Hi.
Thanks for the references. I must confess that I don't know Derrida's work in detail. Do I miss something important?
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Opinions vary, but mine is that you did not. The one thing Derrida does point to are some conceptual dichotomies that have bulked large in Western thought, like speech/writing, male/female, substance/void, etc., where roughly the term on the left hand side is "good" and the term on the right is "bad". He is the not the only or first one to have noticed these. I also disagree with him about the difficulty of "transcending" such dichotmomies, and don't see much point in "deconstructing" them, but that "thinking in them" is a habit of thought I do not doubt.
The Rousseau piece is far more interesting, and quite short. As I say, from the brief quotation you give, Goffman sounds very much like him.
Your interpretation of my "avant la lettre" remark is interesting. But I just meant "beforehand"... :)
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But of course, since Derrida would say he is doing a kind of psychoanalysis of Western culture, you didn't just mean what you wanted to mean :)
More seriously, though, you wrote:
I don't think that mutual manifestness is missing in written communication. For instance, this exchange establishes a mutual cognitive environment not only between you and me, but between us and all the other subscribers to the list who happen to read this message. Maybe writing, such as printing, broadcasting, computing, etc., as media of communication, are technologies which create mutual cognitive environments by their very use.
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I am not endorsing the view, but explicating Rousseau. In spoken language the participants in an exchange physically present to one another. They can percieve one another. This makes speaking a "better" form of communication (according to Rousseau) than writing because it is harder to lie, literally because it is harder to lie to a man's face. Again, from the very short quotation, Goffman seems to accent that to be "co-present" both parties must be physically present, speaking rather than writing. But perhaps not.
Cheers,
M.J.Murphy
The shapes of things are dumb.
-L. Wittgenstein
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