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!"

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.

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.