Principia Deconstructivia

Just when I'm ready to give up on the whole enterprise I stumble across a post like this one that raises interesting issues that were apparently inspired by Derrida. Of course one reason I like it is that Bérubé is a clearer writer than Derrida and situates the latter's contributions within a broader framework that acknowledges both its strengths and its weaknesses. Plus it's a short punchy blog post instead of a long dense philosophical treatise.

It's not Derrida's fault that he doesn't have the perspective to situate his work within a broader context, or objectively evaluate its faults. (Presumably plenty of weak arguments got cut from the final draft.) J.D. was the first one out of the gate with his particular program, and a certain level of obscurity is just the side effect of intellectual creativity. He couldn't do anything but what he did. In this respect he's no different from anyone else who introduces an original idea. You have to cut them some slack, because what matters is not so much what they say but how it ends up becoming part of the background. (Bérubé's seeping-into-the-groundwater metaphor is particularly apt here.) If a philosopher spends their life writing a near-indecipherable mass of verbiage that someone eventually boils down into a Wikipedia article, they've pretty much done their job.

So some of my frustration with J.D. may be a frustration with reading primary sources in general. As someone who works in the sciences (or at least "sciences" in the case of linguistics) I'm used to viewing primary sources as inherently incoherent and unmoored. For example, there is a large component of physics known as "Newtonian physics"–a crucial body of knowledge that helps us keep planes aloft, prevent bridges from collapsing, land probes on Mars, all kinds of neat things. This body of knowledge has its origins in a particular historical figure, Isaac Newton, and a particular book, the Principia Mathematica, and physicists speak of both reverentially. However, no one actually reads the Principia today except as a historical document. It would be a huge waste of time to try and learn Newton's ideas from Newton's words–you're better off picking up a freshman physics textbook, which three centuries' worth of hindsight has rendered vastly easier to comprehend.

I gather that this is not the case in philosophy, where the fundamentally more idiosyncratic and irreconcilable nature of the material requires that you go back and read primary sources to truly get them. (Though I recall some discussion in the Translator's Preface of the way philosophers' ideas seep beyond their original presentations. So for example there's Kant the person, Kant the section of the bookshelf, and "Kant" the second-hand body of ideas, all of which may exist on equal footing. I remember this catching my attention because it reminded me of the Newton example, and intend to go back and look at it again.) So to some extent I'm just annoyed that I can't go read Derrida for Dummies and be done with it. At the same time, if seepage is the final mark of a philosopher's success, then you need skilled explicators to ease that process along. And I have the sense that a certain deliberate obscurity became the house style for many people working in this branch of philosophy. If so, that's too bad for Derrida, because it impedes the dissemination of whatever is useful in his ideas, forcing him to seep through granite instead of soft pliable earth.

Second Time's not the Charm

So I've opted to reread "Linguistics and Grammatology," going through it very thoroughly. I can't stand to write in books, so I bought a bunch of tiny post-its and have been sticking detailed notes onto the pages. Really giving the chapter due diligence, and I'm sorry to say that the closer inspection is proving to be disappointing. My initial impressions about the weaknesses of J.D.'s arguments remain, only now that I'm able to understand more I'm less inclined to think that I'm missing something.

Easily Distracted by the Empire

For my money, Tim Burke is one of the best bloggers out there. His thoughtful and informative response to the book Theory's Empire is one of the main reasons I was willing to give Derrida a shot. All I need is an acknowledgment that, yes, some Theory fans can be kinda obnoxious, and then I'm willing to approach the actual work with an open mind.

For my money, Tim Burke is one of the best bloggers out there. His response to the book Theory's Empire is one of the main reasons I was willing to give Derrida a shot.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Slogged through the last two pages of "Linguistics and Grammatology". Didn't understand a word, but I felt it was necessary.

I'm considering whether to stick with the Ulysses strategy of plowing ahead regardless of comprehension, or going back and rereading this chapter. I'm leaning towards the latter. I'd like to at least get a precis written down, so that it doesn't all vanish into the air.

Backhanded Back Cover Praise

A blurb on the back of my copy from Roger Poole:

Of Grammatology is the tool-kit for anyone wants to empty the 'presence' out of any text he has taken a dislike to. A handy arsenal of deconstructive tools are to be found in its pages, and the technique, once learnt, is as simple, and as destructive, as leaving a bomb in a brown paper bag outside (or inside) a pub.

The bit about leaving a bomb in a pub is in poor taste, but the rest sounds like high praise to me. A fellow linguist once remarked to me, vis à via Noam Chomsky's legendary forensic skills, "His special mutant power is that he can win any argument he gets in even if he's wrong." Even when you know the debating trick well enough to see through its disigenuity, you can still admire its artfulness. I'm a conoisseur, and I'm hoping to learn some killer debater's tricks from Derrida in the form of "deconstruction" but I haven't seen them yet.

Also, what a weird backhanded compliment to have as one of your featured blurbs. Sure it draws in guys like me, but it also sounds like a roundabout way of calling Derrida the king of the bullshitters.

A Glimmer

I'm mostly rolling my eyes and nitpicking my way through "Linguistics and Grammatology", but at the very end there I get the glimmer of the outline of an interesting idea that Derrida might be getting at maybe: this notion that our whole apprehension of reality may proceed through a perception of differences and that this mechanism bears a strong resemblance to the way we read. (As in literally read actual text.) This is how I take the passage on pg. 70 that begins "If the trace, arche-phenomenon of 'memory'...". There's even something lyrical about the idea that all of us go through life writing and reading the great text of the world. (Anyway, it sounded lyrical until I wrote it out just now, and then it sounded corny.)

I'm intrigued enough to try and understand this chapter better.

Discrete Language

The quote from Jakobson about the discrete nature of language is interesting and not just because it name-checks Claude Shannon whose reformulation of the concept of entropy is indispensable to computational linguists.

Thus form in language has a manifestly granular structure and is subject to a quantal description.
–pg. 69

In my experience, most people who think about language end up coming to this conclusion. I remember reading something from Benjamin Lee Whorf in which he utilized some concepts from Hindu mythology to describe the way human minds break the undifferentiated stream of experience up into distinguishable chunks. I like to say that language is a discretizing process, which amounts to the same thing. The discrete/continuous distinction is of course a philsophical issue of interest outside discussions of language (and dear to anyone who grokked calculus), but language seems to make some definite choices in this region.

Context Dependence

If words and concepts receive meaning only in sequences of differences, one can justify one's language, and one's choice of terms, only within a topic...and an historical strategy.
–pg. 70

Not terribly novel but well put. I highlight this because we're getting to the end of the section and this passage appears to be part of where J.D. winds up to his point.

This also seems to locate him on the left ends of the subjective/objective and idealist/realist spectra, which is like big surprise, but I've wondered how much of the linguistic turn in 20th century philosophy is really just the old idealist/realist debate dressed up in linguistic terms. There seems to be a general form of epistemological paradox where you direct your skepticism at some property of yourself that allows to form an argument in the first place. For Descartes that property was sense perception, hence the whole "evil demon" am-I-really-dreaming conundrum which still gets some airplay. For a linguistically-minded philosopher like Derrida, that property is language, the way that words can never quite say what we want them to say–which is a different issue but conforms to the same general outline of the paradox.

Figure/Ground

Derrida is at a disadvantage when he quotes from Saussure, Jakobson, etc. because they are much clearer writers than he is, and he's choosing passages in which they make particularly succinct and forceful points. Set against the background of Derrida's flabby stemwinding, the words of these other thinkers really pop.

I shall use my powers to bend space and time and open the door to infinity!

Incomprehensible few pages (pp. 65-68) about the metaphysics of space and time at the beginning of "The Hinge". The opacity here doesn't bother me though, because I get the sense that here J.D. is just assuming a background in these issues I don't have. (Heidegger wrote a book called Being and Time, right? Maybe I'm coming in on the middle of that conversation.) I don't mind not understanding stuff as long as I think the fault lies with me.

By the way, wouldn't "The Hinge" be a great name for a superhero?

Does arche- just mean meta-?

While we're at it, I came across the following on pg. 70.

If the trace, arche-phenomenon of "memory," which must be...

Just arche- just mean meta-? Does this prefix seem less novel in French?

These days you can order fifty kinds of metaphysics off Amazon.com

...when the concepts required...are defined...outside metaphysics (which can now be "Marxist" or "structuralist")...
–pg 46

Really. Those are my only choices?

Little Fish Eats the Big Fish

Emphasis J.D.'s:

Even though semiology was in fact more general and more comprehensive than linguistics, it continued to be regulated as if it were one of the areas of linguistics.
–pg. 51

I've had the same thought and, if frustration is indeed what J.D.'s italics is expressing here, felt the same frustration. When I first heard about semiotics I thought, "Oh cool, here's a superset of linguistics that will tell me how language fits into the larger scheme of communication." But in practice it seems to be more the other way around–that semiotics involves applying linguistic metaphors to non-linguistic things. ("It's like film has a grammar, see?...") This isn't particularly illuminating for someone already versed in linguistic metaphors, and also gets more and more strained the further the non-linguistic things get from natural language.

Is Arche-Writing Just Semiotics?

In "The Outside Is The Inside" J.D. tries to not just attack F.d.S.'s privileging of speech over writing, but articulate his own idea of the way things should be. About midway through the section he starts to talk about "arche-writing" rather than writing per se (or, as J.D. puts it a "vulgar" notion of writing). So are we talking about ink marks on a piece of paper or something broader and more abstract? Sometimes J.D. seems to want it one way, sometimes another.

It goes without saying that it's unclear what he means by "arche-writing", but again gleaning from usage the term seems to refer to a more general form of communicative symbolic opposition that would underlie both speech and vulgar writing, and maybe much else besides. It sounds a lot like what other people would call "semiotics". As with transcendental signified and trace, he seems to be coining a new term where one already exists.

Typo

There is a typo on page 62 towards the end of "The Outside Is The Inside".

...by rights anterior to all that one calls sign...concept or opeartion...

Unless Derrida is coining a new technical term à la differance, I think this should be "operation".

Two Can Play at this Game

An uncharitable reading of J.D.'s refusal to define his terms is that he's bluffing. A charitable reading is to say that he's doing it on purpose because he's thinks making precise philosophical definitions is a fool's game. No one can actually do it, so why pretend–it's more honest to just start using a technical term like "trace" and let it accrue whatever meaning it's going to accrue. (More honest in the way that writing Being is more honest.) Maybe this is a valid point about philosophical nomenclature, except the definition-by-ostension strategy seems parasitic on someone else's definition-by-describing-what-you-mean strategy. For example, the whole hullabaloo about "traces" falls flat unless we already have the clearly delineated Saussurian distinction between /b/ and /p/ in mind.

Hey, can I push this a little further and deconstruct Derrida? Let's try.

1. Tacit dichotomy...J.D.'s definition-by-ostension differs from other philosophers' definition-by-description.
2. Privileged member of dichotomous pair...Definition-by-description is for chumps. The only way to introduce a philosophical term is to just start using it.
3. Self-undermining nature of dichotomous privileging...Definition-by-ostention only works if there are definition-by-description terms to play off of.

And...gotcha! That was kinda fun, but ultimately unsatisfying.

Of course another possibility is that J.D. isn't doing anything particularly tricky here and I'm simply failing to follow his argument.

Bluffing?

A thought coalesced while I was looking back over the last few posts: Derrida introduces philosophical concepts like "transcendental signified" or "trace" that he clearly intends to be extensions of or rebuttals to more familiar concepts like "referent" or "structural distinction". J.D.'s new terms bear a family resemblance to the ones they supplant and so partake of those terms' long-established significance. But because J.D. keeps his definitions murky, it's not clear where his contribution lies. It's like he says, "You know that old idea of 'referent', well I've got this thing called 'transcendental signified' which is like referent, except better!" And then he's off on a tear and never gets around to telling you why it's better. The uncharitable reading of this technique is that he's bluffing.

For Fanboys Only

By the way, Amy Kofman's documentary Derrida is dippy. Don't waste your time.

Without a [[Trace]]

Derrida introduces the crucial and elusive technical notion of a "trace" in passing. Not only does he fail to define it, but he doesn't even give any indication that he's introduced a technical term. It's just all of a sudden there in a who-invited-this-guy-and-why-is-he-hogging-all-the-snacks kinda way. Sigh.

Piecing together the meaning of "trace" from context, it's something like a gap in a semiotic system, a telling patch of negative space. Because I can't figure out what J.D. is getting at beyond this sketchy surmise, I find myself falling back on structuralist metaphors: a trace is an element of a symbolic system that takes on meaning by virtue of being different from the elements around it. What matters about a /d/ is that it's not a /t/ or a /ɖ/, and so on. Basically, my definition comes straight from Saussure, which is probably not what was intended, but since certain 20th-century Franco-Algerian philosophers I could name think defining one's terms is just so square I guess it'll have to do.

Transcendental Signified Signifies What?

What is the difference (if any) between Derrida's "transcendental signified" and what other philosophers of language (Frege, for example) would call "the referent"?

In Defense of Obscurity

As annoyed as I am by Derrida's opaque style, his isn't the only way to be unclear. I tried to read Philosophical Investigations a few years back, and stylistically Wittgenstein is the anti-Derrida: short, blunt, workmanlike sentences, lots of examples about triangles and building blocks, little pictures. Every paragraph was completely lucid but I could never keep enough of them in my head at once to get his point.

J.D. vs. F.d.S. vis à vis p

Though he won me over with examples of Saussure's curmudgeonly attitude towards French pronunciation, dinging Saussure for prescriptivism is clearly not Derrida's main point. Whatever that point is, it suffuses the long paragraph on page 43 that begins "What do these limits and presuppositions signify?" J. D. is winding up to a big finish here, and I'm actually on board, I want to see what he's getting at, but I just can't make heads or tails of the thing. And it's not just because I don't have the background in Heiddeger or whatever; J.D. is just flat out unclear, which I said I wasn't going to complain about but c'mon. Here is a sketch of the argument he presents.

1. Saussure distinguishes between speech and writing by claiming that the latter is outside linguistics' domain of study.
2. J.D. claims that F.d.S. claims that writing is out of the game because it possesses some property which I'm not clear on so I'll call it p.
3. In part, p = "being the sign of a sign, i.e. lacking semiotic autonomy".
4. Ironically, says J.D., F.d.S. was right about the existence of p, but he was wrong about the entity it applies to. In fact, p is true of the whole of language, written and spoken.
5. This whole issue is not some a priori philosophical debate that would evetually surface whenever one talked about language, but has a specific historical origin in the evolution of western thought, which in turn was shaped by the use of a phonetic writing system in Europe. (So presumably things played out differently in China, but that is beyond the scope of this book.)
   

This is a very charitable reading. The paragraph is nowhere near this clear. I've used this quasi-algebraic p as a placeholder for all the areas where Derrida drifts off into the ether. It may be that there is no there there, in which case p is a placeholder for nothing.

I'm finding that I can do something like the above with a lot of J.D.'s arguments. That is, I can sketch out the general scheme of things and make a list of the rhetorical tricks he employs, but his actual point remains elusive. Of course it may be that J.D. thinks this is all philosophy can ever do, and intends Of Grammatology to be a shaggy dog illustration of that fact. I have to remember to skip ahead and see if the last sentence of the book is "Gotcha!"

Saussure's Prescriptivism

The last two quotes Derrida provides in "The Inside and the Outside" won me over to his side a bit. These are the ones where Saussure complains about the way the writing system is damaging the pronunciation of French, splitting the surname Lefèvre into Lefèvre and Lefèbvre and leading people to pronounce the last two letters of vingt. Saussure depicts this as a decline from pre-existing correct system of French pronunciation, instead of just another instance of language evolution. Any contemporary linguist will tell you that there is no "correct" pronunciation of a language beyond whatever the current consensus among its speakers calls correct, and that consensus is always changing. (Remember that French is nothing but the noble Latin of the Roman emperors after a thousand years of abuse in the mouths of a bunch of Gallic barbarians.) By assuming that there is some objective standard of correctness (which, I'll bet you dollars to donuts, just happens to coincide with the way Saussure says Lefèvre and vingt) Saussure in engaging in what linguists call prescriptivism, which is a mistake when you're trying to be empirical. Furthermore, the excerpts make it clear that this isn't just a matter of tone, but a well-definied assertion. When Derrida shrugs at this and says "Where is the evil?" he's doing exactly what I would do in front of a Linguistics 101 class.

From a modern linguist's perspective it seems odd that Derrida would treat Saussure's prescriptivism as one element in a larger defense of writing, rather than seeing the business about writing as just one aspect of pernicious prescriptivism, but whatever. Derrida's interest is writing here, and it does appear that Saussure focused on writing as well.

Is that all there is?

Also, one of the things that drew me to Derrida was that I'd heard he'd invented this technique called "deconstruction" where you find a binary opposition hidden in the core of a person's work and then show how the tension inherent in that dichotomy undermines their whole argument. That sounds like a helluva debater's trick, and I hope this whole inside/outside thing isn't an example of it, because here Derrida isn't unearthing a tacit dichotomy in Saussure so much as doing his damndest to read one in and then overreact to it.

Anyway patience, patience, I'm not even done with this section.

Jesus, Everybody Calm Down

Part of the way through "The Outside and the Inside" and the basic story Derrida is laying out is good guys vs. bad guys. In honor of postmodernism's typographical exuberance and also just to keep things straight I'm going to highlight terms relating to the former in green and terms relating to the latter in red.

Derrida is critiquing the distinctions Saussure draws between speech and writing. Much of this is expressed through an inside vs. outside metaphor that Derrida attributes to Saussure, where J.D. claims that F.d.S. claims that speech is inside—warm, organic, close to the heart—while writing is outside—artificial, invasive, sullying. J.D. of course wants to say this is all bassackwards, and presents various quotes from F.d.S. in which he appears to be putting forth this melodramatic hostility towards writing per se. I haven't read Saussure so I don't know how accurate a representation of his tone this is, but then Derrida responds in kind with his own melodramatic tone that makes Saussure sound like the Man, trying to harsh our graphological mellow, and the whole thing just kinda spins off. To the speech vs. writing axes I hypothesized earlier I'll add a fourth one: (4) writing is preferable to speech for aesthetic emotional reasons.

Okay, it's not quite as bad as all that. I may have to read this part more closely; my initial sympathies in this chapter are with Saussure because, tone aside, many of the passages quoted sound like admonishments I'd give to a freshman linguistics class as a way of heading off questions like "What's the difference between the 'f' sound in 'fish' and 'physics'?" So my sense is that F.d.S. is making some reasonable methodological points, albeit in slightly overblown language, and then J.D. is choosing to focus on the overblown parts and work himself into a tizzy. But there may be a substantive critique beneath the hysteria.

Caveats

It seems likely that a lot of this blog will consist of me saying "Derrida makes such-and-such a claim about linguistics, but he's wrong because blah-blah-blah..." That's fine, in fact it may end up being this thing's r. d'etre, but I want to take the opportunity to add a couple of caveats now so that I won't have to repeat them later.

1. I will often make reference to aspects of linguistics that Derrida wouldn't have known about, either because he wasn't a practicing linguist or because they came about after Of Grammatology was written.
2. Though he makes passing reference to a broader field of study, so far Derrida writes as though linguistics begins and ends with Saussure. It doesn't, and it would be tiresome for me to keep pointing this out, so I won't.
   

The Outside and the Inside of the Lexicon

Derrida makes a good point about words not being the sole locus of meaning. He paraphrases André Martinet approvingly:

[It's a mitzvah] to make [the usage of the concept of the word] more flexible, to associate it with the concepts of smaller or greater units (monemes or syntagams).
–pg. 31

Non-linguists often find it surprising that the meaning-bearing elements of language can be smaller or larger than words. To linguists, however, this is old hat. In a Linguistics 101 class you'll be taught that morphemes (what Martinet appears to be calling "monemes"), not words, are the smallest unit of meaning. Going in the other direction, many linguists will identify certain syntactic constructions (Martinet's "syntagams" I think) as meaning-bearing units. For example, in Foundations of Language Ray Jackendoff argues that structures like "X-ed his way across the room" and "X-ed her heart out" are atomic units of English meaning. Construction Grammar (about which I know little) moves this idea front and center. Linguists often frame this question in terms of what kinds of things belong "in the lexicon".

So, good point about words, but us linguists are already all over it.

Speech vs. Writing Cagematch

Derrida is setting up a writing vs. speech opposition in which he claims that people privilege (value? esteem? trust?) the latter over the former. This is clearly in anticipation of a point at which he will demonstrate that writing has been getting the shaft all these years and deserves just as much respect as speech. Fair enough, except he's unclear about the axis along which writing and speech are being contrasted. I can come up with three ways in which Derrida might be claiming that the one has been erroneously valued above the other.

1. People in Western society have historically trusted the spoken word more than the written word. The average guy on the street is inclined to believe someone when they're speaking face to face, but to treat a written document with a extra measure of skepticism.
2. Linguists in particular have paid too much attention to speech as an object of study and have not given writing its due.
3. Linguists and philosophers have claimed that writing isn't a semiotic system unto itself–it is just a way of recording speech, and speech is the only true semiotic system in natural language. Writing is just notes on a staff, and not music.

Axis (1) is a broad historical claim, so broad in fact that I don't know what to make of it. Axis (2) is also a historical claim, though of a much narrower scope. Axis (3) is more a philosophical than a historical claim. (In the sense that you could believe in the semiotic autonomy of writing even if everyone else did too.)

I'm not sure if the most charitable reading picks one of these or some combination of the three. However, if this point remains muddy, Derrida's oh-no-no-it's-writing-that-matters counterpunch is going to be something of a wet dud.