Science of writing

In this series on Jack Derrida’s Of Grammatology, we further examine Derrida’s thesis under the chapter ‘Linguistic and Grammatology’. In this chapter Derrida describes the relationship between linguistic and Grammatology.

Derrida builds up his thesis; “ The science of linguistics determines language—its field of objectivity—in the last instance and in the irreducible simplicity of its essence, as the unity of the phone, the glossa, and the logos. This determination is by rights anterior to all the eventual differentiations that could arise within the systems of terminology of the different schools (language/speech [langue/parole]; code/message; scheme/usage; linguistic/logic; phonology/phonematics/phonetics/glossematics).

And even if one wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and contingent signifier (which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not purely sensible), it would have to be admitted that the immediate and privileged unity which founds significance and the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense within the phonie. With regard to this unity, writing would always be derivative, accidental, particular, exterior, doubling the signifier: phonetic. “Sign of a sign,” said Aristotle, Rousseau, and Hegel.

Jacques Derrida

Yet, the intention that institutes general linguistics as a science remains in this respect within a contradiction. Its declared purpose indeed confirms, saying what goes without saying, the subordination of grammatology, the historico-metaphysical reduction of writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full and originarily spoken language. But another gesture (not another statement of purpose, for here what does not go without saying is done without being said, written without being uttered) liberates the future of a general grammatology of which linguistics-phonology would be only a dependent and circumscribed area. Let us follow this tension between gesture and statement in Saussure. ”

Derrida develops his thesis citing Saussure. He observes, “ On the one hand, true to the Western tradition that controls not only in theory but in practice (in the principle of its practice) the relationships between speech and writing, Saussure does not recognize in the latter more than a narrow and derivative function. Narrow because it is nothing but one modality among others, a modality of the events which can befall a language whose essence, as the facts seem to show, can remain forever un-contaminated by writing.

Oral tradition

“Language does have an ... oral tradition that is independent of writing” (Cours de linguistique générale, p. 46). Derivative because representative: signifier of the first signifier, representation of the self-present voice, of the immediate, natural, and direct signification of the meaning (of the signified, of the concept, of the ideal object or what have you).

Saussure takes up the traditional definition of writing which, already in Plato and Aristotle, was restricted to the model of phonetic script and the language of words. Let us recall the Aristotelian definition: “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words.” Saussure: “Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first” (p. 45; italics added) [p. 23 **]. This representative determination, beside communicating without a doubt essentially with the idea of the sign, does not translate a choice or an evaluation, does not betray a psycho-logical or metaphysical presupposition peculiar to Saussure; it describes or rather reflects the structure of a certain type of writing: phonetic writing, which we use and within whose element the epistémè in general (science and philosophy), and linguistics in particular, could be founded.

One should, moreover, say model rather than structure; it is not a question of a system constructed and functioning perfectly, but of an ideal explicitly directing a functioning which in fact is never completely phonetic. In fact, but also for reasons of essence to which I shall frequently return.

To be sure this factum of phonetic writing is massive; it commands our entire culture and our entire science, and it is certainly not just one fact among others. Nevertheless it does not respond to any necessity of an absolute and universal essence. Using this as a point of departure, Saussure defines the project and object of general linguistics: “The linguistic object is not defined by the combination of the written word and the spoken word: the spoken form alone constitutes the object”

According to Saussure, word is ‘Now the word (vox) is already a unity of sense and sound, of concept and voice, or, to speak a more rigorously Saussurian language, of the signified and the signifier.’

Derrida observes, “This last terminology was moreover first proposed in the domain of spoken language alone, of linguistics in the narrow sense and not in the domain of semiology (“I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified and signifier. The word is thus already a constituted unity, an effect of “the somewhat mysterious fact . . . that ‘thought sound’ implies divisions”. Even if the word is in its turn articulated, even if it implies other divisions, as long as one poses the question of the relationships between speech and writing in the light of the indivisible units of the “thought-sound,” there will always be the ready response. Writing will be “phonetic,” it will be the outside, the exterior representation of language and of this “thought-sound.”

It must necessarily operate from already constituted units of signification, in the formation of which it has played no part. ”Potts observes, “Two differences from Foucault. (a) Though both speak of “epochs,” Foucault’s epochs are typically about 200 years long. Derrida speaks of only one epoch, which spans Western history from the birth of Greek philosophy to the present.

Derrida thus believes that what governs his epoch is something more fundamental than the “epistemes” that govern Foucault’s. Whereas Foucault constantly refers to the facts of other epochs in a way that requires him to possess an extra-historical vantage point he denies to the rest of us (a point amusingly exposed by Derrida in “Cogito and the History of Madness”; e.g., “everything transpires as if Foucault knew what ‘madness’ means”, Derrida refuses to step outside the confines of our own epoch and emphasizes that deconstruction operates within and upon the logocentric framework.”.

Potts also observes that Derrida’s argument is self-contradictory as the notion of ‘purity’ is failed ‘because the pure presence of being is inevitably distorted by the process of linguistic or conceptual signification’.