More from the classroom

[triskellian]

The highlight of today's (Good) class was watching the lecturer trying to explain to a bunch of uncomprehending students the idea that there's no such thing as truth and everything is subjective because all truths are expressed through language, which is inherently subjective. It was a major diversion from the intended topic, but very entertaining.

And I've just remembered that I went to read the Wikipedia article on Derrida last week, as background reading for this class, got sidetracked into the Talk page by the disputed factual accuracy notice, and from there into reading about Wiki edit wars, and read barely a word on Derrida. I was just about to make another attempt before being distracted by this entry. I have no work ethic :-(

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Bloody artists: that's the whole point of scientific terminology, to remove the ambiguity and subjectiveness.

Or does "1 + 1 = 2" not count as language? (It might be an assumption, and it's arbitrary notation, but it's not subjective). I'm genuinely curious to know what his defense of that might be.

And, out of the strictly pedantic front, It is a truth universally acknowledged... :)

[triskellian]

"1 + 1 = 2" does count as language. Annoyingly, although my memory registered someone asking that very question, it hasn't registered the answer, so I was clearly too busy being amused to be paying attention. How embarrassing :-(

Anyway, the best I can come up with is that although the fact itself of one and one making two may be objective, we can't interact directly with it, we have to do so through language, and every time we use language we make decisions about which words and signs to use. Different signs and words carry different connotations, and we're into the realm of subjectivity.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

It is subjective, because I could write 1 + 1 = 2 and mean something completely different by it -- or someone unfamiliar with the notation looking at it could read something completely different out of it. It only carries any informational value among the group of people who've agreed on that particular set of artbitrary symbols as meaning those particular things. (Which, fortunately, is quite a lot of people...) Once you've accessed that meaning you can say, Well OK the mathematical relation being expressed is not subjective -- but nonetheless, the written phrase itself is. (Or so it seems to me, IANADeconstructionist, etc.)

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

"With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

Foucault was often lumped with Derrida. That's very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of thinker altogether."

http://reason.com/0002/fe.ef.reality.shtml

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

Doesn't Derrida say that it's impossible to misread anything, since anything could validly mean an infinite number of things, and the writer's intention is unimportant in determining the meaning? Or is that someone else?

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

That's not an unreasonable interpretation of his work (though I suspect you might be thinking of Barthes on authorial intent) but Derrida was never consistent and frequently denied that it meant any such thing; certainly he often talked of the 'undeconstructable' but never condescended to define what criteria could be used to distinguish between what could or couldn't be deconstructed. For Derrida, like Humpty-Dumpty, words meant what he wanted them to mean and never what anyone else might think they meant.

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

He sounds a bit like my dad. In fact, I suspect my dad of being influenced quite heavily by all that. It makes family rows quite tedious.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

My email may be going wonky. Did you get email from me about possibly being a truck driver?

What do you mean no work ethic

[a-llusive.livejournal.com]

You spent ages looking in to the reliability of your source material - sounds like work to me :)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

all truths are expressed through language, which is inherently subjective

It's just a bout of solipsism. Most people get over it, but the ones who don't are disproportionately likely to become career academics.

I have no work ethic

That doesn't matter, because the fact of whether or not you do the work, and whether or not you pass the course, is expressed through language and hence is inherently subjective.