Logocentrism (or another scene of domestic bliss)

Another delightful evening finds our protagonists sitting in their living room cum study. Both are peering into books that have been assigned for their respective courses. On the chair by the window, ET sits, reading a book on the evolution of race and biology while GL tries to make sense of Culler on Saussure. We intrude into this scene with a keen awareness that both out readers are in deep thought, though what they are thinking about is not apparent to the other person ...

ET: I've got so much reading to complete by the next lesson. I've got to finish this book and other stuff ...
Me: Yup -- it's like that for me too ...
ET: But it's different ...
Me (now vaguely interested): Why? There's as much reading in Lit ... we do two to three books a week ...
ET: Yah. But I'm reading about theories. You're ONLY READING STORY BOOKS...

What was exchanged after that would be of interest only to the parties involved but needless to say, words were exchanged. But let us take a step back from that last remark, "You're ONLY READING STORY BOOKS ...", and consider it in the light of Logocentrism.

The assumption in a comment like that can trace itself to a the binary relationship between "form" and "content". In effect, Logocentrism (a neologism derived from the Greek Logos -- the Supreme Word -- and somewhat popularised by that mad brilliant Frenchman Jacques Derrida) is an insistence that the REAL/CORE/ ESSENTIAL/the TRUE should be privileged over APPEARANCE/ REPRESENTATION/ SURFACE. Derrida exposes this as a myth that has been handed down by the Enlightenment but there are implications even before one tries to overturn the distinction.

A Logocentric view of language and knowledge takes "language" as a transparent, objective, uninvolved vehicle of "ideas", privileging the latter over the former. Hence, language is merely the receptacle used to contain the vastly more important "ideas", merely used as a mode of communication. Implicit is the idea that "ideas" exist prior to language; that under different circumstances "ideas" could be transmitted without "language" anyway. We see this insistence of the Logocentric in EVERY English/GP/Humanities class where are essays and writing are the issue:

"It's the ideas that are more important than the grammar or style what. So why are you penalising me because of my language? It's only language what."

"Can you proof read this submission? It's for the Maths/Science/Physics whatever. You don't need to bother about the content -- just look at the language."


Roland Barthes has pointed out that the "science" (under which he includes the social sciences) has been most guitly in promulgating this position, believing that "language" is an instrument that knowledge can confidently deploy for its own purposes. In opposition stands "literature" where the distinction between "form" and "meaning" are endlessly collapsed and questioned. it is then the study of literature, of how forms disrupt the confidence with which we presume the ascendancy of "meaning". Story books have already discovered every theory that psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and the hard sciences have. But they evade the tyrannical confidence of Theory by self-consciously privileging the "act" of knowing rather than presuming it.