It is amazing what the post-structuralist philosophers were able to see 40-60 years ago. Since their writings can be opaque, I’m very grateful for these lectures to help me get clarity on the main points. I have gone through my life never questioning that the speech/writing act legitimately reflects the perception of reality. This goes unquestioned in most people’s minds since it is our fundamental way of interacting with the world. So when the post-structuralist philosophers start to show things are not what we thought, and that “language itself has its own ambiguity” (@6:50) it is very disconcerting. When I speak/listen/write/read I am placed in a virtual double reality. I then give this double reality an ontological status- I grant myself the “right” to judge it. This explains something I experience frequently in reading. The mere fact that it is written down and I am reading it grants it an authority. Is the authority coming from the writing? From the ontological presence created by the inner voice in my mind while reading it? (Or the inner voice of the author while writing?) From both? All? The same holds true with speaking. When you really start getting into it, as this video spells out clearly, it becomes a maze of mirrors that you get lost in. With all these doubles, is it any wonder that, as Lyotard and Mr. Fann point out, knowledge has become so unstable today? We wonder why people believe wild conspiracy theories that they have read online, and explain it by saying it is fulfilling some deep psychological need; but on another level, isn’t this the logical extreme end of a process we are all doing by unconsciously granting whatever we read an ontological status, a “linguistic presence” (@7:21)? Add to this Baudrillard’s view that now we are in a second order simulacra, we have replaced illusion with a hyper-reality and it throws the whole system of representation into even greater disarray. “The idea of representation is mutating” (@28:51). At this point there may be no way out until, as Foucault says, “modern man” is washed away like a drawing on a beach. Although it is unsettling, I am glad I am becoming aware of it so that it no longer unconsciously acts on my thinking process.
This video gives me a new perspective on the impact that this doubled phonetic language has on my life. I began to see how the doubles have pervaded our “reality”. Mr. Fann points out @23:11, how Foucault describes the“circular mirror, completed in a beautiful closed form.” It appears to me that today, we have the linguistic virtual reality created by phonetic language and also the technological virtual reality of holograms and internet algorithms. We train ourselves, creating a reality that searches for“truth”in echo chambers that confirm and reinforce our way of thinking. We are stuck in our own traps! I’m grateful for these lectures!
What amazes me is Mr. Fann’s deep understanding of the post-structuralist philosophical theories, which are often difficult to grasp! But what is more amazing is Mr. Fann’s ability to weave the opaque and thin threads of these philosophical thinkings into a brilliant fabric with a coherent sense of reality !❤❤❤
Through all the complex understandings of Derrida, it’s so refreshing that Mr. Fann provides these clearer explanations of such significant concepts. Language certainly is ambiguous nowadays, especially when basic concepts are now difficult to define or when it’s a struggle to have definitions that everyone seems to universally understand. We are ones to immediately judge when we hear or read words, determining if something is true or false, and we seek to create a perpetual present with our speech, a linguistic presence as mentioned. “It’s a linguistic presence that has nothing to do with anything, but it’s us, we give the meaning, we give the content, we give the substance within the presence.” (8:24) This takes me back to the anthropocentric view we have today or the emphasis on the breath we make to produce speech. As Mr. Fann writes in This Self We Deserve, “Speech-the sound, the voice, and the phonetic-is identified as creator, or spirit, which is supreme in the West. We believe in speech. The phonetic is contained within our breath-that is everything.” (page 8) While we seem set on this linguistic presence that we create, there is a sense of irony that we have no clear definitions of things anymore. On another note, regarding the disappearance of art as a repeating act, it seems that in society today, we contribute to its ongoing disappearance as if it brings amusement or excitement. Much like the linguistic view of things and the pictorial view of things mentioned earlier in the video, the disappearance of art sounds like the disappearance of our definitions of things. It’s as if our philosophical outlook is splashed all over art and vice versa. Likewise, it is chilling to think that the idea of representation is mutating (28:50), and we’re all walking in a sea of fog. It’s so helpful to get clarity like this so that we can be more aware of our thought process and how it relates to our society today.
Derrida’s writing here can come across as a bit of a labyrinth, but it is still inviting to the reader. One can see that the maze-like structure of these sentences are a result of the problem itself he is trying to describe, unlike other writers who purposely intend to confuse the reader in order to assert dominance/authority. This lecture inspired thoughts on the importance of the questions: what is art? What is the beautiful? Of course, I’ve seen these questions raised countless times before, but I had never thought about them from a linguistic perspective. Language to Infinity being worked so seamlessly into this lecture really helped me to understand it, as I’m more familiar with that work and its concepts. The way Foucault and Derrida use “the mirror”to describe our conundrum is insightful and also brings up similar thoughts of the abstract nature of our language and how we seek to understand it and the world around us. The mirror they write/speak about does not exist as a physical object but our ingrained understanding of how a mirror works, provides the best representation of the doubles referenced! I’ll need to watch a couple more times to appreciate the impressive imagery. Derrida, Heidegger, Foucault, and Baudrillard, synthesized by Fuoco B. Fann. 👏🙏
What we are presented here is mind expanding, I am constantly amazed how the French post-structuralist philosophers, Foucault, Derrida, etc., were so far ahead of the rest of Wester society. I am convinced this video would be beyond my comprehension without the experience and understanding gained from all the past videos on this channel. It feels like I have gone through a university course series which has taught me the basics and elevated my abilities to comprehend. After seeing this video, the realization that my judgment of what I read is distorted by the very language used in that thinking, this is amazing and somewhat disturbing. Now, I better understand how the thought process that goes through my mind and into the judgment is dependent on both me and the person trying to communicate with me. When I read another’s writing, or my own writing, it may or may not be true and accurate, and the filters and reflections created by phonetic language influence that very judgement. It is very interesting to reflect on past discussions I’ve had and see how I made an unconscious agreement with the other person. In those discussions the exchange of ideas seemed to float between us. Now I can see how the language used in our discussion had its own ontological status, it seemed to come alive. We were experiencing exactly what is described at 7:34 of the video, the “linguistic presence”. Yet, at the same time we were, and are, trapped by that same language; trapped inside the passe-partout of phonetic language. Reflecting on phonetic language and how we are taught to use it in our western culture, I wish I had learned about how the text is a representation of the spoken word, which is a representation of the idea I am trying to convey. This recognition of the inherent distortions of phonetic language would have greatly benefited me in trying to communicate my thoughts. Knowing what I know now, I believe philosophy should be taught at a very young age and prior to any attempt to compose more than a few sentences. As I have learned about phonetic language, I found myself thinking in value judgments of good and bad (all the typical Judaic/Christian baggage). But through these videos I’m able to look at phonetic language as the inherent environment of my thinking, speaking, and writing. Kind of like a fish, in water, with all its reflections, refractions, and distortions. Unlike Habermas, I choose to acknowledge I am in this environment, it’s not good or bad, it just is where I’m at. How could a fish that denies it is in water make any progress? I can’t change any of this phonetic language environment, but I am sure that I am better off knowing where I’m at. Philosophy is a wonderful thing! There is no need for video games, virtual reality, drugs or alcohol, unless I am too lazy to think. This world around me, explained through philosophy, is more than enough to keep my mind occupied.
Who else but Mr. Fann has this ability to get in to this essay and tie Heidegger, Baudrillard, Foucault, classical art, modern art, postmodern art all the way to Jeff Koons, Lady Gaga, andTaylor Swift, into a brilliant coherent narrative of philosophy and art, side by side.
Wow, this is a pretty deep video with some very complex philosophical concepts, which really has me reevaluating how I look at life. I can’t say that I understand everything that is presented here, but what I think I do understand is that I am locked in a “circular mirror” that reflects itself to infinity. And that this mirror creates a virtual world, which I actually believe is real because I give it an ontological status through my mind. If I am understanding the example given in video correctly, that when I speak, I give my words “substance” (8:32), and this causes me to believe whatever I am talking about actually exists or is true. In fact, however, I am only projecting through my words a virtually reality, which is only a reflection of the reality I am trying to depict. It seems the same holds for what I read (23:20). I think that I am capable to make a judgement about what I am reading (e.g., this is good, or this is bad, this is true, or this is a lie) but I again create a virtual world based on what I am thinking. However, my judgement may be completely wrong and have no basis in reality, but I still think it's correct, so I trap myself again in the virtual reality. I am looking forward to learning more on this topic, as this lecture helps me to see how deeply I am trapped in the virtual world within this mirror, and how living in this virtually reality negatively impacts my life by causing me to to lose touch with reality. I can see from this why so many people today are getting dementia, because they completely lose touch with reality and then become lost in their own virtual world.
Thank you for another insightful lecture excerpt that joins the thoughts of so many different, difficult philosophers in concise form! This is very characteristic of Mr. Fann’s thought and work. These French thinkers (plus Heidegger) create poetic word mazes, and it’s rare to find a thinker that can work through the maze, taking these theorists on their own terms while shining a clear light through to the ideas that connect them. The themes of linguistic presence, the opacity of the mirror, and phonetic language’s ontological status are familiar from This Self We Deserve. I really appreciate the inclusion of Baudrillard at the end of this video-it answered a question I had about the historical perspective underlying Foucault (and Derrida’s) words about words. If I’m understanding correctly, phonetic language always has an “ontological status” by virtue of the “presence of repeated speech in writing”-the double of a double, signifier of a signifier, etc.-but there is a historical development analyzed by Foucault and Baudrillard in which phonetic language departs more and more, through the course of modernity, from its classical representational function. Hence Mr. Fann’s specification in the first lecture of TSWD: the *modern* phonetic language; and whence comes Foucault’s avowal that phonetic language “began to fold in upon itself, to acquire its own particular density, to deploy a history, an objectivity, and laws of its own” during the nineteenth century (quoted in This Self We Deserve, 4). The concluding synopsis on mirrors vs. holograms and the disappearance of illusion via Baudrillard (27:20) made the preceding analyses of Foucault and Derrida on language more accessible for me since I don’t understand many of the word mazes here. They feel beautiful but dizzying and seem, in sum, to suggest something like: phonetic language is an empty double that does not actually signify, but rather erects a fictive hyper-reality that is detached from-and supersedes-any “real reality” we might want to talk about. And there's nothing we can do about it. (No wonder Habermas hates this stuff.) Foucault’s “virtual space” and Derrida’s figure of the passe-partout (and rhetoric like “supplements of unchained performatives interlacing their simulacra,” etc.) make more sense, at least in my limited understanding, when correlated with Baudrillard’s notion of the disappearance of illusion and historical development of simulation. Also, the inclusion of Gaga the Simulacrum and Taylor Swift as pure Swift-sign reminds me of a tendency toward “ontological” modes of making and understanding art during the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries that Mr. Fann described during a lecture at UC Berkeley. These images-plus the Richter and the “Comedian” piece-demonstrate that the “idea of representation is mutating” (28:50) in a way that compliments and clarifies the philosophical narrative that unfolds here. The imperative here seems to be: let’s try to recover the mirror function of language instead of creating more and more holograms (?)-or, at least, let’s recognize the holograms as such. This is precious content and a great channel-I’ll be listening on repeat!
It is amazing what the post-structuralist philosophers were able to see 40-60 years ago. Since their writings can be opaque, I’m very grateful for these lectures to help me get clarity on the main points. I have gone through my life never questioning that the speech/writing act legitimately reflects the perception of reality. This goes unquestioned in most people’s minds since it is our fundamental way of interacting with the world. So when the post-structuralist philosophers start to show things are not what we thought, and that “language itself has its own ambiguity” (@6:50) it is very disconcerting.
When I speak/listen/write/read I am placed in a virtual double reality. I then give this double reality an ontological status- I grant myself the “right” to judge it. This explains something I experience frequently in reading. The mere fact that it is written down and I am reading it grants it an authority. Is the authority coming from the writing? From the ontological presence created by the inner voice in my mind while reading it? (Or the inner voice of the author while writing?) From both? All? The same holds true with speaking. When you really start getting into it, as this video spells out clearly, it becomes a maze of mirrors that you get lost in. With all these doubles, is it any wonder that, as Lyotard and Mr. Fann point out, knowledge has become so unstable today? We wonder why people believe wild conspiracy theories that they have read online, and explain it by saying it is fulfilling some deep psychological need; but on another level, isn’t this the logical extreme end of a process we are all doing by unconsciously granting whatever we read an ontological status, a “linguistic presence” (@7:21)?
Add to this Baudrillard’s view that now we are in a second order simulacra, we have replaced illusion with a hyper-reality and it throws the whole system of representation into even greater disarray. “The idea of representation is mutating” (@28:51). At this point there may be no way out until, as Foucault says, “modern man” is washed away like a drawing on a beach. Although it is unsettling, I am glad I am becoming aware of it so that it no longer unconsciously acts on my thinking process.
This video gives me a new perspective on the impact that this doubled phonetic language has on my life. I began to see how the doubles have pervaded our “reality”.
Mr. Fann points out @23:11, how Foucault describes the“circular mirror, completed in a beautiful closed form.” It appears to me that today, we have the linguistic virtual reality created by phonetic language and also the technological virtual reality of holograms and internet algorithms. We train ourselves, creating a reality that searches for“truth”in echo chambers that confirm and reinforce our way of thinking. We are stuck in our own traps! I’m grateful for these lectures!
What amazes me is Mr. Fann’s deep understanding of the post-structuralist philosophical theories, which are often difficult to grasp! But what is more amazing is Mr. Fann’s ability to weave the opaque and thin threads of these philosophical thinkings into a brilliant fabric with a coherent sense of reality !❤❤❤
Through all the complex understandings of Derrida, it’s so refreshing that Mr. Fann provides these clearer explanations of such significant concepts. Language certainly is ambiguous nowadays, especially when basic concepts are now difficult to define or when it’s a struggle to have definitions that everyone seems to universally understand. We are ones to immediately judge when we hear or read words, determining if something is true or false, and we seek to create a perpetual present with our speech, a linguistic presence as mentioned. “It’s a linguistic presence that has nothing to do with anything, but it’s us, we give the meaning, we give the content, we give the substance within the presence.” (8:24) This takes me back to the anthropocentric view we have today or the emphasis on the breath we make to produce speech. As Mr. Fann writes in This Self We Deserve, “Speech-the sound, the voice, and the phonetic-is identified as creator, or spirit, which is supreme in the West. We believe in speech. The phonetic is contained within our breath-that is everything.” (page 8) While we seem set on this linguistic presence that we create, there is a sense of irony that we have no clear definitions of things anymore.
On another note, regarding the disappearance of art as a repeating act, it seems that in society today, we contribute to its ongoing disappearance as if it brings amusement or excitement. Much like the linguistic view of things and the pictorial view of things mentioned earlier in the video, the disappearance of art sounds like the disappearance of our definitions of things. It’s as if our philosophical outlook is splashed all over art and vice versa. Likewise, it is chilling to think that the idea of representation is mutating (28:50), and we’re all walking in a sea of fog. It’s so helpful to get clarity like this so that we can be more aware of our thought process and how it relates to our society today.
Derrida’s writing here can come across as a bit of a labyrinth, but it is still inviting to the reader. One can see that the maze-like structure of these sentences are a result of the problem itself he is trying to describe, unlike other writers who purposely intend to confuse the reader in order to assert dominance/authority.
This lecture inspired thoughts on the importance of the questions: what is art? What is the beautiful? Of course, I’ve seen these questions raised countless times before, but I had never thought about them from a linguistic perspective.
Language to Infinity being worked so seamlessly into this lecture really helped me to understand it, as I’m more familiar with that work and its concepts.
The way Foucault and Derrida use “the mirror”to describe our conundrum is insightful and also brings up similar thoughts of the abstract nature of our language and how we seek to understand it and the world around us. The mirror they write/speak about does not exist as a physical object but our ingrained understanding of how a mirror works, provides the best representation of the doubles referenced!
I’ll need to watch a couple more times to appreciate the impressive imagery.
Derrida, Heidegger, Foucault, and Baudrillard, synthesized by Fuoco B. Fann. 👏🙏
What we are presented here is mind expanding, I am constantly amazed how the French post-structuralist philosophers, Foucault, Derrida, etc., were so far ahead of the rest of Wester society. I am convinced this video would be beyond my comprehension without the experience and understanding gained from all the past videos on this channel. It feels like I have gone through a university course series which has taught me the basics and elevated my abilities to comprehend.
After seeing this video, the realization that my judgment of what I read is distorted by the very language used in that thinking, this is amazing and somewhat disturbing. Now, I better understand how the thought process that goes through my mind and into the judgment is dependent on both me and the person trying to communicate with me. When I read another’s writing, or my own writing, it may or may not be true and accurate, and the filters and reflections created by phonetic language influence that very judgement.
It is very interesting to reflect on past discussions I’ve had and see how I made an unconscious agreement with the other person. In those discussions the exchange of ideas seemed to float between us. Now I can see how the language used in our discussion had its own ontological status, it seemed to come alive. We were experiencing exactly what is described at 7:34 of the video, the “linguistic presence”. Yet, at the same time we were, and are, trapped by that same language; trapped inside the passe-partout of phonetic language.
Reflecting on phonetic language and how we are taught to use it in our western culture, I wish I had learned about how the text is a representation of the spoken word, which is a representation of the idea I am trying to convey. This recognition of the inherent distortions of phonetic language would have greatly benefited me in trying to communicate my thoughts. Knowing what I know now, I believe philosophy should be taught at a very young age and prior to any attempt to compose more than a few sentences.
As I have learned about phonetic language, I found myself thinking in value judgments of good and bad (all the typical Judaic/Christian baggage). But through these videos I’m able to look at phonetic language as the inherent environment of my thinking, speaking, and writing. Kind of like a fish, in water, with all its reflections, refractions, and distortions. Unlike Habermas, I choose to acknowledge I am in this environment, it’s not good or bad, it just is where I’m at. How could a fish that denies it is in water make any progress? I can’t change any of this phonetic language environment, but I am sure that I am better off knowing where I’m at.
Philosophy is a wonderful thing! There is no need for video games, virtual reality, drugs or alcohol, unless I am too lazy to think. This world around me, explained through philosophy, is more than enough to keep my mind occupied.
Who else but Mr. Fann has this ability to get in to this essay and tie Heidegger, Baudrillard, Foucault, classical art, modern art, postmodern art all the way to Jeff Koons, Lady Gaga, andTaylor Swift, into a brilliant coherent narrative of philosophy and art, side by side.
Wow, this is a pretty deep video with some very complex philosophical concepts, which really has me reevaluating how I look at life. I can’t say that I understand everything that is presented here, but what I think I do understand is that I am locked in a “circular mirror” that reflects itself to infinity. And that this mirror creates a virtual world, which I actually believe is real because I give it an ontological status through my mind.
If I am understanding the example given in video correctly, that when I speak, I give my words “substance” (8:32), and this causes me to believe whatever I am talking about actually exists or is true. In fact, however, I am only projecting through my words a virtually reality, which is only a reflection of the reality I am trying to depict. It seems the same holds for what I read (23:20). I think that I am capable to make a judgement about what I am reading (e.g., this is good, or this is bad, this is true, or this is a lie) but I again create a virtual world based on what I am thinking. However, my judgement may be completely wrong and have no basis in reality, but I still think it's correct, so I trap myself again in the virtual reality.
I am looking forward to learning more on this topic, as this lecture helps me to see how deeply I am trapped in the virtual world within this mirror, and how living in this virtually reality negatively impacts my life by causing me to to lose touch with reality. I can see from this why so many people today are getting dementia, because they completely lose touch with reality and then become lost in their own virtual world.
Thank you for another insightful lecture excerpt that joins the thoughts of so many different, difficult philosophers in concise form! This is very characteristic of Mr. Fann’s thought and work. These French thinkers (plus Heidegger) create poetic word mazes, and it’s rare to find a thinker that can work through the maze, taking these theorists on their own terms while shining a clear light through to the ideas that connect them.
The themes of linguistic presence, the opacity of the mirror, and phonetic language’s ontological status are familiar from This Self We Deserve. I really appreciate the inclusion of Baudrillard at the end of this video-it answered a question I had about the historical perspective underlying Foucault (and Derrida’s) words about words. If I’m understanding correctly, phonetic language always has an “ontological status” by virtue of the “presence of repeated speech in writing”-the double of a double, signifier of a signifier, etc.-but there is a historical development analyzed by Foucault and Baudrillard in which phonetic language departs more and more, through the course of modernity, from its classical representational function. Hence Mr. Fann’s specification in the first lecture of TSWD: the *modern* phonetic language; and whence comes Foucault’s avowal that phonetic language “began to fold in upon itself, to acquire its own particular density, to deploy a history, an objectivity, and laws of its own” during the nineteenth century (quoted in This Self We Deserve, 4).
The concluding synopsis on mirrors vs. holograms and the disappearance of illusion via Baudrillard (27:20) made the preceding analyses of Foucault and Derrida on language more accessible for me since I don’t understand many of the word mazes here. They feel beautiful but dizzying and seem, in sum, to suggest something like: phonetic language is an empty double that does not actually signify, but rather erects a fictive hyper-reality that is detached from-and supersedes-any “real reality” we might want to talk about. And there's nothing we can do about it. (No wonder Habermas hates this stuff.) Foucault’s “virtual space” and Derrida’s figure of the passe-partout (and rhetoric like “supplements of unchained performatives interlacing their simulacra,” etc.) make more sense, at least in my limited understanding, when correlated with Baudrillard’s notion of the disappearance of illusion and historical development of simulation. Also, the inclusion of Gaga the Simulacrum and Taylor Swift as pure Swift-sign reminds me of a tendency toward “ontological” modes of making and understanding art during the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries that Mr. Fann described during a lecture at UC Berkeley. These images-plus the Richter and the “Comedian” piece-demonstrate that the “idea of representation is mutating” (28:50) in a way that compliments and clarifies the philosophical narrative that unfolds here.
The imperative here seems to be: let’s try to recover the mirror function of language instead of creating more and more holograms (?)-or, at least, let’s recognize the holograms as such. This is precious content and a great channel-I’ll be listening on repeat!