Stupid Stuff

[Terrance]

Plato's Phaedrus is a very important dialogue to Pynchon. It
is important for exactly the opposite reason that is being
claimed here. It is not important from Derrida's
deconstruction, unless you enjoy getting Pynchon backwards.
The Phaedrus is a wonderful dialogue to read. It has
beautiful stories, discussions of allegory, Plato's
celebrated irony, Socratic dialogue, and metaphor. In it we
find the celebrated story of the grasshoppers, of the fair
youth, of love and labor not lost, of the dithyrambics and
madness, of the soul's journey through the elaborate
structures given poetic excellence in Dante, and we also
find a word that Derroda has now made almost as famous as
logocentrism. Many of the stories in the Phaedrus are of
interest to Pynchon and he alludes to several of them in his
fiction, but he never mentions Derrida or deconstruction.
Plato was suspicious of technology, the technology or art of
writing has changed the world. In GR we see how  some of the
effects Plato feared are instruments of destruction, 
exploitation, even the death of entire cultures and ways of
life. In Derrida, we discover that when you go to the doctor
and he tells you to take two pills to remedy your ill, don't
take four. 


"Here is an accomplishment, my lord the king, which will
improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I
have discovered a REMEDY for memory and wisdom."
Thamus rejects the gift, saying, 

    "Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an
art is not the best
    judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who
practise it. So
    it is in this case; you, who are the father of writing,
have out of fondness
    for your offspring attributed to it quite the opposite
of its real function.
    Those who acquire it wil cease to exercise their memory
and become
    forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to
their remembrance
    by external signs instead of on their own internal
resources. What you
    have discovered is a remedy for recollection, not for
memory. And as for
    wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it
without the reality:
    they will receive a quantity of information without
proper instruction,
    and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when
they are for
    the most part quite ignorant. And because they are
filled with the conceit
    of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden
to society." 

The word, here rendered as "remedy" is in the original
"phármakon," which the lexicons define as alternatively a
curative medicine, or a poison. Indeed, the two meanings are
preserved in two Modern Greek cognate words: phármakon now
means medicine alone, while the verb pharmakóno is to
poison. 

Now according to Derrida, this apparent ambiguity renders
the meaning of the
word "undecidable."  Let us have a look.  First, within the
context, "phármakon" clearly carries its positive meaning,
right? Why would Theuth attempt to persuade the king by
offering him a poison? Perhaps Derrida was deconstructing
Housman's Terence This Is Stupid Stuff and got drunk or
something. No, is a "Player", he realizes the folly of this
one, but he wants to argue that the other, opposed meaning
insinuates itself upon the intended meaning. Suppose we
examine the word's use in the language to settle this
Meaningful question? But Derrida is not going to play that.
No, he has a radically new way of playing with language. So
Plato, and all Plato's play pals  go jump off the Brooklyn
Bridge.  But wait, don't jumo yet. What if the apparent
double-meaning is not a binary opposition operating solely
within a closed linguistic system?  What if we can play it a
little different? Hey, isn't pharmakon linked to features of
the extra-linguistic material world? 


It was Paracelsus who said it, long before Derrida and even
before Plato, "it depends only upon the amount whether a
poison is poisonous or not." 

So much for  a Saussurean semantic opposition within a
single signifier What we are playing with is only a common
folk way: a small dose may Remedy, while a large dose will
poison.

    There was a king reigned in the East:
    There, when kings will sit to feast,
    They get their fill before they think
    With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
    He gathered all the springs to birth
    From the many-venomed earth;
    First a little, thence to more,
    He sampled all her killing store;
    And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
    Sate the king when healths went round.
    They put arsenic in his meat
    And stared aghast to watch him eat;
    They poured strychnine in his cup
    And shook to see him drink it up:
    They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
    Them it was their poison hurt.
    --I tell the tale that I heard told.
    Mithridates, he died old.

A. E. Housman

Terence this is stupid
.