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 and Philosophy, 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 logophono-ethno-centrism. Each held an explicit privileging of the spoken word over the written word, and when writing was considered, a privileging of phoneticalphabetic 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 with predicates. 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 logophono-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

language there are only differences without positive terms, Saussure tells us) and replaces the sign 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 of which 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 upon by 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 perceive time. 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

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 book The 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 differ whereas temporal relations are deferred. He points to Freuds notion of the deferred effect, or Nachtraglichkeit, as an 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 the logocentrism 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 with symbolic 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

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 same name? 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 by signs [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 signify vacuously, 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 a calculus - and the restoration of a full language, heavy with implicit intentionalitys and analogical references to something else, which it presents enigmatically. In Imagination 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 Evil makes 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.

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 book Laws 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 in Positions, 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 of The Iconic Logic of Peirces Graphs, and The Logical Status of Diagrams, highlights the fact that there is indeed a phoneticalphabetic 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 not valid 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

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.)