Derrida
and Deconstruction
“With the word with, then, begins this text
Whose first line tells the truth.”
(Francis Ponge)
“The Text”
In its most conventional and historical
sense the word “text” means:
The actual words of a book, or poem,
etc., either in their
original form or any form they have
been transmitted in
or transmuted into: a book of such words: words set to
music: the main body of matter in a
book.
When we speak of a text in English studies
we usually mean a particular bound and covered entity such as George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss or Tennyson’s Poetic Works.
Why does text come to mean the same as
book? The word comes from the Latin texere, which means “to weave.” And “text” still has that meaning for
us. We say textile, which is “woven” or
“capable of being woven” or, as a noun, “a woven fabric,” a textile. So when we use the word “texture” we might
mean one of a number of things: “something woven,” or “a web”; we might mean a
certain manner of weaving or simply of connecting; the disposition of the parts
of a body; or “a structural impression” which might come about through a way of
combining parts of a whole, as in music, art, or writing; or, finally, it could
mean the quality conveyed to the senses by woven fabrics.
Clearly the use of the word “text” to
describe a book is possible on the model of weaving, which, we might assume is
appropriate to a certain way of thinking about books, about the way they have
been put together, about the way writing is woven into text from the material
or the fabric of our language. After
all this, imagine my disappointment at finding the definition for
textual-criticism as “critical study directed towards determining the true reading
of a text.”
The true reading? Isn’t it as if the truth had got lost on the
way to becoming a text? As if it was
the job of the critic to find it again by reading. Does this make the text just a vehicle for delivering meaning or
a coat that needed to be taken off?
Well this model of the text is as old as our history and our language
opposes it systematically to all the things it might represent, like life, the
world, the real, anything it refers to, the mind, consciousness, personal or
shared experience. The best text would
be one that conveyed the most accurate impressions of these things. The trouble with the text is that it might
not convey the right impression, the true impression, and it might therefore
be misleading. A rhetorical frontier
has been drawn between the truth of
things and the text. According to this historical prejudice: the text is on the outside, the truth of
things is hidden away on the inside. However,
according to the same logic, the truth
of things only remains hidden inside
because it is essentially outside the
text, in some far off yonder. Once
again we are bound by the rhetorical distinction between the empirical (the
text) and the transcendental (its meaning or truth). This, of course, does not fit the facts. But it does indicate a pervasive and
history-bound prejudice, which for centuries has been instrumental in the way
people have thought.
Deconstruction shakes up a concept like
text in a way that provokes questions
about the borders, the frontiers, the edges,
or the limits that have been drawn to mark out its place in the history of
concepts. Meanings take on their
identity, they come to mean what they mean, by just such a marking out of
frontiers, opposing concepts to each other, defining terms by their differences. So deconstructive reading begins by asking,
“What are the borders? What are the
limits? And how do they come about?” This is the question that Jacques Derrida
asks in his article “Living on/Borderlines.” What are the borderlines of a
text? How do they come about?
We fail to read a text at all if we
jump straight in from out of nowhere proclaiming our opinions and making rash
generalisations. The text is woven from
the same system as the one we each inhabit, the system of concepts that allows
us to think the things we do. So the
text, and any given text, demands that we read it first of all in terms of the
historical and rhetorical conventions that allow us to understand it, and
which, by and large, allow us to agree, more or less, on what it means.
Derrida’s work
Derrida’s work consists in readings
of other texts. The problem of reading
Derrida just is the problem of
reading. Geoff Bennington gives the
following account of why his introduction to Derrida’s work (“Derridabase”) is from
the beginning and always caught up with the problem of reading (while at the
same time mentioning many of Derrida’s key topics):
All the questions to which this type of book must habitually
presuppose replies, around for instance the practice of quotation, the
relationship between commentary and interpretation, the identification and
delimitation of a corpus or a work, the respect owed to the singularity or the
event of a work in its idiom, its signature, its date and its context, without
simply making them into examples or cases ... are already put to us by the texts we have to read, not as preliminary
or marginal to the true work of thought, but as this work itself in its most
pressing and formidable aspects. (Bennington 9-10)
We cannot first solve the problem of how to read Derrida and then read
him. The problems of reading and of
reading protocols are already the
whole problem. Bennington also tells us
that “only Derrida can give us the means to understand this situation” (8). Why, then, am I introducing Derrida through
the writing of his representative? The
answer lies in a certain concept of repetition. A repetition must be more or less the same
as what it repeats but it cannot be identical.
My reading of Bennington’s reading of Derrida’s reading of the
metaphysical tradition’s reading of … constitutes a series of non-identical
repetitions of the same text. In
Derrida it is in this same repetition, this “repetition of the same,” that
there is the possibility of something new (what he will call an invention of
the other). The following sections are
intended to clarify these points by subtly repeating them in slightly differing
contexts.
Presence and Absence
The metaphysical tradition (or philosophy) can be characterised
by two basic desires or trends, admittedly manifested in various different
forms. As we have seen in other
sections, there is a consistent desire to reconstruct the transcendental realm,
which is otherwise radically absent.
The lost origin of our finite or fallen state drives us to continuously
reconstruct our beginnings. Second, the
ideal of presence turns up everywhere. All aspects of experience and/or existence are relegated to a
moment called the present. But the ideal of presence always implies more
than one moment:
1.
Presence, we assume, describes an
original state, a state that must have come first. As I gaze out into the world I can say the world is present to my
observing eye. If that is the case,
then my observing consciousness must be present to my own self-reflection. It thus follows that meaning, in its most pure sense, as conscious thought, must be
present to me as I gaze out onto the world.
Presence is, therefore, the main predicate for a text’s meaning (its sense or its reference), despite the fact that
this meaning is always absent and in need of reconstruction through reading or
interpretation.
2.
For this reason, a second moment of
presence invades consciousness as absence--the
disappearance of the world behind the veils of language, consciousness going
astray, the reign of death, non-sense.
In this way gaps, absences and deficiencies of all imaginable kinds are
subordinate to a principle of presence. Is it possible to imagine an absence without
reference to the principle of presence? It would be a radical absence, something
always and from the beginning absent, missing, lost to experience. If there was such an absence, how could we
glimpse it?
3.
We glimpse it between repetitions as
their repeatability. If the present
moment can be repeated (i.e. remembered) then, preceding the present moment, is
the possibility of its being repeated in memory (i.e., memory itself as
repeatability). So memory precedes and
exceeds the present moment, which we will have remembered. Memory, as traditional accounts make clear,
gets associated with death and the memorialising of the dead, or mourning, in a
way that gets us back, always and from the beginning, to the second moment
(absence).
Derrida’s much-cited statement, “there is nothing outside the
text,” suggests an absence that has never been, nor could ever be,
present. This is what we must try to
think with regard to the sign, and with the notion of text:
1) The sign is
irreducibly secondary. It always refers
to something else. Sometimes the
something else that a sign refers to is actually itself (e.g., this sign here) but this doesn’t mean that
the sign’s meaning (its reference to itself by virtue of its sense—sign =
signifying unit) is primary. What is
primary is the signifying aspect of it.
The sign comes before its
referent (sign) in so far as this
sign means this sign. And that, of
course, is secondary. It also
illustrates that signs are necessarily always divided. Their principle is the repeatability that
allows them to apparently jump out of themselves to refer back. However, in the repetition the sign is
irremediably changed. It is no longer
the sign it was. Disconcertingly, this
kind of punning cannot be dismissed as a kind of sophistic rhetorical
game. Or rather, it can be dismissed. But the principle of your ability to dismiss
it (your ability to ignore basic rhetorical processes and pass over them in
silence) is in fact the same principle that allows meaning to arise in the first
place, cancelling out the rhetorical dimension, the secondary text (vehicle or
coat).
2) So the sign is at the beginning. We never arrive at a meaning independently
of some aspect of text, through which we must pass before cancelling it out as
unwanted rhetoric (vehicle or coat).
Therefore there is no beginning.
The Way We Think
We can understand how deconstruction
operates if we examine Jacques Derrida’s reading of Levi-Strauss, which is
exemplary. A much-republished essay from
1968, called “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,”
has contributed to a widespread understanding of Derrida as a key
“poststructuralist” thinker. Derrida’s
writing has certainly contributed to the critical revision of structuralism
that has occurred over the years, but his own work is more wide ranging than
the term “poststructuralism” suggests.
In The
Savage Mind Levi-Strauss had made the following statement: “Science as a
whole is based on the distinction between the contingent and the necessary,
this being also what distinguishes event and structure” (21). Derrida begins “Structure, Sign and Play”
with the following observation: “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of
the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word
did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural--or
structuralist--thought to reduce or suspect” (278). So Derrida begins by drawing attention to the popularity of
structuralism (in the 1960s) as an event
in the history of the concept of structure.
But the meaning of the word event is something that structuralism would
need to contain as an element within
a structure or at least exhaustively determined by a structure. In the same way that science must contain
all contingencies (chances, accidents and secondary causes) within the thought
of what is necessary, all events should be contained as parts of a
comprehensive structure. The reference
is to the structuralist model that contrasts La Langue (the system or structure) to parole (the event of speech or the utterance). So strictly speaking, and according to
Levi-Strauss, the concept “event” is opposed to the concept “structure.” Once again the model is a version of
empirical/ transcendental difference.
The logic is as follows: The event of structuralism is a
“rupture” in so far as the break between classical thinking in the human
sciences and structuralism is like an overturning of old ways of thinking by
new ones. But the concept of structure
is itself a classical concept and its meaning belongs to ordinary ways of
speaking. Furthermore its meaning is
something like “that which determines and makes possible all events.” The concepts “event” and “structure” must
have been determined by the field that structuralism sets out to explore and
explain, that is, structure (rather than event).
episteme
An episteme
is an ancient Greek term denoting the field of scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is necessary knowledge
and best characterised by the cool rational certainty of mathematics. Derrida accepts the more elaborate meaning
of episteme, which refers to the age
of western science and philosophy that extends--in some fits and starts--from
the Greeks to the late twentieth century (three thousand odd years). The word episteme
thus refers to the fact that the concepts we use have a historicity (the
condition of being historical) and belong to a system of thinking that is at
least three thousand years old. This is
the system that structuralism hopes to overturn.
Structure
The classical concept of structure has what
Derrida calls a “contradictory coherence.”
In other words it is only coherent while it is suppressing a
contradiction on which it is based. A
structure is an organisation (like a literary text for instance) and takes the
form of law or institution. Structures
of this kind are always instituted,
which means that an establishment through inclusions, exclusions and various
means of cancelling out contradictions has been necessary from (or at) the
beginning. Beginnings of this kind,
which are not really beginnings at all but modifications, are often
conveniently forgotten or shrouded in mystery.
All notions of structure have a centre--a point
of presence, as Derrida puts it--a place where the structure originates. Thus any organised thing must have a point
that can be regarded as its centre, and which limits the play that structures may be subject to. With a text any number of possible readings, based upon the
substitutions that the language of literature particularly suggest, can be
limited and qualified by the notion of its centre. Typical concepts of centre in literary criticism, for instance,
would include the author, the historical context, the reader, the ideology of a political
economy, each of which provide a ground outside the text for limiting
interpretation. The centre is in each
case unique. It is a place where
substitutions are no longer possible and in fact it escapes structurality (i.e.
the author of the text is outside the structure of the text itself). So the centre is not in the centre. The centre is outside the structure. This is why the coherence of the concept of
structure is contradictory. It rests
upon a paradox.
Play
Derrida here borrows a notion from
psychoanalysis—desire—suggesting that
the fact of a contradiction indicates a semi-repressed desire. Anxiety is caused by a desire that is
unacceptable. In the case of the
concept of structure the desire is for “immobility” beyond the reach of
play. An origin or an end beyond
the play of a structure has throughout the history of this concept (and all
other metaphysical concepts) been mythologised as a point of full presence
beyond play. Play (in all its senses,
e.g. games, alternative to work, elasticity, gap between word and thing, word
and meaning, wordplay etc.) puts off full presence (e.g. of the world to my
senses) in order for me to get a sense of the fact that it is there--even if
not fully present. My access to the
world is an access to traces of a world, in the same way that my access to a
text is to the traces that the writer has left for me to decipher. The
trace (an original and permanently necessary absence) cannot of course be made
present to my senses but without it there’d be nothing of the world for
me. The only way to master the anxiety
about this absent outside is to hide the contradiction involved in saying that
the centre of a structure is outside the structure. The Ancient Greeks used the word arche for origin and an end was called a telos. From these words we
derive archaeology (which digs back
to the beginnings of man) and teleology
(which dreams of a final purpose to all this scattered and contingent
life). Scientists think that without
teleology science would mean nothing.
That is, all these facts must add up to something one day--they must
have a final purpose that right now we cannot even guess at. However this belief--which a scientist holds
as strongly as the pre-Socratic Greeks held to their belief in Zeus--has
neither justification nor support in the facts themselves. It is just a dream. No one ever knows what is to come.
Philosophy demands that its concepts have
single naked positive meanings beyond the play of substitutions (metaphors and
metonymies) that are possible for all concepts, as elements of a
structure. If the sun can stand for the
truth of reason then where does the play of possible substitutions end? As we saw with Plato we never actually reach
the end. This single (unique) meaning
must therefore be outside the structure itself (and outside the text--whether
the text is literary, mythological, philosophical or scientific). But all the names for the centre (God, Man,
History, the Subject, Mind etc.) are themselves subject to play because they must each be thought of as absolutely unique when
in fact they are historically substituted
for one another. In order for the
concept of an author to limit the play of the text an attempt must be made to
play down or efface the influence on interpretation that the reader, or the
historical and ideological context, have upon it. The centre is itself a concept among the concepts that it would
limit from outside.
The way of
the text
Derrida names three influential authors who
have each been seen as challenging the history of metaphysics: Friedrich
Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger.
But he points out that the tools they use for the destruction of the
history of metaphysics are themselves derived from the concepts of that
history. Any one who tries to “step
outside” philosophy is trapped in a circle:
history of
metaphysics
ì î
ë its destruction í
No language is absolutely foreign to it. So all criticism slips into the form that it
is contesting. Absolute foreignness
(alterity, exteriority, or more colloquially, the other, the outside) can never
be made present to sensible or intellectual intuition. But without this absent aspect we’d have no
presence or absence at all. The
tendency is to name or otherwise characterise this outsideness that gives
origin, meaning and purpose to everything.
But whatever the privileged term gets called it must remain an outsider
(infinite, necessary and missing from the beginning) or always to come like a
Messiah or Mr Right.
Structuralism, on the other hand--and here is
its radical promise--appears to operate without a privileged term that belongs outside
the structure itself (unlike other forms of theory/philosophy). Structuralism says that there is no outside
to the structure. However its
privileged term--the sign--is a metaphysical concept. For metaphysics Sign always means sign of ...
(something). Thus a signifier always
has a signified And they are related
in the same way that the sensible is
related to the intelligible. One is visible while the other is invisible (and supposedly
immortal). The sign in other words is
always reduced by metaphysical
thinking to the “content” it signifies.
Structuralism, against this (classical) conception, begins with the concept of the sign in an attempt to put the
system, in which the opposition sign/content (signifier/signified) functions,
into question. In other words,
Levi-Strauss uses the concepts of
metaphysics without subscribing to their “truth value.” They function as signs only without a
grounding centre outside the structure (of historical concepts).
Bricoleur and
Engineer
One would therefore be led to think that
structuralism has made a breakthrough by giving up on the thought of the
eternal outside. However Derrida’s
reading of Levi-Strauss reveals that such a thought remains a central part of
his thinking. Levi-Strauss contrasts
the primitive science, “the science of the concrete,” with modern technical
science (the science of the conceptual) by making an analogy on the basis of
the difference between engineering and what he calls bricolage. Bricolage is a skill that involves using
bits of whatever is to be found and recombining them to create something
new. In French the word is used to
describe the very skilful professional DIY expert. Levi-Strauss suggests that the model of the bricoleur is a good way of characterising the primitive scientist
(medicine-men etc.) as well as the one who makes up the mythological narratives
(the story-teller). He says “the
elements which the ‘bricoleur’ collects and uses are ‘pre-constrained’ like the
constitutive units of myth, the possible combinations of which are restricted
by the fact that they are drawn from the language where they already possess a
sense which sets a limit on the freedom of manoeuvre” (SM 19). Doesn’t this sound like the structure (i.e.,
the language system) out of which the utterance must be drawn? Nonetheless, Levi-Strauss still finds
something to contrast the bricoleur
to. “The engineer questions the
universe, while the bricoleur
addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavours,
that is, only a sub-set of the culture” (19).
Yes, the engineer, who questions the universe, who is, according to
Levi-Strauss, “always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the
constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization,” can be contrasted
to the bricoleur, in so far as the
latter “by inclination or necessity always remains within them” (19). Levi-Strauss makes the opposition even
clearer by saying that the engineer works by means of concepts and the bricoleur by means of signs. You should already be able to see the trap
he has (amazingly) fallen into here.
How could a structuralist have considered a concept as being separable
from a sign--or thought the sign without the concept? Derrida’s answer is the one we all ought to be able to have given
by now. He says:
If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text
of a heritage that is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that
every discourse is bricoleur. The engineer, whom Levi-Strauss opposes to
the bricoleur, should be the one to
construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who supposedly would be the
absolute origin of his own discourse . . . would be the creator of the verb,
the verb itself. [Listen for the echo--in the beginning was the verb] The notion of the bricoleur who supposedly
breaks with all forms of bricolage is therefore a theological idea; and since
Levi-Strauss tells us elsewhere that bricolage
is mythopoetic, the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur. (SSP 285).
There are many implications that would have to
be drawn from this statement--concerning the discourse of ethnology (the
anthropologist’s mythopoetic bricolage),
the inability to get outside the text of metaphysical oppositions, etc. but one
thing must be made clear at this stage.
Derrida is not saying that we are all doomed to mythopoetic
recombination. Here and elsewhere he
continues to affirm the locus previously reserved for the truth but this is now to be thought as the necessary alterity
(otherness, outsideness, absence) of the trace. One of the terms he applies to his reading of the ethnologist’s
paradox is supplement. This has to be understood in a special
way--but once this special way has been grasped it will provide access to many
other aspects of Derrida’s writing strategies.
What is at stake here is the question of
totalisation. In common with the
natural sciences the assumption is that the field of enquiry is complete in
itself and it is the task of knowledge to gradually cover the entire
field. That is, we don’t know
everything yet but it is just a matter of time before the scientist reveals it
at last. In the physical sciences the
drive for what is called a theory of everything (the TOE) is one symptom of the
desire for totalisation. The idea is
that everything (the totality of Being) ought one day to be part of a complete
knowledge with nothing escaping (no particular finite thing). However the dream is always just that, a
dream, as certain demonstrable conditions show. These conditions are revealed in the paradoxical patterns of
philosophical and scientific thought.
Derrida uses the term supplement to
elaborate the paradox at the heart (the centre) of what was once known as the
human sciences. Levi-Strauss often
affirms the lack of totalisation in ethnology but sometimes he sees the project
as just useless and at others as impossible.
For Derrida this indicates two different kinds of implicit thesis about
the field in question. By “implicit” I
mean that Levi-Strauss is not aware--probably could not be aware--of the
paradoxical double-bind that he is operating within. It is Derrida’s intention to draw out the nature of this
double-bind. There is no question about
the fact that there are insurmountable limits to totalisation. The difference concerns the way the limits
are conceived. Levi-Strauss provides an
example of how there are two mutually exclusive interpretations of the way in
which the “human” sphere eludes totalisation:
1.
The world (of people, texts, histories, subjects, particular individuals, etc.)
contains a richness and variety that cannot be reduced to any attempts at
totalisation (the language of theory).
There is more than one can say. There is no theoretical language rich or
dense enough to capture the finite world of rich particularity. This is a clue to the endless searching
through the variations of particular myths that so much of Levi-Strauss’s work
involves. It is the structural essence
that underlies each variant that he is interested in. On the other hand,
2. It is the character of the field itself (and
not its contents) that excludes totalisation: it is a finite field of infinite substitutions, and the centre is missing
(there is no centre). Instead of a
centre there is the play of substitutions.
The reference to “something missing” (rather than the more popular
reference to play) is crucial for an understanding of the kind of intervention
that Derrida is making. He puts it like
this:
But nontotalisation can also be
determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of
finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept
of play. If totalisation no longer has any meaning, it is not because the
infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite
discourse, but because the nature of the field--that is language, and a finite
language--excludes totalisation. This
field is in effect that of play, that
is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is
to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical
hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a
centre which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. (289)
What this
means is that totalisation is impossible not because of our finitude (we are
finite beings limited by space, time and language, such that we’ll never be
able to embrace the infinite totality of the universe), but because of
unpresentable absence at the very core of experience. In an earlier
article on the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas Derrida has already marked
out the form of the paradox he is teasing out in this reading of Levi-Strauss. The paradox concerns the difference between
our old friends the empirical and the transcendental. These two terms, roughly charting the distinction between scientific
(finite, empirical) discourses and religious and/or metaphysical (transcendental)
ones, are complements of each other in so far as the one attempts to supplement
what is deficient in the other (reciprocally).
My finite empirical knowledge is deficient in what I cannot know of the
infinite. My transcendental concepts
are deficient in terms of what they cannot make into objects of empirical
knowledge (totality, infinity, God, etc.)
It will turn out that these two deficiencies are the same. We’ll call it
“difference” for now and locate it as the difference between the empirical and
the transcendental.
Radical Empiricism
In the article on Levinas, Derrida affirms what in Levinas seems to be
reducible to neither empirical nor transcendental determinations of
experience. The determination in Levinas
seems to be something like a radical empiricism, in which notions like
exteriority, infinity, alterity and the other (names for things that could
never be the objects of experience) are privileged. What Derrida says is this:
By radicalizing the theme of the infinite exteriority
of the other, Levinas thereby assumes the aim which has more or less secretly
animated all the philosophical gestures which have been called empiricisms in
the history of philosophy.
And a little later:
Empiricism has always been determined by philosophy,
from Plato to Husserl, as nonphilosophy:
as the philosophical pretension to non-philosophy, the inability to justify
oneself, to come to one’s own aid as speech. (152).
An empiricism establishes knowledge on the basis of experience
alone--including the sensible experiences gained through sight, hearing, touch,
taste and smell (this is perhaps more the case in France than in Anglo-American
traditions but when the point has been made that will have been irrelevant). If you are a philosopher, on the other hand,
knowledge will have been achieved through some dialectical relationship between
experience and theory--determinations of thought, reason, concepts, ideas, ratio, spirit, and who knows what
else. What Derrida affirms in Levinas
is his “radical empiricism”:
The experience of the other (of the infinite) is
irreducible, and is therefore [quoting Levinas now] “the experience par
excellence.” And, concerning death
which is indeed its irreducible resource, Levinas speaks of “an empiricism
which is in no way a positivism.” But
can one speak of an experience of the
other or of difference? Has not the
concept of experience always been determined by the metaphysics of
presence? Is not experience always the
encountering of an irreducible presence, the perception of a phenomenality?
(152)
An experience of the infinitely other is what causes the metaphysics of
presence (experience considered as a clouded present that needs to be cleared
by rational or empirical means) to crack wide open. “Nothing can so profoundly solicit [‘shake the structure of’] the
Greek Logos--philosophy--than this irruption of the totally-other; and nothing
can to such an extent reawaken the logos to its origin as to its mortality, its
other” (WD 152). It is actually quite
funny (without letting go of the seriousness of the argument of course) to see
how an article in 1964 which shows that Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher of
infinity and the absolute other, is an empiricist, might have stirred up the
intellectual world a little. Well, the fact is, difference and the other are
neither sensible nor intelligible (nor are they either just words or
concepts). You cannot see a difference
per se (nor taste one). You cannot
think a difference per se. If one is
serious about calling the experience of difference an experience then one has
to go beyond both empiricism and metaphysics.
The empiricality of the trace or mark (like written marks, which are a
kind of paradigm in Derrida’s work) cannot be reduced to sensible or
intelligible experience. There is now a
different concept of experience altogether.
So Derrida says that Empiricism is the name that metaphysics gives for
the pure thought of pure difference.
Pure difference, however, could never be the object of a
perception. That’s why empiricism is a
transcendental mediation, like all metaphysics. What in experience could you definitively claim was other,
alterity, future as such? All you have
is a horizon (the Greek words horizen
and horos, become through a series of
transmutations the Hegelian Begriff,
or philosophical concept). The present
(and its self-presence) seems always to have been already mediated anyway--that
just is experience--experience mediates the pure thought and pure difference--or
would do if there was any--but is there any?
Philosophy corresponds to the dream of a univocal concept while
empiricism corresponds to the dream of the absolutely idiosyncratic and
infinitely plural world of things and objects.
As philosophy since Hegel has known, they’re the same thing.
We have already seen how language functions by
virtue of the fact that the signifying element (called signifier) relates to its signified
by way of a perpetually undetermined aspect, an absent trace, which allows the
fleeting and transient phenomena called reference
to occur. I refer to this table here by
virtue of what remains undetermined in the word table. (You’ll have to take my word for the fact that there is
actually a table here that I’m pointing to, that is after all what language
makes possible, whether or not there is an actual table--anyway what do you
think my computer is sitting on?). The
difference between the word and the thing necessarily involves a gap--this is play--which, as we will go on to see,
involves both differentiality (the condition for there being differences) and
repeatability--the condition according to which a sign can signify again and
again and again, each time in a different context, potentially infinitely. Derrida’s formulation reveals a solution to
the age-old problem of the relation between the finite and the infinite
too. The finite field (of theory,
knowledge and experience generally) is finite owing to the absent, unpresentable
“something missing” that leaves it groundless.
For this same reason it is infinite too. A sign is always a substitution for another sign, with no
anchoring point, except the “something missing,” the differentiality and
infinite repeatability of the always absent trace.
What is perhaps not clear from the “Structure,
Sign and Play” article, which is specifically concerned with Levi-Strauss and
the analysis of myth, is that the formulation does not only concern
language. The total field (the world)
is replaced by a signifying structure (signs) in the same way that one sign
replaces another (cat = chat = feline
mammal). The singular condition that
allows us to represent the world to ourselves at all is the absent trace, the
gap between word and thing, the differences between signs, etc. Our experience of presence is mediated by an
absence that we can never experience as such.
This is the crucial limitation to science and to knowledge generally. However, once the nature of the limitation
has been recognised a new implication can be affirmed. If a sign is produced as an attempt to make
up for a deficiency in the field (the “something missing” of one-to-one
representation, the gap between sign and thing) then the addition of the sign
is in fact the production of a new signifying structure that cannot itself be
reduced to that which it is supposed to signify. Another way of putting this would be to point out that
structuralism doesn’t simply discover underlying structures. Rather, it adds more signifying
structure. The pattern follows what
Derrida calls supplementarity.
The supplement
must be thought of as having two mutually exclusive meanings:
1. It is a replacement
(e.g. replacing the absent centre).
2. And it is an addition, adding something new to the structure itself.
The point is, for Derrida, that there is a
remainder (an excess) of signification always remaining “unsignified” (a lack
of signification) which allows new readings in new contexts. So Derrida comes down neither on the side of
structure, nor on the side of play, but locates at the absent centre
a process that he names différance.
The Same
The easiest way into an understanding of différance is (paradoxically) through the concept of the same.
The notion of the same concerns a problem with identity, ideality, and
concept. In an article called “Plato’s
Pharmacy,” from Disseminations,
Derrida provides a commentary on the law that governs the truth of the eidos (Plato’s word for the idea). If this reading concerns the specifically
Socratic version of the law (from The
Crito) it can nonetheless easily be generalized. According to The Crito
the most worthy object of the philosophical dialogue is:
The truth of eidos
as that which is identical to itself, always the same as itself and always
simple, eidos, undecomposable,
invariable. The eidos is that which can always be repeated as the same. The ideality and invisibility of the eidos are its power-to-be-repeated. Now, law is always a law of repetition,
and repetition is always submission to a law (D 125)
A bit later on it turns out that this law of repetition (already
paradoxical in the last sentence) involves a double participation in which the
two parts (e.g., body and soul) are related to each other not through their
being separate but by the one referring back to the other as a repetition of
the same. This is a law that governs
the relationship between writing and idea: “This double participation, once
again, does not mix together two previously separate elements; it refers back
to a same that is not the identical,
to the common element or medium of any dissociation” (D 127).
The law can be outlined as follows: if there is repetition there is
sameness, and there is only repetition if it is of the same, but the repetition
of the same can never be identical.
This dissociation of the same from itself is the principle that governs
the identity of the idea (its ideality and invisibility). The idea must be able to be repeated in
order for it to always be the same idea.
But the principle and the medium of this dissociation and repetition of
the same just is writing. (Which is why
Derrida is led to call everything by the paradoxical formulation arche-writing). Elsewhere, in “Signature, Event, Context”
and in “Mes Chances” particularly,
the law of repetition is developed as the iterability of the written mark. The identifiability of the mark in its
repetition and its differentiality is what allows it to hop about from context
to context (in fact condemns it to perpetual hopping about). So the same
in Derrida is a combination of identity and difference governed by a
simultaneous repeatability and differentiality.
Différance
Différance is a term that Derrida coins on the basis of a pun that the
French language makes possible. An
understanding of this term is helpful because it can explain a lot about
Derrida’s apparently “mischievous” playing with language and ideas. I put “mischievous” in quotation marks
because many people have misunderstood the powerful implications of his witty
strategy. The pun is possible because
in French the word différer can mean
either to differ or to defer, depending on context.
1.
Différence
} to differ from
something and to defer full identity
and presence
2.
Deférence
If I was comparing two different objects of
the same generic type (this hat is different from this one) I’d use différer just as I would if I was
putting off an appointment (let’s defer it until a time when we’ll both be
free). The one, take note, implies
spatiality (difference) while the other implies temporality (deferral). What Derrida is asking us to do is to
combine both, normally mutually exclusive, meanings in the one new term différance. (Because the term has passed into the English language, at least
in theoretical registers, I’ll not be maintaining the italicised and accented
French form from now on). The pun
involves the use of the little letter a. The French différence might mean either difference or deferral. Derrida’s new term, spelt with an “a”
instead of an “e,” should be taken to mean both difference and deferral
simultaneously. The first part of the
pun we can call the performative--or auto-referential--aspect. What this means is that by both differing from
itself (it means two different things at once) and deferring until infinity any
final meaning (it cannot at any one time mean both differ and defer) the word
itself is a performance of its meaning.
Differance just is what differance means. The second part of the pun involves the fact that Derrida’s
misspelling is only noticeable when the word is written. Saying différence
and différance makes no
difference (sorry!) in French. It is
pronounced the same way with or without the alteration. What this brings to our attention is the
difference between phoneme (audible mark) and grapheme (written, visible mark)
and a certain imperceptibility of this particular difference. It is this imperceptible difference that Derrida
is using in the “Differance” article to draw our attention to the permanently
absent, inaudible and invisible trace.
So we can say that Differance is the word that Derrida coins to describe and perform
the way in which any single meaning of a concept or text arises only by the effacement
of other possible meanings, which are themselves only deferred, left over, for
their possible activation in other contexts.
Differance thus both describes
and performs the situation, or the conditions, under which all identities and
meanings can occur--so that any text can be repeated in an infinite number of
possible contexts for an infinite number of potential but undetermined
addressees. It is a powerful
modification of the ordinary notions of identity and difference. We need to explore this logic further.
Difference a
priori
Let me put the implications of the differance argument into a
formulation: it is possible to speak of things, words and concepts because it
is not possible to present the
absence that differance (which is supposedly neither a word nor a concept)
designates. Absence = difference a priori = the condition of being
different of all possible differences.
I called this, under the rubric of the same, differentiality.
Derrida claims that this is not the same as the differences between
letters. It is not the same as the
difference between grapheme and phoneme.
Nor is it the difference between word and concept. Rather he says that it is the vehicle of all
those differences. But because such an
a priori difference/absence can only be named by a word that is itself subject
to the effects of differentiality that it is trying to name, then differance is
precisely both a word and concept designating its own condition of possibility
(and impossibility).
When reading Derrida it is useful to get a sense early on of what he is
trying to say. The first thing to come
to terms with is the fact that what he is trying to say cannot in any ordinary
sense be said. To say the unsayable is
impossible. However the general message
is that without this missing unsayable thing--there would be nothing to say at
all ever and no possibility of saying it anyway. This is the possibility that Derrida calls (with characteristic
perversity but also for very good historical reasons) writing.
A commentary on “Differance”
The following paragraphs present a commentary and a reading of the
opening remarks to the essay just called “Differance.” Here’s a clue: unless you can see that there
is something permanently and necessarily missing from your understanding you’ll
be missing something important. If you
need something to hold onto you could do worse than think through the
implications of what Derrida has to say for the concept of identity. Identity is conventionally opposed to the
concept of difference. But the
opposition can take contrasting forms.
Identity can be considered as an essential and integrated unity (my
identity involves my name, my status, my hair colour and the number of my
fingers, among many other things). The
idea of a unity broken into differences is one possible traditional idea. Another one would be the idea of an identity
that could be contrasted to other identities as its differences (and for which
it too would be different). I am
different from my colleagues, my students, my family and friends and my
enemies. Any notion of difference
(whether subordinated to unity or subordinated to identity) is always a
difference subordinated, in fact, to some notion of presence (present at the
origin or a present identity). Even the
notion of an absent presence (someone or something was indeed here once but now
they are gone) is subordinated to the concept of presence (if only the having
been or will one day be--in the case of the Messiah and Mr. or Mrs.
Right). The whole notion of Being is in
fact subordinated to the concept of presence.
What has been, is now, or will one day be present adds up to Being as a
whole, according to the traditional assumptions. The arguments concerning Derrida’s made-up word differance show, however, that without a
notion of absolute absence--a negative that must be logically prior to any
presence whatsoever (like God, certainly, but nothing actually)--there would be
neither presence nor absence as we experience them. It is easy to demonstrate with language, but the implications
reach far into the ethical, political and practical realms of intellectual
life.
As we have seen, the identity that is made possible by differance (as repeatability and
differentiality combined) is the same
but not identical. Neither repeatability nor differentiality
can be made present to thought or to senses.
Differentiality does not simply mean differentiation, which is easy to
think. The absent insignificant trace
is the mark of a difference a priori.
Difference before unity, before identity. Unless we can learn to read the necessity of this a priori absent, insignificant
difference, Derrida’s writing will remain bewildering. But this is not because Derrida is a muddled
writer. To the contrary, each sentence
illustrates, through a witty play with the French word différer, a silent, insignificant, non-existent, unnoticeable
aspect that nonetheless makes it possible to play in the first place. Without this ( ) it will turn out that
nothing could have been possible in the first place. In other words, what differance names are the conditions that
make it possible to play with French words like différence (or any word at all and thus any concept). The first full paragraph alone
systematically sets out the main aspects of the argument. The paper was originally given as a talk and
the relation between talking (phonemic sounds) and writing (graphematic marks)
is a key one for the argument. In the
spoken version of the paper Derrida begins by promising to speak of something:
“I will speak, then, of a letter, the first one, if we are to believe the
alphabet and most of the speculations that have concerned themselves with
it.” The first letter of the alphabet,
the letter “a” and the alpha of the
Greeks, has a special place in the tradition.
It is supposed to be the original letter of writing, the first written
mark. What luck that it is this letter
that performs the punning effect that Derrida has found! This is an important point--it is just luck
and not anything grand or mysterious.
At this stage we should be aware that this something (the letter “A”)
might be more obscure than we’d have imagined.
Surely it is the most obvious and evident thing, a simple letter. But consider this: are we talking about the
sound we make when voicing the letter “a” or are we talking about the visible
inscription of the mark? They are two
quite different things as we know and related to each other only by virtue of
deep-seated historical and conventional usage (repetition). The relation has chance at its basis. Yet Derrida’s promise is to speak (in
phonemes) about a written letter (a grapheme).
Have a look at the next sentence:
I will speak, therefore, of the letter a, this initial letter which it has
apparently been necessary to insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the
word “difference”; and to do so in the course of a writing on writing, and also
of a writing within writing whose different trajectories thereby find
themselves, at certain very determined points, intersecting with a kind of
gross spelling mistake, a lapse in the discipline and law which regulate
writing and keep it seemly.
This sentence is yet more systematic in its idiomatic French of course
but differance also names the possibility of this less than perfect
translation. This sentence which begins
by promising speech on writing goes on in its main clause to set out what is at
stake. This is important and each
section of “Differance” will return to it.
It is the relationship between at least two forces that will later on
come to characterize a play of forces
(a writing on writing and a writing within writing). On the one hand there is a writing that regulates and on the
other there is a writing (a writing that is both on and in writing) that
apparently capitalizes on the possibility of accidents (lapses, mistakes). Differance represents this play in its
insinuation of the letter “a” where it does not belong. The naughty “a” is a meeting point between
two forces: a writing that regulates through the application of discipline, law
and convention and a writing that reveals the accidental, the chance, the
mistake, as a necessary possibility (for all writing whatsoever). This possibility is undoubtedly one of the
key aspects. The next sentence is as
follows:
One can always, de
facto or de jure, erase or reduce
this lapse in spelling, and find it (according to situations to be analyzed
each time, although amounting to the same), grave or unseemly, that is, to
follow the most ingenuous hypothesis, amusing.
What is always possible?
Correction or trivialisation (especially in this case!). It is after all just a joke. No good trying to make a mystery of this
little letter. It just happens to be
the first letter of the alphabet. All
the different effects of the play on différer
are just accidental. They are
trivial. It is always possible to
correct the mistake or to laugh it off as a joke. Notice the parenthesis has already introduced the topic of the same as differences in repetition, all
the finite particulars adding up incessantly to repetitions of each other. Is this what is so scandalous about
Differance? There is nothing special or
important about it at all. It is a
jokey play with language. It names
nothing but the possibility of jokey plays with language. But this possibility, as Derrida hints in
the next sentence, in its silence and its trivial insignificance, just is
possibility. Let’s take another look:
Thus, even if one seeks to pass over such an
infraction in silence [notice the parodic repetition of Wittgenstein], the
interest that one takes in it can be recognized and situated in advance as
prescribed by the mute irony, the inaudible misplacement, of this literal
permutation.
Let’s reconstitute the sentence that this last sentence ironically
inscribes within itself: “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in
silence.” The famous and often quoted
final proposition from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It’s a joke again, of course, and refers us
to the first words of the talk (repeated again at the start of the
paragraph). “I will speak . . .,” but that which Derrida will speak about
cannot be spoken. It is the mute a that occurs only for vision as an accidental effect of the graphematic
mark (but not the phonetic one). I will
speak about what we cannot speak about.
But that is not just a joke.
That is the topic of the essay and the aspect of it that we still find
Derrida worrying away at in much more recent works. The word-concept “differance” is an attempt to reveal the kind of
thing that is made possible by what cannot be spoken about.
A little later, Derrida anticipates an objection. Let’s have a look at
the summing up section of the paragraph preceding “it will be objected”:
The play of difference, which, as Saussure reminded
us, is the condition for the possibility and functioning of every sign, is in
itself a silent play. Inaudible is the
difference between two phonemes which alone permits them to be and to operate
as such. The inaudible opens up the
apprehension of two present phonemes such as they present themselves. If there is no purely phonetic writing, it
is that there is no purely phonetic phone. The difference which establishes phonemes
and lets them be heard remains in and of itself inaudible, in every sense of
the word.
Phonemes operate as differentiated sounds because of an inaudible
element that comes between them as the difference between them. The difference is inaudible (no possibility
of anybody ever hearing it). What
Derrida is trying to do here is to draw attention to the function of the
inaudible as difference and to show why the inaudible difference that makes it
possible to distinguish between two different sounds cannot be reduced to any
present sound whatsoever. This
inaudible difference must be possible a
priori as the possibility of all the empirical differences, the apparent
differences between sensible experiences of sound. Derrida’s proof of this is rather simple. When you write phonetically you must
incorporate lots of marks (punctuation etc.) that are not phonetic. These are graphic (and we are back with the
difference between phoneme and grapheme).
That is precisely the concern of the potential objection. Let’s have a look:
It will be objected, for the same reasons, that
graphic difference itself vanishes into the night, can never be sensed as a
full term, but rather extends an invisible relationship, the mark of an
inapparent relationship between two spectacles.
Derrida has just about reached the point where he has said everything he
needs to say. The graphic play does,
certainly, act as a kind of revenge against the primacy of speech in all those
texts he has already looked at. But the
implications are greater. Speech is not
now to be simply replaced by writing (sound is not going to simply be replaced
by graphic marks). No. Difference eludes both hearing and vision. No one has ever been able to see or to hear
a difference as such. The objection--but writing depends on invisible differences
too--in fact anticipates by repeating a generally acknowledged truism about
writing in so far as it pertains to speech too (which even then in the 1960s
was not generally acknowledged).
Derrida is not privileging writing now over speech but showing that the
conditions that apply to the one apply to other just as much. As we’re just about to find out,
furthermore, the conditions in question constitute the very relationship
between speech and writing per se.
So here is the argument so far.
Differance, with its peculiar, inaudible, illegal a, refers us to that which cannot be spoken--inaudible difference
as such without which there would be no differences for our experience (and no
spoken language). But for all the
reasons that have been given it will be objected that this applies to graphic
difference too. Well yes it does:
Doubtless.
But, from this point of view, that the difference marked in the
differ( )nce between the e and the a eludes both vision
and hearing perhaps happily suggests that here we must be permitted to refer to
an order which no longer belongs to sensibility.
It is the inaudible. It is the
blank. This is what Differance is
about. It is about nothing else. But at
this stage the stakes are in one move raised (a move almost identical to what has just gone before):
But neither can it belong to intelligibility, to the
ideality which is not fortuitously affiliated with the objectivity of theorein or understanding. Here, therefore, we must let ourselves refer
to an order that resists the opposition, one of the founding oppositions of
philosophy, between the sensible and the intelligible.
The move that disrupts the stable hierarchy of speech and writing is now
repeated in a way that disrupts the hierarchy of ideality and sensibility. What this means is that the inaudible aspect
that makes speech possible and its relation to the invisible aspect that makes
writing possible is the same as the invisible/inaudible aspect that makes perceptions
and conceptions (intuitions, images, ideas and thoughts) possible too. A series of affiliations are evoked, which
repeat another series:
concept/word sound/vision
mind/body speech/writing
intelligible/sensible phoneme/grapheme
signified/signifier form/matter
The translator, Alan Bass adds a footnote here that may be a little
misleading, which just shows how difficult it is to get this stuff across. He says:
A play of words has been lost in translation here, a
loss that makes this sentence difficult to understand. In the previous sentence Derrida says that
the difference between the e and the a of difference/differance can neither
be seen nor heard. It is not a
sensible--that is, relating to the senses--difference. But, he goes on to explain, neither is this
an intelligible difference, for the very names by which we conceive of
objective intelligibility are already in complicity with sensibility. Theorein--the
Greek origin of “theory”--literally means “to look at,” to see; and the word
that Derrida uses for “understanding” here is entendement, the noun form of entendre,
to hear.
The reason this may not necessarily be helpful is that it suggests the
order of differance (inaudible, invisible difference) cannot be intelligible because of these untranslatable semantic
or literal affiliations (theory = seeing/understanding = hearing). Derrida’s point is in fact much more
devastating. The “order that resists
these oppositions” does so because “it transports them.” Differance is the possibility of the
affiliation. It refers to that which is
neither sensible nor intelligible because 1) it cannot be seen or heard (or
tasted or smelled or felt); and 2) it cannot be thought, understood, theorized,
made the object of an empirical science, or analyzed either. But you would have no sensible experience
and no thought whatsoever without the differentiating differance that can be
neither sensed nor thought. That’s the
argument. And we’re only on the third
page.
To sum up: there are always at least two writings, one within and on the
other. The one regulates, disciplines
and forces its way by convention and rule.
The other plays, gives rise to mistakes, accidents, jokes, puns and
witty manipulations. The absent ( ) of
Differ( )nce reveals that the possibility of the latter is necessary for the
former. A correction, a trivialisation,
a passing by in silence is always possible in the face of such accidents
basically because such accidents (and such silences) must always be possible.
The order of this differ( )nce is inaudible, invisible, unthinkable but
its effects are always on each occasion among us. Traditionally this order would be something like God. But differance is an example of these
necessary effects and does not itself escape them. Is Derrida replacing the divine being (or just Being as opposed
to beings) with the possibility of accidents?
Could be. But then everything changes. There is an unthinkable, invisible,
inaudible trace without which there would be no differentiation. That is the argument. Differance attempts to think it, to make it
visible, something that one can hear.
And it fails to do this. But its
failure does illustrate its necessity.
It’s a paradoxical ground in the necessary possibility of failure.
What to Look for
In the “Differance” essay there are a series of repetitions each
involving the following characteristics:
Performance
Differance designates the effects that it is itself
effected by. The word-concept that
explains the possibility of all words-concepts cannot escape the effects it
designates. Theological word/concepts,
on the other hand, are supposed to be able to escape the effects that they make
possible. Differance is a
self-dramatization.
Delay
After-effects that must be presupposed not before the
discourse as such but as after-effect that retrospectively has to be
presupposed. A secondariness that then
has to be presupposed as being necessary a priori, that is before any
postulated beginning. The “thing”
(concept, referent) precedes the sign.
But the differentiality and repeatability of the sign precedes the
presence of the “thing” (concept, referent).
Repetitions of the same
Couples of a certain kind (body/soul, word/concept,
grapheme/phoneme, signifier/signified) generally have hanging off them a third,
hardly significant aspect, that is as it were added to the binary coupling but
which turns out to be the very principle of the coupling itself (in this
instance, writing). The formula is as follows: (concept +
speech) + writing = writing + writing (governed by repeatability and
differentiality). The secondariness of
writing is as it were doubly secondary (tertiary?).
The Law of Repetition
You know this one.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is the term that has been used to describe Derrida’s
“method.” If we accept this
provisionally as an acceptable usage (we will qualify it later) we must take
note of some important features. Like
all Derrida’s terms it has two mutually exclusive (and contradictory) meanings:
to destroy/construct. Deconstruction
does intuitively sound like a form of destruction, of taking apart, perhaps, of
undoing some construction. Many people
have agreed that some deconstruction (thought of in this way) was
necessary. The totalitarian projects of
western metaphysics, the ethical, aesthetic, epistemological projects of
post-enlightenment science, the imperialism of European countries as they
carved out their empires throughout the colonised world, the great patriarchal
domination over women--all of these structures and institutions, people agree,
need to be taken down to their foundations in order to expose their
contradictory logic. But now, the
argument goes, we need some reconstruction.
We need to put things together again in some new, more democratic
order. However this consoling sense of
reconstruction is anathema to any rigorous sense of deconstruction. Deconstruction actually names the
impossibility of setting up “perfect” or “ideal” structures. That which cannot be presented for
conception or perception takes its determination from things like the future
and from the radical alterity of the other (which in its permanent absence
guarantees the particularity of all of us finite particulars). No law could be set up to take that into its
consideration--that is the very condition of the law. Deconstruction does indicate a certain amount of what Derrida
calls “de-sedimentation,” which would imply undoing the work of sedimentation,
the consolidation that occurs with systems of thought. But this is not simply with the aim of
destroying the systems or ensembles in question. Rather, deconstruction implies reconstituting them according to
the conditions (previously hidden or made mysterious) of their institution. In giving an account of his use
of the word deconstruction Derrida
gives the following explanation: “The undoing, decomposing, and desedimenting
of structures, in a certain sense more historical than the structuralist
movement it called into question, was not a negative operation. Rather than destroying it was also necessary
to understand how an ‘ensemble’ was constituted and to reconstruct it to this
end.” So
deconstruction names something rather more powerful than simply undoing. It names the conditions according to which
it is possible for events to occur and for institutions to be constituted. We have seen at the beginning of this
chapter that Derrida has seized upon the word “event” in the work of
Levi-Strauss and his reading of Levi-Strauss affirms the radical alterity, the
“something missing,” that Levi-Strauss’s peculiar ethnology allows us to
read. In other words, in order for
structuralism to have been an event at all (something surprising,
unpredictable, that eludes the conceptions of existing orders), it was
necessary to find this “negative” space.
There is no escape from the “odds and ends” (as Levi-Strauss puts it)
that make up a cultural inheritance and, more determinedly, the historicity of
metaphysical oppositions, but one can open up this space (alterity, futurity,
negativity) in such a way that an event is welcomed and the law, the
institution, the structure, the whole conceptual apparatus, undergoes a
change. So deconstruction is never the
closing down of one institution in order to set up another in its place. Rather it is the persistent opening up of
institutions to their own alterity, towards which they are hopefully forced to
adapt. Deconstruction names the
conditions upon which it is possible for things to change. If there is a strategy, or a method to
deconstruction then it would involve opening boundaries up to an
alterity—almost literally making a negative space—that welcomes the surprise of
future events. It makes or allows
things to happen. The triumphal part of
the structuralist project, hinting at its escape from the bounds of
metaphysical thought, is treated with extreme vigilance by Derrida for, as we
have seen, the metaphysics tends to rush back in just when you’re least
expecting it (like the engineer-god as origin of his own language). What kind of term can replace the recourse
to metaphysical concepts? Can you have
theory, or even thought, without concepts?
As we have suggested the notion of alterity, the other, that “something
missing,” which is obviously not a concept, can nonetheless act against the
solidifying, or sedimenting of dogmatic thought.
Alterity is still quite a
trendy word in critical discourse but not one that is always well
understood. The reason for this is not
because it is particularly difficult to understand—it is not a complex concept
in the theoretical sense—it is just that it is supposed to designate a
structural condition that cannot in itself be understood. Alterity designates nothing real or
actual. But as a condition we could not
do without it. It is a necessary
condition. In the first instance it is
a necessary condition for what we experience in the most basic sense as
writing. Let’s stop and have a look at
the word first. It’s not yet in every
English dictionary. But there is a word
that seems to provide its root: alter.
We get the word alter from the Middle English, and that
comes from Middle French, alterer,
and from Medieval Latin alterare, and
that has passed over from the Latin alter
meaning other (of two) as in “this
one and the other one”); akin to Latin alius,
meaning other. When I take on an
alias I assume a different identity.
Current transitive senses are:
1: to make different without changing into
something else
2: castrate; spay
The intransitive
sense is: to become different
Thus alterity, which takes all
of the above into consideration (as well, please note, as the possibility of
these permutations in etymological passage), is the condition of otherness,
difference, or change. Words ending in –ity or –ability usually designate conditions that can only be grasped in
terms of the effects they describe and are supposed to make possible. So we know that texts are translatable
because we have translations and can speak in more than one language. We also know that pure or simple or literal
translation is strictly impossible.
Translatability is implicated in that impossibility (because a pure or
literal translation would be literally the
same in the sense of being identical). So translation implies as a basic condition
of possibility a certain notion of altered-ness—the translation will be
different or in some way changed from its pre-translation form. Alterity doesn’t just mean other, then, in the Latin sense (e.g.
this burger is nicer than the other one), which would imply a contrast between
two actual discrete entities. Rather it
designates the conditions upon which different discrete entities can be
compared and contrasted at all. One of
the basic conditions of a text (of any kind) is, then, that it can be
translated into different languages (languages that its author, for instance,
may not know). The text is permanently
affected by this alterity, which in other sections we’ve isolated as “something
missing” of its complete meaning (thus enabling further contexts and
translations). It takes up the space of
the otherwise absent referent, and/or sense (or signified if you are still
attached to Saussure). It gestures
forward to the future of randomly determined addressees, and backwards to the
absent origin of the text—in so far as such an origin would be in some sense
(yet to be determined) “outside the text.”
Alterity can also be considered in this way as the
always-not-yet-determined sense of a text.
The fact is, of course, that texts usually have both a sense and can be
attributed with a referent (even a fictional one). But this is only because of their essential alterity—leaving
those possibilities open. So when
Saussure tells us that “language is a system of differences with no positive
terms,” what he implies without actually being explicit about it is that
language relies, as one of its most basic conditions of possibility, on a
certain alterity—a structure that grants difference to its entities, the
individual signs.
Unlike Saussure, Derrida
focuses on this sense of alterity in its relation to repetition. In Derrida the senses of alterity and
repeatability are combined to form the notion of iterability. Iterum (likewise in Latin), which generally
composes the central moment in analogical constructions also means
altered. It signifies the combination
of a repetition (which implies sameness) and difference (which implies
alteration). A repetition is an altered
version of that which it repeats.
Another one of the main conditions for our basic sense of writing is
that it be composed of repeatable marks.
A written mark must always be identifiable as such. Sometimes cloud formations or rock
formations look as if they are composed of repeatable marks. But for something to be considered as
writing we must be able to recognise the marks (re-cognize/re-mark). The same, rather obviously—yet the
implications of this are profound—must be the case for that which the marks
signify as sense, signified, referent or whatever, as and when a mark actually
does signify something definite. That
definite meaning—a definition (de-fining or making temporarily finite) is
provisional and, again rather obviously, made possible only by the fact that
the mark of its meaning be repeatable.
The consequence is that the meaning, as a repetition of whatever minimal
sense it always has, is in fact a usually slight but potentially quite extreme
alteration of what it means in other repetitions, other incarnations. So, you see, deconstruction would not
concern simply all the different interpretations that clever readers can
manipulate by critical reading, but—perhaps more than that—it concerns the minimal ideality of signs and
texts—that which makes more or less repeatable meanings possible. The name he gives for that possibility is
iterability. A minimal ideality ensures
that a text maintains a singularity that contests any attempt to subsume it as
an example. Literary texts more than
any other kind draw attention to this—George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss would not be adequately described as an “example
of the nineteenth century novel.”
Writing always seems to be
added. I have a thought. I write it down. My thought has thus got a vehicle that allows it to roam from its
starting point to some other time and place, to you perhaps, who are now free
to take it over. However that starting
point would remain first of all a silence, a nothing, if I didn’t find some way
to express it. Thus the expression,
which is added to the thought, is not only superfluous. It is also in some sense necessary. Let’s stop and think about that. I’m using writing now a little more in
Derrida’s extended sense in so far is he has shown that all language functions
on the same conditions as writing does (iterability). So by speaking the thought I’m repeating it in a perhaps rather
different form than the one it started in.
By writing it down I repeat it again.
But then the thought too must have emerged on the same conditions as the
spoken and the written word, the conditions of iterability. It must have been repeatable (if I have
repeated it in some form) from the beginning.
So the superfluous parts of expression turn out to be the
necessary—essential—parts of the expression.
I have already pointed out that iterability, as the
double action of repeatability and alterity, cannot be considered as anything
actual or real. Yet the very nature of alterity
as a condition suggests, even conjures up, the thought of the transcendental
reality, the fabulous yonder of much religious thought. Iterability implies or suggests or evokes a
past (the original before repetition) that never was and is already on the way
to a future that is also nothing actual (rather obviously but against ideas of
predestination etc.), but which structures the experience of the present. This is why Derrida’s concepts are, as he
says, quasi-transcendental. That is,
they are not to be taken as actually transcendental but they do indicate that
all thought and action must pass through an apparently transcendental alterity
in order to have been possible in the first place.
Writing and Interpretation
Language is one of the phenomena that
Derrida attempts to generalize by the term “arche-Writing.” “Arche”
is the Greek word for origin or beginning.
It is one phenomenon among others where marks, interpretations and
meanings of all kinds, as well as actions and the experience of things in the
world generally would constitute other phenomena. So, for Derrida, there is an originary writing (on the model of
certain essential predicates attached to writing in the ordinary sense) without
which there’d be no phenomena for us at all.
Because language functions according to the conditions of its
possibility—that is, arche- or
originary- writing—then it is easy to see why writing is open to often similar
though never identical interpretations.
The very concept of interpretation already assumes this. It has always been well known that
interpretation involves seeing a text differently. That is why there have been numerous attempts to close down the
possibilities, that is, to legislate over interpretations. Sometimes these legislations are explicit
(e.g. with certain types of biblical or religious text exegesis) and, at other
times, they are internalized rules or laws like implicit assumptions, the
things one always takes for granted as “natural” or as being “common sense” yet
are thoroughly institutionalized. They
are like a kind of framework that we use to contain a picture but without
actually seeing the framework itself.
When you look at the frame you no longer see the picture in any
natural-feeling way (which spoils things for lots of people). Derrida is permanently focused on the hinges
of the frames. This is just a metaphor
but it is a metaphor for the possibility of metaphor in general too. Most frameworks of knowledge and
understanding function on the principles that allow the literary text and
figurative expressions to function as well.
So if we want to concentrate on the openness to interpretations of texts
we must also acknowledge the institutions that have deeply, historically, already
imposed powerful interpretative strategies upon our everyday reading
practices. In other words this
“openness” is hard to achieve (despite appearances) as most people tend to read
the same text under the institutionalized illusion of humanistic or democratic
differences of interpretation, which is not at all the point. All interpretations, whatsoever, are
overdetermined by multiple causes, never fully controllable or
systematisable. A responsible reading
would acknowledge this beginning in overdetermination as a basic starting
point. It leads to slow and patient
readings and a range of self-reflexive considerations about reading protocols,
assumptions and presuppositions, which certain aspects of all texts, by the
very fact of their being texts, escape, contest, resist and subvert.
Transcendental
Contraband
The only proof of a text is one that
can be grounded in a certain notion of text.
In other words all appeals to textual truth that gesture beyond the text
itself must assert a transcendental origin, system, pattern, cause or whatever. A transcendental system is one in which at
least one key concept in that system cannot be explained within the system
itself. Derrida calls this
“transcendental contraband.” It can
take numerous forms: the empirical, the context, the divine, the mathematical,
history, authorship, the work. These
have all—as has been voluminously documented—been used as anchor or center for
various modes of textual interpretation.
But they ground interpretation each time in an unverifiable assumption
determined only within a system, as its outside. The notion of text—in Derrida’s expanded sense, that is, meaning
not only language but all of what we call experience (and “experience” is one
of those transcendental contrabands too)—can be relied upon as a ground because
of its quasi-transcendental properties.
It always refers beyond what it is but never to anything actual or real
or asserted to be actual or real even though supposedly existing in some
“fabulous yonder.” What is essential
for a text to be a text is that it always remains undetermined with regard to
what we might call its future contexts.
Thus the predicates of writing include repeatability and that sameness
or minimal identity that Derrida calls difference. They stand as verifiable conditions of a
general textuality, according to which each text has a certain singularity also, its minimal identity in repetition that
cannot be compromised by any institution, interpretation or law of any kind,
but which also stands as an example of what makes laws possible in the first
place too. What in principle must
remain absent is anything that would aim to complete or to close—even
implicitly—that potential space. What
was always traditionally perceived as a deficiency (the problem of
interpretable texts or situations, the problem of justice and law, for
instance) could never be “made good.”
Derrida mobilizes this apparent deficiency as an impossibility to be
affirmed. It is that which makes
provisional justice and interpretations of all kinds possible at all. So it is demonstrable that the
transcendental opening is nothing transcendental but a necessary “something
missing” that allows interpretations and experiences of what is to come. By “demonstrable” I mean grounded in
demonstrable aspects of texts and textuality.
So a deconstructive reading might read according to the conditions of
possibility for reading as opposed to some extra-textual interpretive motive
that can always be put up against others.
Derrida works within and upon a tradition, several traditions
in fact, which he repeats in certain ways.
These traditions provide the vocabulary and terminology that we find
stretched beyond their limits in Derrida’s texts. It is important to understand the double-bind of responsibility
that his texts consistently present. A
reading could hardly be considered responsible unless it could:
1)
regard the text in its full complexity, even to the
extent of the regressus ad infinitum
(if you consider everything that must be considered in order to provide a truly
responsible reading of a text, you will never be finished), and
2)
respond to what is exorbitant in it—the beyond of
interpretation that makes interpretation both necessary and possible—though
impossible according to criterion (1)—with an exorbitance that goes beyond the
text, that reads what is missing in it, its inadequacy, its “something
missing,” in a way that maintains the sense of that “something missing.” In other words a responsible reading should
fail resolutely and exorbitantly to complete a text by interpretation.
There have throughout the long
history of written texts (i.e. all of history) been consistent attempts to fix
or to pin down meanings against the evident fact that texts tend to be
interpreted in different ways. In the
past this evident fact was more proof of the fallen nature of “Man” and the
imperfect nature of finite mortal existence.
The fact had correspondences in politics, ethics and epistemology
(knowledge) as well as in ontology (the enquiry into the basic grounds of being). Derrida points out that language is the way
it is because that is the way that it works, as part of a system of powers or
forces that produce the phenomena that are seen to be limitations on it (finite
and translatable language). These
limitations (no perfect translation, no simple interpretation) are the
resources by which language works. The
perfect and the simple turn out to be myths based on the failure to understand
why language works in that way. Why
should such a failure to understand come about? It is probably—but here we get speculative—an anxiety about
finitude and death. If language is the
way it is (blocking us from its dreamed of transcendental attributes against
which language acts as a limitation) then it must be considered as just one
example of many such systems. The whole
dreamed up transcendental realm of perfection, eternity, infinity, omniscience,
omnipotence, essence of existence, transcendental cause functions on behalf of
the refusal to grasp the most basic facts of finite existence—that finitude
positively produces the “something missing” as an inherent structural component
of experience. It is a limitation that
produces what is limited (the dream of a perfect knowledge or a perfect morality).
So the non-present space of possibility cannot
ever be made present as
such--otherwise nothing would happen.
But deconstruction has become a kind of strategy (or a number of
strategies occurring among many domains and dimensions) for outlining such a
space. At this stage we must return to
the issue of exemplification. How does
it work? How does deconstruction change
things?
There are two ways in which a text can
exemplify deconstruction. Both cases
may be understood if we shift our focus to the level of address.
Standard
Communication Model:
Addresser ® Message ® Addressee
A text would need to be
considered not simply as a message alone, standing independently of the level
of address (someone addresses a message to someone else). Rather the level of address is a major
component of the message. A message can
be regarded both at the level of statement
(it says something) and at the level of enunciation
(someone addresses someone else).
Most messages have both sense (they mean something) and a plane of
reference (they refer to some specific thing).
At the level of address (or enunciation) a text can be analysed in its
self-referential aspects, as referring to itself. Some texts do this in obvious ways. The mainstream cinema release Mrs
Doubtfire is an interesting instance of self-conscious
auto-referentiality. The story is, at
the level of its statement, a
sentimental tale of a father (Robin Williams) who would do anything to carry on
seeing his three children after having been estranged from them after
divorce. He takes on the persona of a
female housekeeper/governess/childminder, heavily yet convincingly disguised in
professional costume and make-up, and gets the job. In the meantime he works lugging canisters of film for a TV
company, though gets a break when the company director over-hears him
rehearsing his ideas for an informative yet entertaining children’s show. He is eventually found out in his Mrs.
Doubtfire guise while attempting to play both roles (housekeeper at one table
and aspiring TV actor at another during a restaurant farce). So he loses access to the children but gains
a job as a TV presenter in his Mrs Doubtfire role. Needless to say he eventually returns to the kids in the role of
their father as a full time carer. The
cinema rhetoric is fairly dancing all this time and issues of cross-dressing,
gender and sexuality, the roles of mothers and fathers etc., intrude
constantly. It comes together at the
level of enunciation, the level of address.
The lingering shots of the entertainment world, his gay brother and
friend who labour to produce his Doubtfire persona, the quickfire wit of
Williams in all his personae, all serve to draw attention to the fact that this
is about show business and thus the address is at all times an appeal to the
audience on behalf of the product itself, that is, entertainment. The Doubtfire character 1) succeeds (where
husband and wife failed) to produce fulfilled children who improve steadily at
school, and 2) his programme is responsibly educational as well as being
entertaining. These dramatic
presentations draw attention to the responsible yet entertaining role of the
media in relation to its spectators (the children). It is a message that builds in an evaluation of itself. It also, in grounding the absent real as the father beneath the disguise,
appeals to a transcendental concept of truth but only in so far as it is
contained in the form of the product, that is, theatrical entertaining
fiction. The false persona and the real
father are one and the same thing, a responsible and entertaining parent. In this sense we should be able to see that
the text attempts to legislate, in its own way, over its own conditions (of
production and reception). However the
“something missing” intervenes when we see that the film operates as a
consistent claim to responsibility only by inscribing its addressee—the
spectator—as passive child, at the mercy of good or bad parents.
In this case a message attempts
to legislate over its own conditions.
In the second kind we would witness a message that is responsible to its own conditions (the
alterity of origins and addressees). In
each case the message can be said to exemplify
its own condition, its own laws and the rules of its constitution. In the first case the constitution can be
deconstructed (and there’s barely a text that cannot). In the second case one should be able to
see, at the level of enunciation, that the text is already so constituted as to
exemplify its conditions of construction.
It would in that case simulate a presentation of its own singularity,
the alterity of its origin and the alterity of its addressee, with no appeal to
a transcendental concept that would otherwise ground it.
This logic is
intricately related to the “ideal objects” like literature and the artwork,
where the examples each tend towards
a powerful singularity. In the case of
literature this singularity is so powerful that it allows Derrida to formulate the
questions and, thus, the laws that govern iterable singularities (the laws that
govern the iterability of singularities generally--which is already a
paradox). In an interview with Derek
Attridge, first published in Acts of
Literature, Derrida says:
What is fascinating is perhaps the event of a singularity powerful
enough to formalize the questions and theoretical laws concerning it. [He comes back to the word power later in the interview]. The “power” that language is capable of, the
power that there is, as language or
as writing, is that a singular mark should also be repeatable, iterable, as
mark. It then begins to differ from
itself sufficiently to become exemplary and thus involve a certain generality. This economy of exemplary iterability is of
itself formalizing. It also formalizes
or condenses history.
A text by
Shakespeare or Joyce is a powerful condensation of history (i.e., an example on
the paradigmatic axis) but it is also an absolutely singular event. There is an absolutely singular and
untranslatable uniqueness, which because it is iterable as such, “both does and
does not form part of the marked set.”
The implications of this fact are directed here to science. In learning to understand these laws (which
may be something like learning to read Derrida’s texts) one ought to recognize
that their formalization can never be finished, brought to an end, closed down
or completed. He points out that “to
insist on this paradox is not an antiscientific gesture.” It is done in the name of a kind of science
that would refuse to ignore the paradoxes of its own common sense or reason.
Suggested reading for Derrida and Deconstruction:
Introductory
Reading:
Wolfreys, Julian. Deconstruction.Derrida. London: Macmillan, 1998.
Bennington, Geoff and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoff
Bennington. Chicago: CUP, 1993.
Payne, Michael, Reading Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
For
Derrida’s reading of Saussure see “Linguistics
and Grammatology” in
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology Trans.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1974.
For “Structure, Sign and Play,” look in
Writing and Difference and for “Différance” look in Margins of
Philosophy (both listed below).
Texts by Derrida:
Derrida, Jacques. Positions.
Trans. Alan Bass. London:
Athlone, 1987.
---. The Other Heading. Indiana
University Press, 1992.
---.Margins
of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Brighton: Harvester, 1988.
---The
Truth in Painting. Trans Geoff Bennington. Chicago: CUP, 1987.
---.Writing
and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1980.
Readers
Peggy Kamuf, ed. Derrida: A Reader Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1992.
Attridge, Derek, ed. Acts
of Literature. London: Routledge,
1992.
A collection of essays (including one
by Derrida himself) about Derrida may
be found in
Wood, David, ed. Derrida: A Critical Reader. London: Blackwell, 1992.
Other Texts About Derrida
Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction. Indiana: IUP, 1993.
Cornell, Drucilla. Philosophy of the Limit. London: Routledge, 1992.
Gasche,
Rudolph. The Tain of the Mirror.
Harvard University Press, 1988.
Check out
these Web Sites:
Derrida, the Pop Culture
Derrida Site, with lots of useful links
Jacques
Derrida: more good links for Derrida
My own
engagement continues with the NEW Deconstruction
in Terms
And there’s
always the notorious Lemmata