Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 14:20:26 -0500 (EST)
From: marsha chuk <chukm-AT-ERE.UMontreal.CA>
Subject: Re: Jacques Derrida?


hallo ann.
'philosophe' / 'philosopher'
hehe - you know i'm so accustomed to both words, perhaps more so to the 
french, certainly to the franglais that one can encounter at any given 
moment here, that i missed the subtlety of the reading. interesting 
image : the shimmer of language. i also play with language (music, as 
well) from a visual orientation. here's some more play.

i don't know that derrida refused to traffic in truth as much as not 
accept the idea of transcendentals, universals. this would, of course, 
include husserl's phenomonology and saussure,s structuralism. [i called 
him a spy working from within becasue he still used structuralist and 
dyadic methodologies to explore an escape from these models.]
 
'intellectual' might also be glossed as 'critic, writer, celebrity, 
brat' which barthes, derrida, kristeva &c surely are/were, although 
that's where the similarity might end. but then again it's more a social 
indexical and not necessarily the specific description for each person 
that one might be seeking. similar, perhaps, to the large grouping 
together of 'women intellectuals' (whose work and/or ideologies may or 
may not have anything to do with one another) that the americans call 
'french feminism'. there's no such correspondance in france. [not like 
'french fries' which do exist as pommes de terres frites or, as we say 
here, 'patates frites'.]

re 'northern tradition' : you refer to the 'mn' in your address - 
minnesota u.s? the montreal in my address may be considered northern to 
those further south and southern to those further north. i bring this 
up becasue it makes for a good example of relative positioning and 
description. [i live not far from the rue duluth, named for the sieur du 
lhut, explorer who 'won the lake superiour and upper mississippi regions 
for france' - or that,s one version of events. first nation histories 
take Other viewpoints.] first, it would be helpful for someone to define 
what northern means in their sociocultural and geophysical context. one 
might find universal aspects to living with certain similar geophysical 
conditions. but then there's the concepts of relativity and diversity. 
if we cut a 'northern' swath around the globe following similar physical 
conditions, we pass through northern japan, china, mongolia, all sorts 
of euro territories, *southern* bits of south america, new zealand etc 
and parts of the u.s., canada, and quebec. lots of concurrent contexts 
for 'northern' traditions nez pas (rural, urban, industrialisation, 
societal normes, language-culture &c &c). all this to say, i'd like to 
hear more about your tradition of silence and adoration of physical 
place.

this seems like a good opportunity to respond to the longish subsequent 
post from gerald o'connell.

[snip]

'...this doesn't apply to Chomsky, who uses the same old-fashioned tools
 of analysis, factual scholarship and logical argument to blow his
 bloated culture away and condemn it out of its own mouth; but Noam isn't
 groovy. Noam doesn't 'deconstruct' when analysis is called for; he 
 doesn't 'critique' when criticism is enough to lay bare the diseased
 bones of intellectual hypocrisy; he doesn't put academic terminology to
 the sword in a linguistic holocaust of his own egotistic device -
 perhaps because his understanding of language is too deep for him to
 believe that merely rewrapping its embedded logical structures will save
 a life or liberate a soul.
 ...'

if the immediate ideological tapestries are put aside for a moment (not 
easy but possible) we might see another platform or argument, as it were. 
one might even use 'old-fashioned' semantic analyses or a 'structuralist' 
reductive analysis like deconstruction. as i touched on above, i'm 
describing notions of universals and relativity, sameness and difference, 
memesis and alterity. memesis and alterity, the title of michael 
taussig's book, is well worth the read.

this is not to say that one put aside social implication, cultural 
agitprop &c or maintain a rigid position.

chomsky's work has focused on syntaxic research and not semantic analyses 
which is where one would situate deconstruction and signification within 
a linguistic framework along with saussure, semioticss &c. by the by, he 
has shown a certain flexibility in his own research: he's changed, 
modified his position several times between the 'syntaxic structure' of 
the fifties through the government-binding theories and the current 
minimalist theory. his original idea of an LAD, that is an innate 
language acquisition device is now referred to as 'language faculty' 
by those working in linguistics. like much of language evolution theory, 
studies remain problematic and unprovable. as far as the concept of 
universal grammar goes, the linguistic community remains divided. 
however there is a theoretical shift returning to linguistic relativity 
(descendant of the whorf hypothesis where culture and language are 
recognised as mutually influential, contextualised and culture-specific; 
in other words relative, diverse rather than universal). language 
socialisation and acquisition concepts as well as language-culture 
studies show a tendancy toward the relativist these days.

i'm not sure if relativity and universality need to be mutually 
exclusive. recognition of applications and limitations seems important.

`a la prochaine,
marsha chuk
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