From: fshck@UMAC on 30/03/2001 01:54 PM
whoa list!
this speech and writing thing is getting a little out of hand here i think
the speech before writing thing is important - that realisation (of the bleeding
obvious) is really the basis of structuralism i think - via saussure's spoken -
note spoken - acount of it all ... it was the students wrote it down
is it ten thousand years?
is it two million years of speech ?
who knows
how many years of writing?
halliday is good on this
the fact of the derogation of speech by the literate, of spoken culture by
literate culture, is not a justification for pretending that there is no
difference between them
throw in much walter ong here
of course writing is biased and history is biased agst oral culture... they are
coextensive in that bias
to get derrida properly into the picture
in of grammatology he ties m. rousseau up in knots because in the essay on the
origin of languages rousseau writes naively of speech and its origins as if he
could see what was before them... to a modern reader his written conditioning is
very obvious
and for derrida this is a terrific example of how we don't get out of the places
and moments we write from
writing itself is that kind of goodly prison
however superior it can't help being about the poor benighted souls who can't
...
i think we're getting confused about metaphors for speech and for writing
and metaphor derrida tells us is never innocent - it orients research and it
fixes the results - or something along those lines
of course it would be a mistake then to appeal to a tropic degree zero as the
arbiter here - it would be the same mistake all over again ... if we can't
write in the before of writing we certainly can't eliminate metaphor or other
tropes just through wishful thinking
i think this opens onto what is for me the favourite posture in derrida - the
always already
we've always already written it, haven't we, inscribed it and erased it
look at me !! i'm under erasure even as i'm scribbling
can you call words back - as suggested in Measure for Measure?
that's the thing about words isn't it ??
whatever else you do with them - they can't be unspoken
the erasure thing washes less with writing than with speech
the ages of mechanical reproduction confuse all this further of course
not so mysterious for us anymore when the music comes from nowhere
i haven't got my vico new science before me as i type by i seem to recall four
ages - each corresponding to a trope, right?
it's all written down
apologies for the shorthand
in haste
Christopher Kelen,
English Dept, University of Macau,
Taipa, Macau, SAR, CHINA
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Subject: Re: STIMULUS: THE READER
Hiya
I have a huge problem with saying speech comes first and then comes writing.
Does this mean that writing only came to Australia with the English invasion?
That the people that were always here in this land did not have writing
before the invasion? That people who are so called illiterate cannot write?
Where does writing begin and reading end? Where does speech end and writing
begin? Why is speech given a primacy from which is developed writing? The
idea that speech comes first and is distinct from writing is an imperialist
idea and buys into the very structures of racism in the history of Western
thought and theories of language. In this way writing is said to be more
valuable then speech, even if an attempt is made to reverse the values, since
such an attempt actually admits that writing is more important then speech in
this way of thinking. So people who are claimed to be illiterate are said to
be lacking something, are lesser people, even if the claim is made that they
can participate by using speech in laguage. This is still a discriminatory
judgement, even if such a judgement is not intended as such. I have taught
creative writing to so-called illiterate people... the very term illiterate
is a misnomer laden with discriminatory judgements, I find.
Sorry, but I had to disagree... hope you don't mind this style of
intervention which is not meant as nasty, but a contribution to a politcal
debate on language.
best wishes
Chris Jones.
ps
On Friday 30 March 2001 09:09, you wrote:
> >Writing precedes speech a la Vico.
>
> No it doesn't. We all speak first. And what about illiterates? Are
> they simply disallowed participation in human language because they can't
> write?
>
> A
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