Jacques Derrida and the power of language

It shows great folly...to suppose that one can transmit or acquire clear and certain knowledge of an art through the medium of writing or that written words can do more than remind the reader of what he already knows on a given subject.

- Plato Phaedrus

This quote from Plato captures the problematic relationship that Jacques Derrida examines in his Of Grammatology. The questions Derrida poses in light of this question are numerous: why has western metaphysics, starting with Plato, privileged Speech over Writing? Why is speaking always the direct, formal production of presence while writing is a mere representation? Why has writing been described as the 'other' of speech? Is it possible to deconstruct this hierarchy?

The word 'deconstruction' is most commonly associated with Derrida's work, and should be described, at least briefly, before the actual deconstruction 'performed' in Of Grammatology is described. This definition should be given, however, with a large caveat. In Derrida's words, 'All sentences of the type "deconstruction is X" or "deconstruction is not X" miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false.' (Norris 1987) Recognizing this limitation, deconstruction is generally thought of as a way of reading texts which (1) attempts to find a hierarchy between concepts described in the text, (2) undermine the basis of this hierarchy and reverse the prioritization of terms, and finally (3) problematize the existence of hierarchy in general, arguing that neither term is sufficient. This is the type of reading that Derrida attempts in Of Grammatology, in terms of the hierarchy between Speech/Writing (Derrida 1976). In an attempt to follow Derrida's lead, the following representation of his work, as spoken through my 'authority' as an author, will be puncuated by brief bits from his work. One should not read these interpersed quotes as part of some hermetic narrative I have dutifully constructed for the atentive reader. Rather following the playfulness of any 'deconstruction,' one should notice the places where my description is lacking, too myopic, or just plain dogmatic. The dialogic space between Derrida's text and my representation of it will become the metaphorical 'space' from which 'security' will be examined for its own inconsistencies.

Chapter One: 'End of the book, Beginning of Writing'

Derrida begins by briefly outlining the basic assumptions behinds his reading of the hierarchy between Speech/Writing. This hierarchy, he argues, is based upon a metaphysics of presence. In other words, Speech is prioritized because it claims it is a direct, transparent representation of the mind, of presence, of consciousness. Writing, on the other hand, is a 'secondary reporting' of this presence in which the speaker (the subject) is absent.

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The system of hearing-oneself-speak through the phonic substance - which presents itself as the non-exterior...produces the 'idea of the world' or 'the idea of the world-origin', that arises from the difference between the worldly and the non-worldly. (p8)

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Western metaphysics has traditionally favored the idea of the present through concepts such as: the subject, the cognito, consciousness, subjectivity, the now, the point, the essence, existence, and substance. This hierarchy, Derrida argues, is an expression of power, the power to organize concepts and justify particular ways of organizing the world.

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Phonetic writing, the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical and economic adventure of the west is limited in space and time and limits itself even as it is in the process of imposing its laws upon the cultural areas that have escaped it. (p10)

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The metaphysics of presence is characterized by logocentrism, or the centrality of the logos, Greek for the dual concept of truth and speech. 'If you are logocentric you believe that Truth is the voice, the word, or the expression of a central, original and absolute Cause or Origin.' (Powell 1992) In a system of metaphysics based on logocentrism, writing is excluded as 'secondary' as something which reports a Truth which precedes it.

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Phonocentrism merges with the historical determination of the meaning of being in general as presence, with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system...Reading and writing, the production of interpretation of signs, the text in general as fabric of signs, allows themselves to be confined within secondaries. They are preceeded by a truth, or a meaning already constituted by and within the element of logos. (p12)

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Derrida sees writing as fundamental, as part of speech itself, and most importantly, as disruptive. In these ways, Derrida is attempting to reverse the assumed hierarchy, to show that all signification is a form of writing, that the inside (Speech) is dependent on the outside (Writing) for its expression and even emergence. Writing, in the way Derrida uses it, takes on a new (metaphorical) meaning. Writing becomes a disruptive force which acts against the encyclopedic book. Where the 'good writing' of the book is static, codified, total, ever-present; Derrida sees his writing as unconstrained, 'play'-ful, and implicitly powerful.

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The good writing has therefore always been comprehended. Comprehended as that which had to be comprehended: within a nature or a natural law, created or not, but rist throught within an eternal presence. Comprehended therefore within a totality and enveloped in a volume or a book. The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier: this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality unless a totality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs and is independent of it in its ideality. The idea of the book, which always referes to a natural totality is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology, and of logocentrism against its aphoristic energy, and as I shall specify later, against difference in general. (p18)

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How does Derrida question this edifice of the book? Of truth as ever-present speech? Through his notion of diferance.

A small interruption to explore 'Writing and differance'?

Differance is a term Derrida invents to describe a non-thing, a process which is both present and absent within the making of meaning. Differance connotes two processes at once: (1) difference and (2) deferred.

Difference/Differ: things only make sense when they are compared to other things. Identity is dependent on the difference between things. Example: the letter -A- only makes sense because it is not a -D-.

Deference/Defer: in order to understand the thing, one must wait to have things to compare it to. For example, the letter -A- in J-A-cques only makes sense when one has both read the -J- and read the rest of the word. The identity of the letter -A- is deferred until the totality of the word is understood. - Jacques- : well -A- must be the second letter, it must be accented because it is the first vowel in the word, etc.

Another example (Derrida 1994): say someone picks up a dictionary, to look up a definition of 'reader' and finds both:

(1) reader - one who reads.

(2) reader - you at this moment.

The first definition captures the idea of the order of the word, which is understood by difference. One who reads is not one who skims the page, scribbles doodles, etc. The second definition is understood as deferring. The 'you' at this moment is reading but you must defer your understanding of the moment until it has passed. 'You' must defer your understanding of 'reading' until you catch yourself 'doodling'. The 'you' must defer your understanding of reading until you are cognizant of the order itself, of what it means to be 'one who reads.'

Chapter 2: Linguistics and Grammatology

In this chapter, Derrida attempts to show his deconstruction of Speech/writing by engaging Saussure. Saussure posited the unity of the sound and the sense to form the sign. The signifier (sound) + the signified (the sense, the mental picture) = the Sign. Signs are only understandable in their difference from other signs. Difference in the original sense because signs are still unitary, still whole entities, still present, they are just different by their nature.

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As long as one poses the question of the relationship between speech and writing in the light of the indivisible units of the 'thought-sound', there will always be the ready response. Writing will be 'phonetic', it will be the outside, the exterior representation of language and of this 'thought-sound.' It must necessarily operate from already constituted units of signification, in the formation of which it has played not part. (p31)

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Another example: the sound of the word -S-T-A-L-I-N- plus the mental image of a large Russian man with a mustache produces "Stalin" the Sign, who because of difference we know is not Churchill and not Roosevelt.

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In Saussure's linguistics, writing becomes the S3 in the equation, acting as mere 'phonetic doubling' of speech. Moreover, writing is removed entirely from the construction of the Sign. Writing merely reports it does not help create. In fact, Saussure sees writing as disruptive of the natural presence of the sign. Writing becomes violence by disrupting speech.

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Saussure wishes at the same time to demonstrate the corruption of speech by writing, to denounce the harm the latter does to the former, and to underline the inalterable and natural independence of language...Such is the truth of nature. And yet, nature is affected - from without- by an overturning which modifies itself in its interior, denatures it and obliges it to be separated from itself. Nature denaturing itself. (p41)

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Derrida sees this violence not as merely a problem which only befalls writing, rather he sees this disruption in all modes of signification. Take the presupposition within traditional conceptions of language that Speech is naturally prior to writing. This natural hierarchy is at the same time effaced by writing which naturally tries to force a rewriting of speech. Derrida sarcastically asks why this natural order is consistently trying to denature itself? Why does traditional metaphysics by attempting to 'punish writing for a monstrous crime'?

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Writing is the dissimulation of the natural primary and immediate presence of sense to the soul with the logos. This violence befalls the soul as unconsciousness. Deconstructing this tradition will therefore not consist of reversing it, of making writing innocent. Rather of showing why the violence of writing does not befall an innocent language. There is an original violence of writing because language is first...writing. 'Usurpation' has already begun. (p37)

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The denaturing, the violence of writing is a phenomenon Derrida sees in all forms of signification, and moreover, he creates another non-concept to describe it: the trace.

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Now we must think that writing is at the same time more exterior to speech, not being its 'image' or its 'symbol', and more interior to Speech, which is already in itself a writing. Even before it is linked to incision, engraving, drawing, or the letter, to a signifier signified by it, the concept of the graphie implies the framework of the instituted trace, as the possibility common to all systems of signification. The phonic element, the term, the plenitude that is called sensible, would not appear as such without the difference or opposition which gives them form. Such is the most evident significance of the appeal of difference as the reduction of phonic substance...The pure trace is differance. It does not depend on any sensible, plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. (p62)

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Another small interruption to explore this non-concept of the trace

For Derrida, the graphie, the written-mark, is the form of signification which best demonstrates, or 'implies' the 'trace.' The trace is best understood with an example:

Recall the formula:

The sound -Stalin- plus the concept -Russian man with mustache- equals the Sign Stalin which is not Churchill and not Roosevelt. What is a mustache? The sound -mustache- plus the concept -rough hair on the upper lip- equals the Sign Mustache which is not Beard and not Sideburns. What is a lip? What is hair? etc. etc.

One can understand the trace as a form of 'memory' which is required for meaning to operate. This memory is both present and absent. It is present insofar that when one invokes "Stalin", mustache and Russian man are both very present. But what is absent, but which differance has demonstrated is just as necessary, is the non-mustaches, the sideburns, the beards, the goatees, which make the understanding of Stalin possible.

Derrida has thus described the trace as both 'unmotivated' and 'becoming.' Unmotivated because the endless chains of signifieds required to make a "Stalin" is not determined by any one thing. Trace results from the interplay between signifieds within language and cannot be controlled by any one absolute total presence, or encyclopedia book. It is simultaneously 'becoming,' which is to say that the chain of 'traces' are always deferring meaning to another link in the chain, to another signified.

Which brings us to Derrida's closest attempt at a definition of the trace: 'the non-presence of the other inscribed within the meaning of the present (p43).'

Chapter Two, continued....

We left off where Derrida was posing a question to Saussure: why do you attempt this protection of natural Speech from the naturally disruptive forces of writing? Saussure, Derrida argues, was attempting to keep the power of Speech and the order of logocentrism intact by dismissing and ignoring the effects of trace. To counter this move, this attempt to write the book, to define a presence, to be logocentric, Derrida shows that Saussure's writing in fact proves the trace, that he is himself susceptible to differance, and that he cannot control the play of signification.

Saussure makes the distinction between two levels of the 'signifier' or 'sound images': (1) the material sound of the signifier understood in the head as such (2) the sounds themselves which are mere vibrations in the air. The signifier in the first sense is 'sensory appearing' where the signifier is registered. The second sense describes the 'lived appearing' where the signifier is spoken. Who is this distinction mediated? By the difference within the signifier.

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Now the 'sound image', the structured appearing of the sound, the 'sensory matter' lived and informed by differance...distinct from all mundane reality, is called the 'psychic image' by Saussure: "the latter sound-image is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychic imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses. The sound-image is sensory, and if I happen to call it 'material', it is only in that sense, and by way of opposing it, to the other term of the association, the concept, which is generally more abstract." (p63)

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The articulation of difference between signifiers allows for the registration of differences between sounds of 'tall' and sounds of 'small.' Saussure originally argued that it was the difference between Signs which created meaning. The unified signified/signifier created the signs which were compared. However, his own conception of the signifier is one which implies difference already, before the unity of the sign, before meaning has even been imposed.

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The idea of the 'psychic imprint' therefore relates essentially to the idea of articulation. Without the difference between the sensory appearing and its lived appearing ('mental imprint') the temporizing synthesis, which permits difference to appear in a chain of significations, could not operate. That the 'imprint' is irreducible means also that speech is originally passive...This passivity is also the relationship to a past, to an always-already-there that no reactivating of the origin could fully master and awaken to presence. This impossibility of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary presence refers us therefore to an absolute past. That is what authorized us to call trace that which does not let itself be summed up in the simplicity of a present. (p66)

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These 'sound images' or 'psychic imprints' are required for all meaning to operate yet they are also plagued by differance. Just as writing is a form of 'secondary' signification, so is the Sign which is a secondary mediation of the difference between the 'lived' and 'appearing' parts of the signifier. The Sign is just as secondary, and therefore: Speech is always a form of Writing and Writing is always a form of Speech.

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The signified is originarily and essentially trace, that it is always already in the position of the signifier, is the apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphysics of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon writing as its death and its resource. (p73)

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Conclusions and Chapter 3: Of Grammatology as a positive science

Which takes us back to Derrida's original discussion of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence. 'What is X?' leads us to an answer of presence: 'X is this thing.' Derrida's concept of differance/trace, however, should cast doubt upon these central presences, for just as with the sign 'Stalin', all 'things' are caught in a play of signs, in the differing and deferring meanings that are both present and absent. Which brings us back to the location of power in Derrida's works. While much of Derrida's work focuses on the implicit power of logocentrism, of science and traditional philosophy, which reinforces the 'metaphysics of presence', yet he also highlights the disruptive power of the trace and of differance:

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The necessary decentering cannot be a philosophic or scientific act as such, since it is a question of dislocating, through access to another system linking speech and writing, the founding categories of language and the grammar of the episteme. The natural tendency of theory - of what unites philosophy and science in the episteme - will push rather toward filling in the breach than toward forcing the closure...all of this refers to a common and radical possibility that no determined science, no abstract discipline, can think as such...(p92)

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Derrida's work, while incredibly interesting and comprehensive, is very difficult to approach. Derrida often engages a number of writers in very specific ways, picking incredibly obscure passages (even footnotes) to engage and 'deconstruct.' This makes his writing incredible difficult to comprehend unless one has read the primary passages and understands the implications of Derrida's close textual readings. This approach is understandable: Derrida's project (if one could call it that) is to find the hidden assumptions, the implicit rhetorical connections, and the metaphysical foundations of other philosophers works and undermine/question them. His emphasis on detailed and specific readings complements his deconstructive approach, which attempts to read through the overarching statements and find the unacknowledged innocent contradictions in any work. When completed, this approach is impressive and quite condemning, but while being implemented, often unnerving and difficult.

My attempt to summarize Derrida should thus be read with a large grain of salt. Summarizing Derrida's arguments is implicitly to defy Derrida's approach. The power of Derrida's arguments is often found in the process of reading in the first place (the way the authors such as Saussure are approached, the methods, tropes, and allusions Derrida invokes), rather than his conclusions themselves. In a strange and powerful way, Derrida's work becomes convincing less in terms of what he concludes than in how he goes about formulating such conclusions. Derrida's statement cautioning all those who attempt to answer 'what is deconstruction?' should be read, therefore, not as an attempt to be vague. Rather, Derrida's warnings cautions us from reading works solely in an attempt to find their 'thesis,' the presence of a coherent argument, a transcendental answers to any question asked in terms of 'what is...?'

Bibliography

(1) Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology. With 'Translators Preface' by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press 1976.

(2) Powell, J. Derrida for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers Limited. 1997.

(3) Derrida, Jacques, Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader. With 'Preface' by Peggy Kaufman. New York: Columbia University Press 1994.

(4) Oxford Companion to Philosophy. T. Honderich (ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995.

(5) Norris, C. Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1987.