I've been reading McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary and can't stop thinking about one section. Here's the whole quote. I'll go through each bit below.pic.twitter.com/OFugL67chD
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At the bottom end, meaning grounds out in action, and in the body. This is prelinguistic. Understanding of this goes through Wittgenstein among many others.pic.twitter.com/peeWeOPJYl
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At the top end, words and phrases also activate other words and phrases that are related in some way. This is the top end as these are already packaged into language - it's more conceptual, less direct.pic.twitter.com/Rg0vKJUJw3
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As far as I understand it, structuralism tried to get meaning out of just the top end, the web of relations between terms in language. This doesn't work on its own, there's no there *there* without the bottom end. In 'Force and Signification', Derrida called it a 'deserted city':pic.twitter.com/coFbJUqW9N
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Derrida seemed to be very alive to the problem, and used resources from phenomenology to try and breathe life into the abandoned city. Unfortunately he's unreadable! So I can't tell you whether his solution was any good.
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I think the bottom end without the top end is also a failure. You'd get a sort of unarticulated preconceptual soup with no structure to it. Language stabilises meaning.
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Finally, I really like what Poincaré had to say (in 1905!). Maths instead of language, but the imagery is strikingly similar to Derrida's deserted city. He saw that meaning had to get in from the bottom end too - 'the old intuitive notions of our fathers'. https://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Poincare_Intuition.html …pic.twitter.com/AJsTRR05mm
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End of conversation
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