Jacques Derrida

Sterling: frank why do you insist on looking for ANSWERS in what are *reminders to ask questions*?

Just another example of why I consider this thread dysfunctional. Which isn't meant to imply I'm not having a blast on it, a lot of the time, with my builders and their potent little slabs. Nothing I'm reading, however, makes me doubt my hypothesis that you guys are engaging in a filibuster. But only you guys can answer the questions that I'm actually posing you (what are the impulses, problems, experiences that led you to Derrida et al., and what are such conversations as these acting as a stand-in for?). But I doubt that you'll accept the premise of my question, which is that this is a filibuster.

Let us start, since we are already there, from the problematic of the sign and of writing. The sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, the present thing, "thing" here standing equally for meaning or referent. The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence. Whether we are concerned with the verbal or the written sign, with the monetary sign, or with electoral delegation and political representation, the circulation of signs defers the moment in which we can encounter the thing itself make it ours, consume or expend it, touch it, see it, intuit its presence. What I am describing here in order to define it is the classically determined structure of the sign in all the banality of its characteristics - signification as the différance of temporization. And this structure presupposes that the sign, which defers presence, is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and moving toward the deferred presence that it aims to reappropriate. According to this classical semiology, the substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both secondary and provisional: secondary due to an original and lost presence from which the sign thus derives; provisional as concerns this final and missing presence toward which the sign in this sense is a movement of mediation.

In attempting to put into question these traits of the provisional secondariness of the subshtute, one would come to see something like an originary différance; but one could no longer call it originary or final in the extent to which the values of origin, archi-, telos, eskhaton, etc. have always denoted presence - ousia, parousia. To put into question the secondary and provisional characteristics of the sign, to oppose to them an "originary" différance, therefore would have two consequences.

1. One could no longer include différance in the concept of the sign, which always has meant the representation of a presence, and has been constituted in a system (thought or language) governed by and moving toward presence.

2. And thereby one puts into question the authority of presence, or of its simple symmetrical opposite, absence or lack. Thus one questions the limit which has always constrained us, which still constrains us - as inhabitants of a language and a system of thought - to formulate the meaning of Being in general as presence or absence, in the categories of being or beingness (ousia).

full text

(1) Derrida is talking about signs (the word "sign" raises no difficulties - we all know what a sign is, right?) and about what signs do. He's giving us something like a theory of signs. What he says can be applied to any and all signs.

(2) Derrida is talking about signs (the term still raises no difficulties; when he says "sign" we know what's a sign and what isn't) in relation to particular assumptions that some people make about signs, and in relation to a particular problematic that arises from these assumptions. (A "problematic" is a set of problems and assumptions that are bound together; e.g., if you assume that mind is fundamentally different from matter and that matter is only knowable to the mind via sense impressions, you create a problem in determining what part of your experience of an object comes from the object and what part is added by your mind. Abandon those assumptions, and the problematic disappears.) Derrida is not necessarily endorsing the assumptions or the problematic; he's just showing where the problematic leads us. So this passage is not a commentary on signs but on a particular problematic.

(3) To theorize about signs in general - in the abstract - is both futile and unnecessary, since not every sign does the same thing in all circumstances or does the same identical type of thing as every other sign. For example, clouds are a sign of rain, and "One Way" is a traffic sign, but clouds and traffic signs act differently as signifiers, despite their both being called signs. Derrida knows this, and knows that he's here dealing with a particular problematic that - at most - relates to only some signs, even if the problematic refers to "the sign." As in No. 2, he's showing where the problematic leads us, but he's not endorsing it.

I've seen too little Derrida to know where he stands; my guess is that most people read him as doing No. 1, he actually wavers between 1 and 2, with maybe some 3 thrown in, but if we want we can ignore 1 and 2 and read him as only pertaining to 3.

No, the sign is not usually said to be put in place of the thing itself. Almost no one says this or even assumes that there need be a thing, the exceptions being some - not all - of the philosophers/theorists who've specifically addressed this type of issue. And what these philosophers say about the relation between sign and thing has no bearing on how they actually use signs.

Millions of people stop at stop signs every day, and not a one believes that the stop sign is put in place of a command to stop rather than being the command itself.

Or think of the command "Slab!" in our building language. It is the command, not a substitute for one. Or (J.L. Austin's example) think of the vow "I do" in a marriage ceremony. It's a marriage vow itself, not something that takes the place of a marriage vow. Or think of "2 x 4 = 8," which sure seems to me to be a calculation, not something that's put in place of a calculation.

Smoke is a sign of fire, but the smoke isn't put in place of the fire, but rather leads us to the fire.

"Call me at the first sign of trouble." For the "usual" assumption to be right, the trouble would have to be a meaning or a referent, and the first sign of trouble would have to be put in the place of it. This contention is nonsense. Literally.

Of course, stop signs, "Slab!," "I do," "2 x 4 = 8," smoke, and the first sign of trouble don't stand alone. They need circumstances to live in. ("Only in conjunction with that is it a brake-lever, and separated from its support it's not even a lever; it may be anything or nothing.") But I don't see where "absence" and "deferral" are relevant to that particular point, as nothing's absent or deferred (except for most of the trouble, one would hope). I mean, you can try to act as if circumstances - traffic laws, for instance - are absent, don't exist, but you won't get far.

However, if you assume that all signs must signify a thing - one thing! not five or six! - then it's the "thing" that's absent or deferred, since in many instances I wouldn't even know what sort of "thing" to look for, much less how to find it. But this just shows that the assumption is terrible.

We can decide, temporarily, not to call traffic signs, wedding vows, and so forth "signs" (despite the fact that we normally do call at least some of them signs) and that by "sign" we only mean something that really is put in place of something else. But if all we're doing here is pointing out that the word "elephant" isn't itself an elephant, and that the word "crying" isn't crying, I don't know what we're accomplishing. And anyway it's not obvious to me that we say "the elephant is crying" only as a substitute for presenting the reader or listener with an actual elephant. E.g., an elephant could already be quite present, standing in front of us crying, and I could say "the elephant is crying" as a way of directing your attention to his tears (because who wants to go out to dinner with a sad elephant!).

In reading the previous paragraph, what did you consider absent that you wished had been present? What was deferred that you wished hadn't been put off?

True, there was no actual elephant, merely words that represented him. But is this a problem? Did you miss him? There also wasn't a waterfall; not even the word "waterfall." And there wasn't $4,000. Now that's a problem! I could use the $4,000, and I bet that you could too. There wasn't even practical advice on how to make $4,000. Jeez!

Think of actual situations where something's being absent or deferred might be of interest. Does Derrida's text connect to any such situation?

In starting with what "is usually said," he seems to be engaging a straw man.

Welcome to ILX! As I said, this thread is a filibuster. And what's most poignant about the filibuster isn't that you guys refuse to state Derrida's ideas but that you also refuse to state your own, while concealing your own refusal from yourselves. There's a double filibuster, actually, one of omission and one of commission. The two filibusters walk hand in hand. The verbose nonstatement of your ideas allows you to avoid facing their potential insubstantiality or irrelevance, and in avoiding this, you also avoid addressing whatever impulses, insights, and problems led you to discuss Derrida in the first place and which the Derrida discussion allows you to evade.

unsurprisingly the discourse between Alex, Mark and The Pinefox is zipping around rather above my head, and asking them to take little baby steps everywhere so I can keep up would be completely unreasonable

No, Martin, their failure to take baby steps is a failure to think, and you should demand that they take them. This thread has been great for the hairstyle part of the intellect, for working out one's personality and one's relations to others. But so far we're no more discussing ideas than people nodding their head and saying "Ah so" are speaking Chinese. And I never buy your charming assertions of being out of your depth. On the Buffy and the Shout For The Moderator threads (for instance) you're smart as a whip. It's when a thread deals with capital-I Ideas that you suddenly forget the kindergarten basics of communication. And that goes for the rest of you, too: You're whipsmart when talking of David Banner and Confederate Flags, inarticulate when the subject is Great Ideas. And what's needed isn't deep erudition but a willingness to engage in "oh oh oh, look look look, see Spot run" basics, which you're all capable of doing should you choose to. Don't talk of Undecidables unless you also talk about actual decisions and actual indecision. Don't say "this is no longer what it appears to be, an apple, but is in fact all sorts of things at once, and not as distinct from - say - a pear, when you get down to certain basic levels of analysis" and then not give the analysis or say what makes it basic. You need to state an idea in a thousand words rather than alluding to it in one. If by Derridaean analysis something is open to revision, propose an actual revision. Otherwise you haven't made a point.

But I'm sure other people have more interesting answers.

What if the "point" of philosophy IS disfunction though, "the hairstyle part of the intellect, for working out one's personality and one's relations to others" and all that. What if what we call philosophy qua philosophy is a study in ways to be an asshole? To cut the rhetorical grounding out from others arguments, practice not just for asking questions but shutting them down (coz there's too many to ask 'em all, obviously!). You shut things down the way Wittgeinstein and Austin taught you, by making them so "natural" they drown in the commonsense of common language, a deluge of disparate concretes. The "euro" school shuts things down by denaturalizing them to the point of incomprehension.

When we "end up" in philosophy its never because we start there, but because we start with *different* conceptions of the world, because those conceptions *don't* relate, and coz we're working out a mutual language anyway, and trying to find a shared field to lay those conceptions out on and stack 'em against one another.

You of all ppl. should know that "working out one's personality and one's relations to others" is about as complex and fundamental as it gets.

Also, I think Derrida is pretty, and therefore has the compulsion of truth that prettiness brings, that the idea of language and meaning as comparative intervals of sorts of distinction, thought resonating in the traces the written word leaves as it passes through -- that's just lovely.

But is it a good summary of what Derrida actually thinks, and if so (or even if not), how do we apply it? For an idea to have much import, it must make a difference. Right?

One thing I'm taking as common to Wittgenstein and Derrida (and me) is the idea that for an event to be meaningful there must be a meaningful difference between the event's occurring and its not occurring. (Would this be "comparative intervals of sorts of distinction"? I find that phrase opaque, especially the word "intervals" and the modifier "sorts of." Why not just "language and meaning as comparative"?)

Note that the idea applies not only to "language" but to any phenomenon, to meteorites and hiccups and contagion and mouthwash as much as to words and sentences. And note also, as I've previously said, that in most contexts the idea would be a platitude that barely met its own criterion for being meaningful. It only achieves its import as an objection to a certain type of theory or model of "meaning." If you think it can play some other role as well, you have to say what that role is, and give a specific and intelligible example of its playing the role. Otherwise it's just another piece of the filibuster.

One role that I don't think the idea plays is that of itself contributing to a theory or model of "meaning." I'll explain:

Let's imagine a theory or model of meaning that asserts that for a statement to be meaningful it must somehow "stand for" something nonlinguistic called its "meaning" (and from there we desperately and fruitlessly try to specify, in the abstract, what category this "meaning" should belong to: sense impressions? intentions? neural impulses? objects in the world?). As a retort to this theory - but not as a theory or model itself - we say, "No, for a statement to be meaningful there must be, at a minimum, a meaningful difference between the statement's occurring and its not occurring, and this is true whether or not the statement can be said to relate to or depict something 'nonlinguistic.'"

But - I need to ram this point home - what makes our retort meaningful is that it contrasts with and contradicts the idea that for a statement to be meaningful it must somehow stand for something nonlinguistic. Without the previous theory, our retort would be vacuous.

Another way to state the retort is: "If you say X, you have said nothing whatever unless there is at least one Y that it contrasts with." And Y must contrast with at least one Z, and so on. To use the stream-of-life metaphor, there must be something upstream for X to contrast with (and something upstream for that to contrast with) and there must be consequences downstream, a ripple effect, something that would not have occurred but for X. (The stream metaphor has its limits, of course. There are circles as well: E.g., there'd be no child if there were no parent, but there'd also be no parent if there were no child. So when the child is born, it gives birth to the mother's identity as a mother.)

"But then, if your retort is right, we have to go infinitely upstream and infinitely downstream to find the meaning of X, and we never can." No. The retort is not a theory of meaning, and it says nothing about what constitutes "the meaning of X." Nor does it assume that anything needs to be designated as "the meaning of X" or that a phrase such as "the meaning of X" is even necessary. The retort is just a mundane observation: We don't find something meaningful if there's nothing relevant for it to contrast with. The retort's function is to demonstrate that the theory of meaning is a bad one. But the retort isn't itself the basis for an alternative theory.

To see an infinite regress in the retort you have to be a mugwump. That is, you have to commit yourself simultaneously both to the theory ("in order to be meaningful, a statement must ultimately arrive at a one-to-one relationship to something nonlinguistic that is 'its meaning'") and to the retort that demolishes the theory. That is, if you assume that a statement must refer to some superautonomous, stand-alone, nonlinguistic phenomenon, then you will be journeying forever upstream in futile search for it, finding never-ending distinctions and relationships in its stead. But if you don't make this assumption, you will only look as far upstream as will meaningfully enrich your understanding. In fact, looking too far upstream can be counterproductive, might well be just another filibuster. E.g., to understand "planet" now we don't need to know how people used the word 3,000 years ago and what distinction they were making; to understand how the middle ear works, we don't have to know that it evolved from the upper jaw; to understand the Kosovo conflict we don't have to know what actually happened in the 14th century and what that was a reaction to - though we do need to pay attention to what people are now saying about what happened in the 14th century, bearing in mind that when they claim that the conflict has its roots in the 14th century, they're just making excuses. (Of course, there are plenty of good reasons to learn about 1,000 B.C., or the evolution of hearing, or the 14th century. But not every bit of knowledge depends on our doing so.)

The mugwump shuffle is what I call "The Bearded Man Fallacy."

(1) God is not a bearded man in the sky.
(2) There is no bearded man in the sky.
(3) Therefore, there is no God.

(1) A statement need not arrive at a one-to-one relationship with a stand-alone, nonlinguistic phenomenon to be meaningful. All it need do is contrast with something.
(2) No statement can arrive at a one-to-one relationship to a stand-alone, nonlinguistic phenomenon, given that the need for contrast makes this impossible.
(3) Therefore, all meaning is deferred.

"But Frank, it's not that stupid." Yes, it's every bit that stupid. But my question is whether it is what Derrida is saying (rather than merely what Johnson, De Man, et al. seem to think he's saying), or - even if Derrida does sometimes say "all meaning is deferred" - whether it has much to do with his work. From my uninformed perspective I don't see the guy writing about all meaning. Instead, he starts with specific texts - by Husserl, Rousseau, Plato - and bangs away at their assumptions about, say, meaning, speaking, presence. He may then, for all I know, extrapolate absurdly from these texts, making vague, vacuous, and ridiculous statements about "western thought" and "everyday language." But, as far as I know, he never seriously tries to demonstrate that the assumptions of those texts are the assumptions of much else.

In general (and to repeat what I wrote in the Performing Rites thread), "meaning" and its variants are nonproblematic terms used in requests for further information or in attempts to remove confusion. E.g., you want to know the consequences or implications of something ("Get out of here, you blithering idiot, you're fired." "Does this mean I don't get a letter of recommendation?"), you want clarification ("When you say 'He killed her,' do you mean that he caused the end of her life by shooting her, stabbing her, poisoning her, or something of the sort; or do you mean he made her double over with laughter?"), you want the definition of an unknown word ("What do you mean when you say 'We glocked them'?"), you want to know what distinction is being made ("It's hot in Denver." "You mean in comparison to how it normally is in Denver? Or do you mean in Denver as opposed to San Francisco? Or in comparison to what you were expecting this morning, when you dressed and, as it turns out, overdressed, which is why you feel hot now? Or what?").

When "meaning" becomes more complicated, this isn't due to any deferral, but rather to its uncovering a conflict. E.g.:

"Could you direct me to the Church of Christ?"

"Which denomination do you mean?"

"Young man, there's only ONE Church of Christ. I don't go for that Unitarian or Quaker or Congregationalist hocus pocus. Those people aren't real Christians."

So in this instance, the question "What do you mean?" - which was possibly a request for definition, clarity, knowledge - reveals a battle instead, one that in various times and places has caused bloodshed, murder, warfare, executions. "What do you mean?" can provoke a battle as soon as it touches value judgments and personal and social differentiation. But in touching such things it can just as easily provoke a fun and varied dance. Or provoke something that's both battle and dance (cf. the conversations on ILM about what counts as hip-hop).

"Thought resonating in the traces the written word leaves as it passes through" - this phase has an elegiac atmosphere. But what is it mourning? Are phenomena supposed to do something other than have consequences and leave traces? To really care about "thought resonating in the traces the written word leaves as it passes through" you have to be committed to the bad idea that words must stand for nonlinguistic things, and you must yearn for these things within the depths of your restless and unsatisfied soul. But few people have such a yearning. In fact, the "nonlinguistic thing" isn't merely a bad idea, it's a straw man.

Yet the attack on this straw man has associated itself with much activity, and I wouldn't assume that all this activity is worthless, though I tend not to know a lot about it. Though someone's stated theoretical justification or explanation for an action may be silly or irrelevant, that doesn't necessarily make the action itself silly or irrelevant. There can be a lot else going on of which the theory does not speak.

Well, yes. My problem isn't that so much of this thread is hairstyle, but that it's mere hairstyle. So Omar declares himself to be a Deleuze man but leaves it at that. He displays his colors, declares his gang affiliation, but gives us no idea what the affiliation means, what ideas his being a Deleuze man commits him to and what actions it requires of him. The working out of personality and relations on this thread is truncated, incomplete, stops short; whenever it approaches the putative subject matter of this thread, it quails, quakes, and flees.

So, what's an Undecidable, and what makes you like it?

I don't think I'm being an asshole in asking you to apply that idea to particular thoughts and particular words. How else are you to explain it? How else am I to understand you?

E.g.: "I think I'll have some lunch." How does "I think I'll have some lunch" resonate in the traces the written word leaves as it passes through? The thought lives in a world of distinctions all right: I, as opposed to someone else, will, as opposed to won't - but also "I'll" as opposed to "I will," which identifies me as Ed Casual rather than Ed Formal - have lunch as opposed to having dinner but also as opposed to continuing to play checkers instead of eating (and maybe "I think I'll have some lunch" is heard by Maid Teresa as a command, so she'll have to make Ed Casual a sandwich now, which means she won't have time to dye her hair as she'd planned), and so forth.

Now, what does "trace" have to do with this? Is "lunch" tracing something? Is it leaving a trace? And what does it mean to say that this particular thought ("I think I'll have some lunch") resonates in the traces left by "lunch," "some," et al. as they pass through?

And also, what would be the difference between my believing that "I think I'll have some lunch" resonates in the traces left by "lunch," "some," et al. as they pass through and my not believing that "I think I'll have some lunch" resonates in the traces left by "lunch," "some," et al. as they pass through? How does my having or my not having such a belief change me? If I didn't believe it, what would I believe instead? What if I had no opinion?

Apparently "la déconstruction, c'est l'Amérique" because as a country, "il ne cesse pas de se défaire et de se reconstruire". Actually, from what I could glean, Derrida was much more upbeat about America than Debray was.

Not in the little Derrida I've read. It's more like showing how a text collapses its own explicit (so not "underlying") polar assumptions. So "signifieds" fail to be free of being "signifiers," "original thing that something's supposed to be a trace of" ends up being derived from its trace, and so forth. If anything turns out to be "underlying," it's the collapse, not the bipolarity. (And if I had the time right now, I'd go into why I think Derrida himself is being inconsistent - a mugwump - in believing that anything is "underlying," as I'd have expected him to dispense altogether with the idea that metaphysical preconceptions can actually underlie anything, or that there is a realm of the "underlying.")

In any event, this Derrida "deconstruction" (if that's what Derrida means by "deconstruction") only works on texts that really are attempting to create and sustain bipolar dichotomies, so I'm baffled when people claim to be deconstructing texts that don't do this. It seems like a scam: You claim that a text makes underlying bipolar assumptions (though the text doesn't claim this), then you show how the text itself collapses the assumptions that you projected onto it in the first place. Wouldn't it be smarter, and more honest, simply to note that paired opposites ("inside-outside," "foreground-background," "words"-"space between the words," "independent-dependent," "base-superstructure," "presence-absence," "signified-signifier") function not as bipolar opposites but as relative terms on a continuum? But then you'd have nothing to deconstruct.

I'll repeat something I wrote upthread: In the Derrida I've looked at, he analyzes thinkers who are explicitly working very hard to create bipolar opposites; he's not taking the average Tom, Dick, and Harry and "uncovering" their underlying bipolar assumptions.

Jacques Derrida gets a job at Carphone Warehouse and one day as he is working behind the counter, a customer comes in and asks some questions about the tariff he's on.

"This tariff yeah, I get 500 free messages a month, right?"

"Yes, this is correct."

"Do I get free minutes?"

"No, I am afraid not."

"Do I get picture messages?"

"No, that is not included in the plan, either."

"Do I get a free upgrade when the new model comes out?"

"No."

"Do I get internet access from this phone?"

"No, just the messages."

"So I don't get..."

Jacques becomes frustrated with this line of questioning and interupts with:

"Look, there is nothing outside of the texts!"

The Pinefox is really sur l'argent this time.
-- Omar, Thursday, 27 September 2001

that is so sweet -- thank you, Omar.

Derrida is so 20th century.

Bodrick that was horrible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V46yRvm8Nk#t=2m57s

XD

oops, click this: http://bit.ly/q2rbFq

it's nice that bodrick III and burt stanton weighed in on this thread
cool contributions, bros

“I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another, without sacrificing the other other, the other others”

olde ILMe at its beste

A masterclass from Kogan.

To me Derrida is no more than just an overrated jerk who writes melodically dead emotionally dry books.

A few more beatings administered with Wittgenstein's slabs here: Po-mo vs Futurism vs Modernism

I'm kind of mad Derrida exists, in retrospect, because I think my complete failure to get anything out of trying to read him in college soured me on reading a lot of critical theory I would have liked more.

Has Derrida written on film or literature?

Sometimes the pomo tendency to dwell upon the impossibility of meaning feels to me like an inverted objectivism -- building a "philosophy" around a bad natural tendency (nihilism, selfishness) rather than around aspirational aims. Then again, maybe I'm not typical in being naturally nihilistic, a lot of people don't seem to be.

I read a speech by Derrida wherin he explained that a lot of what 'deconstruction' did was in response to 68 and in general to French society at the time. I'm not sure I'd call it 'nihilistic' or 'selfish', they were writing in a society with a whole lot of ingrained, unquestioned truths and meanings.

to be clear I was associating nihilism with postmodernism and selfishness with Ayn Rand's "objectivism" but that seems fair.

D after not so much the "impossibility of meaning" but its inexhaustibility. been said before, but deconstruction is often (willfully) misconstrued as a critical technique of demystification. it's not something a critic does to a text, its something a text does (maybe even something a text does to a critic)--and at best a critic can trace its movements.

“I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another, without sacrificing the other other, the other others”

I went and read the longer paragraph. It seems to me you could just as well say in general that "I cannot do anything, without sacrificing the other others, the other others." On an absolutist idea of moral responsibility, nothing I do is going to answer more than a tiny number of the hypothetical calls that can be made on me. The fact I can't respond to any particular moral call, without sacrificing all the other calls, sounds less paradoxical and more just tragic if you regard it as one way of filling in the more general claim. I could fill it in with any kind of non-moral actions as well, which makes it seem less like an aporia for the concept of moral responsibility (the only way to respond to a moral responsibility is to sacrifice ethics), rather merely a fact about how infinitely short we invariably fall.

merely a fact about how infinitely short we invariably fall.

yeah, i agree, but this is a major theme of deconstruction. all discourses are approximate; the thing itself always escapes, etc

but the tragedy of our failure to achieve pull presence also has a positive dimension, because full presence would be stasis, death. the "opening" of... derrida often says language but martin hagglund has argued that you can just as easily say "time," so like, lived experience/existence... is the only thing that makes it possible/legible