Strange privilege of sound in idealisation

In the series on ‘Of Grammatology’, this week’s column further examines the seminal ideas of Derrida.

We concluded the last week’s column citing Potts who points out that “ the concepts of being, truth, sense, logos, and so forth, cannot be made good within the logocentric framework. It is the work of deconstruction to expose the tail-swallowing nature of these concepts and thereby reveal the bankruptcy of logocentrism. Deconstruction does not attack the concepts of the logocentric epoch from the vantage point of a new epoch but from within the logocentric epoch--the only place from which they can be conceived at all.”

Quoting Hegel, Derrida observes, ‘strange privilege of sound in idealisation’ “absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning. Hegel demonstrates very clearly the strange privilege of sound in idealisation, the production of the concept and the self-presence of the subject.

This ideal motion, in which through the sound what is as it were the simple subjectivity, the soul of the material thing expresses itself, the ear receives also in a theoretical way, just as the eye shape and colour, thus allowing the interiority of the object to become interiority itself. The ear, on the contrary, perceives the result of that interior vibration of material substance without placing itself in a practical relation towards the objects, a result by means of which it is no longer the material form [Gestalt] in its repose, but the first, more ideal activity of the soul itself which is manifested.

What is said of sound in general is a fortiori valid for the phone by which, by virtue of hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak—an indissociable system—the subject affects itself and is related to itself in the element of ideality.”

Jacques Derrida

Potts observes, “What is needed is a wholly new conception of language which puts writing first. Rather than signifying signifieds in a series terminating ultimately in a transcendental signified, written signifiers according to the new conception signify only other signifiers, not because of a failure of the signifieds but because there is no need of them. There is only a perpetual chain or circle of signifiers, an endless “play of signifying references”, which is never anchored to anything. “This, strictly speaking, amounts to destroying the concept of ‘sign’ and its entire logic”. The key concept is differance (with an “a”), which implies both difference and deferance. Every signifier is inherently different from what it signifies, and we should uphold this difference, not seek to erase it in a misguided quest for presence. By the same token every signifier defers recognition of what it signifies, and we must embrace this also.”

Exteriority

Derrida describes this as; “To this epoch belongs the difference between signified and signifier, or at least the strange separation of their “parallelism,” and the exteriority, however extenuated, of the one to the other. This appurtenance is organised and hierarchised in a history. The difference between signified and signifier belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by the history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality.

This appurtenance is essential and irreducible; one cannot retain the convenience or the “scientific truth” of the Stoic and later medieval opposition between signans and signatum without also bringing with it all its metaphysicotheological roots. To these roots adheres not only the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible—already a great deal—with all that it controls, namely, metaphysics in its totality. And this distinction is generally accepted as self-evident by the most careful linguists and semiologists, even by those who believe that the scientificity of their work begins where metaphysics ends.

Thus, for example, as modem structural thought has clearly realised, language is a system of signs and linguistics is part and parcel of the science of signs, or semiotics. The mediaeval definition of sign—“aliquid stat pro aliquo” has been resurrected and put forward as still valid and productive. Thus the constitutive mark of any sign in general and of any linguistic sign in particular is its twofold character: every linguistic unit is bipartite and involves both aspects —one sensible and the other intelligible, or in other words, both the signans “signifier” and the signatum “signified”.

Hidden sentiments

These two constituents of a linguistic sign (and of sign in general) necessarily suppose and require each other. But to these metaphysico-theological roots many other hidden sediments cling. The semiological or, more specifically, linguistic “science” cannot therefore hold on to the difference between signifier and signified—the very idea of the sign—without the difference between sensible and intelligible; certainly, but also not without retaining, more profoundly and more implicitly, and by the same token the reference to a signified able to “take place” in its intelligibility, before its “fall,” before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below.

As the face of pure intelligibility, ii refers to an absolute logos to which it is immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology: the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God Of course, it is not a question of “rejecting” these notions; they are necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them. It is a question at first of demonstrating the systematic and historica. solidarity of the concepts and gestures of thought that one often believes can be innocently separated. The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth. The age of the sign is essentially theological. Perhaps it will never end. Its historical closure is, however, outlined. ”

What Derrida argues is that ‘the age of the sign is essentially theological’. That means that ‘the sign and the divinity has the same place and time of birth’ and that the process has not yet been closed.