Cultural scene of Grammatology Logic or logocentrism

In last week’s column, we concluded that Derrida questions the well-established basis of ‘All Western intellectual history’ which is based on logic or logocentrism. According to David Potts, the second important fact that Derrida points out in Of Grammatology is signs. Derrida under the sub-title ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of the Writing’ states; “However the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others.

But never as much as at present has it invaded, as such, the global horizon of the most diverse researches and the most heterogeneous discourses, diverse and heterogeneous in their intention, method, and ideology. The devaluation of the word “language” itself, and how, in the very hold it has upon us, it betrays a loose vocabulary, the temptation of a cheap seduction, the passive yielding to fashion, the consciousness of the avant-garde, in other words—ignorance—are evidences of this effect. This inflation of the sign “language” is the inflation of the sign itself, absolute inflation, inflation itself.

Yet, by one of its aspects or shadows, it is itself still a sign: this crisis is also a symptom. It indicates, as if in spite of itself, that a historico-metaphvsical epoch must finally de-termine as language the totality of its problematic horizon. It must do so not only because all that desire had wished to wrest from the play of language finds itself recaptured within that play but also because, for the same reason, language itself is menaced in its very life, helpless, adrift in the threat of limitlessness, brought back to its own finitude at the very moment when its limits seem to disappear, when it ceases to be self-assured, contained, and guaranteed by the infinite signified which seemed to exceed it.”

Potts observes, “Signs (e.g., words of natural language) have two components: signifier, the physically instantiated symbol; and signified, the thought. These are always distinct, even when they are at their closest and are only “discrepant by the time of a breath” .

What certifies the validity of any signified is ultimately the logos. For instance, if what is signified is the thought that cats are mammals, and if the logos is the thought of God, then this particular signified is valid if and to the extent that one’s thought that cats are mammals mirrors the thought of God. Such mirroring is of course not automatic but requires that we purify our own thought through reason (i.e., by participating in God’s logos) to bring it as close as possible to that of God”

Derrida further expands his thesis on signs and thereof the language in a more subtle manner.

“ The “rationality”—but perhaps that word should be abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence—which govems a writ-ing thus enlarged and radicalised, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the desedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos. Particularly the signification of truth. All the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood.

Socratic or the philosophical sense, in the sense of God’s infinite understanding or in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense. Within this logos, the original and essential link to the phonè has never been broken. It would be easy to demonstrate this and we shall attempt such a demonstration later. As has been more or less implicitly determined, the essence of the phonè would be immediately proximate to that which within “thought” as logos relates to “meaning,” produces it, receives it, speaks it, “composes” it.

If, for Aristotle, for example, “spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words”. It is because the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind. Producer of the first signifier, it is not just a simple signifier among others. It signifies “mental experiences” which themselves reflect or mirror things by natural resemblance.

Between being and mind, things and feelings, there would be a relationship of translation or natural signification; between mind and logos, a relationship of conventional symbolisation. And the first convention, which would relate immediately to the order of natural and universal signification, would be produced as spoken language. Written language would establish the conventions, inter-linking other conventions with them.

Just as all men have not the same writing so all men have not the same speech sounds, but mental experiences, of which these are the primary symbols are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images .

The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself. It is the stage of transparence. Aristotle can sometimes omit it without risk. In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense (thought or lived) or more loosely as thing.

All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself (whether it is done in the Aristotelian manner that we have just indicated or in the manner of medieval theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God.

The written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning. This derivation is the very origin of the notion of the “signifier.” The notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified, even if, as Saussure argues, they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf. This notion remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism: ”

What is noteworthy is that according to Potts that the argument boils downs to a hierarchy of signification. Potts sumerises this segment as “ There is thus a sort of hierarchy of signification. Signifier refers to signified, but since not all signifieds are created equal; a signified may refer in turn (as signifier) to another, higher signified as validation. The stopping point of this process must be a primum signatum: the transcendental signified supplied through the logos, a highest signified that needs no validation. Without a transcendental signified, the very notion of sign (as combination of signifier and signified) would collapse into a vicious regress of signifiers”.