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.

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.