Fugedaboutit

It’s a conti thing. Analytic philosophy doesn’t work like this at all. We don’t think it’s even necessary to read the greats of the recent past (Quine, Ayer, Russell, Chisholm….) If they had something worth saying, then its survived in the work of those who built on them. It affects other disciplines to the extent to which they take continental philosophy seriously. There are people working in political science depts, and cultural studies/english depts, who talk the same way. But the source is always the same.

I thought of the influence of Marx in sociology. Once you could have cited Freud as well, maybe. But I don’t think that’s the way things look now – not for past 2 decades.

Chisholm?

I’m still waiting for “The Return of Wittgenstein”. Eeekk!

Was Neil’s post meant satirically?

Not so far as he is able to tell.

I think Derrida, actually, is the best writer on the subject of how and why we do (or do not) “inherit” philosophy and philosophers. Specters of Marx, especially.

We historians will probably never escape from that bloody fellow Leopold von Ranke. (Even though no one has probably read anything he wrote in decades. God knows I haven’t.) I’ll give him wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.

#11; I have no idea what it is like in physics (I suspect much saner than over here) but for it is no so much that we read Samuelson, or von Newman (yes I am skipping over Morgensten) or (this one i skipped somehow) Arrow, but rather that the ideas, for better or worse, are so ingrained about how we think about problems we keep having conversations over them again and again…

There is also, perhaps, the way in which many disciplines teach “canonical” figures at a lower level, but don’t really address them directly that much at the cutting edge. The poli sci intro course I’m currently TAing includes quite a bit of David Easton, but I don’t think anyone does serious work with systems theory these days (I hope not, anyway).

But in political theory and (some) philosophy, you read basically the same people from your first undergraduate course till you retire. Possibly this maps somehow to a humanities/sciences distinction (with analytic philosophy tending to model itself on science); the comment above about the absurdity of “close textual analyses of Feynam” may be related to this.

Parsons in sociology, surely? Or perhaps only in the sociology that I happen to read and not in the more empirical areas of research.

Chomsky in linguistics. (He actually died in 1964 and was replaced by a ‘bot, but you didn’t hear it from me.)

I guess I’m an analytic philosopher after all, but just thirty years ahead of the times, because I don’t read any of those suckers. Even the young, up-and-coming ones are dead to me, just as much as Quine and Chisholm are to them.

In Fauxics, we’ve actually stopped reading anyone. In fact, we discourage all reading, since it interferes with doing true science. True science, as we have discovered, must refer to gauge-midget vectors in the 8th dimension, or it isn’t science at all. This is the consensus view. We frown on any mathematics done with symbols that you don’t invent yourself (and no telling anybody what they mean, either!), and as for experiments – well, rather pointless if nobody is going to read about them, aren’t they? Thus we’ve sloughed off the deadwood. Occasionally, however, somebody in Fauxics does mention reading Finman or Ensteen. So we blast him with a sawed off shot gun and have him stuffed in a toxic waste barrel and buried in a field in New Jersey. It is the only way to keep the field entirely scientific.

Babe Ruth in baseball.

One figure – of speech – that haunts all the social sciences is “we need to think beyond X” (where X is a person, a paradigm, a category, a dichotomy etc.). It allows people to act as though they are saying something terribly clever, while 90 per cent of the time nothing at all is said. In those instances it is put forth as a conclusion to an argument, rather than as an opening to it.

As ogged notes, it is not such an easy thing to ‘get past’ X without engaging with her/him/it.

Chomsky in Linguistics.
Levi-Strauss in Anthropology (and related fields).
Marx in Sociology
I’d actually say Weber is almost as influential in sociologal theory as Marx, but he’s also more mainstream, so his impact is less noticable.

In history–well, social history at least–it’s EP Thompson. Indeed, it seems as if there simply wasn’t any history written before Thompson for all we read it. I’m reading for prelims right now, and almost nothing I’m reading predates the late 70s, or late 60s at the latest. And all that new history is all coming from the post-Thompson realignment, whether or not people who don’t call themselves labor historians actually read Thompson.

Gee, aren’t the analytics just so cute?

Of course, what they’re actually saying is equally rhetorical as continental philosophers. The reason that they think they don’t have to read their founders is largely PR – the analytics want to pretend to be modern natural scientists. But they lose gigantic things by this pretense, among which is their inability to examine analytic philosophy itself critically.

Actually, the reason Derrida and Foucault are still popular in English departments is because a) Derrida still has the best, most rigorous conception of iteration, and b) Foucault’s history of subjectivity still makes perfect sense.

But it’s quite ridiculous to say that English departments only read these fellows. Do I really need to enumerate a fifty-name list to prove it? You’ll find that the people who like to comment most on English departments are people who simply have never read the purported “stranglehold” books that they’re complaining about. ’twas ever thus…

I’m in an English Dept., and I like the cut, etc., Brian, but I’d have to say that computer science is where you’d get the best account of iteration.

“Gee, aren’t the analytics just so cute?

Of course, what they’re actually saying is equally rhetorical as continental philosophers. The reason that they think they don’t have to read their founders is largely PR – the analytics want to pretend to be modern natural scientists. But they lose gigantic things by this pretense, among which is their inability to examine analytic philosophy itself critically.”

Ever heard of the paradox of analysis? Debates over naturalism?

Darwin, Galton, Fisher, Hamilton

Just to avoid any confusion, I wanted to add that the person posting here as ‘brian’, is not me, the occasional CT front-page poster, ‘brian’.

I do wish the other brian would say what exactly the ‘romanticisms about “communication”‘ are that we analytics hold onto. If it’s the need for more iterated models, we’ve probably already been there with Grice. (Or still are there.) And most of the formal models of iteration I know of trace their origins back through work in mathematical logic to Russell and Whitehead. So it isn’t like analytic philosophy hasn’t already played a role in this.

It really is tiring hearing one’s friends smeared like this without anything by way of detailed evidence to back things up.

…sorry: “infelicity”

brian2,

“They think, for instance, that iteration is not always already “citational,” and that you can, in fact, base a theory of language on establishing a “normal” iteration and “successful” communication—one that measures this success against the “infilicity” of citational utterances.”

I don’t think this is a thought that very many analytic philosophers have ever had. I for one have never considered citational utterances ‘infelicitous’! I do think that there’s a difference between talking about Boston, which contains millions of people, and talking about the word ‘Boston’ (or a particular token of it), which contains six letters. But I would hardly think of this distinction as the basis for a theory of communication.

“This not to mention the degree to which analytics measure “successful” communication according to some non-iterative (and therefore supernatural?) thing called “intent”.”

I’m just going to point this out: You have to be pretty deeply entrenched in a particular theory to think that the move from “non-iterative” to “supernatural” is an obvious one. For an example of an alternative view, maybe an intention is a neurological state of some kind.

You might not want to base your impression of analytic philosophy of language on what Derrida says in Limited, Inc. The ridiculous view that he’s criticizing is not one ever held by Searle, or Austin, or anybody else.

I for one have never had a single thought about “infilicity” or citational utterances, at least as such. I do think a lot about intentions, but I don’t think that they are particularly supernatural. I think that they’re constituted by neural activity, or perhaps by relations between neural activity and the physical world.

More the point, I’m too busy trying to digest Grice and Austin and Lewis and Kripke and Kaplan and Stalnaker and Montague and everyone else to have much of an opinion on the Searle/Derrida debate. And in that respect I think I’m a pretty typical analytic.

There’s an interesting thesis available online that is precisely about the Searle/Derrida “debate.” I do think there was a bit of talking past one an other and I certainly do agree that Derrida isn’t well versed in post-positivist analytic thought. But the reverse is true as well.

It’s not really difficult to reconstitute the various aspects of the Derrida/Searle/Austin discussion. One of the issues, for instance, has to do with Austin’s and Searle’s explicit assertion that one can determine a “normal” versus “parasitic” speech act by determining whether or not a given utterance is “citational” and which one is not. (These are Austin’s terms, not Derrida’s).

Derrida simply points out that all iteration is always-already “citational” — because if it weren’t, the utterance wouldn’t be intelligible in the first place.

In order to hang on to the normal/abnormal distinction, then, Searle has to appeal to “intention.” When an actor speaks his lines, the intention behind the utterance has, presumably, nothing to do with the intention that would otherwise seem to be associated with the utterance. The actor’s utterance is thus “merely citational,” and we know this by knowing the status of his intention.

This is where everything falls apart for the analytics, of course. As Derrida rightly points out, you can’t possibly pretend to be able to measure any iteration against something that does not and, by definition, can never exist as an iteration. Intent is supposedly something that is not the iteration in question itself; and it certainly doesn’t exist as some other iteration. Iteration is not any particular iteration. Now, Derrida’s position does not require us to claim there is not or cannot be some mechanism of human desire that originates a given speech — whether you want to call it “will” or “intent” or whatever — but whatever intent is, we could not possibly “read” it if we ever saw it, because it would have to exist outside the order of iterability.

Searle and the rest of the analytics — quite bewilderingly — ignore the small fact that this creature, this non-iterated “intent” has never been witnessed by anybody. More importantly, however, they don’t seem to understand that even if you produced such a thing, it would have no commensurability wiht anything on the order of iterability. You couldn’t “measure” an iteration against this thing — and therefore establish the iteration’s “sincerity,” “normalcy,” “citationality” or whatever — any more than you could use an orgasm to measure the wavelength of a laser’s light.

brian2,

I’m afraid I don’t have time to get into a more detailed discussion of this, but here are a few comments about what you said:

“One of the issues, for instance, has to do with Austin’s and Searle’s explicit assertion that one can determine a “normal” versus “parasitic” speech act by determining whether or not a given utterance is “citational” and which one is not. (These are Austin’s terms, not Derrida’s).”

This is a good example of what I was getting at. From what I remember, Austin uses the term “parasitic” once in a side comment. It is not some central tenet of his theory that pretended speech acts are “parasitic” on “normal” ones. And “citational” speech acts are something else entirely, according to Austin.

“but whatever intent is, we could not possibly “read” it if we ever saw it, because it would have to exist outside the order of iterability.”

Is this just supposed to be obvious? You use phrases like “of course”, and you describe Derrida as simple “pointing out” claims that you then explain in terms of a highly articulated theory which many people do not share with you.

“Searle and the rest of the analytics—quite bewilderingly—ignore the small fact that this creature, this non-iterated “intent” has never been witnessed by anybody.”

Actually, there is a core branch of analytic philosophy (philosphy of mind) devoted to this. Searle is a prominent figure there. Your prior comment indicates that you disagree with some common views in that field, but it is wrong to say that the issue is being ignored.

Incidentally, not all analytic philosophers of language try to explain linguisitc meaning in terms of a prior notion of intention, as Searle does. Before you smear total strangers on the internet, you might want to have a better sense of what their views actually are.

“hm, well I’m not sure where the “smearing” was in my rather dry little exegesis above.”

I was referencing brian1’s comment about your earlier post. Iterating, even.

I don’t disagree because I do not understand what you are saying. You say that if intention is “outside the order of iterability,” then we could not “read” it. And that is supposed to show that it is not “commensurable” with things that “exist as iteration.” And that is supposed to show the intellectual bankruptcy of a field you seem to know pretty much nothing about?

Isn’t the concept of intention a pretty familiar one? I intend to go home in a few minutes–there’s an intention. Can you “read” that intention? Is it incommensurable with my going home in a few minutes? If I hit by a bus and don’t manage to make it home, can what happened be “measured against” my intention? How is this different from my intention to communicate, and my act of doing so? Please explain to me what I am not getting–without using the word “iteration” if possible.

And just some clarification about what Austin was saying:

If I say, “brian2, I challenge you to a duel,” then I am performing the speech act of challenging you to a duel.

If I say, “brian2, remember that time I challenged you to a duel?” then one of the things I’m doing is citing, or mentioning, my previous speech act.

If I laughingly say, “brian2, I challenge you to a duel,” then I have pretended to challenge you to a duel.

Austin thought that a number of factors distinguished between these cases. Context was one, and speaker intention was another.

In all of these cases, the words I use and conventions I employ are borrowed from previous speakers. If this means that non-citational and non-pretended speech acts are “iterations,” then they are iterations.

Also, there are probably borderline and ambiguous cases. There are boderline cases of baldness, but that doesn’t mean that there is no difference between someone who is bald and someone who has a full head of hair.

Finally, this is not the cornerstone of Austin’s or Searle’s theory of speech acts (at least, not as Austin and Searle saw things). And it certainly is not the cornerstone of all of analytic philosophy. As with any other field, the subject matter is broad, and the views on that subject matter vary widely.

By the way: you had mentioned that “context” was another way to determine whether un utterance is “merely” citational. This reminds me of the primary reason the whole “speech act” theory simply doesn’t work. (This critique, by the way, has nothing to do with Derrida or Searle: it’s just me)

The theory claims, for instance, that the marriage vow is a perfect example of a “speech act,” because when you say “I do” at the right moment, it’s not just an utterance: it performs the act of instigating the reality of your marriage.

But let’s say that you say “I do” — and then later find out that your marriage certificate is invalid and the official who presided over your wedding was an intruder who is, in reality, only a busboy. You’ve said “I do,” but you are not married, and therefore the thing that determines the “act” of your speech act was never performed.

Now, let’s say that you obtained a real and official marriage certificate before the wedding, you had a real justice of the peace presiding over your wedding — but you get cold feet when the time comes to say “I do.” Let’s say you only mumble “I don’t know…” — But the official presumes that you did say “I do,” he pronounces you man and wife and your bride hustles you out of the building. You are married, but you never said “I do.”

These simply highlight the fact that the thing that determines the “act” and the reality of your marriage is — no more and no less — the simple fact of whether or not the state has registered your marriage. That, and only that, is the final and determining factor of whether or not you have been married.

If it were true that your utterance of “I do” were the determining factor in whether or not you were married, neither of the scenarios above should be possible. The fact that they are possible confirms that the utterance is not the determining factor in the “act.”

The same is true of all of the other “speech acts” Austin goes into. In every case, the determining factor that determines whether an “act” has been performed is not the utterance itself, but rather an external registry or consensus of one kind or another.

But if you probe even further, you’ll find that these “acts” we’re talking about are always provisional and contingent. For instance, you might be married to your third wife in Utah — but the status of your marriage as an “accompished act” depends entirely on the communal body that is willing to recognize the marriage in its registry.

Given that Austin makes much of the real-world effect supposedly accomplished by a speech act, one has to wonder about the status of this “reality” if it is something that exists in this jurisdiction, but not that one…

“How indeed do you measure the utterance against something that has never been witnessed by anybody.”

Rough analogy and one possible solution to your query, the intention is like atoms. You do not see intents ( to do so you’d have to have technology for monitoring brain activity far more advanced than our’s). But we never the less have empirical evidence that intention exists and when we view positing intention as making an empirical theory it becomes clear how it is possible to distinguish between “parasitic” and non “parasitic” statements.

We seem to have ample empirical evidence for a theory of mind involving intentions. It’s a spectacularly successful theory in explaining the behaviour of those around us . Using it you can predict a hell of a lot. Think of how often you use concept’s like intention to predict the actions of others.

Similar empirical evidence to that which allows us to posit intentions allows us to support theories like “if X laugh’s, X may not intend his previous comment seriously” or “If X takes a sarcastic tone, X may not intend his comment’s seriously” evidence for these theories might come from things like the fact that people frequently don’t act on statement’s made in a sarcastic tone etc. Based on this we can discern when a statement is intended to be “parasitic” by looking at relevant empirical evidence like are they laughing? what is their tone? ( both in terms of voice tone and tone in word choice), does my current knowledge about what this person believes and their personality lead me to think they would seriously assert this? We don’t have to “see” intention and it doesn’t have to be inside the text for us to know it’s there and to know what it is, just like we can know that there are atoms and what they are like based on seeing their effect’s rather than them.

That’s just one possible sketch of a solution I don’t really believe it myself in all it’s details. But it’s plausible and shows that Derrida’s objection ( as you describe it, I haven’t read the text) isn’t necessarily the knock down you proffer it as.

I don’t really have a pony in this race or a dog in this hunt. I’m not very familiar with Derrida and not enamored with Analytic philosophy; my predilictions are toward Wittgenstein and Gadamer. But I’ll chime in with some stray comments on this tail-end debate anyway.

An intention is not an item, an atomic entity. Rather an intention is a distinction that belongs together in a complex with other interrelated distinctions, such that there are acts, which may or may not correlate with movements, consequences, intentions, motives, and the like. “In principle”, it is conceivable that there could be a language-game of acts without there being one of intentions,- (but could there be a language-game of sheer movements?),- and a language-game of acts and intentions without there being any language game of motives,- (which are only ever “known” as sheer inferences anyway),- and so forth. (But how do we identify acts? Is it not through “naming” an intention?) We distinguish acts from intentions insofar as acts can have unintended consequences or intentions can be forgotten, confused or otherwise “unfulfilled” and the like. None of this need imply any self-subsistent interiority distinct from the exteriority of signs. “Intentions” are only ever mutual attributions coordinated through the grammar of first, second and third person perspectives.

But I have trouble with the notion that the sheer iterability of signs or the deployment of material signifiers in particular contexts can sufficiently account for the “effects” of meaning. That does successfully block of any Platonic or “essentialist” account of meaning/language/”mind”, but doesn’t suffice to explain how they actually interrelate and “work”. In fact, no material sign or token is the sign that and of what it is without the interpretation of the sign, which is not provided of itself. (There is no Being without the understanding of Being.) Two things seem to me to be left out of such an account. One is that a natural language is a rule-governed activity, the rules of which must at bottom be constitutive and impose their constraints of the possibilities of meaning generated: no such rules, no language. (This is not to deny that a background of practices and relations is also intricated with the meaning-generating capacities of a language and perhaps “essential” to it). The second point is that, though there is no speech without language and vice versa, those rules, or more exactly complex interactions of several different sets or systems of rules, do not just operate themselves, but I think their generation must ultimately be traced to interactions between speaking or communicating agents.

“Intentions” then would be gatherings or nodal points of complex interacting systems of underlying, implicit rules, which are at once more extensive, elaborate and impoverished than any thematic or focal intention, that are activated by interaction and mutual attribution between agents. “Intentions” would be neither purely interior, mental, or individual, nor would they be wholely exterior, “material” or collective. It is true that meaning can not be reduced to intentions and that intentions can not be independently identified separate from the conditions that generate or constitute meaning. But by the same token signs can not be interpreted as bearing meaning and thus be the signs that they putatively are without reference to the intensionality of meaning and thus to some connection, however potential or tangential, to agents that also and not quite coincidentally can bear intentions.

My upshot here is that there is a danger of being too unilateral in considering questions of meaning. Austin’s initial version of “speech acts”,- (and I’ve read at one time both Austin’s and Searle’s books, though only secondary accounts of the debate),- is tied to a robust conventionalism, appealing to ritual or institutional contexts to uncover the performative dimension of “illocutionary force”, such that he inadvertently seems to imply a kind of structuralism, whereby it is hard to understand how the individual deployment of a speech act can be distinguished from the deployment of the system of conventions and thus how the system of conventions could be generated in the first place. Searles’ methodological or pragmatic principle of explicitness, whereby anything not directly said in a speech act can be said explicitly otherwise, (with the implication that the contextual background can in principle be completely recuperated) tends to assimilate the dimension of “illocutionary force” (or, as I prefer to term it, the modal-relational dimension of meaning constitution) back into the logico-semantic status of a proposition, which is precisely what it is to be distinguished from. And I take it the the crux of the issue over Searles’ compulsion to reduplicate “speech acts” in terms of independently existing, originating mental intentions is that it carries a residue of metaphysics, insofar as it aims at a conception of the unity of “mind” and a theory of “mind” as separate from anything else. But “mind” is not something sheerly separate, individual and intra-cranial. Much of what we identify or designate as “mind” is an internalization of communicational processes across the exteriority of the world. (Call that a post-materialist, hence a forteriori post-idealist, version of Hegelian Geist, if you will). Further, there is no clear demarcation between the physiological, behavioral and mental, but rather the three interact in generating phenomena that we might be wont to call mental. And if communication always occurs across relationships, then “speech acts” are not discrete items, but are only “completed” through speech reception, such that “speech acts” are always intricated with other such acts and signs.

That much is at least clear enough to me. But also I don’t think claims or insinuations of the impossibility of communication or the inextricable and irrecuperable ambiguity of meaning are exactly the last word either. The self-dividedness or doubleness of the human self is in fact the very condition and “hinge”, as it were, of human sociality and relatedness. “The self is a relation which relates itself to itself”; well, not quite: the self is a relation that relates itself to itself through its relations with others. That misunderstanding or miscommunication are always possible is a trivial claim. That the communicative generation and understanding of meaning, however conflicted and mired in material conditions, does occur “for all intents and purposes” is the very condition for the emergence and existence of language and meaning in the first place. Claims that any sentence or utterance can be construed ironically or that the indeterminacy of meaning-potentials must result in a hyperbolic skepticism about meaning strike me as question begging. (It’s not that figurative meaning is non-literal meaning, but rather that literal meaning is non-figurative meaning; any meta-language must imply, without reducing to, an object-language and the same for the relation of meta-communication to communication). Constraints on meaning-interpretation are constitutive of the very possibility of such interpretation. It’s just that such constraints and their parameters are not “transcendental”, once and for all.

brian2:

I didn’t misspell the word: I typed “the intensionality of meaning”, not its “intentionality”. That’s the distinction in logic between extensional and intensional, roughly, between the items that fall under a concept, the “external” scope of application of a concept, and the discrimination of concepts under which items can fall. The point I was trying to make was that for something to be a sign, let alone a sign that and of what it is, there must be at least some minimal reference to intensionality, to a capacity to discriminate and select between concepts, (which is not the same thing as thematic intentionality and doesn’t imply that a sign must somehow embody an identical or stable intention). (Consider the border-line case of ethological interpretations of animal behavior). That does not at all deny that signs are constantly being re-inscribed and are all-but-inevitably exposed to misreading or misunderstanding or contamination by other signs and their contexts. But that would count I think against the sort of Turing test that you propose: in that case, the interpreter ascribes or projects a meaning, based on some minimal assumption of intensionality, that is not “originally” there.

There is not a disagreement here between you and me- (or, for that matter, I think, between Derrida and Gadamer),- that meaning/language is a collective institution irreducible to the intentions of its bearers and is in some sense, for lack of a better word, “objective”, always bearing implications that exceed the intentions of its bearers or users. Similarly, both Derrida and Gadamer agree that texts can not be interpreted by reference to any independently existing intentions of their authors, if only because the ascription of such intentions would itself be just another interpretation of the text, and that the interpretation of a text is always a re-situation of that text that understands more and otherwise, if not “better”, that anything the author could have intended. But I suppose the main point or perhaps corrective I wanted to introduce into the “picture”, over against its potential or actual ellision or denial, was the role that the interactive/relational dimension of meaning constitution plays in the very emergence and existence of the “institution” of language and meaning. (I can well understand the point to non-humanistic perspectives, as well as how various humanisms can be deployed and criticized as ideologies, but I’ve never understood the enthusiasm for “anti-humanism”, with its paradoxical and possibly damaging seeming denial of human agency, “freedom”, however minimal the ascription of such may be in any given situation,- an enthusiasm that seems at the same time to be attached to a radical libertarianism. The course of Foucault’s work, which I have directly read and am much more familiar with, from contingent mutations of entire discourse-formations, to underlying, nonthematic practices of power to “the care for the self” has struck me as having something of the air of re-inventing the wheel.) To that end, I offered a rough-sketch account or “philosophical explanation” of intentionality, that neither takes the experience of focal intentionality as immediately given, irreducible, unsurpassable or foundational, but also does not reduce it to an epiphenomenal illusion rather than a real phenomenon, that emerges at a certain secondary level. The difference from internalist accounts of “mind” such as Searles’, which I think is badly missed, is how the capacity for intentional behavior emerges from relational interaction with others, together with the emergence, formation, or “folding” of a self that bears such agency. (And the formation of a self through its relations and conflicts with others is one of the “fundamental”, recurrent themes or preoccupations of literary works/productions, however much else is dragged along into the “picture”, n’est-ce pas?) In effect, we give ourselves to each other and our world(s). And in that process, language-games involving intentions and their ascriptions are not entirely dispensable, not because they are the primary and entire truth and not because they are somehow predetermined or inscribed in the nature of the universe, but because they are needful for sustaining aspects and activities of our collective form of life that we may find valuable, on pain of archaic regressions otherwise.

yes, right, sorry about reading your “intension” too quickly (!) I think your last post makes it clear that we don’t disagree, especially (and if I understand you correctly) insofar as the presumption and the attribution of intent clearly plays a crucial role in most discourses and dialogues, and inevitably shapes their “progression,” for lack of a better word.

But some of your vocabulary spurs me to yet another test case (forgive me) just to clarify a remaining point.

Years back, I was engaged in a Usenet discussion, and one of the participants used a “signature” in his posts that read: “You can always tell a pioneer by the arrows in his back.” After a while, one of the discussants — who was, apparently, partly of Native American descent — teased the other poster about the casual racism in his signature. To the second poster — and to many of the rest of us — the meaning or significance of the signature phrase is necessarily derived — at least in part — from a historical/linguistic context that refers to Native American peoples shooting European pioneers in the back.

The original poster insisted that the meaning of the phrase could not derive from that context because he had no intention of referring to any such thing. Now, I presume you would agree that the orignal poster’s “intent” cannot pretend to govern the meaning of that phrase. The meaning of the phrase necessarily and inevitably is bound to the historical and discursive context in which “pioneers” and “arrows” have always been found together: the context of European expansion in the United States.

So: when you acknowledge that “signs are constantly being re-inscribed and are all-but-inevitably exposed to misreading or misunderstanding or contamination by other signs and their contexts,” it seems that you may be presuming that intent has the power to establish whether or not a given interpretation is a “misreading” — as if intent somehow establishes the “proper” or “uncontaminated” interpretation of the phrase.

If we suppose (as we all did) that the original poster was being perfectly truthful that he did not intend to convey the slightly racist meaning I’ve been discussing — that has nothing to do with what the meaning of the phrase is. Even if we disagree about the interpretation, the only thing that can adjudicate the matter is the objective, extra-human network of historically-situated signifiers embedded in their complex web of associations — in addition to the various cues and contexts signalled in the original posting.

In other words, it is simply not true that the Native American’s interpretation constitutes a “misreading” of the phrase, even if we agreed that this reading is far from the poster’s original intent. If there has been “failure” in the system here, it is a failure that belongs entirely to the poster himself — it does not inhere in any “contamimation” or “misreading” external to his intent.

It is true that this picture of discourse portrays language as a kind of impersonal machine that we are all simply inserted into as we learn to speak and write. A machine that has nothing to do with the unarticulated desire that constitutes our oh-so-human intent. But that is the reality — the phoneme and grapheme are technological machines like any other. But I see no reason to worry that this is an “inhuman” state of affairs; just as there is no reason to presume that the widespread use of the wheel somehow plunged humanity into the “inhuman”.