What Derrida said

I’ve been to two interviews recently, one done by guys in their mid-thirties and one by someone in his fifties. The first two had interesting ideas about how to dress. All three had started their own business. The first two had a list of interview questions they’d printed off the internetwebness and didn’t really know what to do with them.The second one didn’t have the piece of paper.

To some extent, and I’ve been working on my tolerance skills, I don’t mind people not really knowing what they’re doing so long as that’s not what they primarily do every day. I’ve recruited and hired people in combination with someone else and it’s not something I like doing. Firing them less so, because you hope they’re going to come right and justify the investment you made in them. I’m not even talking about the hope that they’d work out, but the cold hard cash you spent on them, the company car you bought for them, the money from the house you sold to start this new part of the company, the part that turned into a pile of steaming crap because it was based on the total bullshit of the person standing there in front of you repeating their mantra that they’re ‘fully confident.’

And relax.

So I didn’t really mind the two younger guys running their thumb down the page and saying ‘what would people say were your worst points?’ I assumed they hadn’t phoned a random selection of exes, not least because the guy only had one sheet of A4 instead of the multiple volume calf-bound Book Club edition a couple of them compiled, each claiming theirs as the definitive text. Hi, babe. S.

And that one’s easy to deal with in an interview anyway, so long as you don’t mention the baby-oil handprints on the bed either side of someone different’s shoulders you only just noticed. Just keep them looking upwards,

“My worst points at work? Well, probably they’d say I work too hard, I’m too much of a perfectionist. Oh and I stay too long and get in too early as well. And I don’t take enough holiday when I’m owed it.”

Of course I said that. If someone’s going to ask standard questions then they deserve a standard answer.

But what are you supposed to say to someone who asks ‘if I said semiotics to you…?’

“No, thanks, I’ve just had some?”

“Is this a sign?”

Expecting bollocks like this I spent a tedious Tuesday reading about it. This stuff from Wikipedia is clear in comparison, even if it doesn’t have handy cartoons.

In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g. différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida’s literary self.

Or to put it another way, even before the University of Luton was invented, let alone txt spk, Derrida was a self-referential nouveau who made up words to suit himself.

Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.

Rorty. It used to be different.
Rorty. It used to be different.

Rorty used to be what good Brit bikes used to sound like, when someone cracked back the throttle on a Bonneville going down Bythesea Road, but times change.

So far as I understand it, which I’m prepared to say might not be completely, er, complete, it goes like this. What you think something denotes is altered by what happens next, infinitely.

Noam Chomsky wrote “I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I’ve been familiar with since virtually childhood”. Apparently liking Chomsky means you sympathise with Moslem fundamentalist terrorists if I read The Spectator right, so I’m stuck now.

What I should have done is pulled a note out of my wallet, said ‘this £20 is just a semiotic paradigm, isn’t it? Let’s see one of yours,’ pocketed both of them and walked to the station.

I didn’t, because I was still disconcerted from the previous statement, that they were looking for someone who spoke the languages ‘for our business in the BRIC countries; that’s Brazil, Russia, Indian and China.” Well thank-you. I thought it was Belgium, Rwanda, Iraq and Chile. A day you learn something is never a day wasted.

I didn’t actually know there was a language called Indian, nor Chinese, come to that, so I learned lots of things. Maybe when my third sentence in the interview was ‘have you read my CV?’ I should have done what these days I’m more inclined to do, the thing that really, in situations like this, I’m seeing less and less reason not to do.

Stand up. Put my coat on. Smile. And say thank-you for wasting my time.

I walked past my old flat on the way. At the end of the road there used to be a bombsite that got converted to a carpark and in the way of these things got colonised by stray cats, fed by the rufty-tufty huge blokes in big coats who ran the place. Things change. The cats were trapped, sterilised and released. The pub on the corner that used to have its windows put in because gay people used to go there, and not by them, has become a house. The cats car park is a Travelodge now. It’s not quite like that Max Boyce song about the pithead baths becoming a supermarket. But enough to make you tuck your scarf into your coat, smile, put your shoulders back and stride. Maybe it’s a sign.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Maybe it’s me or something

I bought a book about ten years ago. Today I decided to read it and reminded myself why I hadn’t.

The value of a sign derives from the fact that it is different from adjacent and all other signs.

Ok, I can go with that. If there are two traffic lights at a road junction you (a) get irritated and (b) don’t pay as much attention to them because you keep looking from one to the other so when it goes green you don’t move off promptly but check the other one first. Got it.

Difference incorporates this but it also indicates that the value of a sign is not immediately present;
so here I’m going to assume they mean that when someone at school walked through a road junction and his feet started sticking to the road because it turned out he was walking through a pool of blood from a car crash, the pool of blood isn’t going to be there all the time. See, I can follow this stuff.

..it’s value is deferred until the next sign in the syntagm modifies it. Take the syntagm from the English song Ten Green Bottles Ok. Let’s do that now.

Ten And Counting

As we read from left to right, the ‘ten’ gets transformed from “ten what?’ to the answer ‘ten green somethings.But does it though? Isn’t that only true if you want it to be? It’s still ten, whether or not you define what it’s ten of, unless you’re actually saying ten doesn’t mean anything unless it’s something. Or something.

But anyway. ‘The answer to ‘ten green what?’ is then modified to ‘ten green bottles.’ Ok. Go on.

“There is, therefore, (once again)‘ oh mais oui, d’accord, encore une fois et tout ceci ‘ a retroactive construction of meaning. So far so good.’ I’m really not making this stuff up. And I didn’t put the once again and so far so good in. Because it really does strike me that the response to this bit is well, yes and no. If you want there to be. Not if you don’t, it seems to me. But let’s go on. If we do this at a run we might get through.

‘If we extend  the syntagm to: Ten green bottles standing on a wall then further modifications take place. The ten items become items that are standing on the wall and the answer to ‘ten what?’ (the question I didn’t ask, you did, you said that, I didn’t say that) is deferred again.’

But only if you asked it, obviously. It’s just a song, you know?

‘By the time we get to the “wall” and clearly not Pink Floyd’s Wall, (OR IS IT!?!?!? Discuss, with reference to Levi-Strauss if not Levi-Schumann) having deferred our answer to what the bottles are standing on, we envisage the wall not as a bare one but as one with ten bottles standing on it.’

I like to think I’m not particularly dim, so let’s go with this for the moment. For me, if we’re doing walls, the song ends with no bottles standing on the wall, all ten having accidentally fallen. Makes sense? Stuff happens, what happens next is an ever rolling stream, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone, the Pink Paradise put up a parking lot. See, I said I could do this. I went to university, you know.

‘The sign ‘wall’ therefore bears the trace of previous terms in the syntagm.’ See? I said it first though.

‘(Namely ‘ten green bottles.”) Derrida.

Now, I don’t know Derrida. I’ve heard the name, but if this is what he said then he never actually listened to Ten Green Bottles. It doesn’t end with ten. It ends with none. There were no green bottles standing on the wall, Derrida. If the sign ‘wall’ bears the trace of previous terms in the syntagm, and for the sake of getting to the post office for a book of stamps and some fresh air I’ll accept it does, what I’m not going to accept is ‘namely’ the wrong number.

As I said. It could be me. Or oxygen starvation. Or an overwhelming sense of ‘what?’ followed by ‘how do you get paid to come up with this stuff?’ But maybe it’s me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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