people, is simply a way of talking, a way of describing behaviour that we find useful and illuminating. But if you think about how we use this language of thought ascription--and especially how we first come to learn to use phrases like "he's thinking..."--you'll see that this language doesn't really consist of descriptions of inner states, but descriptions of behaviour. Which isn't to say I'm a behaviourist--I'm not saying that thought is behaviour--but just that we learn how to talk about people's mental lives by seeing how they behave, not by seeing into their souls.

This might also explain what I said about thoughts on the tips of tongues. I (and Wittgenstein) wasn't denying that we can often have that experience, and that often we then find the words we were looking for. The point, rather, is that that expression ("it's on the tip of my tongue") isn't a description of my consciousness, where I can as it were see the thought sitting there, but through a thick enough haze that I can't accurately find words for it. Rather, it's a way of expressing the fact that I don't quite have the words I want, but I hope to come up with them soon. As Wittgenstein suggests, if no one ever then came up with the words, we wouldn't have use for this expression.

So yes, I agree with you that thought and language aren't the same thing, and that it's perfectly legitimate to talk about thoughts I can't find words for or what have you. But I want to resist the further inference that these thoughts are things of a sort, mental things, or even mental processes as you suggest.

From Vancouver, many months late

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As usual, I've read and thought far less than I should have in the months since I've written, so I have far less to report on that I should.

I have, however, read Of Grammatology for the first time, and tomorrow I'll finish Henry Staten's mostly excellent book, Wittgenstein and Derrida, which essentially (and I think rightly) aims to identify something like a deconstructionist method at work in Wittgenstein's writings (he calls Wittgenstein unique among Derrida's predecessors in having developed "a consistently deconstructive standpoint").

I was reading Of Grammatology more just to get a sense of what's in it and get a feel for Derrida's style than to do a detailed and critical reading. The stuff that's most relevant to my thesis are some of the essays in Margins of Philosophy (especially "Signature Event Context," "The Supplement of Copula," and "White Mythology") and Limited Inc. But I figured I really should at some point read Derrida's big book. I still think I should just read "Plato's Pharmacy." I read the first twenty pages before other things took over, but it still strikes me as the most lucid thing of Derrida's that I've read.

Still, it was good fun, even at a skimming pace that didn't allow for much careful rumination. Derrida's a wonderful reader of texts (and the attention he gives to Rousseau reaffirms my sense that I really need to get to know Rousseau a lot better) and I'm often impressed by how convincing his readings are considering how strikingly original they are too. There's a lot to learn from his intense attention to neglected details. I think my other reading in recent weeks has been affected by it (more on that in a bit).

I might as well say a few words about why Derrida's relevant to my thesis, which will also tie into my wanting to pick up the thread of our now long-stale conversation about logic and language. The starting point is Derrida's reading of Austin in "Signature Event Context," which will help me develop a question about the appeal to ordinary language in philosophy, which is whether and how "ordinary language" is supposed to exclude other forms of language. One easy answer to that question is that they're contrasting it with "metaphysical" language, which the heroes of my thesis are trying to expose not as an alternative form of language, but as nonsense, a misfiring attempt to say something that in fact results in saying nothing. But, as Derrida points out, Austin also seems to want to exclude all sorts of other "fictional" discourse, from words spoken on a stage to jokes to recited poems. This all seems innocuous enough within the context of Austin's project, but again, it's part of what's impressive about Derrida, that he can pull on the innocuous side remark and make the whole edifice collapse. To Derrida, Austin's exclusionary gesture is an attempt to retain a totalizing control over the words we utter, to be able to say and mean exactly what we want to say and mean, without risk of infelicity. This is all the more interesting as a line of criticism, since it implies a kind of psychologism--locating meaning in the mind of the intending speaker--that Austin very deliberately criticizes. So if he's at fault here, he's very subtly so.

I could go on at great length about all this. One thing it does for me is to help me distinguish Austin from Wittgenstein around the concept of ordinary language as home. Both Austin and Wittgenstein register sin-inflected expressions of disgust at philosophical language as somehow corrupting us and drawing us away from our ordinary inhabitation of the world and of language. But Austin seems to believe that there's such a thing as a fully satisfactory inhabitation of the world and of language that his appeal to ordinary language is supposed to get us back to. It's this nostalgia for a home that never existed in the first place that I think Derrida is essentially attacking. Wittgenstein, by contrast, also uses this metaphor of the ordinary as home but, I argue, is also aware of the ordinary as fundamentally unstable, not as a place of rest, but as a place of recognition of the impossibility of a place of rest.

In this respect, he shares with Derrida a sense of dynamic play being always at work in the workings of language. This notion of play is what I take to be central to the argument of my thesis. I can only envy Derrida's ability to read texts: his genius consists in large part, I think, of being able to find just the detail that will show that the most totalizing texts are constantly at play despite themselves.

This all ties in only tangentially to some of the stuff you said about logic and language many moons ago. As you know, I think I'm mostly in sympathy with most of what you say, or at least the spirit in which you say it. But I still object to the way you conceive of thought as something we struggle to put into words, and that's often distorted or enhanced or diminished by the effort of being put into words. What I'd suggest--and I draw this largely from Wittgenstein--is that you're working with a conception of thought that doesn't seem to me to be fully coherent. At least, it seems like you're operating with a picture of thoughts as these definite things that exist somewhere in the head, and which then take on a particular form when squeezed out of the mouth. Sort of like feces sitting in the bowels, which then take on the shape of distinctive turds when they come out the anus (I thought you'd appreciate the comparison). I'm not sure we can coherently talk about thoughts without their being linguistic. Or at least, if you ask yourself where this idea comes from, that there are thoughts in the head, it's because we sometimes say things and then claim we'd been thinking about them before and couldn't find words for them, or talk about things being on the tips of our tongues, implying that the thought's there but the words haven't come yet. But these manners of speaking aren't descriptions of thoughts bouncing about in our brains like turds in our bowels. They're just ways of speaking about the ways we speak. Or, to quote from the master:

"The word is on the tip of my tongue." What is going on in my consciousness? That is not the point at all. Whatever did go on was not what was meant by that expression. It is of more interest what went on in my behaviour.—"The word is on the tip of my tongue" tells you: the word which belongs here has escaped me, but I hope to find it soon. For the rest the verbal expression does no more than certain wordless behaviour.
James, in writing of this subject, is really trying to say: "What a remarkable experience! The word is not there yet, and yet in a certain sense is there,—or something is there, which cannot grow into anything but this word."—But this is not experience at all. Interpreted as experience it does indeed look odd. As does intention, when it is interpreted as the accompaniment of action; or again, like minus one interpreted as a cardinal number.
The words "It's on the tip of my tongue" are no more the expression of an experience than "Now I know how to go on!"—We use them in certain situations, and they are surrounded by behaviour of a special kind, and also by some characteristic experiences. In particular they are frequently followed by finding the word. (Ask yourself: "What would it be like if human beings never found the word that was on the tip of their tongue?")

I'm very tired and running out of steam, so I'll just say a few last things about animals. The first is that I've been reading some interesting stuff, starting with Coeztee's The Lives of Animals, moving on to a short collection of essays called Philosophy and Animal Life, with contributions from Stanley Cavell and (most interesting among them) Cora Diamond that deal with Coetzee's book, and now a book by my supervisor called The Wounded Animal. I won't go on at length here, but will hopefully return to it all sometime soon. Part of what I find fascinating is that the discussion deals on one hand with our relations with animals, and on the other hand with the tension between philosophy and literature and the "difficulty of reality" they both confront. And I don't think the two are just coincidentally related: part of my interest in animals comes from the difficulties they throw up for our own sense of our place in the world and our attempts to make sense of it.

I'm also trying to write a companion piece to Pork. The ultimate plan is to have a trio of short plays called Three Little Pigs, which are Pork, Ham, and Bacon, respectively. One of the things I've been reading is Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Pigling Bland, which is fascinatingly full of contradictions, which Potter herself must have been at least partly conscious of creating (it's in noting these contradictions that I think my recent reading of Derrida has heightened my sensitivity to such things). We have these pigs on a farm who behave for all the world like normal pigs until it's decided that they're too much hassle and are sold off. Pigling Bland then becomes an anthropomorphic pig who has to dress up like a proper young man and go off on his own into the world as young men in such stories so often do. Except he has to go off to the market, and we all know why pigs go to market (there's a similar tension in "This little piggie went to market..." which is all the more odd for the fact that one of the piggies eats roast beef). He even carries a note permitting him to cross county lines, which one would need if one were meat, but not if one were a person. And the story continues along these lines, with Pigling Bland ultimately escaping from the clutches of his (never explicitly named) butchers to start a life of farming potatoes. A Bildungsroman where the animal grows up into humanity. All very strange stuff, especially for a children's story. Though I guess children's stories are always deeply weird.

Some quickies: Phaedrus, craft vs. inspiration, free content

I've been in a play and am going away this weekend and haven't had time to do much of anything for a while. I managed to find the best part of an hour to finally write something, but I wound up spending the best part of the best part of that hour reading your last four posts. Sadly, your reward for your diligence is that I end up richer for having read some wonderful entries and you end up poorer for my not having time to respond in a way that's at all appropriate.

In particular, I haven't had a chance to even digest, let alone think about, what you said about Phaedrus. I'm not entirely sure I follow your point, but that could be because I don't entirely remember my own point, which you're responding to. Though I agree that it's a lot more subtle in the Phaedrus than simply a condemnation of writing in favour of speech. Surely you've read Derrida's essay on Phaedrus? I've only read the first twenty pages or so, but already there I can see the threads coming apart. One thing I've never been sure what to make of in Plato is how the suggestion that written texts are second rate is supposed to be read. Given that what we're doing is reading a written text. A soft case of the Liar Paradox?

One other little thing before I try to squeeze in a thought of my own. You defend some appeal to a distinction between craft and inspiration by comparing it to the distinction between nature and nurture, which you take to be almost analytic. I think that's a singularly bad analogy--at least to support your case--since most psychologists and biologists think the nature/nurture distinction is bogus these days. As Matt Ridley puts it in the title of a book on the topic, we're better off thinking of "nature via nurture": our environment shapes the way our genes express themselves. So there's no neat way even in principle of saying it's part nature or part nurture. And I think the same could be said for craft and inspiration: inspiration comes via craft. What kind of inspiration we have, how we express, that we're inspired at all, is shaped by the way in which we've prepared ourselves to channel our creativity. To look at inspiration and craft as two distinct entities confuses matters more than it clarifies them, I think, and that's the sense in which I called the dichotomy bogus.

I was supposed to leave the house five minutes ago, which doesn't leave me time to say what I wanted to say in a way that's all personal and spontaneous. Instead I'll do the crass thing and simply copy and paste from an e-mail I sent a friend on the same topic. Shortly after sending it, I found Leon Wieseltier had written something along similar lines in The New Republic:

It occurs to me that increasingly, it's become difficult to make a living as a producer of content. Already with music and movies, it's so easy to package into data that there's a lot of piracy and the industries have to make concessions in order to make piracy less appealing. Newspapers and magazines are suffering as people now expect their content to be available free online, and to survive as a journalist you have to do a lot of free-of-charge blogging and twittering in addition to the content you produce for money. Now that things like the Kindle and google books are taking off, books too are becoming increasingly susceptible to packaging as data and free viewing, and when people get used to that, they'll want to pay less for books too.

And I think the repercussions go beyond that. I'm keenly aware of how much worse the market is for academics than it used to be. I think part of it is a mentality that academics, as purveyors of content, should be doing more for less money, since in the age of easy access to reams of data, we expect to get more content at less cost.

What worries me is that it seems like knowledge and culture are being devalued, not just in terms of it being harder to make a living at them, but that people estimate their relative worth lower. Does any of this ring true to you or am I just talking nonsense? I worry a bit that increased access to information also risks making us crasser.