M-TH: How to spend lunch (aka sad bastard).

[R.Pearson]

Looking through some earlier mails I chanced upon this pearler from the
Buffers:

"I challenge these critics to explain how they conceive of the historicity
and materiality of language and discourse, and of semiosis and
communication."

Language's historicity is undermined by de Saussure's designation of
meaning into the binary of the sign. The laws that structure this process
become ahistorical and the structuralist tragedy is that change can only be
explained through a theory of radical breaks. 
By splitting the sign into signifier and signified de Saussure is able to
remove and bracket the referent, thus  rendering any recourse to
materiality a dead dog before and after the event (apriori/post fido as
Hugh might put it). As such, semiotics, re-rehearses the marginal utility
theory of value (which not incidentally, de Saussure likens his linguistics
to), in which all meanings, values, expressions become merely relational.
As Derrida points out this creates an endless _play_ of meaning, which
therefore endlessly questions any material relationship between the 'text'
and the 'real' 

Discourse theory attempts, but ultimately fails, to restore some sort of
connection between the two. In its Foucauldian form it presents a
hyper-materialism with power centred on the body and the discursive
practices that control the body. But this is tempered by a hyper-idealism:
the knowledge practices that 'coquette' with this power are mere
conventions. Thus, as with Foucault's teacher, old Louis, we end up with a
Marx turned upside down but one that that fails to become Hegel.

Now I can't be arsed to go onto communication. It's the end of my lunch
break and I have to earn a crust. 


Best Wishes,


Russell Pearson.









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