At 8:13 AM -0400 9/8/02, Henry Gould wrote:
>I don't see how supposing there is no dominant logos-discourse is
>disingenuous, if I genuinely hold that supposition. And I do. I think we
>need to dismantle that idea, which is oddly both self-serving and
>self-defeating. In a democratic, egalitarian culture, there is no
>acceptance whatsoever of a fixed dominant discourse.
Ah well, maybe I have trouble accepting that we live in a democratic,
egalitarian society. I have no trouble with imagining a hydra-headed
multiplicity of discourses; but denying that some are more equal than
others doesn't quite fit with how I experience or see things. I live
in a country where too many realities are flatly denied to believe
that all discourses are equally able to exist together. And is it so
easy and straightforward to filter out the propoganda from other uses
of language?
At 10:27 AM -0400 9/8/02, Henry Gould wrote:
>But if language per se - rather than motives of oppression, malice & fraud
>filtered through propaganda - is the culprit, then all the insights of
>feminists, post-structuralists, et al. are utterly in vain, in fact
>complicit with the oppression of language.
>
>I can understand how a poet's sensibility & scruples can paradoxically
>produce terseness, silence, & suspicion of rhetoric. But to base a poetics
>on a wholly negative judgement against communication in language seems
>perverse, if not impossible. Nonsense speech or deliberate obscurantism is
>a technique for creating special effects - but that, too, can be "read" as
>a kind of statement.
I don't know why you lodge this scepticism about language solely with
"feminists, post structuralists" and so on. Beckett based his entire
oeuvre on a "wholly negative judgment against communication"; it
seems to me neither perverse or impossible, even if it means to fail
as no other dare fail... but he writes neither nonsense nor
deliberately obscure language.
--
Alison Croggon
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