Tallis

Joel Garver writes, in response to several posts from Raymond Tallis’s Not Saussure :

“Most post-structuralist authors I’ve read aren’t dealing with things such as cups or trees or rocks, but rather things such as rationality, madness, criminality, virtue, etc. Foucault, for instance, seems to take bodies as ontologically basic, even if every body is always already an inscribed surface of events.

“And when I was taught varieties of post-structuralist theory in graduate school the point was repeatedly made that most everyday sorts of medium-sized objects persist through changes in overall discursive formations since their material nature to which language refers is relatively stable and resists complete re-description. (Of course, there are complicating cases - for instance, languages with alternative taxonomies, Hopi’s lacking a word for water in general, having terms only for this sort of that sort of what we would call ‘water.’)

“Tallis is probably right about misinterpretations or misapplications of Saussure, but some of what you’ve been blogging about seems to me aimed at a straw man post-structuralism (though one that may well actually exist in some literature departments; I learned post-structuralism from philosophers who tend be more careful about these things).”