meaning in grammatology and semiology

7/27/2019 Meaning in Grammatology and Semiology

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Randolph Dible

October, 2013

The Meaning of Grammatology and Semiology

Saussure and Husserl are the two figures through whom Derrida is critiquing

the Western metaphysical tradition. Their respective sciences of signs carry deep

and damaging covert metaphysical presuppositions. As far back as Pythagoras

there are the traces of phonocentrism in his practice of teaching his disciples from

behind a veil. In Aristotles Organon, Ricoeur writes, interpretation is any voiced

sound endowed with significance - every phone semantike, every vox

significativa, and the complete meaning of hermeneia appears only in the

complex enunciation, the sentence, which Aristotle calls logos, (Freud andPhilosophy, 21.) A genealogical line of philosophers representative of Western

philosophy gets cited twice in the interview - Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Hegel,

and Husserl - and names a handful of metaphysical relays of the charges of logo-

phono-ethno-centrism. Each held an explicit privileging of the spoken word over

the written word, and when writing was considered, a privileging of phonetic-

alphabetic script. Their reasons for this, in turn, were a privileging of the presence

of consciousness to itself in the self-presentation of subjectivity and a privileging

of the expression of meaning, lexically, in discreet semantic units associated withpredicates. In all of the philosophers mentioned above these metaphysical

presuppositions are made explicit, and they attempt to exclude writing from

linguistics as a phenomenon of exterior representation, both useless and

dangerous. Derrida calls this the reduction of the exteriority of the signifier, or

the reduction of writing, (Positions, 22.) This act is part and parcel of logo-

phono-ethno-centrism. This is also called the representativist conception of

writing and it goes along with an expressivist conception of meaning.

To deconstruct this metaphysical centrism, Derrida employs a neographism,

which he says is neither a word nor a concept: differance. The difference

between difference and differance (spelled with an a rather than an e) is not a

phonetic difference (it cannot be heard,) it is purely graphical (Margins of

Philosophy, 3.) Derrida takes Saussures differentially-structured linguistics (in


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language there are only differences without positive terms, Saussure tells us) and

replaces thesign with differance, (the one with an a,) a play of differences that

erases its traces. Semiology thus becomes grammatology.

In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida cites Husserl in pointing out an ambiguity

of the two senses of the word sign: it means both expression and indication.

Husserl begins to sharpen his concept by first stripping the indicative sign of

meaning and sense. It is evident to Derrida from such stipulations as logical

meaning is an expression, that Husserl wants to grasp the expressive and logical

purity of meaning as the possibility of logos, (Speech and Phenomena, 20) despite

the admitted entanglement or interweaving of expression and indication. The

representation of language as the expulsion of the intimacy of an

inside (Positions, 28,) Derrida goes as far as to call a transcendental illusion ofwhich Western metaphysics constitutes a powerful systematization, (ibid.) What

is at stake in all this is the meaning of meaning. The critical project is to explicate

the far-reaching shortcomings of the semiological and phenomenological

conception of meaning as expression. Husserls purely logical grammar, as

much as Leibniz mathesis universalis, is symptomatic of this logocentrism (and

Foucault would diagnose it a case of taxomania, a symptom of the Classical

episteme, were there not a clash between the two thinkers.) But Derridas genial

stroke assures us that the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked uponby its own exteriority It already differs (from itself) before any act of

expression Only on this condition can it signify, (Positions, pp. 29.) Such a

notion of the sign as the trace of productive self-differentiation in both a

temporal and spatial sense is the kind of textuality of which Grammatology is the

science. It is a wholly new concept of writing.

The temporality of writing is different than the temporality of speaking.

Whereas speech privileges the present, it is with writing that we may first perceivetime. As Derrida writes in Of Grammatology: Origin of the experience of space

and time, this writing of difference, this fabric of the trace, permits the difference

between space and time to be articulated, to appear as such, in the unity of an

experience (of a same lived out of a same body proper [corps propre]). This

articulation therefore permits a graphic (visual or tactile, spatial) chain to be


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adapted, on occasion in a linear fashion, to a spoken (phonic, temporal) chain.

It is from the primary possibility of this articulation that one must begin.

Difference is articulation (pp. 66, Of Grammatology.) Nietzsche writes that

consciousness cannot be trusted to know its own functioning. Derrida is indebted

to Nietzsche for this suspicious hermeneutics, and in many respects Of

Grammatology is modeled on Nietzsches Geneology of Morals. In his bookThe

Time of Our Lives, David Hoy explains that the trace leaves behind the traditional

metaphysics of presence in the kind temporality it entails. Unlike metaphysics,

he writes, which thinks of its basic concepts as self-contained units of meaning,

Derridas concept of the trace is not such a unit. There are no such units but only

contrastive relations in a system of differences. These differences are both spatial

and temporal. Spatial relations are said to differwhereas temporal relations are

deferred. He points to Freuds notion of the deferred effect, or Nachtraglichkeit, asan example of a temporality that disrupts the usual conceptualization of time as

involving the moments of past, present, and future, (The Time of Our Lives, 81.)

In addition to a Merleau-Pontys notion of the trace, perhaps still mired in a

Bergsonian privileging of the present, and the Levinasian-Heideggerian genealogy

of the Derridean trace, the trace also goes back to Freuds Note on the Mystic

Writing Pad, on which psychical content is represented through a nonphonetic

writing, a text whose essence is irreducibly graphic, even to slips of the

pen, (Writing and Difference, 199, 230.) Although incomprehensible within thelogocentrism it deconstructs, the trace requires the logic of presence, even when it

begins to disobey that logic, (pp. 71, Of Grammatology,) but still, it cannot be

grasped by metaphysics, and thus puts us beyond metaphysics, (The Time of Our

Lives, 77.)

Deconstruction, in its semantically-oriented critical capacity, is also a project

parallel to other post-structuralist philosophies of meaning and value. To bring

attention these parallel aims, I will highlight Paul Ricoeurs semantic problem withsymbolic logic. The metaphysical critique is the same for Derrida and Ricoeur

(both being post-structuralists generally), for instance, in the invocation of the

Leibnizian mathesis universalis, an alphabet of human thought, and the project

of a purely logical grammar in Husserl (Husserl: An Analysis of His

Phenomenology, 161-174.) In the Introduction to Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur


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indicates his progressive direction in contradistinction from both modern symbolic

logics Leibnizian genealogy and Husserls notion of signification, when he asks:

Is it necessary to say that the sort of symbol which will be in question

here has nothing to do with that which symbolic logic calls by the samename? Indeed it is the inverse of it. But it is not enough to say so; one must

know why. For symbolic logic, symbolism is the acme of formalism.

Formal logic, in the theory of the syllogism has already replaced terms bysigns [my emphasis] standing for anything whatever In symbolic logic

these expressions are themselves replaced by letters, or written signs, which

need no longer be spoken and by means of which it is possible to calculate

without asking oneself how they are incorporated in a deontology of

reasoning. These, then, are no longer abbreviations of familiar verbal

expressions, but characters in the Leibnizian sense of the word - that is to

say, elements of a calculus. In this sense [the symbol] is the absolute

inverse of an absolute formalism. One might be astonished that the symbol

has two such rigorously inverse uses. Perhaps the reason should be sought

in the structure of signification, which is at once a function of absence and a

function of presence: a function of absence because to signify is to signifyvacuously, it is to say things without the things, in substituted signs; a

function of presence because to signify is to signify something and finally

the world. [Expression and Signification, Husserl] Signification by its

very structure makes possible at the same time both total formalization - that

is to say, the reduction of signs to characters and finally to elements of acalculus - andthe restoration of a full language, heavy with implicit

intentionalitys and analogical references to something else, which it

presents enigmatically.

InImagination and Chance, Lenoard Lawlor suggests that both Derrida and

Ricoeur agree that thought cannot achieve self-knowledge by means of intuitive

self-reflection, that thought has to externalize and mediate itself in repeatable

signs, and that linguistic mediation disallows the possibility of a complete

mediation whereby the origin would be recovered in all of its determinations. In

light of these affinities he says that Derridas work and Ricoeurs are almost

indistinguishable, (Reading Derrida and Ricoeur, 4.) The above selection from

Symbolism of Evilmakes evident that in addition to general affinities, there is a

more or less complete agreement between the two thinkers in respect to the

formulation of meaning and more specifically the critique of the sign.


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As a last segue it may be useful to give an example of doing philosophy in

nonphonetic writing, an a mathematical notation more akin to drawing. Logician

George Spencer-Browns calculus of indications contained in his bookLaws of

Form is a simple calculus of the consequences of the injunction, Draw a

distinction, a notion thoroughly imported into Niklas Luhmanns use of

Differenz, a notion which is meant to connote Spencer-Browns use of

distinction as much as Derridas use of differance. The calculus of indications

is developed into a primary or non-numerical arithmetic of the two constants, the

marked state and the unmarked state, and by the introduction of variables to stand

for these two constants, a primary algebra. Like Charles Sanders Peirces

Existential Graphs, the calculus of indications is a purely graphical,

diagrammatic, or iconic system, like Venn and Euler Diagrams. In the interview inPositions, Derrida states: The effective progress of mathematical notation thus

goes along with the deconstruction of metaphysics, with the profound renewal of

mathematics itself, and the concept of science for which mathematics has always

been the model, (Positions, pp. 30.)

Yales Sun-Joo Shin, author ofThe Iconic Logic of Peirces Graphs, and The

Logical Status of Diagrams, highlights the fact that there is indeed a phonetic-

alphabetic prejudice against diagrams operant even within mathematics:

Despite the great interest shown in diagrams, nevertheless a negative

attitude toward diagrams has been prevalent among logicians and

mathematicians. They consider any nonlinguistic form of representation to

be a heuristic tool only. No diagram or collection of diagrams is considered

a valid proof at all. It is more interesting to note that nobody has shown any

legitimate justification for this attitude toward diagrams. Let me call this

traditional attitude, that is, that diagrams can be only heuristic tools but notvalid proofs, the general prejudice against diagrams. - Sun-Joo Shin,

Introduction, The Logical Status of Diagrams

Sun-Joo Shins comments on the status of diagrams in mathematics and logic,

along with many other strains of post-structuralist philosophy, agrees with


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Derridas critique of the metaphysics of presence. It is clear, Derrida writes,

that the reticence, that is, the resistance to logical-mathematical notation has

always been the signature of logocentrism and phono centrism in the event to

which they have dominated metaphysics and the classical semiological and

linguistic projects. A grammatology must in effect liberate the

mathematization of language, and must also declare that the practice of science in

fact has never ceased to protest the imperialism of the Logos, for example by

calling upon, from all time, and more and more, non phonetic writing, (Positions,

29, Of Grammatology, pp. 3.)

meaning in grammatology and semiology

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