Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies:
"The Continental Origins of Postmodernism"

Week 10: November 15-21

David Potts comments on Jacques Derrida's "Of Grammatalogy"
with follow-up including funny Po-Mo sites

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 1999 9:28 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Derrida's Of Grammatology Chapter 1

[Moderator's note: David Potts has done us a yeoman service here in
sketching an outline of Derrida's epistemology from "Of Grammatology." This
is an instance of a class of post I have not mentioned clearly, I believe,
which is a working paper or extended essay that contributes to the
discussion in a substantial way. As moderator, I welcome such pieces when
you all care to offer them, as the point of this cyberseminar is training.
In these cases, I do not regard the length restrictions on informal posts as
binding, as long as the piece holds together well and is clearly
expressed. ]

[From: David L. Potts ]

DERRIDA SUMMARY [_OF GRAMMATOLOGY_]

The following is a summary of Derrida's thought as presented in Part I,
Chapter 1 of his book _Of Grammatology_. This book is apparently the closest
Derrida has come to writing a systematic statement of his philosophy, of
which the opening chapter gives an overview.

I must say that getting a handle on Derrida is not coming easy to me. What
follows is a "work in progress," of which I would welcome questions,
criticism, comments, etc.

1. All of Western intellectual history, from the birth of philosophy (3)
(and of alphabetic writing (3, 10)) on, has been a "logocentric epoch" (4).
"Logocentrism" refers to belief in a "logos," which can usually be thought
of as _reason_, although it is not simply mental, being "the origin of truth
in general" (3). Derrida speaks of "logos" instead of "reason" in order to
capture this notion of a guaranteed correspondence or connection with
reality and also because he wishes the term to cover the gamut of historical
conceptions of reason, from the "pre-Socratic" to the "post-Hegelian"
(10-11). Being "the origin of truth" (or "constitutive" of truth (14)) means
the logos will usually somehow be constitutive of reality itself. For
example, Derrida's paradigm of logos is the thought of God (11, 13, 15),
which contains the [Platonic] ideas from which worldly things are created
(11). But one way or another, logos is always the principle in virtue of
which the objects of thought are intelligible and by means of which we may
grasp them.

2. Signs (e.g., words of natural language) have two components: signifier,
the physically instantiated symbol; and signified, the thought. These are
always distinct, even when they are at their closest and are only
"discrepant by the time of a breath" (18).

3. What certifies the validity of any signified is ultimately the logos. For
instance, if what is signified is the thought that cats are mammals, and if
the logos is the thought of God, then this particular signified is valid if
and to the extent that one's thought that cats are mammals mirrors the
thought of God. Such mirroring is of course not automatic but requires that
we purify our own thought through reason (i.e., by participating in God's
logos) to bring it as close as possible to that of God.

4. There is thus a sort of hierarchy of signification. Signifier refers to
signified, but since not all signifieds are created equal, a signified may
refer in turn (as signifier) to another, higher signified as validation. The
stopping point of this process must be a "primum signatum: the
transcendental signified" (20), supplied through the logos, a highest
signified that needs no validation. Without a transcendental signified, the
very notion of sign (as combination of signifier and signified) would
collapse into a vicious regress of signifiers.

5. Now the heart of self-validation is _presence_. That is, no fact needs to
be validated if it is immediately present to us; its presence is its
validation. For example, the basic reason we cannot doubt our own existence
is that we are present to ourselves (which is what is going on in the cogito
argument (12)). Therefore what marks the higher signifieds in the chain of
signification is their higher degree of presence. Indeed the essence of the
signified is presence (18). Moreover, and by the same token, the essence of
_being_ is presence (12). To be valid and to be real are the epistemic and
metaphysical sides of the same coin of presence.

6. Thus "the epoch of the logos" implies an entire "philosophy of presence"
(12-13, 23), an epithet by which Derrida characterizes the whole history of
Western philosophy. All of the distinctions and oppositions fought out in
Western philosophy have been determined by the "logocentric" framework
described above. The only such distinction of which Derrida gives more than
a hint is Plato's distinction between the intelligible and the sensible
(13). The ideas are intelligible, i.e., immediately graspable by (present
to) the mind through "an absolute logos." Physical things are merely
sensible traces of the intelligible ideas. Therefore the former are fit only
to be signifiers of the latter, and only the latter have real being. The
intelligible/sensible distinction thus provides a natural and even necessary
elaboration of the logocentric "metaphysico-theology" (13).

7. Speech is superior to writing in the hierarchy of signification because
the voice is closer to thought and thus to presence (18). We think spoken
words, inner speech, not writing. Written signs in fact - on the logocentric
view - are merely signifiers of spoken signs. Thus logocentrism "debases
writing" as "mediation of mediation" (12-13).

8. Logocentrism, since it seeks presence, abhors all signifiers and tries to
"efface" them by pretending there is unity between signifier and signified
(20). Any separateness of the signifier must represent a fall from pure
presence, pure being. Preference for speech over writing is a key element of
the ploy to forget the separateness of the signifier. But this unity is an
illusion which ultimately cannot be sustained. Heidegger's radical
questioning of being in _Being and Time_ has shown that it is
"pre-comprehended" (i.e., prior to and presupposed by) all language and even
all concepts; yet nothing can be grasped without language and concepts
(20-21). Therefore logocentric linguistics can never reach the pure presence
of being and must be reduced to incoherence if it tries. Meanwhile,
Heidegger's failure to answer "the question of being" through any more
fundamental inquiry only confirms the untenability of the "onto-theology" of
logocentrism (22).

9. The "closure" (or bounds) of the logocentric epoch lies in the
recognition of this radical incoherence: the concepts of being, truth,
sense, logos, and so forth, cannot be made good within the logocentric
framework. It is the work of deconstruction to expose the tail-swallowing
nature of these concepts and thereby reveal the bankruptcy of logocentrism
(10, 14). Deconstruction does not attack the concepts of the logocentric
epoch from the vantage point of a new epoch but from _within_ the
logocentric epoch - the only place from which they can be conceived at all
(24).

10. What is needed is a wholly new conception of language which puts writing
first. Rather than signifying signifieds in a series terminating ultimately
in a transcendental signified, written signifiers according to the new
conception signify _only other signifiers_ (7), not because of a failure of
the signifieds but because there is no need of them. There is only a
perpetual chain or circle of signifiers, an endless "play of signifying
references" (7), which is never anchored to anything. "This, strictly
speaking, amounts to destroying the concept of 'sign' and its entire logic"
(7). The key concept is differance (with an "a"), which implies both
difference and deferance (23). Every signifier is inherently different from
what it signifies, and we should uphold this difference, not seek to erase
it in a misguided quest for presence. By the same token every signifier
defers recognition of what it signifies, and we must embrace this also.

11. So there is no logos, no truth, no ground. These and all the other basic
concepts of "logocentrism" are illusions of a dying epoch. Can there be a
new epoch that successfully discards them and embraces writing and
"differance"? Derrida hedges about this (e.g., 14). Such a prospect must
appear to us "as a sort of monstrosity" (5). For now we are still locked in
the current epoch. We must use existing concepts but at the same time erase
them, make them visible but cross them out (23, 24, illustrated at 19) to
show that we recognize their inescapable embeddedness in logocentrism. But
it is to be hoped that, with enough deconstruction, logocentrism may
eventually be transcended altogether.

12. Two differences from Foucault. (a) Though both speak of "epochs,"
Foucault's epoch's are typically about 200 years long. Derrida speaks of
only one epoch, which spans Western history from the birth of Greek
philosophy to the present. (This is the same span of history that Heidegger
wishes to "de-struct.") Derrida thus believes that what governs his epoch is
something more fundamental than the "epistemes" that govern Foucault's.
(b) Whereas Foucault constantly refers to the facts of other epochs in a way
that requires him to possess an extra-historical vantage point he denies to
the rest of us, (a point amusingly exposed by Derrida in "Cogito and the
History of Madness;" e.g., "everything transpires as if Foucault _knew_ what
'madness' means" (_Writing and Difference_ 41, emphasis original),) Derrida
refuses to step outside the confines of our own epoch and emphasizes that
deconstruction operates within and upon the logocentric framework.

13. Note the key role played by the notion of "purity" in point 8 above. The
"logocentrist" project fails because the pure presence of being is
inevitably distorted by the process of linguistic or conceptual
signification. Thus the diaphanous model shows up as a premise - as it
almost invariably does - when it comes to giving a reason why objectivity is
impossible in general.

[David Potts]


*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 1999 10:20 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Re: Derrida's Of Grammatology Chapter 1

From: Will Thomas

In Chapter 2 of his "Against Deconstruction," John Ellis analyzes Derrida's
epistemology of "differance" and the free play of signs. He notes that
Derrida derives his vocabulary from a reading of the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure, but argues that Derrida simply misunderstands
Saussure.

For one thing, when Saussure writes of "differance," Ellis argues that there
is no doubt that he means differentiation, and not temporal deferance.
Saussure's theory of concepts, as Ellis summarizes it, points out that
concepts, although they have objective referents, are categories formed in
contrast to other, specific, conceptual categories. For instance, Ellis
writes "If anyone takes BLACK as playing against every other word in
English, indiscriminately, then he does not understand its meaning. It is
when he knows that a uniquely relevant contrast is with WHITE and also knows
how that linguistic contrast is relevant to the corresponding contrasts in
visual experience, that we are sure he understands it." Derrida plays on
the French verb differer to make concepts be deferred as well as
differentiated, but this is simply a gross error. (Ellis, 54)

Ellis also argues that while Derrida makes much of Saussure's view that
conceptual categories themselves have an "arbitrary" character, it must be
understood that for Saussure, "arbitrary" does not mean "wholly
unconstrained" but rather, something we might translated into Objectivist
terms as "optional." Thus, for instance, forming the concept GNU (a kind of
African antelope) is something one might or might not do depending on one's
linguistic needs, context of knowledge, etc. (Saussure would probably go on
to argue that GNU is not really fully linguistic until assimilated into a
language as a widely accepted term, but that is another matter.)


--Will Thomas


*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************

To: TOC Cyberseminar

Sent: Saturday, November 20, 1999 9:17 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Two Recommendations

From: David L. Potts

In case there's anybody who does not know about it, I want to mention the Postmodernism Generator web site. At this absolutely hilarious place you can have generated a postmodernist scholarly article, complete with bibliography, at the click of a link. The papers are randomly generated - a brand new one every time you click the link - by a software generator called the "Dada Engine," created by Andrew Bulhak at Monash University in Australia. The output is practically indistinguishable from published postmodernist scholarly papers.

A more serious recommendation is an article by David Stove (who is also Australian, btw) titled, I think, "What's Wrong With Our Thoughts?" The paper forms the last chapter of his book _The Plato Cult_. Stove thinks that most of the history of philosophy is filled with egregious falsehoods and that their progenitors should not be treated with reverence, and he isn't shy about saying so. In this essay, he asks how it is that thought can go so far wrong as to be "pathological." He uses as examples passages from Plotinus, Hegel, and Foucault. Therefore he is not talking about postmodernism specifically but the phenomenon of "thought gone wrong" generally. I don't personally agree with all of his analysis, but he makes you think about the history of philosophy, about why so much of it is so wrong, and about what an appropriate attitude toward it should be. He's also a very funny writer, which doesn't hurt.

-David