Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
html
He notes that a sign always relies on a history of use in so far as it has a meaning, but that this
history does not in and of itself constitute an unambiguous precedence. Theories with a strong or
even mentalistic concept of “literal meaning” — Derrida duscusses Husserl and Austin — thus always
have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to make it seem as if it were obvious how this word
ought to be used in all future cases.
However, he goes on, these features are in fact present in all communication, so we should really
count speaking as a kind of “writing” as well if we take this definition literally.
We don't, of course, but the point is well taken: When a sign means something, it is because it
echoes something else in the past.
There is therefore an essential tension between the observation that signs have meaning because
they conform to a tradition of use, and the assumption that signs express inner, conscious,
authentic intentions. Declaring a meeting open or declaring somebody husband and wife always is
kind of theatrical, and the attempt in Husserl and Austin to ban all theatrical or “non-serious” uses
of language from playing a role in the theory is therefore doomed from the outset.
Derrida is such a bad writer that it can be really, really difficult to even parse his sentences, let
alone to find out what his point is. Because it is so much work to plow through his layers of nested
interjections and weird reverse sentence structures, tt always annoys me when people summarize
him in broad strokes without commenting on specifics.
So I'll try something different here: I'll go through the text, literally page by page, trying to
paraphrase everything he says in readable, English prose. If anybody finds this blasphemous, then I
refer to that French philosopher who says that nobody owns the meaning of a text.
I'm following the page numbers as they appear in Limited Inc. Scans of the text is available from
several university websites (e.g., here, here, and here).
I've not followed Derrida's headings, but rather divided up the text into some smaller chunks. This is
partly to give the argument some structure and partly to give you some breathing space.
The word "communication" can refer to the effects of physical forces as well as the effects of
meaning. This might suggest that we can think of the concept of linguistic communication as a
metaphorical extension of a literal concept of physical communication.
He asks:
But are the conditions of a context ever absolutely determinable? … Is there a rigorous and
scientific concept of context? (pp. 2–3)
Lest you should think that the answer is yes, he asks an even more leading rhetorical question:
Or does the notion of context not conceal, behind a certain confusion, philosophical presuppositions
of a very determinate nature? … I shall try to demonstrate why a context is never absolutely
determinable, or rather, why its determination can never be entirely certain or saturated. (p. 3)
According to Derrida, this demonstration will
1. raise suspicions about the concept of context;
2. change the way we understand the concept of “writing”; specifically, he will
question the idea that writing is a kind of transmission of information.
In order to sketch what the tradition has to say about writing, Derrida provides a couple of quotes
by the French Enlightenment philosopher Étienne Condillac (1714–1780), specifically from his Essay
on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746).
Derrida thinks of this hypothetical origin of language as an explanation in terms of "economy," that
is, practical concerns.
As one might suspect, Condillac thinks that writing is more civilized when it looks like Eurpoean
writing: Thus Greek and Latin letters are the best, Egyptian hieroglyphs intermediate, and pictures
are at the bottom.
He also repeats that Condillac is just one example of this theory, and that others could be given.
Continuing his explanation of what he thinks Condillac is saying, he singles out three properties that
writing is supposed to have according to the "classical" theory:
1. Writing subsists beyond the moment of production and "can give rise to an iteration
in the absence … of the empirically determined subject who … emitted or produced it." (p.
9)
2. Writing "breaks with its context," where context means the moment of production,
including the intention of the writer:
But the sign possesses the characteristic of being readable even if the moment of its
production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor
consciously intended to say at the moement he wrote it, i.e. abondened it to its essential
drift. (p. 9)
So once you write a sentence down, you lose control.
3. These breaks are related to the fact that writing is placed at some distance from the
"other elements of the internal contextual chain" (p. 9). Presumably this chain is supposed
to consist of things like the writer, the time of writing, the intention, etc. Derrida calls this
the "spacing" of writing.
As is probably apparent, this list is really just a repetition of things that he has already said
earlier.
Husserl has a theory of how the sign can be detached from its referent. He proposes, according to
Derrida, the following taxonomy:
1. Signs that have a clear meaning, but no current referent (I say "The sky is blue"
while you can't see the sky);
2. Signs that fail to have a meaning because they are
1. superficial syntactic symbol manipulation, as in formalistic mathematics;
2. oxymorons, like "a round square";
3. word salad, like "a round or," "the green is either," or "abracadabra."
This discussion refers to Volume II of Husserl's Logical Investigations. Specifically, the relevant parts
of the text are Investigation I, §15 and Investigation IV, §12.
Derrida on Husserl, p. 12
Derrida notes:
But as "the green is either" or "abracadabra" do not constitute their context by themselves, nothing
prevents them from functioning in another context as signifying marks. (p. 12)
As an example, he mentions that the word string "the green is either" is used by Husserl as an
explicit example of agrammaticality — so it did after all have a use in language. (Consider also how
the sentences "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" or "All your base are belong to us" have taken
on a life of their own and can now be echoed or referenced.)
Specifically, he holds on to his mentalistic understanding of meaning. The "total context" that Austin
has to keep referring in his discussion always contains
consciousness, the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject in the totality of his
speech act. As a result, performative communication becomes once more the communication of an
intentional meaning … (p. 14)
.
So Derrida claims that citationality is a precondition of meaning. Hence, a theory which tries to
exclude the ritualistic or theatrical aspect of word use will either have to push aside a lot of
counterexamples or run into problems.
Not necessarily, Derrida says: Even a private language will have to conform to some internal
standard, and even an event that happens only once might implicitly be a version of something else.
In effect, Austin thus depicts "ordinary language" as surrounded by a ditch which it can fall into if
thing go awry. But according to Derrida, this is a somewhat misleading picture in that the "ditch" is
a necessary shadow of meaning.
He asks:
Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a "coded" or iterable
utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship
or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then
identifiable in some way as a "citation"? (p. 18)
(Correct answer: No, it couldn't.)
As a consequence:
The "non-serious," the oratio obliqua will no longer be able to be excluded, as Austin wished, from
"ordinary" language. And if one maintains that ordinary language, or the ordinary circumstances of
language, excludes a general citationality or iterability, does that not mean that the "ordinariness"
in question … shelter[s] … the teleological lure of consciousness … ? (p. 18)
(Correct answer: Yes, it does.)
Thus, the concept of "context" itself gets into some problems too, since it is not clear what counts
as a theatrical context, and what doesn't:
The concept of … the context thus seems to suffer at this point from the same theoretical and
"interested" uncertainty as the concept of the "ordinary," from the same metaphysical origins: the
ethical and teleological discourse of consciousness. (p. 18)
To round off, he ensures us that his point isn't that consciousness, context, etc. makes no difference
to meaning, but only that their negative counterparts cannot be excluded from the picture.
.
In the last section, Derrida asks who the "source" is of a highly ritualistic sentence like "I hereby
declare the meeting open." Austin himself compares such sentences with signatures, so Derrida
picks up that thread.
Signatures are funny, he says, because a signature is expected at once to be authentic, and unique
to the specific situation, but at the same time, also have a "repeatable, iterable, imitable form."
Being thus authentic if and only if they are good copies, signatures thus illustrate the contradiction
that is built into the mentalistic notion of writing.
A Last Salute
Perspectives and Additional Claims, p. 20–21
On the last page of the essay, Derrida very rapidly throws a couple of rather large claims at the
reader, mixed loosely with a summary of his main points:
1. The concept of writing is gaining ground, so that philosophy increasingly relies on
authenticity concepts like "speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc."
2. Writing is difficult to understand from the perspective of the traditional theory.
3. His project of insisting on the work done by negative concepts (absence, failure,
etc.) can be carried further in a larger project of metaphysical criticism.
So that's a dubious claim, a triviality, and a literature reference.