Understanding Derrida

I hadn't read this Derrida text before, it's pretty awesome. He touches on something that I've been wondering about for a while, the accessibility of the structure of information/communication. Most linguistic and semiotic analyses attempt to categorize and compartmentalize the various fragments that compose either the field of written language (which is dead language) or the field of immediate apprehension (which is to say, the trace, or dasein, or something like that). The problem in both cases is that, as Derrida paraphrases somebody else, "men are already in a state that allows" both kinds of communication--in order to begin a study of language, one must already be operating under the auspices of language, which necessity seems to preclude a truly comprehensive hermeneutics of language. Despite the various attempts of analytic disciplines to articulate a comprehensive model of communication, there is always an absence which causes the possibility of a failure. In this essay Derrida, rather than delineating this absence with his own words, shows that Austin's work on performatives (interesting and respectable though it is) simultaneously encounters, attempts to understand, and discards the operation of this absence as intrinsic and unavoidable.

The absence of which I speak is the absence of the self, which is constructed by language. In the idea of performative utterances (as I understand it, though from the Derrida piece it appears that Austin changed his mind on some points after his better-known work) there is the possibility of the failure of the utterance: to Austin, the performative fails to function if the context is incorrect. However, as Derrida points out, there is no such thing as context.

It seems that there are only two things: there is the self, whether it is named trace, dasein, presence, etc. Then there are other things. Writing is not another thing, because all language is writing, which is more or less the same thing as being, or at any rate one requires the other ("the essential predicates in a minimal determination of the classical concept of writing ... are ... to be found in all language, in spoken language for instance, and ultimately in the totality of 'experience'"), and all attempts at delineating the boundaries of experience, as far as I can tell, have failed. "Communication" is something that takes place within the inaccessible "self," as is "writing," because writing requires reading to truly function as writing, and reading is not an attribute of the material text, but of the immaterial reader. The context of an utterance is ultimately determined by the reader and no one else, hence the intrinsic possibility of the failure of a performative.

For instance: Derrida quotes Austin discussing the situation of the personal signature. For Austin signatures are inherently performative: in a spoken utterance, the word I functions in the same way that a signature does with a written text, it indicates the speaker and allows the recipient of the communique to situate himself in a contextualized situation, validating the utterance as a performative. However, the same slippage that is characteristic of the word I (its meaning is context-specific) applies to the signature: for example, it is entirely possible to falsify a signature, or to simply refuse to acquiesce to its supposed authority. In both of these cases the failure of the performative is caused by the context, but again, the context is simply the absence of the I. To Austin the possibility of this failure is a parasite on language, to Derrida it is the point at which Austins analysis fails.

So there seem to be a few conclusions (though inconclusive ones) to which we are drawn: all writing is language, or all language is writing; regardless of the order of terms, they both refer to a problem, to wit: there is writing, and there are books, but they only exist as such when they are apprehended by a cognizant reader. The problem is that, as I said earlier, "writing" and "reading" are both attributes of the inaccessible subject, but anything that can be demonstrated as writing (a written text, or anything else) is simply an object: in order to be transformed (transsubstantiated) into the function of reading or writing, it requires the supplementary addition of the reader, who grants the object the qualities of existence, otherness, and iterability, though none of these inhere in the object: they are attributes of the subject as object. When I look at the computer screen I am hypothetically "seeing" something real, but really there is only a process I call "myself" or "I," which includes the computer screen: if I see it, and understand it, it is only because I am understanding the way that that piece of myself functions in relation to the other pieces of myself.

So in the last analysis, if I understand correctly, all we can do is continue to exacerbate the différance, spiraling inwards towards a continually inaccessible center. Is that what Derrida's saying? It appears that since Plato, or more recently, since the Cartesian Cogito, people have been trying to situate the subject in an appropriate location (so to speak). The greatest innovation of semiotics, as I understand it, was to propose that the subject should be sought in the (supposedly comprehensible) operation of the dead universe of writing. Derrida is wonderful but maddening, because no matter how hard I try to follow him all I end up with is the Hindu admonition from master to student: neti, neti (not that, not that); an understanding of things as their own negatives. But Derrida mentions occasionally that logical negativity isn't what he's looking for, so I guess I have no idea.