Nonce Is The Word

Derrida’s Deconstruction

cmbodayle:

The typical deconstructivist move is to show that the play of differences produce meaning by appealing to either (a) a non-linguistic entity or (b) a term that masks a binary opposition, providing a “center” to the discourse.

By “play of differences,” I mean the distinctions between different things. Derrida uses the term “differance” (with an “a”) to refer to the movement of “difference” and “deferral” (the same word in French). The idea is that meaning requires us to make a distinction between things, saying that the “differ” from one another. This distinction “defers” the meaning of (e.g.) “orange” to its degree of difference between red and yellow. So the “deferral” means that the meaning is postponed until we understand the distinctions that make the distinction possible. In speech, Derrrida says, this is “temporalized” (postponed to the end of the speech). In writing, it is “spatialized” (moved to a different location in the text). The play of differences, he thinks, would go on indefinitely unless something puts a stop to them.

People typically take Derrida’s claims about “differance,” the “transcendental signified,” and “there is no outside the text” to be an assertion that everything is merely linguistic. His point, however, is about the role of “difference” on a general conceptual level. The point about animals is supposed to show that “differance” determines meaningful content in much more than just “language.”

It might help to think about this in terms of the “one and many problem,” which is in my view the most important issue in the history of philosophy.

Traditionally, philosophers have focused on how to establish the unity of something that’s many. Kant’s TUA unifies the manifold of categories, Hegel’s Absolute establishes the unity of unity and difference, Schelling’s absolute the unity of idea and reality, and Husserl’s noema the unity of the manifold sides of the object.

Derrida calls the “unifying” or “totalizing” gesture into question. Like most late-20th century French philosophers, he’s interested in multiplicity and difference, not in unity.

It’s worth noting that in early 20th century analytic philosophy, “meaning” was determined in reference to “states of affairs” or various observations. Meaning was taking to be something outside of language.

Likewise, in early 20th century continental philosophy, the main tradition (phenomenology) defined meaning in relation to non-linguistic experience. It’s worth noting that Carnap (among others) studied under Edmund Husserl, and that there are certain parallels between Husserl’s “principle of principles” (that every valid theory has a correlate in a possible first-person mode of givenness) and the positivist “principle of verifiability” (that every meaningful proposition has a correlate in a possible empirical observation).

On the other hand, for Wittgenstein, meaning only occurs within the horizon of a specific language game. In between language games, there are only “family resemblances.” Language games become monads, only having a “rapport” with the same words in other language games. It would be fair to say that Wittgenstein understands “correspondence” as only made possible by the rules of the “correspondence game.”

In a similar sense, Derrida sees meaning as made possible by the “play” of differences. However, he sees texts as having to put a stop to this play at some point, otherwise meanings would be “differed/deferred” indefinitely. Like I said, he sees this happening in two ways: (a) by the text referring outside of itself to a “transcendental signified,” (b) by a binary opposite that “centers” the discourse, or (in most cases) some combination of the two. (A possible Derridian critique of Wittgenstein, then, would be that the “language games,” in unifying a particular “game,” prevent the play of the language games with each other, thus isolating them into “monads” and containing meaning therein. Likewise, Wittgenstein perhaps looks “outside the text,” as it were, to a “way of life,” a transcendental signified that “stabilizes” the unity of each language game).

Take recent pragmatism, for example. There’s a difference between (a) “knowing that” and (b) “knowing how,” a distinction established by Gilbert Ryle and well known to most analytic philosophers.

Robert Brandom (for example) defines pragmatism as the position that “knowing that is a form of knowing how.” This then allows him to build an entire system of knowledge re-describing “knowing that” as a kind of “knowing how.” Yet if “knowing how” only makes sense in contrast to “knowing that,” pragmatism undermines the “difference” (“that” vs. “how”) that makes the discourse and all of the other distinctions possible.

This move, Derrida thinks, serves to “close off” the play of differences, bringing this “differing/deferring” play to a halt at a certain point, keeping the discourse contained and the meaning controlled.

Perhaps even the classic objection to Logical Positivism (“What verifies the principle of verifiability?”) could be included in the kind of self-undermining statements Derrida has his eye on.
[Originally posted on /r/askphilosophy]