Phenomenology, Psychology and Derrida
Phenomenology, Psychology and Derrida
Beyond Phenomenological and Deconstructive Philosophy
Joshua Soffer, Chicago,Il.joshsoffer1@gmail.com(comments and criticism welcome!)About Me
What is deconstruction?
Although it is Derrida who is most closely associated with deconstruction as a philosophical orientation, there are a number of other writers who see their work as consonant with the aims of this approach. Since we view Derrida's thinking as perhaps closer to the direction which we want to pursue than that of these others, we may most specifically articulate the architectonics of Derridean differance by locating deconstruction with respect not only to the gathering of Derrida's writings available in English translation over the past decades, but also in relation to writings of authors who consider themselves friends of his approach. Let us situate our analysis of Derrida via a brief interweaving of his articulations with some of those whose proximity to his thinking has been recognized as or recognizes itself as close to Derridean differance. By touching upon features of Derrida's thinking which seem to set him apart from certain sympathetic writers, we will be able to achieve a more precise focus on what is at issue for us in Derrida. This concerns, first, aspects of his corpus that are underclarified, and, second and most importantly, those that are inadequately thought through. From one vantage, a range of poststructuralist thinking differentiates itself author to author, from Caputo and Lyotard to Nancy and Derrida, on the basis of a more or less effective problematizing and decentering of conceptual tropes. But seen from a more global vantage, they may be bound together by a common if heterogeneously expressed failure to penetrate a minimal configurative structurality assumed as the origin of experience. What do we mean by `configurative structurality'?
Before we explain this proposition in greater detail with regard to Derrida's work, we will start out by summarizing other writings supporting a deconstructive orientation. From within these accounts we will identify problems, or at least questions, that we will then address to Derrida. John Caputo's comprehensive treatment of Derridean thematics, ranging from the basis of interpretation to the genesis of the ethico-religious, provides us with a place to begin. According to Caputo, to radicalize the thinking of experience is to avoid the temptation to preempt the play of history by reifying it into formalisms. He cites many ways in which philosophy has attempted to force experience into such ungroundable universals, such as the Cartesian idea of truth as correspondence with an independent reality, with language acting as the pure vehicle of communication or mediation between an autonomous subject and an environment. Even as the more recent efforts of semiological structuralists (Saussure, Lacan, Chomsky, Levi-Strauss) broke away from this atomistic tradition by positing language as a system of signs regulated by the unity of a schematic center, Caputo recognizes that these writers failed to address the historical genesis of such structures. He re-iterates the poststructuralist realization that larger structures and conventions of language are as ungroundable and contingent as the particulars which they presumably regulate.
Against these tendencies, Caputo argues there would be no infinite which steers or commands all things, no center or origin which is the key to a system of signs. Instead, there would be a differential system of signifiers without signified. Caputo says "Repetition and representation cut into the very essence of signs, and it is never possible to separate out an original and a representative element within them" (RH133). Caputo affirms that language transforms what it embraces; in representing thought it always represents differently-disruptively. There would be no metavocabulary to arrive at, only a continual recontextualization of language conventions and practices. If we create the world through speech rather than approximate it, this is not a unidirectional endeavor. We don't invent words for our purposes, we are invented and reinvented, along with our purposes, by the contingent vocabularies that we participate in as cultural beings, and these vocabularies are transient. Not the autonomous self-conscious subject intimate with her goals, but the heteronymous subject always at a distance from herself, losing and gaining her identity differently through history. Caputo refers to this repetition of becoming as flux, and also as an ethics of dissemination, borrowing the term from Derrida. For Caputo, the conventions of language and culture which lay claim to us as individuals are utterly without permanence. The very basis of experience in its radical contingency guarantees the inevitable dispersal of all power structures(RH288) which would try to persist in their self-sameness; to understand this is to actively and endlessly participate in a critical emancipation from certainties. Caputo says that the instability in personal experience that this implies requires a jettisoning of a notion of `self' in favor of a site of `non-identity, difference'(RH289), flux, a place of "disruption, irruption, solicitation"(RH289).
We want now to concentrate on the supposed mechanics of this flux or play of differences as the moment of the contingent sign and its dislocation. We might be tempted to assume that, by making non-dialectical movement and becoming the central ethic of experience, the hold of foundational metaphysics has been broken. But there is still so much that can be said concerning the relative substantiveness and power of the in-between of relational experience, in its guise as content as well as its function as separation. This book is dedicated to investigating a range of implications, from the interpretive to the aesthetic, the religious to the ethico-political, arising from the precise sorts of commitments that are made with regard to the internal structuring of the being-with of contingent experience.
On the Architecture of Event as Contextual Pattern:
At issue in this conversation concerning the in-between of meaning's exposition is precisely what is meant by an event not being `present to itself'. Caputo may believe an event is not present to itself by virtue of its absolute dependence on other events for its very determination. And this would seem to be a reasonable (if at this point still unspecific) argument to make about the ungroundability of conventions of meaning, an argument which puts Caputo in the company of writers like Glendinning and Wittgenstein. For instance, Glendinning offers up a contrast between "a supposedly essential (and thus indefinitely repeatable-as-the-same) identity or content"(OBWO79) and a content which depends for its very essence on the effacing substitution by another content. According to this account, to be self-present is to have a fixed meaning that transcends immediate context, justified traditionally by what Glendinning calls the `thesis of ideal conceptual exactness'. Contrary to this, he insists that "we cannot independently identify a determinate `something' which might be set up as an `in which' that determines and contains the play of concepts. If a meaning only exists as itself for the instant of its appearance, "each `singular event' of `writing' is not what it is except in view of another such `singular event', an event that is not what it is except in view of another such `singular event', an event...And so on"(OBWO122). What appears and passes away as a signifier, then, is not an independently existing perceptual datum received by a consciousness, not a phenomenal entity imposing its structures on a passive subject. There is no private realm of ownness or otherness; the subject or self is not protected from, and is in fact nothing but, the contingency and plurality of eventness itself.
Wittgenstein's analyses in the Philosophical Investigations rigorously elaborate the notion of a dissimulated basis of the sign. When he asks, "What is the meaning of the words:`THIS image? How does one point to an image? How does one point twice to the same image"(PI118)?, Wittgenstein is putting into doubt the meaningfulness of a meaning which simply `is' as a self-referential unit. In example after example, he leads us to see that, if an entity is a having of something, in `having' a something, we are showing it, and in showing, we are submitted to alteration, to an other. To inhabit is to ex-hibit, to use. To simply have a word, meaning, sign, self, is to affirm it and give it up inseparably. The signalling word or gesture is between ourselves and another, a bifurcation, and in this sense a language game. Meaning is always a public secret, an indissociable interaction. The intrinsic is undecidable when its having is always in its transgressing. This is what Wittgenstein means by `essence as grammar'.
He recognizes that a notion of sign as intrinsic presence, reflection, representation, implies the thinking of imagination, the seeing of an image. It is the possibility of having something that no one else has, a private experience. "There is here no question of a `seeing'-and therefore none of a `having'-nor of a subject, nor therefore of `I' either..."(PI120). "Every sign BY ITSELF seems dead. What gives it its life?-In use it is ALIVE. Is life breathed into it there?-Or is the USE its life?" (PI128) The use isn't the content of the sign, as if we could return to this sense again briefly. The sign has no intrinsic content. It is only itself as a new use, a new application, a new game. A `string' of such signs need not be thought as being separated by displacements, when the displacing is co-extensive with the novelty of the use. No cleansing moment is needed to absolve us of the sin of redundancy when the self is itself NOW in self-effacing motion. To think `this thing' or `this same thing' or `this is this same thing' or `this new thing' ; all three examples involve both effacement and presence together in the gesture of new application. If a pointing is an altering, not a return but an affirmation-in-transformation, then how do we ever know that there is an original, even as the temporary, fleeting event-in-context? The answer is that we don't. There is no center, no transcendental or privileged signified, only endless substitutions. The contingent original as momentary sign is undecidable; it is being-in-transit. Thus, in the sense that the context instantiated by any particular sign does not repeat itself identically into the next moment, it is true that a sign thought this way is not purely present to itself.
However, let us make our questioning of the transitive dynamic of signification more specific. We must ask, in the play of moments, what is the status or justification of the `this' and the `that' supposedly giving sense to the spacing between this and that sign? In Caputo's work, for instance, how does the singular function in the instant of its being-with-an-other? Even after the transcendingly enduring self-presence of an event has been placed in doubt, we might locate a different and more radical sort of self-presencing of meaning, a self-presencing which thinks itself only as the very instant of the quasi-transcendental. The issue amounts to what it is that is left of the structurality of the sign BEFORE (not temporally but meaningfully) it is affected, disrupted and effaced by another meaning. Even if we do not know HOW an event of meaning functions except by our repeating and therefore transforming that meaning, there is something we can say `in general' which holds from event to event as the very condition of eventness. This would be the quasi-transcendental (a term popularized by Gasche in `Tain of the Mirror') , functioning in Derrida as differance, which effects as a self-reflexive trope the necessary possibility of impossibility of an event, the nature of eventness as simultaneously formal and contingent.
In this light, let us examine more closely Caputo's delineation of the quasi-transcendental infrastructure or architecture of the eventness of meaning. The flux, play or dissemination which he attributes to Derrida is articulated as a fold between signifiers. Marks or traces make:
...nominal unities called `words' or concepts or meaning...not merely and not primarily in virtue of the intrinsic "substance" of the "signifier" but in terms of the "differential" relationship-the "space"-between the signifiers(WTD157).
If it is not merely and primarily the `intrinsic substance' of a sign which effects meaning, is there not still something of the intrinsic, immanent, interiorized, implied in this discourse of referential movement? Caputo says that "the things we do with words will come UNDONE"(WTD157), implying a temporary duration to the doing before an undoing intervenes. Caputo says, "I take it from Derrida that there is a kind of unresolved dialectic, a rhythmic alternation, between tentative schemes and their disruption"(RH196), "structures which evolve, linger for a while and pass"(RH198). These structures would be "contingent arrangements of signs"(RH220), figures which must "eventually turn to ash"(DN34).
Notice here that a vocabulary is chosen consisting of structures, arrangements, schemes that linger, that EVENTUALLY turn to ash. And:
The easy rhythms and rote rotations of the circle, the gramophone effect of the program, must be regularly interrupted and disrupted by unprogrammable ("grammatological") irruptions, originary events of various scale(DN199).
Irruptions are those events which interrupt a program, a circle. But what might be implied by a notion of configuration, scheme, pattern, program as the irreducible basis of being-between-programs? It is possible to think the formal aspect or element of the quasi-transcendental condition of an event in terms of the contingent regulating or idealizing function of a scheme or configuration and still justifiably claim to be preventing the self-presencing of the sign. But in its iterative transformation from one passing formation to another, such an attempt may be considered to escape one kind of self-presencing (repeatable identity) only to succumb to a more fundamental self-presencing. This is because the infrastructural basis of eventness evinces itself as foundational, not just when a meaning is presumed to repeat itself identically `over time', but when the many is supposed to be thinkable as one `contingent' synthetic figure in differential relation to other synthetic figures. To claim that the syntactical-contextual finitude of a meaning destroys its attempted ideality is in no way to unravel the presumed structural integrity of experience if experience originates in the play between structuralisms or gestalts. This is the case EVEN WHEN, instead of lingering in its self-sameness from one repetition of experience to the next, a paradigmatic structure only exists for a contextual moment as synthetic constellation or configuration of elements, never to be recovered or asymptotically approached as itself.
Writers endorsing a general account of meaning as non-recuperable or non-coincidental from one instantiation to the next may nonetheless treat the heterogeneous contacts between instants of experience as transformations of fleeting forms, states, logics, outlines, surfaces, patterns, procedures. When thought as pattern, the structural-transcendental moment of eventness upholds a certain logic of internal relation; the elements of the configuration mutually signify each other and the structure presents itself as a fleeting identity, a gathered field or relational procedure determined by its differential and contextual relation to other such fields, procedures or patterns. The particularity of eventness is not allowed to split the presumed (temporary) identity of the internal configuration that frames the event; its framing is altered AS A WHOLE moment to moment. The radical inseparability of an event from what is other than it is thus expressed as the endless reframing of a frame, the infinite shifting from paradigm to paradigm.
For instance, let us say that the transit from event to event is like the shifting texture of a fabric blown by the breeze (without the implied phenomenality of a `natural' origin). Let us then imagine a singular instance of this self-transforming process as a momentary textural configuration of the cloth, never to repeat itself identically. We can say that this momentary texture only determines its sense, and in fact only has its existence in its differential relation to a prior and subsequent configuration of the fabric. But what is it we are experiencing as this or that instant? Is a singularity-in-relation experienced all at once as a network of folds and lines, a pattern or procedure? We want to suggest that Caputo's temporary patterns, configurations, arrangements, schemes may assume themselves this way as a simultaneous plurality in differential relation to other internally gathered pluralities, procedures, programs. It is this presumed schematic internality of eventness, the power of abstractive multiplicity given to the sign for the fleeting moment of its actuality, which causes experience to be treated as resistant to its dislocation, as a lingering or resistant form, pattern, configuration, infrastructure. A hermeneutic of interpretation, radical or not, depends on the idea of such an infrastructure.
If the comments from Caputo that we have quoted thus far hint at a notion of Being-with as a contingent play of internal schematisms, an examination of Lyotard's writing reveals a detailed depiction of such dynamics. Since Lyotard has been mentioned by at least one supporter of Derrida's (Bennington) as having a close proximity to deconstructive thought, let us examine a sample of his writing. In `The Inhuman' , Lyotard makes use of a style of explication not generally seen in his other writings. Here he translates his concepts into terminology compatible with recent strands of psychological research. He explains that thinking is a constructed product of the Erde;the mind is a self-organizing system.
"Any material system is technological if it filters information useful to its survival, if it memorizes and processes that information and makes inferences based on the regulating effect of behavior, that is, if it intervenes on and impacts its environment so as to assure its perpetuation at least."
He says the human being
"has a regulating system (codes and rules of processing) that's more differentiated and a storage capacity for its memory that's greater than those of other living things. Most of all: it's equipped with a symbolic system that's both arbitrary (in semantics and syntax), letting it be less dependent on an immediate environment, and also `recursive'(Hofstadter), allowing it to take into account (above and beyond raw data) the way it has of processing such data. That is, itself"(TI12).
Motifs such as the force of desire and phrase universe, seen in previous Lyotardian works, re-emerge here within the context of a more stark, and perhaps in some ways, more revealing, language. The contingent functioning of regimes of phrases and genres of discourse can be seen as deriving from the symbolic recursiveness of a human information processing system, as Lyotard describes it here, wherein pre-established criteria do not determine in advance what's appropriate to choose. Human thought doesn't "work with units of information (bits), but with intuitive, hypothetical configurations. It accepts imprecise, ambiguous data that don't seem to be selected according to pre-established codes of readability"(TI15).
Lyotard touches on terrain here pertaining to the researches of second order cybernetics, autopeiotic self-organizing systems theory and radical constructivism (See Maturana), recent approaches within the larger field of cognitive science. Gergen characterizes their central themes thusly:
Knowledge is not passively received either through the senses or by way of communication, but is actively built up by the cognizing subject. In effect, the individual never makes direct contact with the world as it is; there is nothing to be said about a world that is unconstructed by the mind(RR68).
At the same time we can acknowledge Lyotard's post-structuralist recognition of the fact that meaning is a function of continually self-transforming constructive activity, we may also note that the notion of a self-organizing system he borrows from cybernetics depends on the rubric of an agential internal schematism (algorithmic pattern) as its irreducible basis.
Notwithstanding Bennington's (ID117) embrace of Lyotard's work as having much in common with Derrida's, we do not mean to suggest that the quasi-transcendental architecture of the Derridean trace is necessarily closely comparable to that which may organize Lyotard's (or Caputo's) thinking. Derrida(PA), Deleuze (AO243) and Nancy(DI) have each, in different ways, pointed to foundationalist tendencies in Lyotard's work, which arguments we support, as far as they go. Nancy, for instance, has written against Lyotard:
"Being" is here understood not as a substance nor as a substrate, even less as a result or a product, neither as a state, nor as a property... Rather it is understood as an act, and hence equivalent to a "doing"...This being is as incommensurable with any given as with any operation which presupposes a given put to work (and an operative agent)(DI268).
The gist of this objection (among others) of Nancy's would seem to be that Lyotard allows the presencing of an event to be thought as something potentially applied or derived from another element, rather than as a being-with, an `ex-nihilo', that is always strictly its own end and measure, an underivable and unassimilable repetition of co-existent singularities. However, even if we grant that the structurality of the structure of eventness is of this non-agential order of the `ex-nihilo', we will still not have not fully addressed the central issue we began with, namely, the question of the justification of the singular event as minimally patterned or configured. It would be possible to satisfy Nancy's conditions concerning the exorbitancy of an event of meaning while still allowing events to function as irreducible schemes. It would be a matter of thinking the being-with of meaning constituted by the relation of one singular to the next as the relation between configurational structures, each one being non-representable and non-identically reproducible except via its own effacing transformation. In this way, the internally patterned structurality of a singular element, while implied, could never be analyzed, delineated, or decomposed. Nor could it function as the substrate of an applied or derived product.
The following passage from Nancy suggests how his own deconstructive work may begin from such a notion of a non-reproducible schematic play.
"From faces to voices, gestures, attitudes, dress, and conduct, whatever the "typical" traits are, everyone distinguishes himself by a sort of sudden and headlong precipitation where the strangeness of a singularity is concentrated...As for singular differences, they are not only "individual", but infraindividual. It is never the case that I have met Pierre or Marie per se, but I have met him or her in such and such a "form", in such and such a "state", in such and such a "mood", and so on(p.8)...""..what is an affect, if not each time a sketch? A comportment, if not each time a pattern? A voice, if not each time a faint outline? What is a singularity, if not each time its "own" clearing, its "own" imminence, the imminence of a "propriety" or propriety itself as imminence, always touched upon, always lightly touched:revealing itself beside, always beside.(BSP7)."
For Nancy, the being-with of meaning would seem to originate with the co-existence of singular `forms', `states', `patterns',`sketches', `outlines'. Now, even though, as we have said, Nancy clearly does not want such entities to be thought as anything other than utterly contextual and non-derivable elements-in-relation, we are left puzzled concerning what it is that is supposed to be imminent as the moment of the singular itself, even in its inseparable co-existence with other singulars. Does Nancy think the irreducible double scene of eventness as the differential spacing between momentary paradigmatic fields or programs, as we have represented the minimal condition of these structures? The least we can say is that we find in Nancy's writing a lack of attention given to the sort of inquiry which would allow us to answer this question in the negative. At most, we can suspect that he has failed to unravel a certain self-presencing remnant lurking within the body of the singular as pattern.
What can we say of Derrida's corpus? We are finally ready to turn to his work and address to him these questions we have opened up in Caputo, Lyotard and Nancy. When we examine Derrida's writing we find that the repetition of differance modalizes itself as regions of inscription. Derrida speaks of differentiated configurations, bodies of work, ensembles, masses, tissues, complexes, modes, codes, networks, motifs, registers, voices, trajectories, discursive zones, contextual constraints, thematics. And what is the irreducible basis of these programs and systems? Derrida tells us such groupings do not have an identity which survives as itself moment to moment, a persisting conceptual center that would control, define or regulate its particular instantiations. On the contrary, the experiencing of each heterogeneous particular re-invents the sense of a group. A thematics or style
is at every moment in the process of undoing itself, expropriating itself, falling to pieces without ever collecting itself together in a signature... its consistency would be the repetition of not-collecting itself, its being the same differently or otherwise...Perhaps you will say that there is a way of not collecting oneself that is consistently recognizable, what used to be called a `style'(PT354).
A collectivity is always itself differently, not only from one individual to the next but from one event to the next; as Derrida says, there would be no common measure, no simple resemblance, sharing, counting of instances. We can trace the origin of this instability to the structural-genetic basis of an event itself as a spacing, tracing, referral, differance between elements of meaning. Derrida writes, "...an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces"(P29). He adds:
The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself(P26)
If the force or formidability of an event of meaning is a function of an irreducible tension between elements, what structural figure is contributed by a `simple element' in its inseparable co-existence with another element? If a social formation or a textual work is a heterogeneous, always shifting field of singularities, one might get the impression from reading Derrida a certain way that for him the figure of the element `itself', when examined in its inseparable relation to other elements (whether encountered as literary, political, philosophical modality), originates as a certain synthetic architecture. For instance, in `Between Brackets I' and `Ja, or the faux-bond II', Derrida says the closure of a program or code must be deformed and displaced. One transforms "the code, to upset the translation in order to flush slumbering investments out of their cover(19PT)." One alters "the scene, the frame, and the relations of force(PT16)". In resisting a program, "the resistance creates a symptom and is set to work on the body, transforming, deforming it and the corpus from head to toe--down to its very name"(PT17). In "Passages-from Traumatism to Promise", Derrida writes "...all of history being a conflictual field of forces in which it is a matter of making unreadable, excluding, of positing by excluding, of imposing a dominant force by excluding...(PT389)". And elsewhere he writes "For it is necessary that we learn to detect, in order then to resist, new forms of cultural takeover"(OH54). In these comments, Derrida appears to be locating discrete (if non-identically repeatable) moments of structurality in a world alongside their disruption. One resists `a given program, a system of expectations'. "The historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and the finite structure, between history and historicity...(WD60)."
Based on these and many other comments scattered throughout his work, we are prompted to wonder if perhaps Derrida thinks of the interval between `simple elements' at the core of the referential dynamics of deconstruction as the transformation of elemental PATTERN. It would not be as if Derrida, anymore than does Nancy, means this patterning as a repeatable, definable, analysable substrate. But with Derrida, as with Nancy, we find ourselves searching for an analysis of the `structurality of structure' that might unambiguously allow us to conclude that he recognizes a more intricate origin of the trace than that which points to an irreducibly configurational dynamic. That we have not as yet found such clarity, due to either an inadequacy in the texts or in our reading of them, is less important to our present concerns than the crucial import of the distinction we are making between a patterned and a less-than-patterned double origin of meaning.
Unravelling the Momentary Structure of Configuration
At this point we need to make clearer the nature of this more intricate deconstructive origin we have in mind. What alternative would there be to (or within) formulations of the movement of experience as the relational transit between patterned forces? Must not an event have a minimally configurational way or mode of being-in-relation in order to make any sense at all, given that it has been prevented from prevailing as a recoverable essence moment to moment? How do we think of this imprinting or marking of the event if not via an at least minimal contextual thematicity or procedurality? Our investigation of deconstruction at its limit offers the following: the structural-genesis of eventness can be understood as both utterly particular and indeterminate, as just that imbecilic gesture which, together with the breath of the empirical, performs the tension or transit which is the experience, the intrinsic mobility of eventness. If what we think of as `this matter' is simultaneously elsewhere in the instant of our embrace of it, then certainly we must recognize the existence of `this matter' as the self-effacing interval between elements rather than as simply a present entity. But we must go further that this, and say that this between-elements must not be assumed as the dislocating spacing of a schema, procedure, arrangement, pattern. An element thought via such pluralistic tropes would not be an element at all but already a multiplicity of events. It would need to be understood that pattern-form could constitute no simple element of meaning, anywhere. The configurational structure of something like a woven fabric of text would be the experience of the repeated transition of an event existing, each time, only as the play of a singular hinge, the articulation of a mark or trace in its simultaneous presencing and absencing. This mark or trace would have its entire effect exhausted in its being just barely other than itself, as just the most insignificant whiff, feel, tinge of novelty. Not yet an interval between procedures or schemes, but instead the referential play between minuscule and non-plural aspects (not of any prior whole), variations, accents in continual self-alteration and transit. A play between singulars could be a relation between no such ELEMENTAL thing as a pattern, scheme, synthesis. A supposed patterned or configured element-in-tension would instead be the ongoing effect of a multiple repetition, the repeated knot or tie of a less-than-schematic between, the interval between a ` this' and an other `this'. The `this' and the `this' constituting an interval of meaning would not form a relation between two or. Not meaning as the dislocating co-existence of two or more abstractive `these' enclosed by the circle of `this pattern' and `that body', but the transit from the barest hint of simple sense to the barest hint of new sense.
In consisting as the structurality of internal procedural plurality, meaning as the spacing accomplished by the reframing of contextual frame would unknowingly succumb to a destabilization before it could even think a single instance of its decentering gesture. An internally gathered procedure could not justify itself as such a system or body, and so the supposed determinativeness of the event as an internal structure-in-relation-with-an-other reveals itself as phantasm repressing a more intimate, unformidable series of effects. What we are trying to convey here may be a world unavailable to much current deconstructive writing. It is not simply a matter of pointing to `smaller particles' than that of disseminative patterns, but of revealing an entirely different notion of the structurality of an element and thus a different notion of meaning as spacing or tracing between elements. The bleeding of the sense of the world from one instant to the next is of a vibratory immediacy, dynamism and relational inconsequentiality that may be obscured by the clumsy, constraining tropes of deconstructive forces and their dissemination.
But perhaps we are misreading Derrida in suspecting him of attributing too much of a structural thickness to the elemental play of meaning. Derrida has said that the Being of eventness is simultaneously singular-plural not just by virtue of the fact that each singular event is inseparably determined by its differential relation to other events. The play of sense is to be found not only between elements but within each singular as the equivocity of a presenting and an absencing. Differance is not simply the tension between-one-another. A singular event is paradoxical, double within-itself even before its existence as the passion, tension and responsivity of being-with another event. Derrida writes
The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53).
This paragraph lends itself to at least two distinct readings. On the one hand, the differential split between elements may be read as a play between non-reproducible registers or bodies. On the other hand, perhaps Derrida does not mean differance to perform as the in-between of heterogeneous configurations, and instead begins from a different and more primordial hinge. Perhaps he means the differential relation between an element and itself to be of the order of an extraordinarily simple gesture of novelty. Certainly, without the limitation on significance posed by a radically intimate and insubstantial self-duplicity within an event of meaning, too much authority may be claimed for the contingent force of what lurks in the `between', in the space of apparent sense opened by relation of one element to another.
Violence and Radicalized Deconstruction
Herein lies the ethico-political import of the distinction we are making between a reading of the Derridean trace of meaning as the transformation of the moment of configuration, and the trace as less-than-schematic hinge. Event as irreducible pattern is a force of violence in its belief in the fatness of the singular. In the case of Caputo and Lyotard, experience is assumed to hold onto an authoritarian force when its designation as structured form is delineated with and against its transformation-disruption. For instance, Caputo's radical hermeneutic treatment of meaning as a play between contingent programs may be intrinsically single-mindedly violent in this sense not because it defends the event against its dissolution, but to the extent that there is the faith in the first place in such a thing as the intention-mindfulness of the moment of a program. Compared with the thinking of an intricate implicative iteration, this architecture of positing-and-negation is always, by its own definition, wrenching and forceful. It forces the stamp of temporary thickness over a subliminal play, and then, too late, notices and endorses a displacement that it reifies as disruption-displacement-communication. It is too busy being caught up in this bumper car ride of the parade of moments to notice that a quieter, more mobile and intimate tension has been proceeding (repeating) all along, buried within-on the margins of the lurching play of constructs and their alteration.
The deconstructive trace, pushed to its more radical implications, can teach us to be suspicious of any account of self-effacing meaning which finds it necessary to claim spacing as a traumatic distance between elements. Such a radicalized thinking of differance should place in question a comment of Derrida's like the following: "When it is alive in some way, when it is not sclerotically enclosed in its mechanics, the philosophical discourse goes from jolt to jolt, from traumatism to traumatism"(PT381). We wonder again if it is the assumption of an irreducible, minimal mechanics of synthetic form-in-transformation that makes Derrida assume that the movement of experience is necessarily a `traumatism'. We are even more troubled by Nancy's characterization of the being-with of experience as `surprise', the `shock of meaning', `discord', a `jolt', the "irreducible strangeness of each one of these touches to the other (BSP6)", `odd', `curious', `disconcerting', `bizzare', the com-passion of Being-with as "the disturbance of violent relatedness"(BSPxiii). As a most insignificant differance, the pivot of sense does not have the substantive (configurative) power to shock or jolt; if there is no form to be transformed, there is no jolt; each of these terms is reciprocally implied by the other. When the `force' of an element is seen as utterly imbecilic, as impossibly simple in its insignificance, the cut of its appearance-disappearance is less than a trauma. An event's pole of presence doesn't know or do anything in and of itself; its only claim to existence in any `form', as any effect, is that it is the barely discernible simultaneous other or partner of an utterly insubstantial moment of absence, and vice-versa. Caputo's schematized other who surprises and disturbs me is presumed to come at me from a substantial distance. But the intimate other who intervenes at the very origin of thinking doesn't come AT me; the other is impossibly close to me, it comes from or WITHIN me.
It is true that we cannot go back and gather or confirm, act on, express, declare, our preference without our attempted return to `what we want' simultaneously but subtly forgetting and displacing its motive. However, if the transitioning impetus of the relation with the other is the imbecilic gesture we have represented it as, then this tension of being-with is profoundly gentle in a sense. Because the `what' that is displaced amounts to very little, less than the fatness of pattern, the gesture of `disturbing' otherness co-determining its essence is hardly a disturbance at all, but instead has the character of a radical implicate continuity. This implicate integrity is not of the order of a derivation or application depending on an originary substrate or construct. There are only derivations of derivations, endlessly. I can only speak of another person or concept because my experience is already oriented ahead of itself, but now `person' and `concept' lose their meaning as forms or bodies. The social world has already begun (and ended) with the iteration of a differance preceding the machinations of procedures, norms and bodies. This is a more fundamental origin than that of interpersonal relation, not because it resists the otherness of community, but because it is already structured as such, although in a way which requires a more insubstantial, unformidable, intimate notion of the social. We cannot agree with Gergen when he says, in a reading of the later Wittgenstein:
Languages are essentially shared activities. Indeed, until the sounds or markings come to be shared within a community, it is inappropriate to speak of language at all. In effect, we may cease inquiry into the psychological basis of language (which account would inevitably form but a subtext or miniature language) and focus on the performative use of language in human affairs(RR270).
In apparent disagreement with such a view, Derrida writes:
...there is no self-relation, no relation to oneself, no identification with oneself, without culture, but a culture of oneself as a culture of the other, a culture of the double genitive and of the difference to oneself"(OH,10).
And
One is always calculating with what one perceives of the cultural field. But even if this calculation negotiates in a very cunning fashion, it always consents to serve a more unruly, disarmed, naive desire, or in any case another culture that no longer calculates, and certainly not according to the norms of "present" culture or politics. One is coming to terms with someone, with someone other, dead or alive, with some others who have no identity in this cultural scene(PT353).
We support these comments of Derrida. And in the spirit of a deconstruction pushed to the limit, we want to emphasize the scene of this play of self and other as less than a jolting, disturbing leap from configuration to configuration. Events could not be said to do as much as disturb or resist their surrounding context; they would BE their surroundings in an intensely intricate, implicit and anticipative way. As Gendlin says,
In sensing itself the body functions as our sense of each situation. It is not a perceived object before you or even behind you. The body-sense IS the situation, inherently an interaction, not a mix of two things (PB347, See also TBP).
Language, as all experience, is sensate in the most unformidable way that there could be sense, not to be distinguished from or located as one modality among others within some categorical spectrum which might include cognition, feeling, perceiving, sensation, acting. These supposed `psychological agencies' have no basis as internal structures presumedly processing or interacting with an external milieu. All such modes are already implied by, and in fact are to be seen as only unstable, less than definable effects of, a movement which is less than the meeting of a formed inside and a formidable outside. Meaning as sense is already spoken for prior to reactivity. What is `within me' is `other than me' not because it is exposed to the response of another living interlocutor or perceived entity, but simply because it is exposed to itself as a most evanescent coloration of pre-schematic novelty. My `private' conversation with myself is already at the same time public prior to any notion of interchange with other human beings or semantic-syntactic schemes. Whether I contemplate `myself' or another, the variations of sense are immediately my culture, subverting the self-sameness of my identity. They don't come at me, they tumble out of me, as an integrally unfolding re-invention of me. They (and myself) only ex-ist in the transcendent-empirico instant of differance as delicate accent on accent, patternless variation of variation, implication of implication, anticipation of anticipation. I become myself anew in and through sense, and sense is born anew as response, interlocutor, to its own inquiry, being itself in being always just barely ahead of itself. In this fashion, the structure of my desire is that of sense's return to itself differently-but-integrally, as a carrying-forward which re-invents its direction every moment without tearing the delicate fabric of its anticipative continuity. To find oneself in desire is to find oneself (and at the same time lose oneself) sensing, without this finding and losing bearing the heaviness indicated by terms like surprise and mourning.
And what about animals, plants and rocks? Do these `entities' relate to a world in the same way that we have characterized as the experience of an individual, or are such living and non-living things in some sense lacking (poor or absent in world, as Heidegger has said)? They could not be said to be excluded in any way from the process of intricate movement we have been describing, not because they would be presumed to function this way on their own account, from within their own resources as we imagine them, but only because they could have no existence in the first place independent of their function as concepts generated in our thought. And to say that they are concepts is to say that the sense of their meaning instantiates-differentiates itself moment to moment for us as always a less than schematic hinge or transit. And who or what is this `I', this `self' that experiences such changing senses of terms like animal and rock? As this ever-changing production of a self-transforming experiencing, could the very idea of an `animal' or `rock' then be said to be the invention of a human subject? No, such a thing as a human subject must itself be considered, along with terms like animal and rock, as only a constantly transforming, or spacing-temporalizing, invention of an underlying dynamic. That which generates itself as the intricate process of experiencing is not yet identifiably human, not yet living thing, not yet recognizable as any particular form, gathering, self, subject or `I', and never can become one (as Derrida apparently realizes). This divided-dividing origin, as not yet a producing form, substrate or gathered essence, is `itself', `IS' only as contingent history, as the differentiating repetition of a presencing-absencing hinge of sense.
We distinguish the effect of sense as experiential intricacy from Merleau-Ponty's fleshly boundary, as well as other phenomemological accounts. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is the chiasmic mediation between phenomenally real elements of self and world, the irreducible communication between an inside and an outside. It is far from our intent to think the sensate articulation of a trace as the subjective-objective encounter or assimilation of a phenomenal entity with its own supposed semiological contribution. The being of traces with each other is not a mediation or encounter of phenomenal bodies or signs, nor is it the tension or resistance between post-phenomenological singulars, a Being-with as Being-surprised. As imbecilic hinged sense, it is more accurate to say that an element of experience implicitly GENERATES another element which effaces it than that it is SURPRISED or DISTURBED by this effacement.
Caputo might fear that the failure to have the temporary stability of schematic form between the cracks of the flux amounts to the jettisoning of all reason (He says, "Without the signifier, the thing itself slips away altogether, right down the drain"(RH191). However, the deconstructed signifier doesn't disappear; instead it loses its assumed internally structured unity as temporary `master name', subject, scheme. Far from an anarchy, the deconstructive gesture conceived this way consists in a play more (and differently) intricate than an alternation of contingent reason and its disruption, of briefly lingering abstractive master names and their dissipation. Rather than this being an `anything goes' accounting of experience, it is one of an exquisitely intricate connectivity-disconnectivity of experience, history as a textualizing so intimately and insignificantly woven as to render notions of location and dislocation found in a discourse of arrangements of signs and their dislodgment to be at the same time too substantive and too violent.
No theological moment of emancipation on the order of a gestalt shift could be localized within a community or individual when thinking never has the chance to form a gestalt, even for an instant. The to-come could not `shatter our horizon of expectation', `regimes of presence', `law of the present', as Caputo says. Instead of a horizon of expectation, there would be an excessiveness within expectation keeping it mobile with respect to itself, carrying it forward. its supposed horizonline would really be a strange spiral dislodging me ever so slightly from myself and my community in my moment of intention. This is the case whether experience seems to meet my expectations or not.
To understand most fundamentally the basis of social dynamics is thus to be brought back again and again differently, but intricately, to the double gesture of the instancing of meaning. The ethical import of a deconstructive thinking would not be in the encouragement of a hope of emancipation from repressive schemes. Its import would be in demonstrating the minimal tension inherent in desire as profoundly gentle in relation to the harshness which issues from the rhetoric of schematizing, forceful signs in dispersal. This minimal tension stemming from the bifurcated origin of experience as radically mobile and intimate would determine that to intervene within a site of social endeavor is to further differently what is already an ongoing, if plodding, self-transformative movement working within even the most apparently rigid systems of power, at all levels. Such a deconstructive intervention would not be a matter of forcing a culture from actual stagnation but rather of joining-rejoining with them, participating-otherwise with `their' already internally heterogeneous movement, in its extension-transformation, individual to individual, moment to moment, sense to sense.
One would thus want to treat cautiously Derrida's depiction of history as a `conflictual field of forces', as well as the implication of his comment below:
...sometimes, to change something within the corporation, the intervention of some power outside frees the situation, is necessary. Sometimes-I know that in France-the current of philosophers is simply reproducing itself constantly, constantly, and if there is no intervention from the state, from the state, or from some who are outside, it will reproduce itself for centuries without accepting anything new. And I'm sure that if you don't impose on the philosopher that they appoint someone totally foreign to their own school of thought, nothing will change for centuries(OHP36).
Given Derrida's articulation of differance as destabilizing the very concept of repeatable identity, we don't believe he means to suggest that there could be a `pure' repetition of a given program in the case of the status of institutionalized French philosophy, or in the analysis of any other history. In the first place, he recognizes that a dominant cultural formation would consist not as a single essence but as only a relatively gathered, constantly shifting field of heterogeneous forces. There would never be perfect but only relative agreement among the participants in any normative apparatus concerning what is being excluded or opposed by that apparatus. Furthermore, if a hegemonic cultural formation functions (differently for each participant) by "imposing a dominant force by excluding(PT389)", it is also the case that "This rejection leaves marks (more or less deferred) which it would be hasty, I believe, to think of as simply negative or unproductive"(PT45). This comment suggests that Derrida acknowledges transformative movement to be implicit at the heart of the most ardent thinking of a status quo. Considered in this way, his mention of history as a `conflict of forces' may refer back to the fundamental dynamics of differance as a force of dislocation operating to prevent any meaning from ever congealing into a self-preserving totality one minute to the next.
Nevertheless, it is important to question the necessity for a language requiring the `forceful' or resistant' intervening in supposedly entrenched regions of power when a radical, subliminal and subversive weave of continuity-novelty already functions from within those communities to keep experience mobile. Even within the most supposedly foundational, fundamentalist community of belief or institution of power, each singular `individual', in reaffirming the so-called norms and programmatics of that community, is doing this differently each moment of experience, finding their own intention subtly exceeding itself from within in the `instant' of its affirmation. Given this intricately, constantly mobile relationship of individuals to a particular cultural institution, and more importantly, to themselves moment to moment, one could not in fact locate any aspect of institutional practice, regardless of how rigidly rule governed it intends its programmatics to be, which would not avail itself to continual, if subtle, re-formulation (or, more precisely, re-sensing) for each individual each instant, as a less-than-conflictual self-exceeding.
A foundational choice, rule, mechanics, is always, for every individual and at every moment, reaffirmed differently, as the transit or carrying forward of something that in each instant is less than a mechanics. Perhaps, then, Derrida would agree that programmatics, mechanics, institutional repetitions and norms never actually mean anything except as terms of language favored by individuals who nevertheless, in their use of these terms, immediately and unknowingly multiply the terms' senses (in a referential movement of less-than-patterned-elements). In this light, we would want to qualify Derrida's observation that in attempting to oppose oneself dialectically to a point of view, this "reversal reproduces and confirms through inversion what it has struggled against"(PT84). From a too general vantage it can appear that one remains wedded to that system of thought which one wishes to overcome, dialectically or otherwise, `once and for all'. But, examined more closely, it becomes clear that one's opposition to a given way of thinking expresses a subtle transformative shift in one's relation to that which one remains attached-through-protest. One's faith in the reign of the concept would not freeze one's mutability but render it as a plodding and polarizing movement. It is only in this relative sense that a foundational thinking of any sort could be considered repressive or paralyzed.
If an event of meaning is transit without schema, if desire is in-motion without stance, then what is the end of an ethics? If our desire does not project itself over time as a self-identical content, and does not even have the integrity for a singular moment of a transitivity between norms, forms, configurations, then can we still locate regions of greater or lesser cultural violence or injustice in the world? Because differance is not just a within-trace play but also a between-trace relationality, the utter singularity of each moment simultaneously speaks to the variable politico-ethical fortunes of our moment to moment experience. On top of the always ambivalent ethical play marking every event as doubled within itself, there would be an ability to make local, contingent, contextual ethical distinctions between more or less plodding or interruptive relational scenarios within political, philosophical, literary culture. There would be more or less just individuals (and only indirectly, communities) to the extent that our experiences of these textualities, as rendered and judged re-inventively moment to moment, individual to individual, are more or less `in need of' deconstruction, but without there being a way to produce a lineage or hierarchy of ethical decadence, and without there being a way to ever locate a schematic instant of transitive Being. It would not be as if deconstructive thinking could claim to be better than the text it puts into question in any formal way; rather, it intervenes to accelerate the efficacy and intimacy of movement in a text already deconstructing itself naively, lugubriously, haltingly.
What a deconstructive approach can be seen to question, then, would not be a realized thinking of totality but the claim for it. One `resists', that is to say, transforms the consequences of the illusory faith in conceptual dogmatisms, programmatics, norms and configurations. And what are those consequences? Even if belief in pure conceptual repetition, and even the brief stasis of scheme, is a `phantasm', those who subscribe to such an ideal suspect and resist, often violently, any assertion that questions its assumed hegemony. The enormous variety of thinking depending on myriad sorts and degrees of totalitarianism of the concept, on programmatic mechanisms, on the self-presence of the intending subject, is in each case an internally decentering thinking which may be characterized by a relative impoverishment of experiential momentum, but never of an actual absence of movement.
Return to index
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Cultural Chronology:
Homer:700 b.c.
Thales:625 b.c.-545 b.c.(80)
Anaximander:610 b.c.-540 b.c.(70)
Pythagoras:580 b.c.-500 b.c. (80)
Heraclitus:540 b.c.-480 b.c. (60)
Sophocles:495-406 b.c.(89)
Protagoras:485 b.c.-415 b.c.(70)
Gorgias:485 b.c.-380 b.c.(
Socrates:470 b.c.-399 b.c. (71)
Aristophanes:445-385 b.c.
Plato:428 b.c.-348 b.c. (80)
Aristotle:summer,384 b.c.-322 b.c. (62)
Euclid:323-285 b.c. (38)
Archimedes:287-212 b.c. (75)
Philo:-25 b.c.to 50 a.d.
Diophantus:b. between 200 and 214, d. between 284 and 298 AD, lived in Alexandria, Egypt.
St.Augustine:354-430(76)
Khwarizmi:780-850 (70)(Invented algebra, along with Diophantus. �Algorithm� is derived from a latinization of Al Khwarizmi, Algoritmi .
Al Farabi:870-950 (70)
Avicenna:980-1037 (57)
Omar Khayyam:1050-1123 (73)
Ibn Rushd(Averroes):1126-1198 (72)
Maimonides:march 30,1135-dec.13,1204 (69)
Aquinas:1225-1274 (49)
Dante:may 15,1265-sept.13,1321 (56)
Giotto:1276-1337
Chaucer:1342-oct.25,1400 (58)
Master of Flemalle(Robert Campin):1378-1444
Jan Van Eck:1390-1441
Gutenberg:1400-1468
Botticelli:1445-may 17,1510 (65).................................1450-1500
DaVinci:april 15,l452-may 24,1519 (67)
Copernicus:feb.19,1473-may 24,1543 (70)............................1500-1550
Michaelangelo:march 6,1475-feb.18,1564 (89)
Raphael:april 6,1483-april 6,1520 (37)
Martin Luther:1483-1546
Vesalius:dec.,1514-june,1564 (50).................................1550-1600
Cervantes:sept. 29,1547-april 23,1616 (69) |
|
