Linguistics and Grammatology: The Outside and the Inside
pages 27 - 44
Apologies for the brief delay; some personal stuff came up at the end of last week. But, what I would like to do before moving onto the next section is very briefly summarize a few of the themes I found most interesting in the first chapter (possibly in the future making these summaries their own posts):
(Western) metaphysics is fundamentally logocentric. In privileging the present, essential, fixed, rational word it must suppress originary difference/differance and disparage writing as a sign of a sign (which we will shortly see vis-a-vis Saussure).
While perhaps metaphysics has always carried the seed of its own deconstruction within it, according to Derrida at this moment it is science that has breached its protective discourse. Cybernetics, linguistics, math, biology, etc. are all in their way turning from essence and fixity toward signs, messages and information (that is non-phonetic writing).
This all is ultimately historial—which will mean both that Being (and the difference between Being and beings) and speech/writing are subject to change and that the very concept of history itself is at stake in this change.
With the beginning of chapter 2, we start to see this not in a broad schematic way but how it plays out in Saussure’s attempts to bracket writing and bar its consideration in developing a science of linguistics. This section (and the brief intro to the chapter) seem, at least to me very readable and straightforward. Derrida argues at first that any attempt to define what writing is (or what it does) tends to slip into a treatise on when and where writing originates; he then goes on to show Saussure repeats Plato, Aristotle and Rousseau in insisting that writing is unnatural and a dangerous usurpation of the proper place of language as speech:
Saussure takes up the traditional definition of writing which, already in Plato and Aristotle, was restricted to the model of phonetic script and the language of words. Let us recall the Aristotelian definition : "Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words."
Moreover, the attempt to excise writing from language, to make of it an outside to language, also appears as an attempt by metaphysics to defend itself from history. Writing for Saussure always threatens to modify speech to force it to change by its seductions, thus Derrida in tracing Saussure:
For it is indeed history that one must stop in order to protect language from writing
That is history—and writing is always the mark and medium of history—threatens to deny language its essence and fixity; the privileged and eternal relation of word to logos.
Two final points then. First, and I am sure we will return to this at length, but writing is seen as fundamentally external to language in part because it is a technology—a set of tools; techniques; a prothesis to memory and speech:
Writing would thus have the exteriority that one attributes to utensils; to what is even an imperfect tool and a dangerous, almost maleficent, technique.
And we can remember here—and include a bit more of the quote—that adventure we spoke of earlier at the beginning of chapter 1:
It is therefore as if what we call language could have been in its origin and in its end only a moment, an essential but determined mode, a phenomenon, an aspect, a species of writing. And as if it had succeeded in making us forget this, and in wilfully misleading us, only in the course of an adventure: as that adventure itself. All in all a short enough adventure. It merges with the history that has associated technics and logo centric metaphysics for nearly three millennia. And it now seems to be approaching what is really its own exhaustion
What metaphysics has always believed, and believed in error, was that technics was a mere tool in the service of logos—while at the same time has always feared that technics (as writing) could usurp it. I believe it would be an error though to read this as a pro-technology accelerationist position, what is occurring as the exhaustion of this adventure is much more subtle and requires us to understand technics in a much broader sense as well as trace the ways in which metaphysics tends always to recuperate that which threatens it.
Second and final point, Derrida explains rather artfully what is happening in Saussure’s work (as he tries to exclude writing from linguistics):
It is when he is not expressly dealing with writing, when he feels he has closed the parentheses on that subject, that Saussure opens the field of a general grammatology. Which would not only no longer be excluded from general linguistics, but would dominate it and contain it within itself. Then one realizes that what was chased off limits, the wandering outcast of linguistics, has indeed never ceased to haunt language as its primary and most intimate possibility. Then something which was never spoken and which is nothing other than writing itself as the origin of language writes itself within Saussure's discourse.
One can notice here a number of elements which are indicative of the movement of deconstruction that repeats throughout Derrida’s work. Saussure in attempting to secure his discourse, and drive out writing, to see it as a novel but uninformative species or representation of language, ultimately falls under the sway of it; here writing “writes itself” into the discourse in question. Furthermore, deconstruction often operates by disrupting the border between general and specific or between the frame and content (this latter formulation shows up especially in “The Purveyor of Truth” where Derrida attempts to show that Lacan has erased some of the frame of The Purloined Letter in his seminar—Barbra Johnson has an excellent essay on the whole affair) and ultimately inverts the relationship between the inside and the outside showing that they cannot be kept separate. Or in this case, that despite Saussure’s wishes to the contrary he sets us down the path of writing in general, of a grammatology that could be the grounds and frame for linguistics (perhaps even all the sciences).