I just wanted to get to this since I’d forgotten Halloween is this weekend so I may not have as much free time as I’d thought. I wanted to address some points I’d raised with Edwina. I started this last week and it’s gotten a little longer than I expected. My apologies but it seemed necessary for the topic at hand. I’ll probably have to go silent until next week. So my apologies if I don’t answer your comments or corrections.
> On Oct 23, 2015, at 2:12 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote: > > The way I read Derrida (and I admit, some time ago) in his 'Linguistics and > Grammatology' and 'The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing', they > were filled with Saussurian terms (signifer and signified; distinction > between language and speech) which he didn't seem to question. And his focus > on Peirce was only a few pages - he never examines the triadic semiosic > action. He seems more to focus on the symbol - but this is not the semiosic > action. That is, for Derrida, the focus is on rhetoric - which is all about > 'signs' - but not the triadic semiosic action. Derrida even calls the 'thing > itself' (which i take to be the Dynamic Object) as a 'representamen'!! (Of > Grammatology, p 49). Saussure is the ideal foil for Derrida due to the place his lectures came to have in structuralism. Structuralism of course dominated a lot of philosophy and analysis, especially in Europe, during the first half of the 20th century. More importantly though Saussure’s theory of sign is a dualism of object:interpretant rather than a trichotomy of object:sign:interpretant. (At least in the form as used. I’ve had some people tell me this isn’t how Saussure himself necessarily conceived of it.) This conception of sign in turn applies for Derrida not just to Saussure and structuralism but also to Husserl and the problem of the inside and out within that conception phenomenology. As such an analysis of Saussure is the perfect for an understanding of an underlying problem Derrida sees in philosophy. Not just Saussure or Husserl but also Descartes and the logical positivists and more broadly. This is often cast by Derrida as logocentrism which I’d define as a logic that denies vagueness or a move towards determinism (semiosis). I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such as signified (On Grammatology, 49) That is there is a desire and logic for a complete and present sign we always have access to. For Derrida the ideal example of this error is a certain way of reading Plato such that the forms are always absolute and already complete forms. A kind of stasis ala Parmenides rather than the flux of Heraclitus. European structuralism and Saussure in particular are a manifestation of this stasis in how they conceive of the sign. Derrida’s using Saussurean terms not because he agrees with Saussure but because he wants to show how they undermine themselves. Effectively the critique is of Saussure from a more Peircean perspective but in terms of Saussurean terminology. This can be confusing if one doesn’t keep straight what is going on. (At least it can be for me as I tend to think in Peircean terminology) While the explicit Peircean section is just a few pages the analysis fundamentally runs through the entire first section of the book. (And in some ways through the Rousseau section as well, although I’ll confess I don’t like that part nearly as much) One should keep in mind that in the 50’s Derrida came to Harvard with one of his major projects studying Peirce for a full year. So we should be very careful in dismissing Derrida’s use of Peirce. While Peircean scholarship in the 50’s was clearly nothing like it is today, Derrida would have read all the main papers of Peirce along with quite a few not widely dispersed in that era. Whether we agree with Derrida or not, I don’t think we can say Derrida was being casual with Peirce. As for semiotic action and the symbol, there clearly are parts Derrida’s not focusing on. However I think in particular “New Elements” is very important to understand Derrida’s project. Again we can criticize how Derrida reads Peirce. I recognize most dismiss Derrida’s reading. But I think we have to be careful in our criticisms. The thing itself should be considered in terms of Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenology where they saw the project as a return to the things themselves. As such their phenomenology projects can in certain ways be seen as a kind of return to direct realism whether of the scholastic form or even of the Scottish renaissance. Of course there are key differences from say the direct realism of Reid and company. For both Peirce and Derrida the direct realism is mediated whereas the classic medieval direct realism is unmediated as I recall. (I think there were variants though) As for why Derrida uses representamen for thing itself I think “New Elements” gets at this issue. However beyond that in On Grammatology Derrida is concerned with the relation of the thing itself and the sign. The sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, the present thing, “thing” here standing equally for meaning or referent. The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence….And this structure presupposes that the sign which defers presence is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and moving towards the deferred presence that it aims to appropriate. (“Différance", 9) Within the analysis of Saussure we’ll thus have Peirce’s final interpretant (which is the completeness of the sign through a temporal process it is moving towards as a limit) put up against Saussure’s transcendental signified (which is the perfection of the sign as already present). The thing is both the object as source of semiosis as well as the interpretant towards which semiosis leads. Again this is made quite clear in a Peircean frameworks in “New Elements." Allow me first to clarify one of my comments to you. > > Quickly off the top of my head (so beware errors on my part) what Derrida > means by rhetoric is what Peirce calls speculative grammar. (I’ll see if I > can’t write more on this later) I didn’t put that very well. I don’t mean Derrida reduces speculative grammar to speculative rhetoric or vice versa. Quite the opposite. He’s after how they are irreducible and produce a certain tension. I’m not sure when Peirce first introduces these terms but I know the distinction plays a key place in “Of Reasoning in General” (EP 2:20) The idea is that the study of semiotics is split into speculative grammar, logic, and speculative rhetoric. Speculative grammar arises out of some medieval texts falsely attributed to Duns Scotus. The typical argument against Derrida’s use of Peirce is that Peirce’s semiotics is concerned with logic whereas Derrida rejects such logic. I think this just gets Derrida wrong but I recognize it’s a common way of reading the use of Peirce in On Grammatology. It’s true Derrida’s aim is to deconstruct the sign. However we always have to keep in mind that the sign Derrida deconstructs is Saussure’s sign which is a dualism not a trichotomy as in Peirce. By extension this will also apply to phenomenology involved in dualisms (which is how Derrida reads Husserl, although there are ways of reading him different ways) What Derrida does is replace the term “sign” with the term “gramme” and semiotics" with “grammatology.” The criticism is that Derrida wants to avoid all categories and that with this move he’s rejecting Peirce’s sign and semiotics. I’m not quite sure this is accurate. Instead what I think he wants to do is note how all categories are themselves based upon signs and are symbols. (That is categories as signs - which can get confusing because we can talk of the categories of signs) Thus the very notion of category itself depends upon the play of signs. (Or if you don’t like the word play replace it with process or semiosis) A sign is interpreted by making an other sign. This means that stable categories (pure secondness) and undermined if they are in fact thirdness. Derrida is then concerned with how this applies to signs themselves. Further the shift in terminology is to break with Saussure, not Peirce. The later terminology he adopts is that of trace as the Peircean sign which he gets out of the Timaeus. In the Timaeus there’s a section dealing with the creation of elements. The elements are made by the form and the receptical (khora) producing the elements. Interestingly Peirce’s cosmology in various places makes a similar move with potential becoming actualness via signs. I’m convinced Peirce is also influenced by the Timaeus although that’s getting us a bit afield. Now Derrida’s move here poses no problem for Peirce since of course his notions of mediation and continuity require this. Any sign can itself be broken down into sub signs ad infinitum. Derrida then applies this in a more Heideggarian realm. Being is within philosophy treated as a thing, as being subject to the category. If it is a manifestation of this logic of thirdness though (process) then how philosophy conceives of Being is just wrong. (See below when I discuss Peirce’s “New Elements”) The problem is that Being as Being (or thirdness as thirdness for that matter) can’t be understood only as representation the way say analytic philosophy does. Analytic philosophy misses the iconic and indexical parts. More importantly it misses signs as this essential thirdness. Philosophers seem always to want to make signs a matter just of object and interpretant and avoid what makes that relationship possible. Those making the criticism of Derrida in terms of Peirce typically (although not universally) make the mistake of treating thirdness as just this sort of representation (especially representations as conceived of in analytic philosophy from Descartes to the present) Again “New Elements” is crucial here. Going back to Peirce’s categories in “Of Reasoning in General” we have the following. logic: reference of signs to objects speculative grammar: general conditions of signification speculative rhetoric: relation of signs to interpretants By speculative grammar Peirce is concerned with how signs must function in order to have a sense. The idea from the medieval era is that meaning is independent of truth but is tied to signs. But note how Peirce’s speculative grammar entails that notions of truth simply can’t function as they do especially in the analytic tradition. (But also the earlier continental tradition with Kant through Hegel up to Husserl) Peirce can deal with this because of the way the final interpretant functions. But again, the final interpretant as such is always absent. It is never something present as we have with Descartes or the most popular interpretations of Plato. We may have a true statement but it is true because it is the same kind of sign as the sign of the final interpretant. But we don’t have an absolute certain way of having truth. And this disruption between truth and sign is possible because signs are thirdness and not secondness. Going back to Derrida this aspect of Peirce means that speculative grammar and speculate rhetoric can’t be collapsed into one an other. We then have the connection between rhetoric or signs to interpretants and grammar or signs in themselves. The issue is that because of grammar we have an indefinite form of reference. (Signs signify their object with a guess; interpretants rise out of this logic of guessing) It is this gap between sign and object that lets us know we’re even dealing with signs. Yet with speculative rhetoric we have this notion of interpretants and the very idea of a final interpretant. This is why Derrida emphasizes that “the thing itself is a sign.” This gets at categories and in particular the Saussurean sign where we only have the object and interpretant in a dualism. This play of the sign is absent. Things are never static. This also is the issue of inside/outside for Husserlian phenomenology where we have this dualism rather than a thirdness. (Although again there are some key places to read Husserl in a different way) It’s precisely this issue of a problem in Husserl that is why Derrida turns to the problem in Saussure and by extension all structuralism in the first half of the 20th century. Now we get to the key place in On Grammatology for rhetoric. When Derrida speaks of rhetoric he’s talking of the third category just as in “On Reasoning in General.” He says it “has the task to ascertain the laws by which every scientific intelligence one sign gives birth to another.” That is interpretants. But note the subtle shift. The interpretant is itself an other sign. So there’s this essential connection between speculative rhetoric (interpretants) and speculative grammar (signs). To have a final interpretant in the traditional (non-Pericean) sense is to have an absolute stop. But Peirce’s final interpretant is not a final stop. It is a place of stability in semiosis. It’s not a stop so much as a completeness. The final interpretant are the interpretants semiosis arrives at given sufficient time. But it doesn’t mean semiosis has stopped. (This is why in other places Derrida appeals to Nietzsche’s use of the Eternal Round which is just the playing out in infinity of all signs such that we can conceive of completeness) There are some big places to critique Derrida here. However they simply aren’t the places he usually gets critiqued. The big question I’d put up for Derrida would be how to deal with Peirce’s conception of substance. However even here, at least in the early Peirce, things get tricky. Early on as Peirce is revising Kant he has five categories: Being, Quality, Relation, Representation, Substance. (W 2:49-59) However he drops Being and Substance because they are unthinkable limits and thus have no meaning in terms of how we think. Kelly Parker does some great work on this — although we should be careful to distinguish the early Peirce from the mature Peirce. The mature Peirce in “New Elements” is a bit more cautious. Allow me an extended quotation. (Sorry, quoting from my Kindle so I don’t have page numbers - emphasis is mine.) Every sign that is sufficiently complete refers to sundry real objects. All these objects, even if we are talking of Hamlet’s madness, are parts of one and the same Universe of being, the “Truth.” But so far as the “Truth” is merely the object of a sign, it is merely the Aristotelian Matter of it that is so. In addition however to denoting objects, every sign sufficiently complete signifies characters, or qualities. We have a direct knowledge of real objects in every experiential reaction, whether of Perception or of Exertion (the one theoretical, the other practical). These are directly hie et nunc. But we extend the category, and speak of numberless real objects with which we are not in direct reaction. We have also direct knowledge of qualities in feeling, peripheral and visceral. But we extend this category to numberless characters of which we have no immediate consciousness. All these characters are elements of the “Truth.” Every sign signifies the “Truth.” But it is only the Aristotelian Form of the universe that it signifies. The logician is not concerned with any metaphysical theory; still less, if possible, is the mathematician. But it is highly convenient to express ourselves in terms of a metaphysical theory; and we no more bind ourselves to an acceptance of it than we do when we use substantives such as “humanity,” “variety,” etc., and speak of them as if they were substances, in the metaphysical sense. But, in the third place, every sign is intended to determine a sign of the same object with the same signification or meaning. Any sign, B, which a sign, A, is fitted so to determine, without violation of its, A’s, purpose, that is, in accordance with the “Truth,” even though it, B, denotes but a part of the objects of the sign, A, and signifies but a part of its, A’s, characters, I call an interpretant of A. What we call a “fact” is something having the structure of a proposition, but supposed to be an element of the very universe itself. The purpose of every sign is to express “fact,” and by being joined with other signs, to approach as nearly as possible to determining an interpretant which would be the perfect Truth, the absolute Truth, and as such (at least, we may use this language) would be the very Universe. Aristotle gropes for a conception of perfection, or entelechy, which he never succeeds in making clear. We may adopt the word to mean the very fact, that is, the ideal sign which should be quite perfect, and so identical,— in such identity as a sign may have,— with the very matter denoted united with the very form signified by it. The entelechy of the Universe of being, then, the Universe qua fact, will be that Universe in its aspect as a sign, the “Truth” of being. The “Truth,” the fact that is not abstracted but complete, is the ultimate interpretant of every sign. There’s a lot in this paragraph. Peirce has shifted from his earlier phase. He’s willing to use metaphysical language. Particularly Aristotle conceive of in a more neoplatonic way. However he doesn’t feel committed to it. The key though is conceive the universe in its aspect as a sign. Second there’s a type of direct realism which I think is what Heidegger’s externalism commits him to and that by extension the realist interpretation of Derrida commits him to. (Remember though for Derrida the things themselves that Heidegger is committed to are signs because we can only think in signs) So what Derrida says rhetoric gets us to is this universe in its aspect as a sign. Speculative rhetoric can’t fully be separated from speculative grammar. The final interpretant is not something abstracted and present but is the completeness of semiosis. This is that unthinkable limit that Peirce refers to early on. (It’s just that now Peirce is willing to use metaphysical language while being explicit he’s not committed to it) I should add that “New Elements” has some analysis of Being that is just amazingly profound and I don’t think gets commented on enough. In particular how he discusses the copula. He makes an interesting note about Greek permits the copula to be admitted and it’s not until Abelard when logic is done in Latin that the copula is seen as constituent of logic. He then notes how logicians have treated the copula. Yet he notes that logically the mark of the junction, where the copula goes, is an index. Then he notes, "the only way in which any index can ever signify anything; by involving an icon. The sign itself is a connection.” Heidegger and Derrida’s work placing being under erasure (often the copula in various forms with a big X through it always reminds me of this part of “New Elements." Peirce next condemns the German practice of tying all this to judgment in place of propositions (which are these signs with the index by icon). Finally he makes a masterful analysis in terms of feelings of how iconicity of symbols functions and enables indices. He then makes a comment that could have been an aporia written by Derrida. (And it appears this underlies a lot of the analysis Derrida does in On Grammatology) It is quite certain therefore that in this feeling we have a definite instance of a symbol which, in a certain sense, necessarily signifies what it does. We have already seen that it can only be by an accident, and not by inherent necessity, that a symbol signifies what it does. The two results are reconciled by the consideration that the accident in this case is that we are so constituted that that feeling shall be so interpreted by us. The nature of the constitution is revealed in the climax of “New Elements” found in its final paragraph. It’s the idea of the human as symbol and thus part of semiosis. That is our judgments aren’t judgments in the German sense Peirce condemns (and that we find in America as the Vienna Circle comes to dominate analytic philosophy for a time) Rather they (and we) are merely the selection of greater powers in this process of semiosis. A remarkably radical claim constitutive of his semiotic realism. Peirce then next return to a cosmology fairly similar to his early thought. Now it is of the essential nature of a symbol that it determines an interpretant, which is itself a symbol. A symbol, therefore, produces an endless series of interpretants. Does anybody suspect all this of being sheer nonsense? Distinguo. There can, it is true, be no positive information about what antedated the entire Universe of being; because, to begin with, there was nothing to have information about. But the universe is intelligible; and therefore it is possible to give a general account of it and its origin. This general account is a symbol; and from the nature of a symbol, it must begin with the formal assertion that there was an indeterminate nothing of the nature of a symbol. This would be false if it conveyed any information. But it is the correct and logical manner of beginning an account of the universe. As a symbol it produced its infinite series of interpretants, which in the beginning were absolutely vague like itself. But the direct interpretant of any symbol must in the first stage of it be merely the tabula rasa for an interpretant. Hence the immediate interpretant of this vague Nothing was not even determinately vague, but only vaguely hovering between determinacy and vagueness; and its immediate interpretant was vaguely hovering between vaguely hovering between vagueness and determinacy and determinate vagueness or determinacy, and so on, ad infinitum. But every endless series must logically have a limit. Leaving that line of thought unfinished for the present owing to the feeling of insecurity it provokes, let us note, first, that it is of the nature of a symbol to create a tabula rasa and therefore an endless series of tabulae rasae, since such creation is merely representation, the tabulae rasae being entirely indeterminate except to be representative. [...] In so far as the interpretant is the symbol, as it is in some measure, the determination agrees with that of the symbol. But in so far as it fails to be its better self, it is liable to depart from the meaning of the symbol. Its purpose, however, is to represent the symbol in its representation of its object; and therefore, the determination is followed by a further development, in which it becomes corrected. It is of the nature of a sign to be an individual replica and to be in that replica a living general. By virtue of this, the interpretant is animated by the original replica, or by the sign it contains, with the power of representing the true character of the object. That the object has at all a character can only consist in a representation that it has so,— a representation having power to live down all opposition. In these two steps, of determination and of correction, the interpretant aims at the object more than at the original replica and may be truer and fuller than the latter. The very entelechy of being lies in being representable. A sign cannot even be false without being a sign and so far as it is a sign it must be true. A symbol is an embryonic reality endowed with power of growth into the very truth, the very entelechy of reality. This appears mystical and mysterious simply because we insist on remaining blind to what is plain, that there can be no reality which has not the life of a symbol. [...] A chaos of reactions utterly without any approach to law is absolutely nothing; and therefore pure nothing was such a chaos. Then pure indeterminacy having developed determinate possibilities, creation consisted in mediating between the lawless reactions and the general possibilities by the influx of a symbol. This symbol was the purpose of creation. Its object was the entelechy of being which is the ultimate representation. The importance of “New Elements” when considering Derrida just can’t be underestimated. It’s here that we understand the relationship of icon and index in feeling so as to enable symbols to function the way they do. The other place of attack on Derrida relative Perice is usually that Derrida neglects the icon and especially index. I think reading “New Elements” carefully shows why Derrida’s use of symbol doesn’t fall prey to this attack. The final interpretant really should be thought of in terms of mathematical limits such as we find in calculus. Finally quite from denying logic Derrida’s whole point is to show how logic, rhetoric and grammar are irreducible. It’s only by examining them carefully that we realize this and thereby see how logic has to proceed. Peirce is pretty clear on this, especially in key papers like “New Elements.” Those who take Derrida as rejecting or undermining logic just miss that what he is taking seriously is the relationship of logic (or how signs relate to objects) with signs in themselves and how signs relate to interpretants. The problem is that philosophers want to deny in various ways this irreducible nature. Or, as Peirce typically puts it, they are committed to nominalism: the idea of object:name rather than object:sign:interpretant.
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