Abstract
Mind, language, machine: three systems without positive substance that, copulating interactively, create the universe as it is known and manipulated by man. Each seems to have a ‘physical’ reality, and yet each is also — and more importantly — an ethereal network of relations: a mind, elaborated through its eerie space like a language, is not simply a brain (a neural structure, ‘wetware’); a language is not simply air in motion or ink on paper; a machine is not simply silicon-based circuitry (hardware). Each, like the signs that comprise language, has a particle/wave nature, has something of Jacques Derrida’s trace (‘trace’) about it: each ‘can be focussed either materially or conceptually,… both is and is not matter, and carries within itself a kind of necessary exteriority’.1 Each in its insubstantiality consists of software: differential relations, diacritical nodes. No stuff at all finally: just functionalist patterns of interrelation, maps without territory, wispy microtexts interwoven. Each is — or is coming to be understood as — the same kind of system. And yet there seems to be a divorce among them, an otherness of each to the others.
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Notes
Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 175.
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 26.
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 94–5.
Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 77–8.
Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 122.
J. David Bolter, Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 15.
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1961; reprint edn, New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), p. 54.
Michel Serres, ‘The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, and Thermodynamics’, trans. Mark Anderson, in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Haran and David F. Bell (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 76.
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© 1988 Michael L. Johnson
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Johnson, M.L. (1988). System, Text, Difference. In: Mind, Language, Machine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19404-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19404-9_2
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