I happened to catch some of I feel therefore I am on Radio 4 on Tuesday. Here’s the blurb:
In the final programme in the series, Professor Abigail Williams tackles the idea that a single objective truth is now being replaced by the idea of multiple truths. This investigation into the multiverse of truth takes us on a journey from Descartes to Derrida via the parallel worlds of science-fiction and the online multiverse.
How do we know things, how do we value both ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’ and is the new focus on personal feeling and subjective truths something to celebrate or fear?
BBC iPlayer
It was OK. I realise it’s a radio programme for ‘general consumption’. All the same, if you’re going to invoke ‘Derrida’, then I do think you need to tread carefully. Why? And why the scare quotes?
Well, it’s not to do with his writing being ‘difficult’ (although it is difficult), or to do with translation (although much of his work is read in translation), or even his being dead. And yet, of course, it is to do with all of those.
The simplest way I can think of to explain why saying ‘what Derrida says’ is problematic is that a good chunk of his writing is an exploration, each time different, of why quotation is problematic. So, how do you quote someone who is skeptical, let’s say, of whether faithful quotation is even possible? Answer: carefully. Or perhaps by the use of scare quotes to acknowledge that the attribution of quotation can only ever be provisional. When the power of language is called into question, but language is the only tool you have to articulate that, it’s the best you can do.
Examples? Well, acknowledging that ‘the exemplar’ is also subject to interrogation, the example where Derrida deals most straightforwardly with this is around the signature, the logic of which goes something like this:
To sign a document is to authenticate it so that someone else, at some other time, in some other place can say ‘yes, this person agreed to this thing and that time’. The purpose of a signature is to stand in for a person in their absence to attest to their wishes. The basis on which a signature is taken as being a ‘true’ ‘authentic’, ‘genuine’ (all those big words) representation of a person’s wishes in their absence is that a person’s signature is uniquely their own. If you really want to be sure that a person has signed something, then you could in principle (and occasionally in practice) call upon them to replicate that unique signature.
So, although a signature is unique to a person, it does also have to be replicable by that person. If you were to sign documents a different way each time, that wouldn’t work: how would a reader know it was your signature, and not a fake? Or someone else’s signature? Or an ink blot? The authenticity of the signature depends on it being unique to you, but also on it being repeatable: you need to be able to sign documents with the same signature again and again.
How can something be both unique and replicable? If something is in principle replicable, no matter how ornate or intricate it is, how can we be absolutely 100% sure that this person, and not that person signed it?
Anything that is in principle replicable can in principle be forged. This has nothing to do with the everyday problems of being a forger, or something that could be solved by adopting a more ornate signature, or even the kinds of measures used in banknotes: if something can be replicated, forgery is always a possibility that cannot be absolutely excluded, and signatures must be replicable. This means that the authenticity of the signature, the thing it attests to, the intention of the signatory, cannot be completely secured.
So, what has this got do do with quotation? Well, its about that same business of attribution: to quote someone is to say this person said this thing, and meant this by it. The quote stands in for a person’s meaning or intention in their absence, that is, in different contexts. For that meaning to be intelligible at all though, rather than just gibberish, it must be written in common language. A quotation means nothing if it is written in a private language; like the signature, the quotation cannot be unique to its time and place and meaning – it has to be replicable.
Glass half empty: the necessity that the signature / quotation be replicable across context (Derrida calls this iterability) means that the meaning of the signature / quotation cannot be authenticated with absolute certainty. This is the reason for being careful when quoting Derrida, or saying ‘what Derrida says…’. It means, at the limit, that the meaning of a quotation, or for that matter any sentence, can never be definitively bottomed out. There is no guarantee the postcard (authorial intended meaning) will ever reach its destination.
As a slight aside, I invoked the possibility of a ‘private language’ earlier – an internal dialogue perhaps, or even thought itself. However, the same necessity for iterability – repetition across time and context – applies just as surely (see Speech and Phenomena, Derrida’s reading of Husserl for this).
This is the ‘death of meaning’ side of Derrida, or I suppose, the thought I’m attributing to Derrida in his chronologically earlier writing (it will be no surprise that time also comes in for a scrambling): if language (the signature / the quotation) must function in the author’s absence, at the limit it must continue to function in the event of the author’s death (as it does). Language therefore inscribes the necessary possibility that I might be dead – to speak is to acknowledge one’s mortality.
This is the side of ‘Derridean thinking’ (see how problematic this is) picked up on by Anglophone academics in – I think – the eighties, to claim that Derrida was endorsing some sort of nihilistic relativism: if meaning cannot be bottomed out in some sort of definitive intentionality, then it no longer makes sense to say that there is any meaning outside language – no fixed reference, no absolute truth, just language (‘nothing outside the text’). Crisis! If there is no definitive meaning, on what basis can we discern truth from falsity? Right from wrong?
Moreover – ha ha! – if Derrida says that there is no truth, then how can he say it’s true that there is no truth, heh? Not so clever now, are you? This is the side that only acknowledges the ‘de-‘ of deconstruction, but there is another side, ‘The Tain of the Mirror‘, as Gasché put it.
Glass half full: above, it was the necessity that meaning be repeatable across time and context – its iterability – that undermined that very notion of meaning. But the fact that meaning cannot be definitively pinned down does not mean there is no meaning: you’re reading this, I’ve read some Derrida (a long time ago, admittedly), and we’ve both understood something of the text, no matter how imperfectly. That is only possible because my words and Derrida’s words, in fact all words, convey meaning across time and context. That is what makes language language. I might be dead by the time you read this. Jacques Derrida is already dead. Shakespeare is dead, Dickens is dead, but they are al still read: it’s just that meaning doesn’t arrive at a definitive end, a full stop: the letter does not arrive at its destination but continues to circulate (see Derrida’s engagement with Lacan around Poe’s The Purloined Letter).
This might be ‘the death of meaning’ in the sense of the Platonic ideal of an immediacy of understanding between speaker and listener (or thought and self) supposedly found specifically in speech, but, Derrida would say, it is also the condition of there being any meaning at all.
Derrida’s patient reading of the likes of Husserl and Plato and others, particularly in his earlier writing, are in part about demonstrating how each author, each in the context of their own writing about language, thought and meaning, arrive at some magical point at which the sign (the signifier) perfectly encapsulates meaning (the signified thought, intention, meaning), such that nothing is left over (nothing remains). For Plato, this is found in the ephemeral nature of the specifically spoken word. For Husserl, it is an interior moment of intuition, but for both, Derrida shows that the demands of iterability – that meaning be repeatable for there to be any meaning at all – insets a gap, a disconnect, a pause, between ideal meaning (the signified) and it’s material carrier (the sign, the word).
The traditional philosophical privileging of speech as the mode closest to the ideal of the perfect sign – that which contains and represents meaning with absolute fidelity by the likes of Plato and Husserl (and also, we should note in the context of the programme, Descartes), is shown by Derrida, each time, to be untenable. Rather, on close reading, Derrida shows that each author, at the crucial moment of answering the ‘how do we know’ question (in its various guises) ends up resorting to metaphors of writing to allow for that repetition that is required for thought or meaning to be represented to itself or to others. While this resort to the specifically written word might appear to spell the end of that philosophical project, it remains as the fertile soil for deconstruction. Language is a wonderful thing. Communication happens. The necessity that communication may go astray is why it works, and also lets in creativity, new readings, and a level of self reflection. There is a side to deconstruction that is not so much about knocking down the greats as revering them: after all, who reads the greats with such attentiveness and… love. Moreover, to deconstruct a text is not to master it, but to recognise that deconstruction would be nothing without that text. As a critique of the will to master meaning, deconstruction does not exclude its own desires from its own analysis. In this respect it is profoundly humble.
