Art Madsen, M.Ed.
There
have been two prominent figures in the field of linguistics who have heavily
influenced my thinking during this semester. One of them is, of course,
the Father of Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure and the other is Jacques
Derrida, a linguist and theorist born in Algeria but who has published widely
in France and, in translation, throughout the entire world. I discovered Derrida in the course of
independent reading on the subject of structure and meaning. In this paper, I
would like to present some of the thinking that exists 'between' these two
important theorists, and perhaps propose some ideas of my own regarding
structure and meaning in language. Because I speak Arabic and English, I may be
able to propose some useful material, building upon both Saussure and Derrida.
Having
read major portions of Derrida's Writing and Difference (Routledge,
2002), I find that Derrida's most influential ideas on literary criticism and
linguistics seem to me to be based upon fairly routine, but extremely
insightful, notions of language and meaning which, in turn, are also broadly
located in basic Saussurian linguistics. Nevertheless, Derrida appears to
display a constantly shifting attitude to Saussure. On the one hand,
he justifies many of his positions with reference to Saussure,
readapting several of his terms, whereas, on the other hand,
he heavily criticizes him.
This Derrida/Saussure dialogue
appears to me one possible way to penetrate Derrida's personally defined
concepts. By inspecting Derrida's ideas of language and meaning in
relation to those of Saussure, I may be able to clarify certain rather unclear
issues.
Derrida, it is obvious, was particularly
unhappy in the mid-1970s with the ways in which Saussurian linguistics had
dominated criticism and academic thinking in the field of language and meaning.
He therefore developed his "deconstructionist project" in France as a
consequence, to some extent, of his reaction to an ultra-strict
academic and intellectual climate that imposed a
single interpretation of literary texts on students and writers at the
time. Not only do his deconstructionist ideas pertain narrowly to linguistics
and the structure of language, but they have, as will be demonstrated, major
social and political implications as well.
For Derrida, there was "nothing outside of
the text", as he repeats frequently in his Writing and Difference, and
when addressing the issue of text analysis with his particular linguistic frame
of reference, he denounced the domineering effect of its rigid structure
upon literary interpretation. It is astonishing that, contrary to Saussure's
more basic thinking, Derrida wanted, not simply to undo, but to attack the
central position of 'meaning' which so-called 'structuralist
thinkers' of the 1950s felt contained hidden or privileged meaning in language.
There has been a long history of studying the structure of
language in relation to meaning. Ancient societies, including many in the
Middle East, had complex structures in the telling of their stories and
narratives. Another socio-linguist, Levi-Strauss, according to Derrida,
attempted to analyze what he claimed were certain opposing elements of
meaning contained in the structures of the narratives of these ancient
societies. Out of this thinking, the concept of the 'myth' was developed in the
minds of listeners, but both Derrida and Levi-Strauss seem to claim
that the myth already existed in the listener's mind as a hidden
'signifying system' through which both the teller and the
listener generated their world views. Language (words,
phonemes, morphemes) was the medium, but thought was actually at the root of
this (mythical) structure, not necessarily language itself. I found this concept
fascinating.
Moving farther into his subject matter,
Derrida restated certain points that were originally at the center of
Saussurian linguistics based on relationships and differences within elements
of meaning. However, Derrida thought that analysis of linguistic
form in terms of 'pure values', where the value of each sign depends
only upon the system where it is found, was a valid answer or
explanation solving the shifting thoughts and meanings that can
sometimes be produced by language. On the contrary, Saussure felt there
was one clear and universal distinction between concepts
that could have a single value or meaning. He
thought that language, and therefore words, have only a conventional value,
only at the time when spoken. So, according to Saussure, a sentence like
"Wow, look at that goal just scored!" could only apply to that
specific goal being scored at that specific moment on the playing field,
whereas Derrida might find other meanings, depending on the linguistic system
in use.
But Derrida accepts no reference outside of
language, even though he accepts differing systems of language and structure.
This indicates quite an important point of departure for the
deconstructionist movement that Derrida founded. As a
consequence of Derrida's thinking, objects, words, and their meaning,
and therefore the world, are subject to differences and
various shades of meaning, in spite of previously 'standard' interpretations.
It is important to leave Derrida and Saussure
for a moment, who differ obviously, to clarify this point. According to
Thomkins (1988) who supports Derrida's model, "There
is then no difference between language and objects because objects are at play
in a system of differences too.... The sign, the thing that is articulated by
the system of differences, is all that there is, and, therefore, language is
not secondary, is not provisional, is not just marking time or keeping place
until the thing itself arrives because things themselves are linguistically
constituted. And the world itself is discourse."
But Saussure's system is not too simple, as we
might suspect from the foregoing quote. Words for him are not, of course,
just labels which have been attached to things already
understood. Words, for Saussure, supply the conceptual frame of
reference for man's analysis of reality and also the linguistic framework
for his description of this reality.
This brings us back, in spite of Derrida, to the
starting point of linguistics. Saussure's model of a linguistic sign, as we
studied in class, is of a "two-sided psychological entity"
(Saussure 1983), making up the meaning of the word (morpheme),
together with its sound image constituting phonemes. He uses the analogy of two
sides of a piece of paper to illustrate the bond, one that is actually quite
close in the Saussurian model.
Derrida, after one reads Writing and
Difference, seems to develop his main system from a
new interpretation of Saussure's central principle, contained in his
previously cited work, that states "... in language there are only
differences." Saussure, continuing his thought, proposes that the
value of a sign is produced by its relations with other signs surrounding it in
actual speech (or writing). Also, the value of a sign is tied in with its
psychological associations within memory groups. These are terms that can be
used to replace or combine with the sign. In fact, Saussure's analysis builds
upon consideration of specific differences and identities between one sign and
other signs to which the first is directly related.
On the other hand, Derrida's
reinterpretation of Saussure's ideas, especially as explained in Writing
and Difference, allows for comparisons that can be made. Under Derrida's
analysis, there was to be, what he calls, "free play" of
differences. This opens the door to multiple interpretations of the same
words and structures, in effect destroying the previous system of universal
meaning! The implications for this new thinking, actually a part
of Derrida's deconstructionist project, are wide ranging.
Beyond this point, Derrida introduces another
constantly shifting element that radically affects meaning and
significance. In a major portion
of his Writing and Difference, Derrida defines the meaning of
‘differences’ to indicate a sort of dependence on a chain of linguistic terms,
or what he calls "a field of infinite substitutions" that can always
be extended, reviewed or placed in different contexts. He also uses the French
term 'differance' (which means a deferral or a delay). Meaning, therefore, for
Derrida is never in the present, it emerges from the interaction of both
differences and 'differances' between the various terms in the text. These
differences, and 'differances', are subject to continuous review, in an ongoing
(sometimes unspoken) dialogue…that involves time and shifts in meaning.
Deconstruction, as Derrida proposes it, removes
the actual content or text from its purpose of communication, and thereby
disguises or postpones, maybe indefinitely, meaning! What does Derrida propose to substitute for this lost or
distorted meaning? He
basically seems to say that everything needs to be constantly subjected to
interpretation!
Contrary to Derrida’s thinking, I would argue
that most observations and questions that we meet in everyday life require no
interpretation or clarification at all.
This can be confirmed by the relatively few occasions on which
misunderstandings occur. But I can see Derrida’s viewpoint, too. I am amazed,
when listening to a tape recording of a lesson or lecture, at just how few
words are used, or how few are required, to transfer meaning. If we place these
‘broadly spoken’ recorded words, phrases or elements of meaning under the
microscope and analyze or ‘deconstruct’ them, they could easily be interpreted
in dozens of ways. Some of them
might be affected by the time factor, and lose meaning; others might be
misinterpreted because of poor contextual clues or lack of clarity.
It is safe to conclude that social interaction,
especially in this modern age, is not dependent upon spoken or written language
alone. There are a myriad of other signifiers, some culturally based, which
indicate how a particular statement should to be interpreted. Derrida would
seem to suggest that we constantly interpret, re-interpret and re-examine
everything, because the actual meaning might be something entirely unrelated to
the original intent or purpose.
And that is quite disturbing because it implies that speakers may, in
spite of sophisticated language structures available to them, actually have
very few means at their disposal to communicate effectively.
Having seen that Derrida is quite serious in his
thrust to attack conventional language structures in the rather effective ways
discussed above, it is important to ask why he did so. Surely, as an academic, he is
interested in truth. But truth is
a relative concept and is difficult to define with accuracy. We can infer, perhaps, that Derrida
might have had another reason to attack Western Language so
energetically. Born in Algeria and
aware of anti-European movements in his country, I feel that he was oriented in
his thinking by his early years in a foreign culture and that, convinced of the
need to undermine structure and meaning in the West, he developed an elaborate
system for doing so. But he also
developed, in his deconstructionist project, a valid sequence of thoughts and
insights that have become useful to linguists from all cultures and
backgrounds.
REFERENCES
Derrida,
J. (2002) Writing and Difference (A. Bass Trans.) Routledge, London.
Ellis,
J. (1989) Against Deconstruction. Princeton University Press, New
Jersey.
Saussure,
F. (1983) Course of General Linguistics, Duckworth, London.
Tompkins, J. (1988) A Short Course in Post-Structuralism. College
English 50 (7) pp.733-747.