Johnson on deconstruction

Prof. Barbara Johnson, in her excellent Introduction to her own translation of Derrida's essays in Dissemination, makes this very valuable comment on Derrida's method:

III. Deconstruction

Let us now examine more closely the strategies and assumptions involved in this type of critical reading. It is clear that Derrida is not seeking the "meaning" of Rousseau's text in any traditional sense. [Prof. Johnson has just discussed Derrida's treatment of Rousseau's Confessions. - jr] He neither adds the text up into a final set of themes or affirmations nor looks for the reality of Rousseau's life outside the text. Indeed, says Derrida, there is no outside of the text:

There is nothing outside of the text [il n'y a pas de hors-texte]. And that is neither because Jean-Jacques life, or the existence of Mama or Thérèse themselves, is not of prime interest to us, nor because we have access to their so-called "real" existence only in the text and we have neither any means of alerting this, nor any right to neglect this limitation. All reasons of this type would already be sufficient, to be sure, but there are more radical reasons. What we have tried to show by following the guiding line of the "dangerous supplement," is that in what one calls the real life of these existences "of flesh and bone," beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau's text, there has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differntial references, the "real" supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement, etc. And thus to infinity, for we have read, in the text, that the absolute present, Nature, that which words like "real mother" name, have always already escaped, have never existed; that what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence.

Far from being a simple warning against biographical or referential fallacy, il n'y a pas de hors-texte is a statement derived frm Rousseau's autobiography itself. For what Rousseau's text tells us is that our very relation to "reality" already functions like a text. Rousseau's account of his life is not only itself a text, but it is a text that speaks only about the textuality of life. Rousseau's life does not become a text through his writing; it always already was one. Nothing, indeed, can be said to be not a text. [end quotation, pp. xiii-xiv of "translator's introduction"]

One could go on quite a while quoting Prof. Johnson and still benefit a lot. I urge those interested to pick up a copy! -- John Ransom

Comments

[Jodi]

I'll bite:

I think there are some slippages in your summation: from 'our relation to reality already functions like a text' to Rousseau's life 'already was' a text. There is a difference between being something and being like something, because if something is like something then we are also noticing that it is not that thing. So, which is it?

I think this is important for various reasons, including presumptions that lives are narratable and/or that there is an ethical responsibility to narrate one's life.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Unless we never believe one thing is another, or at least we believe that one thing is another only tropologically.

[Matt]

[pedant]

Don't you mean to say, "...in Barbara Johnson's summation"?

[/pedant]

Care to elaborate on that, Ken?

I suppose the questions, about Derrida's distance from Husserl in particular, and from mop, and various phenomenology is...still open for much debate.

Somewhat relatedly though, there is the theory that every act of writing is in a sense autobiographical..

[Kenneth Rufo]

Sorry, not trying to be cryptic, just trying to note that the difference between "like" and "is", in this instance is a gap that goes by the name trope. "Reality functions like a text" and "Life is a text" are, it seems, metonymic and metaphoric. There's still a slippage in the summary, I suspect, but it's not a slippage that's not already bridged by the thing in language that requires that the gap be there in the first place, which is catachresis, or the tropological structure of language. In neither instance, for example, does one think the principle of identity is invoked (where text = Rousseau like A = A) but rather an operation of equivalence (metaphor) or of substitution (metonymy). Which is just a way of saying that I'm not sure I understand Jodi's objection just yet.

[Matt]

Likewise sorry, to Jodi, if my comment seemed at all...pufferfisher-ish (??--honest to God...)

Revisiting the introduction now by Barbara Johnson that John mentions, I couldn't second his urging strongly enough. Absolutely everything to do–it seems to me– with "the philosophy of pop..."

So if you'll forgive a bit more "abstruse" and "Great Man" "Theory", this from earlier in the same introduction (may it improve, we can only hope, upon certain interpretive quarters of the comments sections):

Derrida's critique of Western metaphysics focuses on its privileging of the spoken word over the written word. The spoken word is given a higher value because the speaker and listener are both present too the utterance simultaneously. There is no temporal or spatial distance between speaker, speech, and listener, since the speaker hears himself speak at the same time the listener does. This immediacy seems to guarantee the notion that in the spoken word we know what we mean, mean what we say, say what we mean, and know what we have said. Whether or not perfect understanding always occurs in fact, this image of perfectly self-present meaning is, according to Derrida, the underlying ideal of Western culture. Derrida has termed this belief in the self-presentation of meaning "Logo-centrism," from the Greek word Logos (meaning speech, logic, reason, the Word of God). Writing, on the other hand, is considered by the logocentric system to be only a represestation of speech, a secondary substitute designed for use only when speaking is impossible. Writing is thus a second-rate activity that treis to overcome distance by making use of it: the writer puts his thought on paper, distancing it from himself, transforming it into something that can be read by someone far away, even after the writer's death. This inclusion of death, distance, and difference is thought to be a curruption of the self-presence of meaning, to open meaning up to all forms of adulteration which immediacy would have prevented.

In the course of his critique, Derrida does not simply reverse this value system and say that writing is better than speech. Rather, he attempts to show that the very possibility of opposing the two terms on the basis of presence vs. absence or immediacy vs. representation is an illusion, since speech is already structured by difference and distance as much as writing is. The very fact that a word is divided into a phonic signifier and a mental signified, and that, as Saussure pointed out, language is a system of differences rather than a collection of independently meaningful units, indicates that language as such is already constituted by the very distances and differences it seeks to overcome. To mean, in other words, is automatically not to be. As soon as there is meaning, there is difference. Derrida's word for this lag inherent in any signifying act is différance, from the French verb différer, which means both "to differ" and "to defer." What Derrida attempts to demonstrate is that this différance inhabits the very core of what appears to be immediate and presetn. Even in the seemingly nonlinguistic areas of the sturctures of consciousness and the unconcscious, Derrida analyzes the underlying necessity that induces Freud to compare the psychic apparaturs to a structure of scriptural différance, a "mistic writing-pad." The illusion of the self-presence of meaning or of consciousness is thus produced by the repression of the differential structures from which they spring.

Derrida's project in his early writings is to elaborate a science of writing called grammatology: a science that woudl study the effects of this différance which Western metaphysics has systematically repressed in its search for self-present Truth. But, as Derrida himself admits, the very notion of a perfectly adequate science or -logy belongs to the logocentric discourse which the science of writing would try, precisely, to put in question. Derrida thus finds himself in the uncomfortable position of attempting to account for an error by means of tools derived from that very error. For it is not possible to show that the belief in truth is an error withotu implicitly believing in the notion of Truth. By the same token, to show that the binary oppositions of metaphysics are illusions is also, and perhaps most importantly, to show that such illusions cannot simply in turn be opposed without repeating the very same illusion. The task of undoing the history of logocentrism in order to disinter différance would thus appear to be a doubly impossible one: on the one hand, it can only be conducted by means of notions of revelation, representation, and rectification, which are the logocentric notions par excellence, and, on the other hand, it can only dig up something that is really nothing–a difference, a gap, an interval, a trace. How, then, can such a task be undertaken? (Dissemination, viii-x)

[Jodi]

I was commenting on John's summary. And, I don't think that Kenneth's intervention solves the matter because I don't think the issue is catechresis here and because of the difference between metaphor and metonynmy. So, I think that John said that Rousseau's life is a text (or already was a text) and I want to know in what sense because I think that there are important ways in which lives are not texts, ways the the textual metaphor occludes.

[Matt]

Hi Jodi, it's a small pedantic point, but as far as I can tell the only thing John's said about Barbara's introduction is that it's "excellent", and anyone interested should pick up a copy. John doesn't use blockquotes, however--or rather, only for the part Barbara quotes Derrida as saying/writing--so it's a bit misleading.

Of course this is something of the classic debate/conversation, when it comes to deconstruction...and I'll be happy to strike the second chord:

because I think that there are important ways in which lives are not texts

Well okay...like what, for example?

[Squibb]

I don't know what Jodi would say...
but I am sufficiently provoked.

Lives are not texts insofar as texts betray a specificity of space that lives do not.

Agamben:

“It is truly "the language of language," which saves the meaning of all languages and in whose transparency language finally says itself. “

Lives are here the language of languages, pre-textual, insofar as they account for languages' saying of itself. Text exists prior to the subjective effect of language; lives are the Being of said effect, its condition of possibility.

Lives as the condition of possibility of text, demanding the possibility of language as such, which never 'is', as such, (textually?) perhaps.

A text insofar as it is a (count-for) one of language, the result of the state of a linguistic situation, a state requiring something like the life-in-excess-of-text that Jodi would hold out for, here mere possibility, nothing-other-than-the-throwing-into-relief of text, as such.

That which must feel the letter purloined, that for which death 'is' at all, all in all the conditions of possibility for something like a text to be the kind of presence that it is, the reason for the difficulty of its non-occurrence, that which presences the presence of the text, and thus defeats itself, these are the lives which we cannot deny. (textually, perhaps)

[Matt]

Ha! No, quoting Agamben on "the language of language" will not do. Unless you're prepared to defend how language finally (!) may "say itself."

Lives are not texts insofar as texts betray a specificity of space that lives do not.

Hm..My life betrays a great specificity of space. Or do you mean to say lives before they mean? To assert some Heideggerian primacy of the origin..

Lives are here the language of languages, pre-textual, insofar as they account for languages' saying of itself. Text exists prior to the subjective effect of language; lives are the Being of said effect, its condition of possibility.

Care to unpack that at all? What's the distinction between language and text you're suggesting, for instance. If we absolutely must speak this idiom, then: If lives, as Being, preceeds langauge, as condition of possibility if you insist(or is it just plain possibility?), it still holds that Being is without meaning until it enters language, différance, and text.

[Squibb]

Yeah… that was a late night kind of posting. I was not entirely myself. So what follows is also, unfortunately, pretty silly, as I want to do the best to cash the checks I write, regardless of the circumstances.

But really, if you want the gist of what follows, its pretty simple:

Please, don’t drink and blog.

You’ve been warned.

So there is Jodi’s assertion:

I think that there are important ways in which lives are not texts

And your question, which I will paraphrase as

What are the ways that lives are not texts?

First, I must say that I was not simply quoting Agamben, but beginning with him. I do think I was approaching the problem you indicate, all obvious tangles aside; insofar as I don’t believe this is simply a question of not being hip to the knowledge that Agamben has different a different approach to language than Derrida, and that Derrida was clearly right and Agamben is clearly wrong.

Thus you demand of A, and those who would quote him an articulation of how language might say itself. Specifically the how of its saying itself.

Are we prepared to fix language as constitutively beyond its own means, as that which is always eludes its own enunciative capacity? Is language its own sort of transcendental signified, untouchable by any instance of its own occurrence? Whatever it is we are speaking about, it is most certainly NOT language, that sort of thing?

Two quotes:
“I try to write (in) the space in which is posed the question of speech and meaning. I try to write the question : (what is) meaning to say? Therefore, it is necessary in such a space, and guided by such a question, that writing literally mean nothing. Not that it is absurd in the way that absurdity has been in solidarity with metaphysical meaning. It simply tempts itself , tenders itself, attempts to keep itself at the point of the exhaustion of meaning…”

and

“Therefore, one has to admit, before any dissociation of language and speech, code and message… a systematic production of differences, the production of a system of differences, a differance, within whose effects one eventually, by abstraction and according to determined motivations will be able to demarcate a linguistics of language…”

Two location questions then, in this world where language cannot speak itself: By virtue of what does this author claim the ability to inhabit the space of the question? Where does he get the authority to admit the production of difference? An authority existing in such a way that we are to take his admission as being what it is, namely, an instance of admission? Is this space of admission somehow, exhaustively, outside language? Are we to believe that the language here reproduced has nothing to say, even obliquely, about language?

It would seem to me that one of the central attempts here is to think the possible how of language saying itself. But I could be wrong.

(Also difference from the asserted political experience of sayability, insofar as I would say that language might say itself before sayability ever organized a revolution- for the record)

On to the much less well covered ground of lives, and specifically, how they might be other than texts. You ask,

What's the distinction between language and text you're suggesting, for instance. If we absolutely must speak this idiom, then: If lives, as Being, preceeds langauge, as condition of possibility if you insist(or is it just plain possibility?), it still holds that Being is without meaning until it enters language, différance, and text.

I take texts here, and in the above comment, to be language as it exists for us, in the specificity of its specific denial of itself-as-such, such that language-as-such cannot be experienced because it would require a presence of structural emptiness that is denied in the always already of language’s presentation of itself - what we would call the text. Thus language is always experienced as text, and a pre-textual, meaning-evacuated language falls outside the possibility of experience.

However, simply because we cannot experience language-as-such does not mean we cannot ask something to stand in for it, as a ‘what’ that would be the conditions-of-possibility for the text of its appearance. That this standing will too fall prey to the texty-ness it appears within does not rob it of the full failure of its pretensions.

.

Or, insofar as
language happens as text
and that
‘language happens as text’ happens as text
does not mean, suddenly,
that language does not happen as text, (though not otherwise, either) clearly,
it is not a simple double negative. It is nowhere as clean as that.
What we have instead is a location, within text, of (something like an idea of) language, with all attending difficulties.

Thus insofar as language is experienced it is never other-than a performance of specificity we call textuality, yet we are still put in a position of accounting for this sensation of textualtity, the taste of text, of its not being the what that it would be if it were not limited by what it is for us. The how of text not being language in our experience.

The two most common appeals, in this idiom, would be to Being, or to the Other, depending on whose death appears for who, and when.

Lives is here an intoxicated location of the two. A marker for the excess that the text cannot reveal– of the space between the text and the language it would be (but is not, the failure that allows for us to call it text) – but (intentionally) underdeveloped.

What is intoxication? It is a knowledge and an ignorance existing side by side, a perceptiveness and a moment of perception’s absence, yet these appear un-reconciled, not a knowledge of ignorance, a perception of misperception, but both perception and misperception, knowledge and ignorance. Lives in their plurality reflect(ed) this co-presence, and thus stood out in such a way as to remind me of the language the text could never be.

Thus I am grouping Language and Being away from text and differance. That the latter are the conditions of possibility for the former, simply stated, forgets that it is only by appeals to the former that we can see the latter for what, apparently, they are.

Lives worked better when I was drunk, I’ll admit, but say also that it was only then that I found myself proceeding.

[Bob]

Blogging drunk happens, to the best of us.