If you're into this sort of thing—and I sincerely hope you're not, for your own sake—then you should have noticed that Language Log had a neat piece back in September about Derrida and whether one can tell his statements from their logical (perhaps) opposites. That's a fun game, and I took a crack at the example given by Mark, who says that "If you know even a little bit about Derrida, you should be able to distinguish..." Well, I know a little, and I wasn't able to tell them apart too readily, though I've got a hunch.

In converse news, I was sent this interesting interview with Valeri Tsaturian, a man who invented a way to automatically translate a chess game into a piece of music. There are some interesting statements in there, like "Naturally, games played from the same opening sound similar in the beginning." That's not necessarily the only natural way to do it; a temporal sequence of moves need not be transformed piecewise into a corresponding temporal sequence of notes. What if the early moves determined the low notes and the later moves the high ones? It's interesting to trace this sort of naturalized patina of 'logic' that mathy intellectuals tend to apply: to suggest that there's an obvious natural way to do things and an obvious right answer. For example, in another place in the interview, he says, "According to my calculations, at least 20% of the [retarded] patients in special schools could be rehabilitated." Does anyone here think he calculated anything, to say nothing of whether his calculations are remotely compelling?

Anyway, the relation between the converse and the original above is that here we have two 'intellectuals': Jacques Derrida and Valeri Tsaturian. Both are, perhaps, 'frivolous': neither is curing cancer or building water pumps for rural Tibetan villages. But Tsaturian is giving us fun games to play, while Derrida fills our heads with so much criticism of earlier philosophers. The generative and the critical impulses, exemplified. [Not respectively, but conversely.]