Derrida on Reference

Posted on June 2, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy | 6 Comments

Over at DuckRabbit’s discussion of Davidson I brought up Derrida and Reference. I want to engage this in a more robust fashion. Hopefully tonight when I have access to my library. But I wanted to bring out what I see as the core debate: the problem of reference and description.

To me what Derrida gets at is that the things we refer to shouldn’t be taken as stable, complete and present entities. Thus I brought out a distinction in the two kinds of perspectivism one can consider.


One is that we have only access to our perspectives rather than the thing as a whole. To draw an analogy I might be able to see only the front of a sculpture. My judgments will thus be based upon incomplete data. However the backside of the sculpture ‘is there’ in a real sense and my ability to reference the sculpture is unaffected by the fact I have incomplete descriptions.

The other view is that perspectivism isn’t merely an epistemological limit I face due to incomplete engagement with present entities. Rather this perspectivism sees the problem in the things themselves rather than in I the knowing subject. That is that the things as they unveil themselves to me as an ontological reality are incomplete. An other way of putting this is that they do not necessarily have a stable form such that I can possible reference them. The problem isn’t just on I the knower but rather the very medium between I and the things I know. (I put this in the medium rather than purely in the thing for reasons that will become clear later)

The problem for Derrida thus becomes that reference is more difficult and problematic.

Where can one find this argument in Derrida? One good place is in the second chapter of the first half of On Grammatology. I’ll be returning to this issue in depth later when I turn to Peirce instead of Derrida in the conception of the problem. In the meantime allow me an excerpt.

Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such a signified. Now Peirce considers the indefiniteness of reference as the criterion that allows us to recognise that we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. What broaches the movement of signification is what makes its interruption impossible. The thing itself is a sign. An unacceptable proposition for Husserl, whose Phenomenology remains therefore — in its “principle of principles” — the most radical and most critical restoration of the metaphysics of presence. The difference between Husserl’s and Peirce’s phenomenologies is fundamental since it concerns the concept of the sign and of the manifestation of presence, the relationships between the re-presentation and the originary presentation of the thing itself (truth). On this point Peirce is undoubtedly closer to the inventor of the word phenomenology: Lambert proposed in fact to “reduce the theory of things to the theory of signs.” According to the “phaneoroscopy” or “Phenomenology” of Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that “the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign.” There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called “thing itself” is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself. The property of the representamen is not to be proper [propre], that is to say absolutely proximate to itself (prope, proprius). The represented is always already a representamen. Definition of the sign:

Anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, this interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum. . . . If the series of successive interpretants comes to an end, the sign is thereby rendered imperfect, at least. [Elements of Logic]

From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion of the sign at the very moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognised in the absoluteness of its right. One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence. It is not surprising that the shock, shaping and undermining metaphysics since its origin, lets itself be named as such in the period when, refusing to bind linguistics to semantics (which all European linguists, from Saussure to Hjemslev, still do), expelling the problem of meaning outside of their researches, certain American linguists constantly refer to the model of a game. Here one must think of writing as a game within language. (The Phaedrus condemned writing precisely as play — paidia — and opposed such childishness to the adult gravity [spoudè] of speech), This play, thought as absence of the transcendental signified, is not a play in the world, as it has always been defined, for the purposes of containing it, by the philosophical tradition and as the theoreticians of play also consider it (or those who, following and going beyond Bloomfield, refer semantics to psychology or some other local discipline). To think play radically the ontological and transcendental problematics must first be seriously exhausted; the question of the meaning of being, the being of the entity and of the transcendental origin of the world — of the world-ness of the world — must be patiently and rigorously worked through, the critical movement of the Husserlian and Heideggerian questions must be effectively followed to the very end, and their effectiveness and legibility must be conserved. Even if it were crossed out, without it the concepts of play and writing to which I shall have recourse will remain caught within regional limits and an empiricist, positivist, or metaphysical discourse. The counter-move that the holders of such a discourse would oppose to the precritical tradition and to metaphysical speculation would be nothing but the worldly representation of their own operation. It is therefore the game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all the forms of play in the world.

Put in other terms the debate about Davidson and his issue of causal relations as a way to fix meanings is an attempt to exist the unlimited semiotic relation. That is to discuss an interaction not bound by signs. This would be an attempt to end semiosis which can be seen as a kind of dogmatism or even exercise of power. It is the claim that we can escape signs in our discussion.

The reason why Derrida will talk of eruption or breaks is simply because during the semiotic analysis (the analysis of the signs we encounter) we will find new phenomena. It is the eruption within a relatively stable sign-system of new signs that enables meaning. The Gadamer/Davidson view entails some theoretic matrix of signs that are stable that we are converging upon. This matrix of signs is the shared context and the signs are definite stable signs purely representing the pure causal relation of thing and the first one to refer to the thing with language.

Related posts:

  1. Peirce & OOP
  2. Peirce on Reference
  3. Gary and Peirce on Mind and Functionalism
  4. Heidegger, Humans and Language
  5. Language and the House of Being
  6. Morris vs. Peirce

Comments

6 Responses to “Derrida on Reference”

“One is that we have only access to our perspectives rather than the thing as a whole. To draw an analogy I might be able to see only the front of a sculpture. My judgments will thus be based upon incomplete data. However the backside of the sculpture ‘is there’ in a real sense and my ability to reference the sculpture is unaffected by the fact I have incomplete descriptions.”

I don’t see that this opposition (“rather than”) makes sense. I don’t think there is anything perspectival views are opposed to; to have a view is to have a view perspectivally. There is nothing visible in the “view from nowhere”. So there is no “incompleteness” in a true description of an object to which can be added other true descriptions of the same object; a description does not aim at “superdescription”, a description to which nothing further can be added. A description simply is true or false of the object(s)/event(s) described. There are always further descriptions that can be given, further perspectives from which to approach a topic, further affordances which an object can offer up. A judgement is not based on “incomplete data”; it is based on knowledge of an object. That one can always know more is not a flaw in any presently existing knowledge; what knowledge we have is knowledge absolute. (Further inquiry shall presumably lead to abandoning many previously-held claims, and so some of what we take ourselves to know we do not in fact know, but it is not possible that we are wrong about most of what we take ourselves to know.)

I would also note that I “see” the back of a sculpture when I look at its front; I see a sculpture as having a back (rather than being a facade with an open back). When I look at a studio backlot at Universal Studios, I see it as a backlot, even if it is “indistinguishable” from an actual cityscape. For if it turns out that part of the cityscape is not a facade (say, there really is a store where I took there to be a facade of a store), then I saw illusorily; what I took myself to have seen then was not what I now see to be there. Ordinary perception does not take the “painterly perspective” in which the world appears “flat”; in ordinary perception objects are richly detailed. Sean Kelly has written some excellent stuff on this, in relation to Merleau-Ponty.

“The Gadamer/Davidson view entails some theoretic matrix of signs that are stable that we are converging upon. This matrix of signs is the shared context and the signs are definite stable signs purely representing the pure causal relation of thing and the first one to refer to the thing with language.”

Huh??

the critical movement of the Husserlian and Heideggerian questions must be effectively followed to the very end

Okay, if that’s your game (and it might be Gadamer’s). But it’s not Davidson’s. To see Davidson as “caught within regional limits and an empiricist, positivist, or metaphysical discourse” is simply to fail to see how his picture works – that is, in part, where he’s coming from and where he’s going. All this stuff about the “transcendental signified” is not at all to the point if Davidson is the target. There’s no such thing.

Put in other terms the debate about Davidson and his issue of causal relations as a way to fix meanings is an attempt to exist the unlimited semiotic relation. That is to discuss an interaction not bound by signs. This would be an attempt to end semiosis which can be seen as a kind of dogmatism or even exercise of power. It is the claim that we can escape signs in our discussion.

No it isn’t. It just isn’t. Sorry I haven’t been able to make this clear. That we do not “escape signs” just doesn’t mean that we can’t know how things are, or what someone meant by something (or that this caused that, for that matter). That is, it’s not true that skepticism or relativism is the result.

You do agree, though, I see, that Derrida’s gripe is a skeptical one (qua directed at “dogmatism”), as I have been saying, as well as an accusation of a sort of transcendental realism which is (on my reading) completely absent from Davidson’s picture. In fact Derrida sounds a lot like Rorty here (and the Nietzsche of “Truth and Lie”) – when Rorty is complaining not about Davidson, of course, but instead about Davidson’s opponents. Of course Rorty makes his own mistakes (and misreadings); but for him anyway, Davidson and Derrida are on the same broadly “anti-representationalist” side.

I actually agree (in the sense that I agreed elsewhere that we should interpret Derrida charitably). I just think that, as with all skeptics, his strategy is one-sided (qua recoil).

As for perspectivism, that position (which is a word I apply to my own view) is very hard to describe properly. I agree that “incompleteness” is a misleading idea in the context. A duck is a duck, whether or not the “same thing” can be seen another way (where the scare quotes indicate suspicion of looming scheme-content dualism).

That one can always know more is not a flaw in any presently existing knowledge; what knowledge we have is knowledge absolute.

Yes, but I think I’d like to use the word “absolute” for something that we don’t have (or even, if this makes any sense, to see it as not meaning anything; or better, something indeterminate between those two). What knowledge we have is as good as is possible, and perfectly good qua knowledge. That it isn’t something mightier, or more transcendent, or whatever, is no fault of its own.

BTW, how about a preview function here? I’m afraid I’m going to forget to close a tag and the whole page will be flooded with superfluous italics.

Oops, never mind. I see how it works.

Yeah, as I said in the other thread I see I just got Davidson plain wrong. I really should have reviewed my Davidson before launching into critiques. (My only defense was that I planned to over the weekend and didn’t)

I reread “Three Varieties of Knowledge” and “Indeterminism and Anti-Realism” last night and you’re right – Davidson and Derrida (and Peirce) are much closer than I remember.

I will say that the fact we can’t escape signs never entails we can’t know. Rather it is an issue of how we know. I don’t think Derrida’s gripe is the skeptical one. Rather I think he’s trying to change the basis of how we refer and know. So it’s much more subtle than mere skepticsm.

Let me get caught up on readings and then I’ll say more.

“Yes, but I think I’d like to use the word “absolute” for something that we don’t have (or even, if this makes any sense, to see it as not meaning anything; or better, something indeterminate between those two). What knowledge we have is as good as is possible, and perfectly good qua knowledge. That it isn’t something mightier, or more transcendent, or whatever, is no fault of its own.”

I have no particular attachment to “knowledge absolute”; “knowledge full-stop” would work the same in that sentence. I meant what you said — what knowledge we have is perfectly good qua knowledge; it’s as good as possible. The sorts of knowledge which are supposed to be better than the knowledge we have are philosophical chimeras; there is no “mightier” knowledge. Which is not to deny that we might (and hopefully will) become more knowledgeable as inquiry progresses; but this will not be because we pick up a new kind of knowledge. We simply lose false beliefs, and gain true ones.

I suspect I’m enough of a Hegelian that I’d really be happier finding a way to domesticate “absolute” rather than giving it up to false positions; this doesn’t keep me from lambasting “absolute knowledge” or whatever in the false sense. It just becomes a “bad absolute”, as opposed to my “good absolute”. It is of course easy to believe that “absolute” is just not worth saving, like “idealism” isn’t. (“German Idealist” is a phrase I want to keep out of the dirt; “idealist” I’m happy to trample upon.)

On the preview button issue: What’s up with the 64 minutes & 40 seconds time limit? Concerned that people will try to retcon their comments if you don’t lock them in at some point? And why a non-round number??

Sorry I’ve not had time to talk philosophy. I’ve been busy at work. We’re trying to make a ton of bulk chocolate for some high end restaurants and have been working late on this.

As for the time limit I don’t recall picking a time beyond wanting it long enough for people to have time to make edits. I think I made it longer than the default but was in a rush at the time and just picked an arbitrary number slightly longer than an hour. I think making it too much longer leads to problems since someone will be replying to a message that isn’t there any longer. So more substantial corrections probably should be just done in a subsequent comment.

I could easily lengthen it though if people like a bigger number.

Well, chocolate is important too, so no worries.

“Knowledge full-stop,” eh? Are we Britons then? What about “knowledge, period”? In any case I think we agree, given your elaboration here, whatever we call it.

As for “absolute,” I do think we need a word for the bad thing, and outside of Hegelian contexts people do seem to use it that way (that is, even if they themselves don’t think of it as the bad thing). I agree, though, that in some contexts a distinction between “good” and “bad” “absolutes” will be necessary. I’m happy to allow (unmodified) “idealism” to refer only to erroneous positions, as long as we preserve symmetry by speaking the same way of “realism”. Fair’s fair, after all.

Speaking of German Idealism, I just got Beiser’s book German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781-1801, which, at about 700 pages, works out to about 35 pp. per year, which is probably how fast I’ll be reading it.

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