Derrida & Deconstruction (Condensed)

[Epistemic status: Medium+ confidence on accuracy. I am not a Derrida scholar, but I know enough to know I am not entirely misreading him. Some of my interpretations, though, likely don’t conform to scholarly consensus, because I am unaware of them. I have the feeling Derrida would like that.]

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I.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is known for his semiotic analysis of texts known as deconstruction. He was an Algerian-born French philosopher associated with the post-structuralist and postmodernist movements.

We say he was a “postmodernist,” but what does that mean?

Generally, it means a break from the “modernism” of the Enlightenment tradition, which espoused the foundationalizing of knowledge, the accessibility of truth through rational argument, and natural progress. For Derrida, though, this break went beyond just the Enlightenment. He sought to show the incoherence of all Western philosophy since its formal induction in the writings of Plato.

Plato, he says—as well as Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and almost every other philosopher of the Western tradition (especially modern)—assumes that there is some “Archimedean point,” some God’s eye view, some first certainty where we come face to face with the truth of a matter, because that truth is immediately present to our consciousness. From there, this immediacy—this “presence”—can guarantee the truth of our most basic premises, providing a foundation for our logic to build on. Finally, then, all we have to do is express (or signify) the truth that we arrive at, in our minds to ourselves and in language to others.

Derrida labels this assumption, this privileging of reason on ostensibly firm foundations, “logocentrism” (from the Greek logos), and he argues that it has become an inescapable staple of almost all of Western philosophy. This, he says, was our first mistake. That is what makes him post-modern.

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II.

But what is “deconstruction”?

Deconstruction is a way of reading a text, or of understanding culture, customs, and institutions—of showing the holes in any suggestion of certainty. To “deconstruct” a text, Derrida demonstrates how the foundations on which a particular writer’s thoughts are built are inherently unstable and slippery. He wants to show how their own logic, which is based on those foundations, ultimately subverts itself. The truth that they sought to convey, then, becomes distorted and subject to interpretation.

Derrida does this to underscore the undecidability of language, and thus also of reason, since language is an expression of this reason. (Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”) His goal, though, is not to say that everything is up for grabs, all meaning is bankrupt, and truth and falsehood are identical. Rather, he wants to make our thought more rigorous and less arrogant, and to persuade us of the difficulty (impossibility?) of using reason and language to come to any conclusion with certainty. Certainty and metaphysics are dead.

Everything is relational. Everything is contextual. There is no Archimedean point that we can access.

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III.

To me, his arguments are pretty persuasive, oftentimes showing what they say, performing their meanings—which is also what makes him difficult to understand. Which proves his point?

How does he show all this, though? How does he use language and reason to show the instability of language and reason?

Derrida begins by pointing out that the Western tradition (and maybe all human schemas?) is dominated by distinctions between binary oppositions. Speech and writing. Rationality and irrationality. Light and dark. Good and evil. In each of these pairs, one is given primacy, preference, and originality—the other being its shitty derivative.

Plato, for example, claims that speech is better than writing because the meaning of our thoughts are immediately present to the hearer, in the proper context, whereas the meaning in writing can be decontextualized and skewed. Writing would increase forgetfulness in us, substituting reminding for remembering. Speech good, writing bad (he says while writing). Difference booooo!

We don’t even need to bring race into this to see the point it makes.

Using ideas from Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theory, Derrida tries to show how this opposition undermines itself even in the writings of the most “logocentric” philosophers.

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IV.

Language, Saussure says, forms a system of differences. A word (as a “sign” or “signifier”) does not inherently mean what it refers to (the “signified”). The word “sun” does not inherently mean the bright yellow thing in the sky. The sign is arbitrary. We could just as well call it 太陽 (taiyō), like the Japanese. But the word sun only makes sense insofar as it is not other words. Sure, I can point at the sun and say “sun,” and a Japanese person will understand that I mean taiyō. But once we’ve learned a large portion of a language, the sun no longer means merely the bright yellow thing in the sky, in a direct correspondence. Rather, its meaning is tied up with a whole system of other signs and associations, like “sky,” “star,” “space,” “solar,” “galaxy,” “light,” “hot,” “beach,” etc.

Once we recognize that we speak in a language, we can see that the sign, in some sense, floats free of its object, suggesting other words and emotions and associations that the hearer brings to bear on it. A dog is not just a “dog,” but the enemy of a “cat,” “man’s best friend,” etc. A “guitar” is not just a guitar, but a part of a “band,” playing “music,” “rock n’ roll,” etc. Thus, Derrida says, “the signified concept is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself. Essentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences” (Of Grammatology, 11).

The meaning of a word, then, depends on how it relates to other words. If I say someone was “killed,” do I mean that they “died” accidentally, as in a car crash, or that they were “murdered”? If your friend says gay marriage should be federally legalized, does that mean they think immigration restrictions should be lifted too? When Yeats says “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” what is he referring to? It’s up for interpretation, until we get some clarification (which on a super subtle issue, with limited time/patience for explanation, might be nigh impossible, so we’ll probably just take a quick heuristic, thx), if we ever get clarification at all. The association gang cannot be outrun.

So part of the meaning of a word is absent when we use it. It calls to other related words in the system. The sign, Derrida says, has “traces” of other signs in it. Any sign is a “trace” of the meanings it is related to in the network of meanings that gives the sign its meaning.

[This absence, this ambiguity inherent to our words, this opacity in our meanings, is the suggestibility in poetry. It is the cause of your side-thoughts that ignite and spring away while reading a book. And it is central to the difficulty of communication, like we see in Poe’s law and Wiio’s law.]

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V.

Our language then is not entirely in our power. The moment it leaves our mouths, or is published into the world, its reception is subject to interpretations that are impossible for us to control for. Sure we can be more or less specific and accurate with our language, but on a certain level, what we say does not have its origin in what is present to us, because much of its meaning is in the background of what we say. And not even our intentions or the context we say it in can freeze the meaning of what we say into something absolute and definite. We do not control the system of signs we borrow from to mean.

Thus, it is impossible to free our signing from interpretation. Finally, then, the primacy of speaking over writing breaks down once we tug on it. Absent meanings and traces are not excluded from speaking any more than they are from writing.

In a fun little play on words, Derrida describes this non-presence of a sign as “différance.” In French, the difference between “difference” and “différance” can only be seen in writing, as their pronunciation is identical. With this word, he is creatively performing his point, as he proceeds to bestow it with two meanings. On the one hand, it means to “differ” (to be other than), and on the other, to “defer” (to put off for later or postpone). It’s a word’s “différance” that simultaneously allows it to mean what it does by its differing from other words, and yet separates it from this meaning, deferring its own meaning, assuring its difference from its meaning. Quite a paradox.

By virtue of this différance, then, the meaning of a word is always disseminated, spread out, and decentralized, rather than held together cohesively, just waiting to simply be deployed and immediately understood.

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VI.

Because of the referential nature of a sign and the system it’s a part of, Derrida was able to famously state that “there is nothing outside the text.”

What does he mean here?

Gotcha! That fact that we even had to ask proves the point already. If a sign’s meaning is always disseminated and deferred, then there is no limit to the context of a text, no limit to what may be relevant in trying to understand it. This “does not mean,” he says, “that all referents are suspended, denied, or enclosed in a book […], but it does mean that every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this ‘real’ except in an interpretive experience” (Writing and Difference, 148).

Does he mean that we must restrict ourselves to the text we are studying to understand it, ignoring the cultural and historical factors during the time it was written? No! Quite the opposite! Everything, all of reality, must be accounted for what interpreting something, because it’s ALL a part of the text. All of reality IS the text. There is nothing outside the text because there is nothing outside of reality!

With this one phrase, “there is nothing outside the text,” he invites misinterpretation, thus proving his point performatively, from a supra-textual meta-level, where the text (his book) actually exists for interpretation in the greater “text” of the system it cannot help but borrow from—that is, from reality. Any interpretation, then, must account for all of this.

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VII.

This being the case—all of reality being a part of the text, and there being no inherent meaning to signs outside the text—any attempt to foundationalize knowledge, language, or reason by privileging any one sign as the primary sign, as the original point of certainty and truth, is ultimately unstable and doomed to fail by its own logic. Derrida is thus able to “deconstruct” any text that makes claims to certainty by showing how its meaning, built upon excluding some binary opposite, ends up excluding itself in the process, and how its meaning depends upon including the very thing it aims to exclude.

If you are looking for complete consistency, firm foundations, and certainty, according to Derrida, you will not find it from inside the text. But that is exactly where you are.

Without a God’s eye view, no solid foundations can be built. So if we are to continue on as philosophers, as people trying to understand the world, we must give up certain cherished hopes for certainty and mere semblances of truth, and instead blaze on with humility and a recognition that the center cannot hold, since that is the only way we can carry on with intellectual honesty and rigor. Without access to certainty, we must be content to have our meanings in a relative mode.

So what is all this, then? Is this just a big linguistic trick, clever but fatally flawed? Or does this have something important to say about the nature of our quest to understand reality from inside it?

Tough to say. Derrida’s proposition here is an uncomfortable one, but then again, if it wasn’t, I’d be much more worried.

We can always let it simmer, and defer our judgment till later.

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Main source: The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy, 6th edition, Norman Melchert.