The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (124 page)

And it is in these terms that he provides his alternative characterization of the metaphysics of presence. The metaphysics of presence is metaphysics that presupposes just such a distinction, along with its implicit prioritization. You may wonder how this connects with the characterization given in the previous section. The point is this. The sense that is made of things in
SPEECH
depends only on what is present to consciousness when the sense-making is itself present to consciousness. By contrast the sense that is made of things in
WRITING
depends on what is absent from consciousness when the sense-making is present to consciousness: it depends on relations between itself and other, distinct entities. In a way, therefore, when sense is made of things in
SPEECH
, those things are themselves
made present
to consciousness, whereas when sense is made of things in
WRITING
, those things are at most related to what is present in consciousness. And the metaphysics of presence rests on the presupposition that for sense to be made of things in any way at all is ultimately for it to be made of things in
SPEECH
; in other words, that when sense is made of things in
WRITING
, this is parasitic on its being made of them in
SPEECH
. (See e.g. ‘
Sec
’, pp. 311ff.; and cf. ‘Semiology’, pp. 19ff.)

Derrida rejects this picture. The very idea of a direct mark is an anathema to him. (See esp.
Speech and Phenomena
, passim.)
²⁷
There can be no such thing as
SPEECH
.

It may appear to follow that there can be no such thing as
WRITING
either. After all, do not indirect marks depend for their existence on direct marks? They do. But that is why the definition of
WRITING
needed to be qualified. Derrida’s notion of
WRITING
survives his rejection of the picture above. It embraces the use of any signs whose meanings are not intrinsic to them, not just those which –
per impossibile
, as it now appears – are associated with direct marks, in other words not just those which qualify as indirect marks. (See e.g.
Grammatology
, pp. 8–10.) Let us call any sign whose use his notion of
WRITING
embraces a
non-direct
mark.

Very well, but how can anything
be
a non-direct mark if not by association with a direct mark, that is to say if not by qualifying as indirect? What else can breathe semantic life into it?
²⁸

This metaphor of life and breath is one that Derrida himself uses in this connection (
Speech and Phenomena
, pp. 76 and 81). Aptly enough, so does the later Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §432). I say ‘aptly enough’, because the answer that Derrida gives to these questions is likewise reminiscent of the later Wittgenstein. He adverts to the repeated use of signs.
²⁹
For signs to be meaningful they need to be applied again and again, in different contexts, so that relevant connections can be established.

One feature of signs that is critical here, as Derrida himself is at pains to emphasize, is their
iterability
(e.g. ‘
Sec
’, p. 315). But we must straightway note a curiosity in Derrida’s handling of the notion of iterability. Philosophers in the analytic tradition distinguish between ‘sign-types’ and ‘sign-tokens’. This distinction is to be understood in such a way that the following list – ‘tiger’, ‘lion’, ‘tiger’ – contains two sign-types and three sign-tokens, one of the sign-types appearing twice. Talk of the iterability of signs naturally puts us in mind of sign-types. Precisely what the list above illustrates is the iterability of the sign-type ‘tiger’. And that iterability does indeed seem indispensable to the connection of that sign-type with tigers. It is the fact that the sign-type ‘tiger’ can be repeatedly applied in suitable contexts, for instance contexts where there are tigers, or contexts that stand in relations of historical dependence on contexts in which it has previously been applied and where there have been tigers, that its connection with tigers is able to be established. But Derrida, whose notion of
WRITING
never quite loses the connotations of the more familiar notion of writing on which it is modelled,
³⁰
reminds us that even sign-
tokens
are amenable to a sort of iteration. If someone makes an inscription on paper and sends it to someone else, then that very inscription can survive both the person who made it and the recipient and can be reassessed in contexts that are quite distinct from any that surrounded the original transaction. Part of what it is for a sign’s meaning not to be intrinsic to it, even in the case of a sign-token, is for there never to be a definitive, once-for-all interpretation of the sign.
WRITING
, on Derrida’s conception, involves putting something meaningful in the public domain, something whose interpretation is thereafter at the continual mercy of what lies in the future. This is fundamentally different from entertaining
an aspect of transcendental subjectivity. We can now see more clearly, then, how Derrida’s insistence that all meaning is meaning of this
WRITTEN
kind serves as an expression of his anti-Husserlianism.
³¹
(See e.g.
Speech and Phenomena
, §4, and ‘
Sec
’, pp. 314ff.)
³²

Let us reflect further on the idea that all meaning is meaning of this
WRITTEN
kind. One thing that follows from this is that there is no saying what a given piece of
WRITING
represents, no indicating what a given piece of
WRITING
represents, no
thinking
what a given piece of
WRITING
represents, except by producing more
WRITING
. Whatever the relation between the sign ‘tiger’ and tigers, for example, nobody is going to be able to get any purchase on that relation except by producing, in
WRITING
, some definition of ‘tiger’, or some equivalent of ‘tiger’ in another language, or some way of locating ‘tiger’ in a lexical network, or something else along those lines. There is no Fregean sense attaching to the sign, no Platonic form of tigerhood, nothing which, by its very nature, directs attention to tigers.
³³

Meaning, on Derrida’s view, is determined by the repeated use of signs in
WRITING
. It is also, we now see,
given
by the use of signs in
WRITING
– in the sense illustrated in the previous paragraph. This in turn means that it is given by a kind of perpetual deferral: the connection of any given sign with what it represents is given through its connection with other signs, whose connection with what they represent is given through their connection with other signs, whose connection with what they represent is given through their connection with other signs, and so on indefinitely (see e.g.
Grammatology
, Pt I,
Ch. 1
, passim).

It is easy sometimes, when reading Derrida, to get the impression that he denies that there is any such thing as meaning. And it is easy sometimes, when reading him, to get the impression that he denies that there is anything
but
meaning. Both impressions are faulty. But I think we can now account for both. The first is due to his rejection of
SPEECH
, together with our engrained tendency to think that, if meaningful activity is anything, then
SPEECH
, ultimately, is what it is. The second impression is due to his commitment to the line of thought sketched in the previous paragraph,
together with that same engrained tendency in us
. Thinking that meaningful activity is ultimately
SPEECH
, that is the exercise of signs whose representational powers are intrinsic to them, and reflecting on the fact that, for Derrida, meaningful activity is ultimately the exercise of signs whose representational
powers are given through their relations to other such signs, we conclude that, for Derrida, all there is, ultimately, to be represented in meaningful activity is the meaning of other meaningful activity.

This conclusion may seem to be corroborated by such pronouncements on Derrida’s part as ‘
Il n’y a pas de hors-texte
’ (
Grammatology
, p. 158) translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as ‘There is nothing outside the text’ (ibid.). In fact this translation is misleading.
³⁴
Derrida is not claiming that everything is text, still less that everything is text as that term is ordinarily understood, still
less
that everything is meaning. On the contrary. He is adverting to context, the extralinguistic reality within which, as he is at the same time reminding us, every meaningful activity occurs, the point being that there is no meaningful activity which, of its very essence, irrespective of its relations to things in the contexts in which it occurs, and irrespective in particular of its relations to other associated meaningful activity, homes in on that which is being represented in it. There are no direct marks.

Here are two crucial quotations, the weariness in which is audible:

I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned by language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. (‘Interview’, p. 123)

The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction
³⁵
(‘
il n’y a pas de hors-texte
’), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context….

… The concept of text or of context which guides me embraces and does not exclude the world, reality, history. Once again (and this probably makes a thousand times I have had to repeat this, but when will it finally be heard, and why this resistance?): as I understand it …, the text is not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself confined to the library. It does not suspend reference – to history, to the world, to reality, to Being, and especially not to the other, since to say of history, of the world, of reality, that they always appear … in a movement of interpretation which contextualizes them according to a network of differences and hence of referral to the other, is surely to recall that alterity (difference) is irreducible. (‘Limited Inc’, pp. 136–137)
³⁶

I need to say something about the references to difference in the second of these quotations. Derrida’s insistence that there are no direct marks means that a sign’s relations to things other than itself are crucial to its meaning.
In particular, as we have seen, its relations to other signs are crucial to its meaning. Meaning does not attach, atomistically, to individual signs. It is a feature of systems of signs, and of the structure of their interrelations.
³⁷
But that structure in turn resides in the differences between the signs and in how these differences themselves relate to one another.

Here Derrida’s ideas echo those of Saussure. (This despite the fact noted above, that Saussure is a prime representative of the prioritization of speech over writing, and, indirectly, of
SPEECH
over
WRITING
.) Saussure holds that there is nothing to the elements of language beyond the systems in which they occur, rather as there is nothing to the rook in chess beyond the moves it can make in any given chess position. He applies this idea in the first instance to the phonetic elements of a language. A phoneme can only be identified by where it stands in relation to other phonemes in a system of contrasts. Phonemes are not ‘sounds’, in any neutral language-independent sense of that term. (Think how in some Asian languages there are distinctions between tonemes to which nothing corresponds in English, and conversely, how in English there is a distinction between the liquid consonants
l
and
r
to which nothing corresponds in those Asian languages. And note, incidentally, how this, in its own modest way, further threatens the metaphysics of presence. As Derrida himself puts it, ‘the difference which establishes phonemes and lets them be heard remains in and of itself inaudible, in every sense of the word’ (‘
Différance
’, p. 5).) It follows that there is no identifying one phoneme in one system with another in another, just as there is no saying how the ace of spades moves in chess. Likewise, Saussure argues, in the case of the semantic elements of a language. The meaning of a sign can only be identified by where it stands in relation to the meanings of other signs in a system of contrasts. (See Saussure (
1983
), passim.) Derrida, as we have seen, repeats much of this at the level of meaningful signs, though of course without the suggestion, implicit in what has just gone and explicit in Saussure himself, that meaningful signs are indirect marks and their meanings the direct marks with which they are associated (see
Grammatology
, Pt I,
Ch. 2
, esp. pp. 44–65, and pp. 141–143).
³⁸

I shall close this section with some quotations from Derrida that helpfully summarize all these ideas. But first I must note a couple of points of terminology, themselves derived from Saussure. Derrida uses the term ‘signifier’ to stand for something that is meaningful in virtue of its relation to something else that is meaningful. (This is obviously a variation on what I have been calling a ‘non-direct mark’.) Given any signifier, so defined, there are two possibilities. The first possibility is that it launches an infinite regress. There is the signifier itself; then there is some other signifier to which it is appropriately related; then there is a third signifier to which the second signifier is
appropriately related; and so on indefinitely (perhaps in an infinitely recurring loop). The second possibility is that any such regress is eventually arrested with something whose meaning is intrinsic to it: what I have been calling a ‘direct mark’ and what Derrida himself calls ‘the transcendental signified’ (e.g.
Grammatology
, p. 20). Derrida’s view, in these terms, is that it is always the first possibility that obtains. There is no transcendental signified. Or, as he also puts it at one point, there is no signifier ‘signifying a signifier itself signifying an eternal verity, eternally thought and spoken in the proximity of a present logos’ (
Grammatology
, p. 15). Now for the quotations: