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page068from Building Ideasadhere to the principles of Positivism – such as those with which Wittgenstein began and soon abandoned.
Derrida is likewise concerned with the limits of language, together with the general principles and mechanisms of signification, and in this he takes off from the ideas of Structuralism, which we will return to in Chapter 4. In his preoccupation with language as the very medium of philosophy, he betrays a similar priority to Heidegger, although he is much more concerned with the peculiarities of writing as distinct from the traditional emphasis on speech. The difference is significant for much of Derrida’s work but what is important here is the wider objective – by enquiring into the medium of his discipline with such vigour he set a pattern which has inspired others to follow. In architecture his ideas have found an enthusiastic reception, especially among those looking to challenge historical tradition. His frequent use of metaphors drawn from architectural sources has also been the source of much direct inspiration. Despite the problems with applying the process of design what began as a tool for analysis, Derrida has collaborated with the architect Peter Eisenman with some success, and we will return to this theme later in concluding this chapter. Another source of new ideas that have crossed over into architecture is the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and this collaborator Felix Guattari. They too have focused on language as a theme in much of their work, including the multiplicity of possible “language-games” as ways of conceiving and describing the world. This pragmatic theme of potential usefulness, as opposed to the “truth-value” of various languages, also forms part of Deleuze’s general vision of theory as a “box of tools”. In his early work he uses the theories of individual philosopher of dynamic reinterpretation. The resulting offspring of these relationships provides a model of his later theory, where he sets out the general strategy of adopting “voices” for different purposes. In all of this, as with Derrida, there is a lesson for other disciplines, as their creative engagement with the past provides a means to deal with the problems of tradition. More importantly for the theory of
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