Grammatologist, Denture Wearer...

At the beginning of "Linguistics and Grammatology" Derrida contrasts the scientific background of linguists with the more humanities-based background of grammatologists. Who are the grammatologists? I didn't realize this was a field. What are some names?

Ha, ha

From "Linguistics and Grammatology" page 29.

That the particularity of the example [of Ferdinand de Saussure] does not interfere with the generality of my argument is a point which I shall occasionally try not merely to take for granted.

I've been told that beneath Derrida's elephantine prose there's an impish sense of humor at work, but this is the first passage that made me crack a smile.

A Guy Can Dream, Can't He?

From "Linguistics and Grammatology", page 28.

It is all the more surprising that, among the "sciences of man," linguistics is the one science whose scientificity is given as an example with a zealous and insistent unanimity.

Emphasis mine.

Precis of "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing"

This chapter is divided into three relatively independent sections:

1. The Program...A claim that writing has superseded speech, and the notion of writing has been broadened to include many different channels/media, including "cybernetics"—which makes you wonder what sort of mid-60s whirring tape drives and punch cards Derrida had in mind. Most interesting for a broadened definition of "writing". Somewhat melodramatic tone which I guess I'll just get used to.
2. The Signifier and Truth...Generally anti the notion of the "transcendental signified", which I take to be something that lies outside the system of differnces that enables a semiotic system. Discussion of where the T.S. has been located historically. Allusions to "theological" notions, i.e. the transcendental signified is God. The notion of God reminds me of Descartes' ontological argument (I think I'm remembering correctly) where "God" ends up getting identified with an infinite set of properties, one of which must be existence, which means he must be real, so there, or Bishop Berekeley's answer to, you know, "Does a tree stop existing as soon as no one is looking at it?" "Ah no, because God is still looking at the tree." The implication seems to be that any attempt to locate a referent outside the system of signification is no less naive than this 17th century God-as-ad-hoc-philosophical-catch-all lameness. Anyway, Derrida then moves on to discuss the presumption that the spoken word has a more direct access to truth than the written word. Like the former can be trusted. Advances this argument by tracing the history of the nature-as-the-speech-of-God metaphor (or book written by God, God being the only written source we can trust). The claim that people have historically accorded speech more authority than writing doesn't ring true to me, but let's go with it. Regardless, Derrida is trying to throw doubt on the notion of some external incontrovertible ground for philosophical truth.
3. The Written Being/The Being Written...An attempt to throw doubt on the notion of ontology in general by making the signified of "being"—both the common verb and Heiddiger's technical term "Being"—murky. I didn't follow this because I don't have the background in Heiddiger. I found it helpful when Derrida referenced "transcendental" and "epochal" signifiers, because it gave me a sense of what the adjective "transcendental" might mean in this context. (Seems analogous to a mathematician's "global" vs. "local".)

Okay, so yeah, Derrida is very opaque, he doesn't define his terms, there are no simple examples, and his prose is an uninterrupted warm bath of abstraction. I knew that would be the case, so I've decided not to find it annoying. I'm also reading for the gist instead of lingering over passages I don't understand. That strategy got me through Ulysses many years back, and I think it applies here as well.

Signifier of a Song

An analogy for the "signifier of a signifier" idea that Derrida mentions vis a vis writing and speech is the realtionship between music and music notation. Most people would agree that the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a particular collection of sound, while the thing pictured above is just notation we use to describe it. Both are semiotic systems, but the latter exists solely in the service of the former.

The division of labor is clear when we're talking about written music, less clear when were talking about written language.

The Phonetic Nature of Writing

Since Derrida seems to be calling attention to phonetic writing systems in particular I just want to take this opportunity to to point out that there are plenty of non-phonetic writing systems in the world. Writing systems vary greatly in their degree of phonetic accuracy, from the non-phonetic (Chinese), to ones that omit large amounts of phonetic information (Arabic), to ones that are basically phonetic but have tricky spelling rules (English, French), to ones that are pretty faithful to the acoustic signal (Spanish, Korean). But even those at the far end of the spectrum aren't completely phonetic. Even the International Phonetic Alphabet devised by linguists for the purposes of transcribing speech sounds can't capture every subtle variation in human speech. Not sure where he's going with the phonetic stuff, but I'm going to keep an eye out in case Derrida makes any sweeping statements about human language which really only apply to French and English. (He wouldn't be the first.)

The discussion of the limitations of the IPA does remind me of something I've said to introductory linguistics students: the only perfect transcription is an audio recording. Or, joking aside, any writing system has to be somewhat faithless to the audio signal, it has to omit some acoustic information, in order to qualify as a writing system. This seems similar to some of the presence vs. absence stuff Derrida discusses, but I can't tell if this is a true analogy or just a surface similarity because both are counterintuitive statements about language.

I've Seen this Sign

The overview of Derrida's take on what makes signs problematic (Translator's Preface xvi-xvii) just sounds like the Saussurian Arbitrariness of the Sign insight. Presumably there is more to it than this.

An Out of Band X

In the discussion of Heidegger's technique of putting an X through "Being" (Translator's Preface pg. xv) the idea seems to be this: at some point in philosophy we're going to encounter concepts that are so abstruse that we'll never be able to adequately talk about them. The usual strategy is to invent technical terms for these concepts, but that makes them look like things we can talk about. It's more honest to just draw a big X through the word, to draw attention to the fact that such-and-such a concept is a tough nut to crack. Apparently Derrida is going to embrace and extend this idea in his own notion of erasure (sous rature).

Heidegger's X is what computer protocol people would call out-of-band information. The standard channel is conventional printing, while the out-of-band channel is created by the typographical novelty of a strikethrough, though here Heidegger crosses out the word "Being", whose odd capitalization is itself already a typographical novelty. (At least it is in English; I'm not sure how this comes across in German.) Note that this only works because strikethrough is relatively rare. If everybody started drawing X's through words willy-nilly, erasure would become just another part of the writing system. Arguably this is what has already happened to shudder quotes.

("Arguably" this "is" what has already "happened" to shudder quotes.)

Spivak shows examples of Derrida putting "is" under erasure. Derrida must be aware that copula be gets expressed in many different ways in the world's languages. Many people just don't say "is" so there's nothing to erase.

All Right I Give Up

Can you blame me for always thinking that Jacques Derrida was full of crap? I went to college in the early 1990s, just as the era of high cultural criticism was cresting. Even a physics major like myself could smell the Theory in the air. At first I was intrigued. Even back then I had an interest in linguistics, so another academic discipline that concerned itself with the way language was all bound up with meaning seemed right up my alley. When I started asking around as to what this Derrida guy was all about, however, I couldn't get a straight answer. One person would maunder on about binary opposition, another would start using everyday words like "author" and "text" in a needlessly obscure way, and yet another would lapse into rich-kid Marxism. When I'd ask for the simple example that made it all clear (the technique physicists use for explaining their dark magic to outsiders) none was forthcoming. I began to suspect there was no there there.

I might have left it at that, but while the content of Derrida and his coevals' work struck me as merely obscure, the style was infuriating. I'd encounter people for whom the lack of clarity was somehow the point. (A feature and not a bug, as I would later learn to say.) As a physicist and later computer programmer whose whole intellectual project involved making complicated ideas as simple as possible, this seemed inexcusably lazy. Then there was the way this body of work got all bound up with a particular brand of rote campus liberalism. For some, postmodernism seemed to be less a source of ideas than a badge of affinity for a particular upper middle class left-wing tribe for which I feel roughly equal levels of affinity and extreme annoyance. Plus it was disappointing to see a style of thinking that promised to radically undermine the notion of certainty itself get pressed into grinding out the familiar eternal verities that capitalism is pernicious, racism is wrong, and Republicans are jerks.

I got testy. Even second hand, postmodernism's distinctive textual quirks became profoundly irksome. Every time I encountered the late-80s academic tick of putting ironic little parenthesized (re) prefixes before key terms I felt like I was being nudged in the ribs. When I read that Derrida's obtuse style was his way of being playful, I reflected on the fact that people who think they are playful are precisely as charming as people who think they are zany. Through friends who were artists I saw the extent to which the postmodern style of speaking had come to dominate the discussion of visual aesthetics. I don't really have a dog in that fight–I enjoy the art world more for its air of upper-middle class conviviality than the work–but occasionally I'd stumble across a grainy video tape of a guy standing in a vat of jello with a rubber glove on his head reciting nursery rhymes that caught my fancy, and it seemed such a shame for it to be accompanied by a paragraph of leaden prose spelling out what it was a deconstruction of. (Usually consumerism, as I recall.) Derrida and his ilk seemed to have spawned an army of buzzkill pedants who didn't realize the joke isn't funny if you have to explain it.

And yet, and yet...My original curiosity remained intact. Academics were annoying long before postmodernism came along, weren't they? I couldn't lay the whole of ivory-tower pomposity at Theory's feet, could I? At least I could have the courtesy to try and read some of it first. After casting around some, I settled back on my original source of fascination, Jacques Derrida, because whatever else he might be, he was also clearly a philosopher of language. And of his books, Of Grammatology seemed the most directly concerned with questions of meaning and reference which were of daily interest in my new incarnation as a linguist. What the hell, I thought. I'll try to read it, and if it's gibberish at least I'll be able to say so with authority. I also decided that I would try a novel approach to reading this book: I would keep a blog as I made my way through it. This would provide a convenient place to put notes for myself, and would serve as a record of where I had been should life intervene and force me to abandon this project for long blocks of time.

So here I am, and here are my caveats. I have never read anything by Derrida before, and my knowledge of his work doesn't rise much above the Wikipedia level. I am unfamiliar with both Derrida's immediate philosophical forebears (Heidegger, Husserl) and his postmodern cohort (Foucault, Lacan, Deluze). The only other Theory guy I've had a crack at was Foucault, whose Discipline and Punish I read several years ago and cannot clearly recall. (Though I think the movie was better.) I know dick about Freud. Pun intended. My training in linguistics has given me a decent second-hand knowledge of Saussure, and an inclination towards what I think could be called Structuralism, which I think Derrida is supposed to be Post- to. Or something. My general stance is that of a reasonably bright outsider who is intrigued but not easily impressed. Nevertheless it seems Derrida and I share a fascination with the weird alchemy by which the primate squawks humans make at each other somehow coalesce into words, language, thoughts, culture, you, me, us. That sympathy will be our initial common ground.

All right I give up. I'll give Derrida a shot. The word "grammatology" sounds like grammar, which means Derrida is on my damn turf. Let's see what he has to say.