Logocentrism

[Paul Mackin]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2000 Muchasmasgracias at cs.com wrote:

> Muchasmasgracias at cs.com writes:
> 
> One more thing:  did somebody in this thread mention the existence of 
> PHONOcentric philosophy?  Who might that be?  Blake?  Parmenides?  Pynchon?  
> Anybody?  Aren't philosophers usually trying to squeeze aesthetics (e.g. mere 
> considerations of sound) out of their work?

I mentioned it but only because someone else had earlier. I was trying to 
relate a McLuhan discussion of media to phonocentrism which means
that speech is a more direct and natural way of transmitting pure
ideas than writing and possibly that speech conveys ideas directly. Plato
and Socrates didn't care much for writing. On rereading what I wrote I see
I mangled whatever point I was trying for by not quoting McL
correctly. What he said was that "the 'content' of a medium is always
another medium." This to me implies that ideas, the presumed content of
speech, are just another medium which will need their own content and this
Derridan-like deferral or recursivity logically must go on forever--thus
it's impossible to get at the idea itself. This is just my reaction, not
what McL says. He doen't use the words logocentrism or phonocentricism 
here. But this is fairly early McLuhan. One problem with reading McL is
there's no index. Very McLuhanesqe I guess.

By the way I think the present discussions are very much p-related. As
McHoul and Wills say, "Pynchon's fiction may be more contribution to CLT
than 'object text' for it."

	 P.