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 However, no one actually reads the Principia today except as a historical document.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.

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.

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.
   

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.

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.