Mike of Modernity (or post?)

"What is unnameable is the play that brings about the nominal effects, the relatively unitary or atomic structures we call names, or chains of substitutions for those names" Differance - Jacques Derrida

"'Discipline'...A technology" - Michel Foucault.

It is interesting when reading Derrida and Foucault in concert, for what appears is one man emobodying (Foucault) what the other is referring to. Derrida's ideas of "differance" as it differs from "difference" are an amazing and frustrating web of philosophy, carefully worded politics, and collapsing and contradictory theory. What appears from this web however is a keen observation of the massive complexity of language, their subtleties and paradoxes. When referring to the conception of naming, assigning a signifier to a signified, he speaks about the "chain of substitutions" that become attached to a particular signified object, or sign. Example: What was once simply called "jewelery" is now called "bling" in almost everyday parlance. It will doubtless evolve again, our signifier for precious metals and gems worn on the body to decorate it. (Bling sounds better.) He examines them as "atomic structures" as well, and this idea becomes translated into Foucault's work in "Discipline and Punish". Quite fond of lists, Mr Foucault is (a man after my own heart) as he shows how a single concept like "discipline" can be deconstructed. After an eerie and somewhat anti-establishment explanation of the plague era version of discipline, he shows has discipline and punishment have evolved into a more subtle art of the "Panopticon". At the end we see that Foucault sees discipline and it's underpinnings "Maybe identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics',or 'anatomy' of power, a technology. " Discipline, the one word, has a great many levels of meaning and interpretation. Even more so because as Derrida and Foucault know, there are as many ways to legitimize concepts like 'discipline', as there are ways to interpret it's meaning and effects. "Censorship" may mean safety for one person, and fascism to another. "Freindship", "love", "fate", the list could go on, but what unravels here in deconstruction is ther very idea that our constructs really "mean" anything; except what we assign to it.