A Note on Aporias, etc.

I think I've finally come to be able to articulate my visceral objection to the value of notions such as Derrida's "aporias" or "self-deconstructing concepts", though I might note that this objection itself raises issues that comport with the deconstructionist and post-structuralist ideas we recently discusses. One example of such a concept was that of giving accordng to Focault's interpretation, in some sense a gift is arguably never a gift, since we invariably expect to get one sort of benefit or another from the giving, even if it is only a feeling of satisfaction, making the supposed act of generosity a kind of transaction. In my view, a understanding of the way all linguistic concepts work makes this less subversive of our basic understanding of the world than it might first appear.

It's a basic insight of the field of linguisitcs (and one that I'm fairly sure precedes thinkers such as Derrida) that the objective physical world does not contain within it pre-packaged facts to which we assign names. Rather, the labels we attach to objects and phenomena frame our perceptions of them as distinct entities. Somewhat in common with Foucault's notion of the exclusionary nature of the text, we can only understand a given linguistic concept (boy, cat, dog, democracy, etc.) by contrast with all other elements of reality. What language does is to mark off segments of the spectrum of phenomena we percieve so that we can make sense of the whole.

In one sense, this is arbitrary. Colors are an excellent excample. Some indigenious cultures are known to have only two words for color, roughly corresponding to light or dark. This does not mean they cannot recognize the difference between say, blue and purple, but they would still conceptually view those shades as falling under the same category.

Yet this arbitrariness of the boundaries of lingusitic concepts does not vitiate them of meaning. Reality is always too messy for humans to construct a single conceptual system that perfectly captures it. We are entirely capable of recognizing some actions as "gifts" as opposed to every other kind of action (including related concepts such as "purchase" or "theft"), even if there are flaws in the abosolute logical construction of the concept as it relates to our experience. It may be that people expect something from gifts (such as good-will or a positive feeling), but we do not weight these facts in our recognition of the actions as "gift" in the same way that we do actual material transactions.

In essence my point is that any abstract or even concrete concept can be rendered apparently meaningless by attempting to precisely pinpoint the lines that segment the part of the spectrum of reality which that concept occupies. But perhaps those lines are more like asymptotes, meaning the exact point at which one concept is exchanged for another (the human and the non-human, say?) is impossible to define. But I still feel that gifts, humanity, and democracy are like porn. We know it when we see it.

Of course, sometimes we may in fact disagree over what we are seeing, but in this case we simply take a magnifying glass, as it were, to those segmentations of our experience in the world in order to see whether a given phenomenon fits within our concept. The concept itself need not have any kind of absolute rational integrity, because it is arguable whether any concept does. Even porn.