The Big No by Kennan Ferguson

Author:Kennan Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI034000 Philosophy / Social
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2022-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

It is a laborious effort to describe reality by signifying it, by inscribing it, via scripture for which a language is required. The language is automaton, and Saussure has explained successfully how. A similar model of postulating an automaton of signification has been employed by Alan Turing: finite automata both Saussure and Turing have studied rely on what I will tentatively call “unilateral binarism.” The elements in the binary operate via unilateral difference and do not constitute “a meaning” but rather a physical effect that serves to convey “a meaning” or the movement of the signifying chain (language). The “material”—or “physical,” as Marx would put it instead—rules of inscription or of coding produce the abstract effect of “cloning the real” and its derivations, such as meaning and truth. The automaton itself is grounded in the “senseless real”: in the material “logic” of phonetics, cognitive and physical underpinnings of morphology, the tape and the head and the instructions that move them. The finite automata are moved, as Saussure said, from the “concrete to the abstract”:

For the first time we have broken away from abstraction. Now for the first time we have found the concrete, irreducible units that occupy a place and correspond to a bent in the spoken chain: p was nothing except an abstract unit linking the common characters of p> and p<, the only units that actually exist. In the same way, the still higher abstraction of “labiality” links together P, M and B. We may speak of P as if it were a zoological species; there are male and female representatives of the species, but there is no ideal specimen. Before, we had been singling out and classifying the abstractions; but we had to go beyond the abstract to reach the concrete. Phonology made a great mistake in considering abstractions real units without examining more carefully the definition of the unit.6

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