Prof: So anyway, to get launched on today's
topic, obviously we confront one of the more formidable figures
on our syllabus, a person who recently passed
away and who in his last years and into the present has had a
kind of second life as a person who in his later work didn't at
all repudiate his earlier thoughts or indeed his earlier
style, but nevertheless did begin to
apply central aspects of his thinking to ethical and
political issues.
He and a number of other writers like,
for example, the Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben, are the figures whom we
identify with what's called "the ethical turn"
in thinking about texts, literature and other matters
that is very much of the current moment.
Hence Derrida's reputation and the tendency of people
interested in theory to read him is alive and well today,
but the materials that we are reading for this sequence of
lectures date back much earlier.
The essay that you read in its entirety for today,
"Structure, Sign and Play in the Language
of the Human Sciences," was delivered on the occasion
of a conference about "the sciences of man"
at Johns Hopkins University in 1966.
It was an event that was really meant to be a kind of coronation
of Claude Levi-Strauss, whose work had burst upon the
American scene only a few years earlier.
Levi-Strauss was there.
He gave a talk, he was in the audience,
and Derrida's essay was widely taken--
far from being a coronation of Levi-Strauss--
as a kind of dethroning of Levi-Strauss.
I have to tell you that Levi-Strauss,
who is still alive, a very old man,
expresses great bitterness in his old age about what he takes
to be the displacement of the importance of his own work by
what happened subsequently.
What happened subsequently can, I think, be traced to Derrida's
lecture.
One of the million complications of thinking about
this lecture and about Derrida's work in general--
and, for that matter, about deconstruction--
is indeed to what extent it really is a significant
departure from the work of structuralism.
There is a self-consciousness in the thinking about structure
that we find in many places in Levi-Strauss that Derrida freely
acknowledges in his essay.
Again and again and again he quotes Levi-Strauss in
confirmation of his own arguments,
only then in a way to turn on him by pointing out that there
is something even in what he's saying there that he hasn't
quite thought through.
So it is not anything like, even as one reads it in
retrospect, a wholesale repudiation or even really a
very devastating critique of Levi-Strauss.
Derrida, I think, freely acknowledges in this
essay the degree to which he is standing on Levi-Strauss's
shoulders.
In any case, this extraordinary event in the
imaginations of people thinking about theory in the West did,
however, tend to bring about a sense of almost overnight
revolution from the preoccupation we had in the
mid-sixties with structuralism to the subsequent preoccupation
we had throughout the seventies and into the early eighties with
deconstruction.
Derrida was, of course, a central figure in
this.
He was here at Yale as a visitor in the spring for many
years.
He influenced a great many people whose work is still
current throughout the United States and elsewhere.
He--after that--had a comparable arrangement with the
University of California at Irvine and his influence there
continued, a key figure whom many of us
remember from his period at Yale as a galvanizing presence.
The idea that there was what was called by one critic a
"hermeneutical mafia" at Yale arose largely from the
presence of Derrida together with our own Paul de Man and,
more loosely connected with them, Geoffrey Hartman and
Harold Bloom-- and also a scholar named J.
Hillis Miller, whose departure for the
University of California, Irvine resulted also in
Derrida's decision to go there and be with Miller rather than
to continue to stay here.
That was the so-called Yale school.
It generated extraordinary influence in some circles but,
well beyond its influence, an atmosphere of hostility
which had in many ways to do, I think, with what might still
be called "the crisis in the humanities"
as it is widely understood by state legislators and boards of
trustees as somehow or another something needing to be
overcome, backed away from,
and forgotten >
in the development of the humanities in academia.
The reasons for this we can only imply,
I think, probably, in the context of a course of
this nature, but are nevertheless
fascinating and will recur as we think not just about
deconstruction itself but about the sorts of thinking that it
has influenced.
Now you have now read some Derrida.
You've read all of one essay and you've read part of another,
difficult.
Indeed, in addition to finding him very difficult you've
probably said, "Why does he have to write
like that?"
In other words, "Yeah, okay.
He's difficult, but isn't he making it more
difficult than it needs to be?"
you say to yourself.
"I've never seen prose like this,"
you say.
"This is ridiculous.
Why doesn't he just say one thing at a time?"
you might also want to say.
Well, of course it's all deliberate on his part,
and the idea is that deconstruction is,
as a thought process, precisely a kind of evasive
dance whereby one doesn't settle for distinct positions,
for any sort of idea that can be understood as governed--
this is what "Structure, Sign and Play"
is all about-- as governed by a blanket term,
what Derrida often calls a "transcendental
signified."
We'll have much more to say about this.
Derrida's prose style--its kind of a crab-like,
sideways movement around an argument--
is meant as rigorously as it can to avoid seeming to derive
itself from some definite concept,
because, of course, deconstruction is precisely the
deconstruction of the grounds whereby we suppose our thinking
can be derived from one or another definite concept.
Also--this is to be kept in mind, and this is of course one
of the key distinctions between Derrida and de Man--
we'll have more to say about distinctions between them on
Tuesday: Derrida is not a literary theorist.
Though he sometimes does talk about texts that we call
"literary," indeed he very often does,
nevertheless Derrida's position and the logic of that position
suggest that we can't really reliably discriminate among
genres.
In other words, we can't use genre
either as a blanket term; and therefore he is one of the
people-- one of the most influential
people in persuading us that there's no such thing as
literature, legal texts,
theological texts, philosophical texts,
or scientific texts.
There is discourse, and to think about the field of
texts is to think about something which is full of
difference.
>
Needless to say, it's the central word in
Derrida, which is nevertheless not
classifiable or categorizable, and so for that reason we can't
really say Derrida is specifically a literary
theorist.
Now I've been talking so far about difficulty and confusion,
but in view of the fact that we're all in a state of tension
about this-- I'm in a state of tension about
it too-- let me remind us that we've
already been doing deconstruction and that much of
what's problematic in reading Derrida really has already been
explained.
Let's begin with a kind of warm-up sheet which we can
anchor in these little drawings I've made [gestures towards
chalkboard].
Obviously, you look at these drawings and you say,
"Ah ha.
That's the vertical axis," right?
Of course, once we get to feminism, feminism will have
certain ideas of its own about the vertical axis.
We will be getting into that when the time comes.
In the meantime the Eiffel Tower [gestures towards
chalkboard] is a wonderful way of showing
the degree to which the vertical axis is virtual.
That is to say, if you ever saw a dotted line
standing upright, it's the Eiffel Tower.
There's nothing in it.
It's empty.
It's transparent.
Yet somehow or another, if you're at the top of it--
if you're in the viewing station at the top of the Eiffel
Tower-- suddenly all of Paris is
organized at your feet.
That is to say, it's a wonderful axis of
combination that you're looking at.
It is just there with its landmarks,
not having the same kind of status as that which you are
standing on, but rather just in a kind of
row as the key signs, as it were, of the skyline of
Paris: so you get the Notre Dame,
the Arc de Triomphe and so on, all sort of lined up in a row,
and there it is.
Guy de Maupassant in a famous anecdote complained rather
bitterly about this, according to Roland Barthes in
an essay called "The Eiffel Tower":
Maupassant often ate at the restaurant in the tower [up here
someplace] [gestures towards the
chalkboard] even though he didn't
particularly like the food.
"It's the only place," he said,
"where I don't have to see it."
In other words, if--as Saussure says,
once again--we "put both feet squarely on the
ground" of the Eiffel Tower,
we're liberated from the idea that somehow or another it's a
governing presence.
If we're actually there, we no longer have to worry
about the way it organizes everything around it into a kind
of rigorous unfolding pattern.
After all, there's a very real sense in which we infer the
Eiffel Tower from its surroundings.
It's built in the nineteenth century.
It's by no means causative of the skyline of Paris.
It's something that comes in belatedly just as langue
comes in belatedly with relation to speech.
The Eiffel Tower is a virtuality that organizes
things, as one might say, arbitrarily.
Sort of as a reflection on these same ideas,
you get the famous poem of Wallace Stevens.
I am sure you recognize this as Stevens' "Anecdote of the
Jar," but I will quickly quote to you the poem.
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around,
no longer wild.
[As Derrida would say, the center limits free play,
right?] The jar was round upon the
ground And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
In other words, it is arbitrarily placed in the
middle of the free play of the natural world,
a free play which is full of reproductive exuberance,
full of a kind of joyous excess which is part of what Derrida's
talking about when he talks about what's "left
over": the surplusage of the sign,
the supplementarity of the sign.
There's an orgasmic element in what Derrida has in mind,
so that when he speaks of "the seminal adventure of
the trace," toward the end of your essay,
you want to put some pressure on that word
"seminal."
Well, in any case the jar is just arbitrarily in the middle
of that, organizing everything without participating in the
nature of anything.
It is, in other words, a center which is outside the
structure: "a center which is not a center,"
and we'll come back to that in a minute.
Now the Twin Towers--and I first started using this example
decades before 2001-- the Twin Towers have a kind of
poignancy and pathos today that they would not have had then;
but what they suggest is in a way today--which overwhelms us
with grief--the ephemerality of the vertical axis.
The Twin Towers had the same function in New York that the
Eiffel Tower has in Paris.
It was a wonderful place from which to see the city,
a wonderful place from which to feel that everything was
organized at its feet.
There's a very fine essay about the Twin Towers--again,
long before 2001--by Michel de Certeau, which makes this
argument in sustained form.
I recommend it to you.
In any case, it's another example that we
can take from our experience of the uneasy sense we may have
that to infer a spatial moment from which the irreducibly
temporal nature of experience is derived--
to infer a moment from the fact of this experience
as a necessary cause of it--
is always problematic.
It always necessarily must, as Derrida would say,
put this sense of a spatial full presence of everything
there at once in systematic order--
as Derrida would say, must put that "under
erasure."
In other words, in a certain sense you can't do
without it.
Derrida never really claims that you can do without it.
If you want to get a sense of structure,
you've got to have some sort of inference of this nature,
but at the same time it had better be in quotes
because it is always tenuous, ephemeral, dubious even as to
its existence, and necessarily needs to be
understood in that way.
All right.
Now other ways in which we've already been involved in the
subject matter of what you've been reading today:
take a look at page 921, a couple of passages in which
Derrida is quoting Levi-Strauss on the nature of myth.
Once having quoted you these two passages from Levi-Strauss,
here's where I'll return just for a moment to Levi-Strauss's
analysis of the Oedipus myth and show you how it is that Derrida
is both benefiting from what Levi-Strauss has said and
ultimately able to criticize Levi-Strauss's position.
Bottom of the left-hand column, page 921:
"In opposition to epistemic discourse [that is to
say, the kind of discourse which has
some principle or transcendental signified or blanket term as its
basis-- in other words,
something which in a given moment makes it possible for all
knowledge to flow from it], structural discourse on
myths--mythological discourse--
must itself be mythomorphic.
It must have the form of that of which it speaks."
[And Derrida then says] This is what
taken from one of Levi-Strauss' most famous books]
The Raw and the Cooked. I just want to quote the end of
it, the middle of the right-hand column, still on page 921.
Levi-Strauss says: "In wanting to imitate the
spontaneous movement of mythical thought,
my enterprise, itself too brief and too long,
has yet to yield to its demands and respect its rhythm.
Thus is this book on myths itself and in its own way a
myth."
In other words, here is a moment when
Levi-Strauss is admitting something about his own work
which he is not admitting in his analysis of the Oedipus myth in
the essay from Structural Anthropology that you read
last time.
What Levi-Strauss is saying here is that his approach to
myth is itself only a version of the myth.
That is to say, it participates in the mythic
way of thinking about things.
It uses what in the Structural Anthropology
essay he calls "mythemes"
or "gross constituent units" of thought.
It deploys and manipulates those gross constituent units of
thought in the ways that we saw, but notice what Levi-Strauss is
saying in that essay as opposed to the passage
Derrida has just quoted.
He says in effect, "This form of the myth is
scientific.
One of the versions that I have made use of to arrive at this
scientific conclusion is, for example,
Freud's version of the Oedipus myth.
In other words, Freud, Sophocles,
all of the other versions I have at my disposal,
have equal merit as versions, but none of them is a
transcendental signified, none of them is a blanket term,
and none of them is the causal explanation or meaning of the
myth.
The meaning of the myth is discoverable only in my
science."
Now, of course, Freud himself thought he was a
scientist, and his reading of the myth was also supposed to be
scientific.
What was Freud's reading of the myth about?
Two or one!
>
It was, in other words, about the problem of incest,
the problem of the over-determination of blood
relations and the under-determination of blood
relations.
It was a thorough examination of that problematic leading to
the conclusion that that's what the myth was about.
In other words, Levi-Strauss's conclusions are
already anticipated in Freud.
Furthermore, what is Levi-Strauss doing?
He's denying the influence of Freud, right?
It's my myth, not his myth--right?--which of
course is precisely what happens in the primal horde.
It is a perfect instance of the Oedipus complex.
Levi-Strauss is repudiating the father and,
in repudiating the father, showing himself to fall into
the very mythic pattern that Freud had been the first to
analyze.
Okay?
So when you say that what you're doing is scientific in a
context of this sort, you are making yourself
vulnerable.
The moments in this essay in which Derrida is criticizing
Levi-Strauss are those moments in which Levi-Strauss has
unguardedly said something on the order of "My work is
scientific"; but there are lots of
occasions, and he always quotes Levi-Strauss to this
effect, when Levi-Strauss is not saying
that-- when Levi-Strauss is conceding
that his work, that is to say his viewpoint,
disappears unstably into the thing viewed.
All right.
Now also take a look at--because we've been doing
this too-- take a look at page 917,
the left-hand column, where Derrida is talking not
about Levi-Strauss but about Saussure.
Here he's talking about the nature of the sign,
and he is concerned, very much concerned,
about this relationship between the concept and the sound
image-- which is to say,
the signified and the signifier--
that is the basis of the science of Saussure:
that is to say, the relationship that's
involved in the pairing of signified and signifier is the
basis, the cornerstone,
of the science of Saussure.
So here's what, a little more than halfway
down, the left-hand column, page 917, Derrida has to say
about that.
He says: … [T]he signification
"sign" has always been comprehended
and determined, in its sense,
as sign-of, signifier referring to a signified,
signifier different from its signified.
If one erases the radical difference between signifier and
signified, it is the word signifier itself
which ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept [which is
to say, a transcendental signified:
in other words, the idea that the concept in
some sense generates the signifier--
right?--which is the basis of Saussure's thinking about this].
Here's where I come back to that example that I already gave
you with a question mark next to it when I was talking about
Saussure.
Suppose I think of the relationship between
"signified" and "signifier"
as the relationship between two terms--
because after all, one way of signifying the
concept "tree" [gestures towards the board]
is to write the word "tree"
and put quotation marks about it.
So if I take away the quotation marks, all I have is the word
with no indication that it's a concept.
Notice that this is now a relationship which Jakobson
would call "metalingual."
What it suggests is that "tree"
is another word for "arbor."
In other words, it's a relationship not between
a signified and a signifier but between a signifier and a
signifier, so that the binarism of the
relationship is broken down, and we begin to understand the
combinatory structure of speech or writing as one signifier
leading to another-- I think-- signifier:
Derrida says in effect, "Let's banish the word
'signifier,'" but he might as well say,
"Let's banish the word 'signified.'"
I think a signifier, and it triggers by
association--as Saussure would say--
it triggers by association a subsequent successive signifier,
which triggers another, which triggers another.
That's what gives us, in the language of
deconstruction, what we call "the
chain," the signifying chain: not an organizational
pattern but an ever self-replicating and
self-extending pattern, irreducibly linear and
forward-progressing through a sequence of temporal
associations.
One of the things that happens when you demystify the
relationship between a concept and a signifier or a sound image
is that you also demystify the relationship between a
set of associations, which exist somehow in space,
and the way in which association actually takes
place, which is necessarily in time:
in other words, if one signifier leads to
another--if like history, where there's one damn thing
after another, speech is one damn signifier
after another-- then that is actually the
nature of the associations that Saussure has been talking about
in the first place.
But it doesn't exist in a systemic space;
it exists in an unfolding time, right?
These are some of the implications of no longer being
satisfied with the way in which a sign can be understood as a
concept to which we attach belatedly a signification,
a signifier.
What we have is a situation in which we find ourselves caught
up in a stream of signification, all of which is,
in a certain sense, there before we came along and
are moved, as down a stream,
by the way in which one signifier succeeds another in
ways that later on, as we take up concepts like
we can think of a little bit more precisely.
Okay.
So now finally then, there's one other way in which
Derrida's essay from the very outset confirms what we've been
saying about the crisis of structuralism being the need to
deny ordinary understandings of genesis or cause.
In structuralism, if something emerges,
it emerges from between two things.
That is to say, it's not this and it's
not this, or it "emerges"
as that which is not this, not this.
It doesn't, in other words, derive from an antecedent
single cause as an effect.
It emerges, on the other hand, as difference within a field.
Now that's what Derrida is talking about with extraordinary
intensity of complication in the first paragraph of your essay,
page 915, left column, first paragraph:
his first words uttered at the famous conference in- at Johns
Hopkins in 1966.
He says: Perhaps something has occurred
in the history of the concept of structure that could be called
something which emerges, something which is there now
and wasn't there before]… That's the most problematic
issue for structuralism.
When structuralism thinks about how yesterday things were
different from the way they are today,
it has to say: yesterday there was a certain
synchronic cross-section of data,
and today there's a slightly different synchronic
cross-section of data.
But structuralism is unable and furthermore--
much more importantly--unwilling to
say anything about how yesterday's data turned into
today's data-- in other words,
to say anything about change.
It sees successive cross-sections,
and it calls that "history."
I am anticipating here, and we'll come back to this in
other contexts: but it doesn't say "one
thing led to another"; it says "one thing after
another"--in my facetious reference to history as I have
already given it to you.
Now this is what Derrida is deliberately struggling with in
this first paragraph: … an "event"
[quote, unquote], if this loaded word
did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of
structural-- or structuralist--thought to
reduce or to suspect.
But let me use the term "event"
[quote, unquote] anyway, employing it with
caution and as if in quotation marks.
In this sense, this event will have the
exterior form of a rupture [that is to say,
an emergence among things, right--a rupture:
the volcano parts and there you have lava,
right--an event] and a redoubling [a
redoubling in the sense that "something has
happened"].
As Bob Dylan would say in effect, "Something has
happened, but it's not something new.
It is, in fact, a replication of what was
unbeknownst to you because, Mr.
Jones, you don't know very much of what was,
unbeknownst to you, there always--as Derrida says--
already: something that emerges but at the same time presses on
us its status as having already been there,
always already been there."
All right.
So in all these sorts of ways, understanding structuralism as
a problematic critique of genesis--
because it's still very hard to grasp,
to accept the notion of things not having been caused--
why can't we say things were caused,
just for example?--the notion of the sign as an arbitrary
relationship between a substratum of thought which is
then somehow or another hooked onto a derivative series or a
system of signifiers; the notion of getting outside
of myth and being scientific, and the notion that we can
ascribe reality to the vertical axis--
all of these are ways of questioning the integrity,
the security within its skin, of structuralism we have
actually already undertaken.
I only want to suggest to you with this long preamble that
much of the work that lies before us is actually in the
past and we have already accomplished it.
Now "Structure, Sign and Play"
is a critique of "structurality."
It's not just a critique of structuralism.
It's a critique of the idea of anything that has a center,
one which is at the same time an enabling causal principle.
In other words, I look at a structure and I say
it has a center.
What do I mean by a center?
I mean a blanket term, a guiding concept,
a transcendental signified, something that explains the
nature of the structure and something also,
as Derrida says, which allows for limited free
play within the structure; but at the same time the
structure has this kind of boundary nature.
It may be amoeboid but it still has boundaries--right?--and so
at the same time limits the free play within the structure.
That's like the New Critics saying that a text has
structure.
It has something that actually in the phenomenological
tradition is called an "intentional
structure."
Kant calls it "purposiveness"--
that is to say, the way in which the thing is
organized according to some sort of guiding pattern.
But to speak of an intentional structure as a center is not at
all the same thing as to speak of an intending person,
author, being, or idea that brought it into
existence, because that's extraneous.
That's something prior.
That's genesis.
That's a cause, right?
The intending author, in other words,
is outside, whereas we can argue that the intentional
structure is inside.
But that's a problem.
How do you get from an intending author to an
intentional structure and back?
A center is both a center and not a center,
as Derrida maddeningly tells us.
It is both that which organizes a structure and that which isn't
really qualified to organize anything, because it's not
in the structure; it's outside the structure,
something that imposes itself from without like a cookie
cutter on the structure, right?
This then is an introductory moment in Derrida's thinking
about centers.
On page 916 in the lower left-hand column,
he talks about the history of metaphysics as a history of
successive appeals to a center: that is to say,
to some idea from which everything derives,
some genesis or other that can be understood as responsible for
everything that there is.
The list is very cunningly put together.
This is bottom of the left-hand column.
It's not necessarily chronological,
but at the same time it gives you a sense of successive
metaphysical philosophers thinking about first causes,
origins, and about whatever it is that determines everything
else.
I'll just take up the list toward the end:
"transcendentality, consciousness,
or conscience, God, man, and so forth."
Notice that though the list isn't strictly chronological,
man nevertheless does succeed God.
In other words, he's thinking about the
development of Western culture.
In the Middle Ages and to some extent in the Early Modern
period, we live in a theocentric world.
Insofar as he understands himself as man at all,
man understands himself as a product of divine creativity,
as something derived from God, as one entity among all other
entities who participate and benefit from the divine
presence.
But then of course, the rise of the Enlightenment
is also the rise of anthropocentrism,
and by the time the Enlightenment is in full cry you
get everybody from Blake to Marx to Nietzsche saying not that God
invented man, but that man invented God.
Man has become the transcendental signified.
Everything derives now in this historical moment from human
consciousness, and all concepts of whatever
kind can be understood in that light.
But then of course he says, having said "man,"
>
he says "and so forth."
In other words, something comes after man.
Man is, in other words, an historical moment.
There are lots of people who have pointed out to us that
before a certain period, there was no such thing as man,
and in a variety of quite real senses,
after a certain moment in the history of culture,
there is also no such thing as man.
The argument Derrida is making about the emergence of his
"event" is that a new transcendental
signified has actually substituted itself for man.
In other words, the world is no longer
anthropocentric; it's linguistic.
Obviously, the event that Derrida is talking about--the
emergence, the rupture, an event which makes a
difference--is the emergence of language.
What I really want to talk about here is something that is
on page 916, the right-hand column:
The moment [of emergence--the event,
in other words, about halfway down]
was that in which language invaded the universal
problematic [in other words, that moment in which language
displaced the previous transcendental signified,
which was man]; that in which,
in the absence of a center or origin,
everything became discourse--provided we can agree
on this word-- that is to say,
when everything became a system where the central signified,
the original or transcendental signified,
is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.
He's making a claim for language while erasing
it.
In other words, he's painfully aware that
language is just the new God, the new Man.
Many critiques of deconstruction take the form of
saying that deconstruction simply instrumentalizes
language, gives it agency,
and gives it consciousness as though it were God or man and
then pretends that it isn't.
This is a common response to deconstruction.
Derrida is aware of it in advance.
He says in effect, "Look, I know we're running this risk
in saying everything is language,"
or, if you will here,
everything is discourse.
At the same time, we are saying something
different, because hitherto we had this
problem: in other words, we had the problem of something
being part of a structure--
that is to say God is immanent in all things,
human consciousness pervades everything that it encounters--
in other words, something which is part of a
structure but which is at the same time outside of it.
God creates the world and then sort of, as Milton says himself,
"uncircumscrib'd withdraws,"
right?
God is not there.
God is the hidden God who is absent from the world and is,
in effect, also the structure of the world.
The same thing can be said of man.
Man brings the sense of what the world is into being and then
stands aside and somehow sort of takes it in through an aesthetic
register or in some other remote way.
Language doesn't do that.
Language is perpetually immersed in itself.
Derrida is claiming that language is different in the
sense that it makes no sense to talk about it as standing
outside of what's going on.
This is an essential part of the critique of structuralism.
Language is not other than speech;
it is perpetually manifest in speech, right?
It's simply a distinction that can't be maintained,
which is why he calls it an "event."
In other words, something of significance has
happened, Mr.
Jones, and that is language, right?
All right.
So I suppose in the time remaining and,
alas, there isn't a lot of it, we'd better ask what
"language" is.
We've talked about it.
We've had a great deal to do with it, but of course we still
haven't the slightest idea what it is.
Soon we'll know.
First of all, we'd better say,
as is already clear from what we've been quoting,
language is not quite Saussurian.
That is to say, it is not a system of signs
understood as stable relationships between a concept
world and a world of signifying.
It is not a world in which language can be understood as
somehow or another a means of expressing thought.
Deconstruction calls into question the distinction between
language and thought in calling into question the distinction
between signifier and signified, so it's not quite
Saussuria--even though, as Derrida says,
it can't do without a Saussurian vocabulary.
Another problem is--and also related to the critique of
Saussure-- is that this idea that what's
inward, what is essential,
is something that can be voiced and should be
voiced; so that if I think a sign is a
way of talking about the expression of a thought,
notice that I call--if I am Saussure--
that expression a "sound image."
In other words, language, according to Derrida,
in the Saussurian tradition seems to privilege sound over
script, over what is graphic.
He claims that this is a hidden bias in the whole history of
metaphysics.
Why, in other words, should we think of language as
speech, as voice?
Why do we think of voice--in the sense of the divine
logos, the word: "in the
beginning was the word"-- why do we think of voice as a
kind of fully present simultaneity that is absolutely
present precisely in consciousness or wherever it is
that we understand language to derive from?
What's so special about voice?
Why do they say all of these terrible things about writing?
Writing is no different from voice.
Voice, too, is articulated combinatorially in time.
Voice, too, can be understood as inscribed on the ear.
This is a metaphor that Derrida frequently uses,
as a kind of writing on the ear.
The distinction, which Derrida takes to be
metaphysical, that Saussure wants to make
between something primary, something immediate and
underivative-- voice--and something merely
repetitious, merely reproductive,
merely a handmaiden to voice-- namely writing--needs to be
called into question.
Now this is the point at which we need to say something about a
number of key terms that Derrida uses to sustain this sort of
criticism of traditional ideas of language.
The first has to do with the notion of supplementarity.
A supplement, he points out,
is something that either completes something that isn't
complete or adds to something that already is complete.
For example, I take vitamin C.
I also drink a lot of orange juice,
so I've got plenty of vitamin C, and if I take a vitamin C
pill I am supplementing something that's already
complete; but if I don't drink any orange
juice, then of course if I take a
vitamin C pill I am supplementing something that's
not complete, but either way we always call
it a supplement.
It's very difficult even to keep in mind the conceptual
difference between these two sorts of supplement.
Now a sign traditionally understood is self-sufficient,
self-contained.
Saussure has made it a scientific object by saying that
it's both arbitrary and differential,
but a sign understood under the critique of deconstruction is
something that is perpetually proliferating signification,
something that doesn't stand still,
and something that can't be understood as self-sufficient or
independent in its nature as being both arbitrary and
differential.
It is a bleeding or spilling into successive signs in such a
way that it perpetually leaves what Derrida calls
"traces."
That is to say, as we examine the unfolding of
a speech act, we see the way in which
successive signs are contaminated.
That's not meant to be a bad word but suggests being
influenced, one might say,
in the sense of "open the window and influenza,"
by those signs that precede it.
Supplementarity is a way of understanding the simultaneously
linear and ever proliferating, ever self-complicating nature
of verbal expression.
of talking about the difference between voice and writing.
There is a difference between voice and writing even though
they have so much in common.
Voice and writing, by the way, are not a stable
binary.
There are no stable binaries in Derrida.
The difference between voice and writing is that writing can
give us all kinds of indication of difference that voice can't
give us.
Part of the interest of misspelling
is that we can't, in terms of voice as sound,
Actually, one can, slightly, but it's not a
difference worth lingering over.
with its substitution of the a--
and remember the riff in the essay
as alpha, as origin, and as killing the king because
the king, remember, is the transcendental
signified: God, man and so forth.
of those things is something that we can only pick up if we
understand language as writing, because in speech these modes
of difference don't register.
linguistic system, a system of differences
understood as spatial: that is to say,
understood as available to us as a kind of smorgasbord as we
stand in front of it.
deferral and reminds us that difference--
that is to say, our understanding of
difference, our means of negotiating
difference-- is not something that's
actually done in space; it's done in time.
When I perceive a difference, I perceive it temporally.
I do not understand the relation among signs as a
simultaneity.
I want to, if I want to pin it down scientifically,
but in the actual--as Joyce would say--
stream of consciousness, I understand difference
temporally.
I defer difference.
I unfold.
I successively negotiate difference, and in doing that I
All right.
There a couple of things that I want to say about the key moves
of Derrida.
I will mention those next time.
I will also look over my notes and see what I might say further
about these troublesome terms and their relation to Derrida's
understanding of language so that Tuesday our introduction
will still have to do with Derrida and then we'll move into
thinking about de Man.