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When Difficulty Becomes Meaning: The Reader, the Avant-Garde, and the Text

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Introduction — “I Understand Every Word, But I Don’t Understand the Text” There is a peculiar experience that often accompanies the first encounter with difficult theoretical writing: the words are familiar, the sentences are grammatically intelligible, and yet the text as a whole seems strangely inaccessible. A reader opens Derrida, Barthes, or Lacan and recognizes text , writing , signifier , meaning , subject . Nothing appears to be written in another language. And yet, after reading a paragraph, the reader may be left with the unsettling impression that nothing has been understood. This experience can easily produce suspicion. Perhaps the writer is making a simple idea unnecessarily complicated. Perhaps the terminology is being used to create an appearance of profundity. Perhaps the whole thing is, as some readers have concluded, simply charlatanism. Sometimes such judgments may be justified. But there is another possibility worth considering. Perhaps the problem begins not w...
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What Kind of Thing Is a Phoneme? Pāṇini, Saussure, and Jakobson

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Introduction: The Student's Question Is a phoneme a concrete sound or an abstract entity? The question seems straightforward, but it becomes difficult as soon as we ask what we mean by phoneme . The same phoneme can be realized in somewhat different ways, while a relatively small difference between two sounds may be enough to distinguish two phonemes within a particular language. What, then, is the thing we are calling a phoneme?   Part of the difficulty is that phoneme does not designate exactly the same object in every linguistic theory. The term has a history, and its meaning changes with the theoretical system in which it occurs. This is particularly important from a Saussurean perspective. Just as the value of a linguistic sign depends on its relations to other signs, a theoretical term derives much of its value from the concepts and distinctions surrounding it. We might therefore think of a linguistic theory, for the purposes of this discussion, as a kind of “mini- langu...
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