Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy: Writing does not allow to transmit the truth

Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy is an essay that dialogues with one of Plato's dialogues (Phaedrus) about writing to show that speech has more value than writing. The French philosopher announces in the introduction of this essay that he will be discussing writing through a very close-reading analysis that he does of Phaedrus. From the very beginning, Derrida identifies writing with the term Pharmakon, which is a term that was used by Socrates in Plato's dialogue to referred to texts. This term allows Derrida to provide characteristics to writing that are not very possible, especially when these texts or pharmakon become (an) orphan/s, that is, a pharmakon abandoned by the father of logos, “the speaking subject,” looses its value. 

The author claims that “[w]ithout his father, he would be nothing, but in fact, writing”. Then he goes on to establish a system of opposites constituted by the following categories: good and bad. Of course, the father is placed under the first category, which he calls agathon. Throughout the essay the number of metaphors created to show the weakness of writing is amazing. Thoth is another of the metaphors to represent writing that becomes manifested in the following quote: “It is not in any reality foreign to the 'play of words' that Thoth also participates in plots, perfidious intrigues, conspiracies to usurp the throne” (434). In this scenario the author is claiming that writing is taking over the speech and usurping or replacing it which is presented as something bad. The substitution of the living matter (speech) for what is death (writing). (The essay becomes some type of dramatic play where the good and the bad are fighting against each other to win the throne. And lets remember that the good and the bad are also represented by the father and son relationship, which I think, it might allow for a Freudian reading...) 

Later we are presented with a son-death-writing with no identity and this is why it needs to imitate the father to be able to exist: It becomes an imitation of the father (!) but, at the same time, it becomes its antithesis. (I imagine like an evil clone of an individual). What at one point writing seemed to be a good thing to do (not in this essay, of course), the author is claiming the opposite. He says: “The pharmakon produces a play of appearances which enable it to pass for truth, etc” (437). Writing is external, productive of belief and pure appearance, to sum up, it's bad! (…) 

I think it would be interesting to see what truth means but even if this is an abstract term, the essay does not seem to suggest that the truth can be captured in writing. But I supposed by truth the author is referring to the actual meaning of the message conveyed and this is why it is so important to have the subject to explain it, and not a third person interpreting, which is what really happens with translations... and, maybe, this is also why the author also points out the issue with translating texts....Ok, this can go on.....

Taking the realness away

Myth Is Language

Barthes says that "Myth is language," and looking at it from that perspective, then, if language is a system of signs, in a myth, what would be the equivalent of the signifier and what would be the equivalent of the signified? Now, going back to Saussure, for him a sinifier (the sound) refers to the concept and not to the thing itself, and by a signified, he means the image. Lets looks at the article “Toys”. Barthes says that he want to identify what-goes-without-saying, that is, the ideological  abuse, as he calls it (I'm going to need help here, so feel free to correct me and make suggestions): 

The signifier would be: A little girl playing with dolls (dolls with the ability to walk, eat, drink...)

The signified would be: ...this something ( A little girl playing with dolls) is always entirely socialized, constituted by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life: the Army, Broadcasting, the Post Office, Medicine (miniature instrument-cases, operating theatres for dolls), School, Hair-Styling (driers for permanent-waving), the Air Force (Parachutists), Transport (trains, Citroens, Vedettes, Vespas, petrol-stations), Science (Martian toys). p. 53

French toys always mean something: Imitation. In this case “[t]his is meant to prepare the little girl for the causality of house-keeping, to 'condition' her to her future role as mother” (53).

As Barthes points out in the Preface of this book, myths make Nature indistinguishable from History (social constructs).

Human Experience vs The Experience of a Human 

 

After reading some of the essays included in Mythologies (1957), it got me thinking about the difference between Human Experience and The Experience of a Human (I'm making these up). By human experience I mean experiencing things (life) through a more empirical process, where things that are experienced are not controlled or even expected to happen. The latter, on the other hand, refers to those experiences planned and controlled by the human. For example, traveling. A tourist might plan a trip to BC and s/he might arrive to the city with a “things-to-do list” (an itinerary) in her/his pocket. That is to say, it is a more programmed process of experiencing things. Now, what I think is interesting is that this tourist is going to leave the city with a certain idea about it and to her/him that IS what the city IS about. S/he will provided the meaning to the city based on her/his own experiences. Therefore, the person provides meaning to things (This is also stated in “The Death of the Author”). Now, it seems humans have the freedom to create their own world based on their own interpretation of it. Right? Or is the tourist using the “general semiology of our bourgeois world” to interpret the meaning of the city (10)? Therefore, if this last statement is true, when we experience something, we don't really provide meaning to that experience but we're attributing a meaning that is expected to be attributed. Is this the purpose of the experience of the human, where not only the interpretation is already given, but it is also organized for him/her? In the article “Blue Guide” as well as in the article “Striptease” the ultimate myth seems to be the perpetuation of the idea that the "costumer is always right" allowing to keep alive the industry and a happy consumer...

Althusser...

      Althusser's essay is, as announced in its title, about “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses on the Reproduction of the Conditions of Production”. His essay consists on revising/revisiting Marxist tradition and places special emphasis on the production of means of production. He analyzes reproduction employing the same terminology used by Marx and shows particular interest in discussing the power held by economy and how it influences everything around it to the point of creating a deterministic system dependent on it (society, ideology...). Or on top of it, to use the analogy of the building he gets from Marx to refer to the dynamic between infrastructure, structure ad superstructure: “upper floors could not 'stay up' (in the air) alone, if they did not rest precisely on their base” (135). This is a direct reference to the Marxist Dialectical Materialism and Marx's Levels of Culture Model. Infrastructure is represented, as Althusser clarifies, by “'the unity' of the productive forces and the relation of production,” that is, population, basic biological need, and resources (134). 

 

      He decides to “take the point of view of reproduction ” to analyze Law, State and Ideology to show “the point of view of practice and production on one hand and from that of reproduction on the other” and analyze their basic function (136). In the Marxist tradition the State is referred to as State Apparatus, which is formed by Government, Administration, Army, the Police, the Courts, Prison, etc. but the French philosopher decides to call this “Repressive State Apparatus”(143). And what Althusser calls State Apparatus Ideology (SAI) is “a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialize institutions”: Religious ISA, Educational ISA, the family ISA, the legal ISA, the trade-union ISA, the communications ISA, the cultural ISA (144). They all belong to the private domain in contrast to the Repressive State Apparatus. It is through these 'realities' that the hegemonic ideology prevails and helps to maintain the State Power. By “ideology” the author means “the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group” (158).

…

Ideology has no history
Ideology is nothing insofar as it is a pure dream

Ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious

• Ideology represent the imaginary relationship to their real conditions of existence
  • they constitute an illusion
  • they do make allusion to reality
  • they need to be 'interpreted' to discover the reality
    • the is a cause to the imaginary transposition of the real conditions of existence: The cause is the existence of a small number of cynical men who base their domination and exploitation of the 'people' on a falsify representation of the world, which they have imagined to slave other minds by dominating their imaginations

I...Once one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person's dream that is self awareness...” WL

Life is a dream?

According to Freud, a simple dream is a puzzle made up of images requiring an organization to understand its meaning. The dreamer, within the dream, produces a whole new world in need to be interpreted. The meaning can only be found by substituting the images in the dream for letters or words to figure out what is happening in the unconscious thinking. In order for Freud to engage into this journey, he attempts to create patterns that would allow him to see through all the elements that are included in the dream-content. His approach is not only interesting but quite intriguing at the same time. It seems his desire to see what he wants to see allows him to actually see it! The symbolism attached to the image representing the thought or idea in the dreamer's dream are given by Freud in an almost arbitrary way. His interpretation is highly dependent on Freud's knowledge. Lacan points out in his essay “The Instance of the Letter” that “to interpret the unconscious as Freud did, one would have to be as he was, an encyclopedia of the arts and muses, as well as an assiduous reader of the Fliegende Blatter” (203). The image within a dream, as it was interpreted by Freud, made me think of the sign of Saussure: it is arbitrary and differential. The interpreter is giving the order and the meaning based on what the dreamer remembers, and not on what the dreamer actually dreamed. On the other hand, the dreamer is also interpreting and recreating his/her own dream while narrating it, so how reliable can it be? Words are tricky. 

Reading “The Instance of the letter” and “The interpretation of dreams” made me think about how much power we have given to words. They both seem to believe that "the signifier enters the signified". We don't seem to value what, in theory, made us develop a communication system (objects, places, etc). Everything needs to be translated into words, and yet words are so malleable that who knows what people really think when they're listening to your descriptions? It was not enough to attempt to create a world dominated by words, but people seem to have gotten interested into doing that the same thing with what is referred to as the unconscious. People even make formulas today to, ironically, have a better understanding of the world, when everything is being replaced by words (which many represent a single perspective). 'Signifiers' seem to call more our attention but that does not seem to be because we think in terms of words, but more because we have been trained to think of the world in a simplified manner...

Art as a communictive system?

     

   There seems to be a relationship between the Russian Formalism and Saussure's semiontics, even though semiontics is not a literary theory. According to Saussure, semiology is the study of conventional communicative systems, which can be called languages. Human language, then, is a mode of communication that, however, belongs to the public sphere, meaning that it was not originated by a particular individual. Shklovsky in his essay "Art as Technique" points out that "the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known” (that's the artist's responsibility , correct?). To understand Shklovsky, I though it might be helpful to look for the meaning of perception, as it seems to be a key concept throughout the essay (s). Therefore, Perception is a "conscious understanding of something". If art can be used as a technique or device to make an object visible, that is, to make it available to the public to be consciously perceived as it is (and not as we know it, by employing techniques that make things unfamiliar) then, one could say that art, as a technique, is a mode of communication that seeks to show things through the process of perception. It's a system of signs that appeals the un/conscious. 

     Formalists seem to reject the notion of seen things for what we are accustomed to see them rather than for what they actually are. It seems to me they suggest a separation of the object from any (cultural, ideological, etc) connotation in order, for the reader/spectator, to be able to appreciate it. If the artist manages to present the object in a way that it is being appreciated, through the process of perception, by the reader, then we could say that the artist succeeded? So, could we say that the role of the artist is to make things “visible” to the viewer? Perhaps the value of the object is not found within its signified (because the meaning may vary depending on the employment in different discourses[?]) but in itself. But now, by perceiving an object for what it is and not for what we know it, what are we perceiving? 

     The formalists seem to rely on the reader, what I wonder is if there is an implicit reader in the author's mind while writing literature, or is the formalist critic suggesting that the author should have a reader in mind while s/he is creating? Or, is the critic suggesting that the reader must be trained to focus and distinguish features of literature in order to be able to understand and see? Or are both ideas being suggested?

    The essay “The Study of Fairy Tales” seemed to me as an example of how it is possible to create patterns withing a genre to allow it to be communicative. On the other hand, PE (poetics of expressions) appears to defend that PE seeks to capture the reader's natural reaction to the work of art.

"...as long as it pleases God Almighty to let you live"

Maupassant's "The Little Cask" employs a pretty good deal of details to describe everyday life in combination with ironic and, at the same time, unexpected situations. From the start, the first paragraph seems to invite the reader to focus on the character that is being described (Jules Chicot), as he can be the key element that might turn things around. Throughout the story Chicot is shown as manipulative and greedy person willing to use a friendly attitude to disguise his true intentions. What could possibly be represented through such ruthless and avaricious man capable of referring to the Almighty for the purpose of persuading, who would later use alcohol and food to distract you from what matters, to finally be the one taking (over) your life? If the story were written within our contemporary time, I'd be inclined to say the banks (right?). However, taking into account that the author died towards the end of the 19th century (1893), the story may actually be referring to the expansion of industrialization and its effects on people (what most naturalists represented in their work).

Maupassant was, perhaps, seeking to awaken people's awareness on this issue by presenting his concerns regarding this situation through literary techniques such as the absurd, and irony to get the reader's attention. The author presents Chicot as a man "with a red face and a round stomach," which may suggest that this character is accustomed to a certain lifestyle related to consumerism (over-drinking and over-eating), which it is later revealed in the same sentence by emphasizing that he was "a very knowing customer ". However, later in the story Chicot is not only shown and a simple customer, but also as a businessperson who owns a hotel, land and, clearly, knows how to make profit (it is not explained how he acquired the properties he owns). Another particular detail that made me wonder about the male character was the fact that Chicot seems to drink almost as much alcohol as Mother Magloire, but he seems to be able to handle the effects pretty well, unlike the 72 year-old woman. It seems to me the alcohol in the story represents the capitalist system (as alcohol is a type of commodity) and that the reason why Chicot is able to handle it better it is because he is not only being exploited through certain commodities, but he is also part of the game by exploiting others, which makes him more resistant to survive within this dynamic.

At the end of the story, she dies due to over-drinking. The story ends with Chicot reflecting on her death and says: “It was very stupid of her; if she had not taken to drink she might very well have lived for ten years longer.” This conclusion seems to be used to warn the reader, in a didactic way, by suggesting that Chicot, aware of the effects of alcoholism, offered the woman the drink. The author, through Chicot, employs the word "stupid" to describe her action for not realizing the intentions behind the drink given to her, maybe, hoping to educate people on the issue by reflecting on the tragic ending of Mother Magloire.

     

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