Derrida and Basic Ontology

Correlationism is an exceptionally broad term. Correlationism does not simply mean the correlation between being and thinking. It can be the correlation between language and reality. It can be the correlation between the social and reality. It can be the correlation between signs and reality. It can be the correlation between power and reality. It can be the correlation between the body and reality. And so on. All correlation requires is that there is one human term and another being term. Everyone knows that Derrida does not advocate a Kantian or Cartesian style subject. But that’s not a sufficient condition for allowing him to escape the charge of correlationism. I notice that you said this in a previous post:

Good point. One I should have brought up although that gets even more complex. Clearly the text, for Derrida, isn’t something determinate. (Once again this is a place where I think reading Derrida in terms of semiotics is helpful – it’s all signs and signs are ambiguous in key ways)

I am aware of zoosemiotics, so please don’t throw that at me, but semiotics is overwhelmingly correlationist in character. Where Kant places transcendental subjectivity in the position of structuring world, the semiotician treats signs as structuring the world. Different content, same form. This is precisely what the realists are objecting to in all its variants. And, of course, for OOO Derrida’s endless play of signs is particularly noxious precisely because objects are independent of their relations.

Michael,

That’s just not charitable. Everybody involved in the debate at Levi’s has read scads of Derrida and learned from some of his principle expositors.

The thing is all of us about fifteen years ago chafed under the then hegemony of a certain kind of methodology of “deconstruction.” So we haven’t read much Derrida in the last fifteen years.

Finally, are you willing to say Marder has demonstrated his “lack of reading.” I hate his book as much as the next guy (every sophistical stylistic tick of Derrida at his worst is aped in it), but the guy was hired at Dusquene on the strength of the book for God’s sake. Anyhow, please read the NDPR review on his book ( http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=18867 ).

Graham’s point is that Derrida is at best doing the kind of realism-of-the-remainder neo-Kantianism that is critiqued ably in his (Harman’s) Guerilla Metaphysics. Marder presents what is supposed to be a new and and shocking reading of Derrida as a realism-of-the-remainder neo-Kantian. So you can’t condescendingly put down Harman, Bogost, Bryant, and me are bad readers of Derrida without also saying that Marder is.

I mean, the substance of Graham’s posts was that realism of the remainder Kantianism is not enough.

Sorry for going on about this. I initially just wanted to say I found the Mormon Metaphysics post above really nice.

Jon, I’ve not read Guerilla Metaphysics yet so I can’t really comment on his critique of Derrida. And of course there are different ways of reading Derrida. Some more useful than others. I’ll be the first to admit that the texts of his middle more demonstrable period were fascinating to me back in the early 90′s but which I find uninteresting now. They are all demonstration based immanent critiques but tended to say more or less the same thing. (With a few exceptions) The early texts from the 60′s and early 70′s I still personally find amazingly valuable. Although as I mentioned as time goes on I find him more interesting and valuable primarily as opening ways of reading Heidegger or Peirce.

I think the Derrida you, Levi, and Harman critique is a common one. It’s just not the Derrida I find interesting nor valuable. It’s the old problem in philosophy. Yes you can attack a particular reading of a philosopher, but there’s these other readings that people see as valuable. Yet they are cast off as if in defeating one reading you’ve defeated all readings. (I find this with Plato as well)

That said there’s also the problem of time and resources. Everyone has to decide what philosophers and arguments to focus on. There’s just not enough time or energy to read everything that gets thrown out. So I can’t fault OOP folks who discount Derrida even though I personally think there’s a lot valuable there and potentially a lot valuable to OOP. (As I’ve been at pains to point out – I don’t yet feel confident on the basic points of OOP to critique it)

Levi, I think once there are more books on the various kinds of OOP out there it will be easier. Right now it’s very hard for people to get a grasp on OOP. I’ve read Graham’s Prince of Networks as there’s a lot there I found valuable. But I think you have to admit there’s a paucity of writings. That’s been changing a lot this year but I think it’s a different situation from Derrida, Heidegger and Husserl – to pick three names.

Regarding semiotics, I’d note that I was speaking of Peirce’s semiotic realism and not the sort of limited semiotics that gets discussed in English departments and anthropology departments. (Most of whom give only superficial consideration of Peirce) So I think you’re attacking the wrong target. More a degenerate form of semiotics rather than the general semiotics of Peirce for whom it is the basic ontology of the universe. i.e. it’s signs all the way down. That’s not correlationist in any of the senses you outline. And that’s how I read Derrida’s comment that the thing is a sign. As a broad ontological claim rather than a correlationalist one.

As I noted over at LS, Derrida’s disciples abusing some poor souls in graduate school has nothing to do with Derrida’s writings themselves. It’s a rather poor form to argue that because some Derrideans oppressed some non-Derrideans (this oppression is, I believe, largely exaggerated – I went to graduate school and the only oppressive practices I found were actually economically and institutionally oppressive, not some ideological rape), Derrida is somehow implicated.

Jon, whether people discussing Derrida over at LS did or did not read “scads” of him is something I seriously question, considering the amount of utter nonsense said about Derrida, like the stuff about “Derrida only writes about books/texts” – that’s just plain ignorance and, yes, it might not be charitable to point it out, but it needs to be pointed out – Calarco’s original comment was a spirited reaction to precisely this sort of misreading. All other points could be argued about, of course, but if we begin with such a basic misreading of Derrida, seemed to be his point, we will never get anywhere.

He also explained his use of “Derrida 101″ several times and I can’t understand why you continue to reference it as a put down of your knowledge of Derrida. And the poor Marder book! Surely, it’s not an entirely original premise to say that, wait for it, people have disagreed about Derrida for decades now! Calarco’s (and mine) point was basically this: if you dismiss Derrida as someone who only writes about books/texts, you can’t go on and talk about realism/antirealism, regardless of who or what was said in books (or what sorts of people got hired to what sorts of school having written what sorts of books).

Wow, I didn’t mean to start such a firestorm. Let’s survey the damage.

Jon Cogburn:That’s just not charitable. Everybody involved in the debate at Levi’s has read scads of Derrida and learned from some of his principle expositors.
The thing is all of us about fifteen years ago chafed under the then hegemony of a certain kind of methodology of “deconstruction.” So we haven’t read much Derrida in the last fifteen years.

Houston, we have a problem. If you’ve read “scads” of Derrida, even fifteen years ago, you certainly would not refer to deconstruction as a “methodology”, much less a hegemonical one. It’s difficult to read you charitably when your claims about Derrida are so far removed from his writings– if you get the trivial things wrong, how can I trust your deeper analysis?

Jon Cogburn:Finally, are you willing to say Marder has demonstrated his “lack of reading.”

I am not. I have not read Marder’s book, and make no claims about it, or the quality of his reading of Derrida.

Jon Cogburn:Marder presents what is supposed to be a new and and shocking reading of Derrida as a realism-of-the-remainder neo-Kantian. So you can’t condescendingly put down Harman, Bogost, Bryant, and me are bad readers of Derrida without also saying that Marder is.

Sure I can. The fact that statements by you and Harman indicate a shoddy reading of Derrida has absolutely no bearing on Marder’s thesis, or the claims of Bogost or Bryant (of whom I have said nothing.)

Levi:It’s ironic you are making a call for close reading and then go on to suggest that for OOO objects are “reified and static things”.

Fair enough. I was responding to your claim that “objects are independent of their relations”; if they can be so, and yet not be static or reified, I stand corrected.

Levi: Every time you open your mouth about OOO you just reveal how little you’ve read of OOO and how you’re thinking entirely in terms of certain connotations of words such as “object”, rather than reading what OOO theorists actually have to say about objects. On the one hand, we give actual arguments as to why objects cannot be treated as bundles of relations and why any position that claims as much fall into incoherence.

The fact that OOO theorists believe that “objects cannot be treated as bundles of relations” (contra Derrida and Nagarjuna) was my primary claim about OOO, and you seem to have backed it up.

Levi: On the other hand, process is all over the place in OOO. At least try to accurately represent the positions you’re arguing against. I guess that standard only applies to big daddies like Derrida, huh?

Not at all–if I have misrepresented OOO on process, I apologize. My point was that Derrida (and Nagarjuna) from a completely different premise than OOO, and I think we agree on that.

Where I suspect we disagree is in your view of Derrida as a “correlationist”; I’d remind you that Derrida was highly critical of Saussurian semiotics, and spent his early years problematizing the notion of the “sign” in Husserl and Saussure.

Mikhail Emelianov Jon, whether people discussing Derrida over at LS did or did not read “scads” of him is something I seriously question, considering the amount of utter nonsense said about Derrida, like the stuff about “Derrida only writes about books/texts” – that’s just plain ignorance and, yes, it might not be charitable to point it out, but it needs to be pointed out – Calarco’s original comment was a spirited reaction to precisely this sort of misreading. All other points could be argued about, of course, but if we begin with such a basic misreading of Derrida, seemed to be his point, we will never get anywhere.

Extremely well put. I wish I had put it that clearly the first time.

Clark:And that’s how I read Derrida’s comment that the thing is a sign. As a broad ontological claim rather than a correlationalist one.

And even as a broad ontological claim, it’s a fairly nuanced one: it’s worth recalling that Derrida felt compelled to put the words “thing” and “is” under erasure when writing about the sign as that thing, perhaps the only one, which escapes the instituting question of philosophy, “What is…?”

Where exactly does Derrida move from the term “sign” to the term “trace”? It sounds as though he was all about “signs” and then he moved and decided to be all about “trace” – explain?

I think Michael answers it. “Sign” in the context Derrida was working in was primarily determined by structuralism. (You’ll note Levi made the same assumption when I used the term sign) So he’s moving to a conception of the sign as “in betweenness” where it deals with non-presence. This is very much the original Peircean notion of semiotics as Derrida himself notes. Indeed had Derrida read the later Peirce (which I suspect he wasn’t exposed to) he’d have found most of the key points of deconstruction. Although there is some debate over differences between Derrida and Peirce. See for instance Barnouw’s “Peirce and Derrida: ‘Natural Signs’ Empiricism versus ‘Originary Trace’ Deconstruction’” – although the differences are subtle and relate to the three kinds of signs Peirce considers arbitrary symbols, indexes and icons. I’m not sure Derrida rejects icons and indexes as some believe though.

To add to my comments in (6). The greatest strength of Peirce but also why his ontology is so often discounted is because he effectively sees the universe itself as mind. This isn’t something like Berkeley. Rather he sees signs as fundamental and broadens the conception of mind. So famously he considers a beehive or ant colony as exhibiting mind (something biologists only recently have postulated) but also a lot of physical processes as mind like. To him the difference between mind and matter is one only of degrees based upon how regular the habits are.

I’d note some see a connection in Derrida (rightly or wrongly) between trace as sign and Heidegger’s das man. If the universe is profuse with signs and if Derrida’s focus on trace is a focus on the objects themselves rather than the “knower” then I think it easy to see how to extend Heidegger and Derrida into a general Object Oriented Philosophy. It won’t be the OOP of Graham Harman and probably not Levi either, in that it’ll be an OOP that rejects the metaphysics of presence. But I think it would be a very Peircean OOP.

I suppose one might call them bad readings, but they are bad in a different way than that normally connotes. Interestingly they aren’t bad the way that say Heidegger’s are. (Say his reading of Kant or Plato) I think Derrida would probably agree, of course. Although he’d not use the word bad. His whole point is that authorial intent doesn’t control reading.

After reading the decades long ongoing debate between Searle and Dreyfus though I’m not sure the “charitable” reading opens up any less bad readings than what Derrida did to Searle in Limited Inc. I think that overall I have to favor Derrida over say Gadamer in terms of the role of charitable reading. (Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t try to be charitable, just that it can’t work the way some suggest)

So I agree that element of textualism is key to Derrida. Sort of a Kant but where one adopts a hermeneutics of suspicion towards not only the categories but the very possibility of the categories. All that said the reason why some get upset when Derrida is reduced to mere textualism is that it misses what he is really about. (IMO) You’ll note that my criticism of the middle period was less about the textualism and more that he kept saying the same thing over and over by means of differing immanent criticisms. At a certain point I threw my hands up and yelled, “yes. I get it.”

That said he moved away from that in the 80′s and by the 90′s was doing some very interesting stuff again. Related, yes. But much more interesting. (Think, for instance, “Force of Law.”)

BTW – I found the whole religious turn in France in the 90′s rather peculiar. It opened up a whole slew of rather annoying, to me readings. Interestingly I was recently at a philosophical conference where Kevin Hart was giving a paper. (A rather interesting one on the prodigal son as an example of phenomenological analysis) I asked him what I thought was a pointed question about the relationship between text and justice but he went off on a general critique of Derrida much like what you outline. But to me that missed what I took to be the real point of texts like “Force of Law.” So even people pretty sympathetic to Derrida do read him as you suggest. As I said I’m just not sure this is the most helpful way of reading him as it definitely opens up a way of merely discounting him out of hand.

You know I’d never read that last rejoinder to Derrida by Searle before. Thanks for pointing it out to me. That book came out around the time I’d sort of given up caring about Theory much anymore. So I never bothered reading the book.

That said I think Searle still misses the point a bit. I don’t think Derrida’s sense of undecidability is the same as the fuzziness of boundaries in concept analysis. (Although clearly undecidability entails the latter) And I think Derrida is right in the quoted reply. Analytic philosophy acknowledges a fuzzy demarcation line. But it’s more on par with the old question in epistemology of how many hairs a man has to lose before he is bald. Yet the underlying analysis is still all about clear and present concepts.

It’s interesting that Searle brings up Peirce’s type – token distinction as that’s been the main focus of all my philosophical investigation the past decades and I’m not sure I’ve made much headway. It’s a pretty complex thing. I’d be the first to agree that Derrida’s not the best place for the analysis though. I think Peirce is much clearer but things aren’t much better there in a way that leads to Derrida’s point. For Peirce all thought is in terms of signs and thus in terms of “generals” (i.e. types) which entails even if there are marks/tokens we know them only as types. The question of what in the type – token relationship gets repeated (iterated in Derrida’s terminology) is anything but a simple issue. It is here, actually, that I think there may be a big divide between Peirce and Derrida. But it’s a subtle one I’m not entirely clear on despite having studied it for quite a long time. (Surprisingly its not one that’s been written on well either)

I should add that Peirce moved from type – token into a division of type – tone – token which is quite interesting in its own right. You might recall that tone is something De Man brings up in this context. (Although I must confess I’ve not liked De Man that much for various reasons)

Searle’s notion of background is interesting although as the Dreyfus/Searle debates have brought out subtly yet importantly different from the similar notion in Heidegger.

Anyway, I’m not sure Searle says a lot new in that essay. Many of the points were ones he’d raised before (such as the claim Derrida doesn’t understand type – token relations which I think is just demonstrably false) Derrida just disagrees with the permanence during repetition of the type – token relationship. This is ironically a point of Peirce too whom Searle appealed to in that essay.

Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from likenesses or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of likenesses and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo. A symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows. Such words as force, law, wealth, marriage, bear for us very different meanings from those they bore to our barbarous ancestors. The symbol may, with Emerson’s sphynx, say to man. (Peirce, “What is a Sign?”)

On the one hand Searle will of course agree with this. (It’s hard to deny the difference of types in Shakespear’s time with ours even when the tokens are the same) I suspect Searle will want to say this is less about the change in symbols than the change in what symbols tokens point at. i.e. a change in reference rather than a change in meaning. However for Peirce (and I suspect Derrida) it isn’t a change in reference to a semi-eternal type but an actual evolution of the type itself. Where Derrida is a tad more radical than Peirce is in arguing via demonstration that this movement takes place even within relatively short texts. (I think his best example is actually “Tympan” from his middle period – even though I grew very tired of his middle period I still love that text)

Anyway I think Searle is attacking indeterminacy of the sort concept analysis engages with. (See for instance some of the great work by Timothy Williamson even though I ultimately find his positions rather than his arguments most interesting) Derrida is talking about a general instability which is much, much more radical than what Searle sees in Derrida.

I do think Searle is really good for others to use in order to bring out more clearly what Derrida’s importance is. If only by showing a version of Derrida that isn’t that significant. The Derrida that escapes this critique is very much the Derrida I find interesting. The ultimate issue though is repetition and the type-token relationship.

I just re-read the Searle essay in question, and by my reading, Searle is as confused as ever. That he doesn’t understand what Derrida is doing is clear; why he feels a need to attack it is somewhat less clear. (I think, though, he gives the game away when he refers to Derrida’s “attack on Austin”, presumably in “Signature Event Context”, which is by no means an attack. This, I believe, got Searle’s hackles up, and he rushed off to defend Austin against Derrida’s imaginary attack, and ended up embarrassing himself, repeatedly.)

The crux of Searle’s misunderstanding can be found here:

It is just a simple confusion to suppose that from the fact that I say something and mean something by what I say, and somebody else might use other tokens of those very words and sentences to mean something completely different, it follows that somehow or other I have lost control of my speech act.

What Searle fails to grasp is that his “speech act” theory gives us no way of knowing whether the speaker of those tokens “means something” or “means something completely different”, except via context– which, as Derrida points out, is never saturated. There never was “control” to begin with, despite Searle’s insistence.

The final page of Searle’s essay is a masterpiece of misreading; I find it interesting that Jon Cogburn likes this essay, and yet accuses Derrida of “preposterously bad reading”– I, for one, would love a concrete example of the latter.

Dorfman,

You should google Searle on “background,” where he articulates a really clear theory, clear enough to be helpful to linguists, and which is consistent with everything you are attributing to Derrida. I mean none of these claims about a prior unarticulable context started with Derrida. Also (more fruitfully for my research) see Dreyfus on Heidegger and Wittgenstein on this same theme.

This was part of why I gave up on Derrida as being something helpful to my research fifteen years ago as an undergraduate. As far as I could get it to be clear and even halfway plausible (via Norris’ work) it was stuff analytic philosophers of language were already saying and arguing about in a much more rigorous and clear manner.

At the time I found interpreters other than Norris to be largely confused because the arguments they attributed to Derrida had him trading in false dichotomies between something like an Augistinian view of language and a radically holistic view of language that is analogous to the metaphysics of the classical British Hegelians (the arguments are really weirdly similar too; cf. Graham Priest on Derrida to appreciate this). I think that Division One of Being and Time presents the best way out of this and as a result view Derrida’s classic essays as almost entirely retrograde in this manner.

I’m sure you disagree with me just as I am aware a lot of people disagree with me. But the difference isn’t whether one of us gets Derrida better, but rather our estimation of the prospects for completing the anti-Cartesian project in Division One. This is something intelligent people of good will can disgree about, I think (though weirdly, something that probably puts most Derrideans and most analytic philosophers on the same page).

Also, obviously, as this debate has shown Norris’ early work is not the last word on Derrida.

Jon

I’ve only read a little Priest but I have to admit I found a lot of his notions rather interesting and compelling. The big issue is whether Derrida embraces infinity or whether that too would for him be totalizing. (i.e. were Derrida to have a philosophy of mathematics would he be a realist or a constructivst?) No idea the answer to that question and I’d probably want to read more Priest on Derrida to even have an opinion on his views there.

It’s interesting as I suspect that too might be a place Derrida and Peirce differ although I’m not sure on it.

Norris I’ve not read in ages but recall his writing being among my favorite back when I was getting heavily into Derrida.

Regarding Searle on background I think there are some big limits to his views. As I recall some of these came up in the latest chapter in the Dreyfus/Searle debate which was published in those two volumes in honor of Dreyfus. I’d have to check to see the differences but as I recall they are superficially the same but differ considerably as one looks carefully. So I don’t think Searle’s view is really the same as Derrida/Heidegger.

Searle’s paper is provocatively called “The Limits of Phenomenology.” The opening is quite funny (unintentionally)

One of [Dreyfus'] rhetorical strategies in his Heidegger book is to contrast my views unfavorably with Heidegger’s. However, he persistently misstates my views, and I believe his misunderstandings are not accidental. Dreyfus has a real difficulty in understanding my position, because he thinks I am trying and somehow failing to do phenomenology. He seems to think that the analysis of intentionality must somehow be phenomenological and he also seems to think there are only two possible general approaches to intentionality, the Husserlian and the Heideggarian. ( 71)

As I said they’ve been going back and forth with each other for decades now. You can find most of the papers on the internet if you look hard enough. And they really do misunderstand each other which makes the debate quite funny. Doubly so as I don’t think either is that hard to figure out. Although I have to confess Dreyfus’ response on page 324 is pretty compelling. Dreyfus admits Searle’s background is similar to Heidegger but then lists a series of differences including the problem of internalist dualism. (The most useful aspect of Heidegger, as I’ve often mentioned, is his popularization of externalism)

Without externalism the “location” of the background becomes pretty problematic. Presumably it’s mental and thus in the head. Not so for Heidegger. The relationship between the background and the body is one obvious example although I think the issue goes much farther.

The other issue of the background is what Peirce calls habits. You start with rules which then for Searle recede into the background, suggesting the background consists of rules. Whereas for Heidegger and Dreyfus that background may have things that are appropriate but it is not necessarily rule based. (Indeed Dreyfus’ famous attack on AI via rules is largely just applying Heidegger to computers) That said I think Searle is probably being a little more Wittgensteinean here than Dreyfus is picking up on.

The most interesting part of the debate is logical analysis vs. phenomenology. I’d want to reread Searle again closely because this is a subtle point. Doubly so since both appear in Peirce in interesting ways. (He has both logical analysis – indeed was one of the fathers of it – but also had a strong phenomenology)

BTW – a later chapter in the debate is Dreyfus paper “The Primacy of Phenomenology over Logical Analysis” (rtf). I don’t know if it came out after Searle’s paper in Heidegger, Coping and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus v. 2. Dreyfus’ paper is from Nov ’99 I believe while the Searle essay in that Dreyfus volume is from around 2000. (Or at least that was when the volume was printed, which isn’t the same thing of course). For some reason I thought it was more recent – but that’s probably just because I got my volumes just last year.

I think that’s a pretty good point about Searle and one that holds in many of his texts beyond his engagement with Derrida. (I’m here thinking of his distinctions between models of the mind and his rejection of functionalism, ontological emergence, and so forth) There often is a moment where he hides things under the rug (IMO).

Regrading bad readings, Jon indicated that he doesn’t think it’s merely being true to the author’s intent or (presumably) the “typical” public reading. If so, I confess I’m not sure what he means by bad reading.