Review: Jaques Derrida\'s, Signature Event Context

Signature

EVENT

cOnTeXt

Jacques Derrida speaks of communication as a word and a concept that communicates. With such an inquiry he questions the entire conception of language as a structure for the transmission of ‘unified’ meaning having determinate content (semantic/conceptual content), identifiable meaning (semantic operation), and describable value (linguistic exchange). Further, the word’s polysemic aspects do not allow it to remain within the reigns of a semantic, semiotic or linguistic domain the minute it has been uttered or inscribed. Communication as a concept suggests a transmission and a movement that separates it from its original intention (by an infinite number of possibilities) the moment a word is ‘communicated’. The word is lost beyond recall in its communication…therefore, is the word communication truly communicable in the manner of a unified and unambiguous meaning?

Derrida’s discussion of the ‘unified meaning’ of a signifier goes to the heart of the problem of semantics, as it is known to traditional philosophy. A unified meaning seems impossible not merely due to the signifier’s polysemic aspects but it seems that a word in communication outstrips all possibilities of expected signification.

Therefore the original

intention or connotation (the literal meaning) of a word does not form the simple basis for its extension or denotation on the contrary its metaphorical references return to ruin the original intention of the literal meaning.

Tradition believes that the problematic and ambiguous field of communication is reduced and controlled by context. This is a context that seeks control on the communication that it encompasses. And therefore any form of writing within this concept will always already be

marked by its context the minute it is inscribed. Derrida, however, feels that the concept of context itself is never absolutely determinable and that there is no rigorous, scientific concept of context. Derrida thinks that context does not help in the clarification of communication since it itself can never be exhausted by our conception of its extents and limits. Context can never be saturated by meaning; in fact it outruns meaning such that its determination can never be totally saturated.

This non-saturation of context that Derrida speaks of reveals the inadequacy of the current conception of context both linguistic and non-linguistic (to me this is an extremely radical notion, especially in the field of architecture that questions and redefines our very notions of place and home). It also calls for a review of established notions of writing that have been in place since antiquity. It seems that with this new notion of context writing can no longer be taken as merely an instrument for communication and for furthering the purpose of speech. Rather the writing exceeds the grasp of the context and in fact contributes to the non-saturation of the context.

Writing has always been viewed as a sophisticated form of communication that is a derivative of speech and an instrument for its propagation. Derrida argues against the current concept of writing that considers writing as merely a means of extending the scope of the spoken utterance, which has been understood as the innocent, primitive and natural form of communication. In citing Condillac Derrida explicates a representative viewpoint of what tradition has held with regard to writing and the homogeneous space of communication within which it operates. Such a view proposes that the origin of all ‘idea’ is in thought, which is then communicated through speech. Writing is merely an economic representation of speech to increase the scope of the phonic or gestural communication within a fundamentally continuous and self-identical field. In its homogeneity (self-identicalness) and mechanical character (as only

a means of communication) it thus possesses little capacity to alter, even slightly, the structure of communication. In reducing writing to a convenient abbreviation of speech, tradition, yet again, displays its predilection towards the concept of presence in the simplicity of the model of communication it proposes.

Such a notion of communication, Derrida suggests, presupposes an absence of both the sender and the receiver that Condillac fails to analyze. The communication exists without both the sender as well as the addressee and even after their death does it not cease to work. The communication thus communicates beyond (both in time as well as in meaning) the original intention of the sender. In Condillac, as in all of philosophy, in remaining a representation writing is only involved with make present over and over again through time the original intention of the author. Thus this absence that writing implies is only a continuous modification of presence.

In Condillac trace would necessarily be a trace of something present and thus drawing or painting only is a representing or bringing back into presence the thought In Condillac the philosophical operation of retracing is a simple reverse of the process of tracing of a present object of perception to its representation. Similarly sign, memory and imagination are all in the service of a present perception. The concept of analogy for Condillac therefore is an essential one that ensures the continuity between the reality and its sign-- the present and the absent. In a system where a sign remains a mere representation of the object perceived in the present, communication is “that which circulates a representation as an ideal content (meaning)”. Writing is, in such a view of communication, a species with a certain specificity within the genre of general communication.

In questioning the specific difference that writing embodies, Derrida finds it is absence since it is the absence of a certain kind that allows the production of the sign that is written. In other words, it seems that the written sign is always subordinate to the first perception and thought and thereafter to all other modes of communication, phonic or gestural. Derrida disputes this proposition with the question ‘what if the other modes of communication were also to contain this element of absence?’. Therefore the absence in writing, in order to allow it to remain specific within the broad genre of communication, must be of an original type.

Derrida dismisses the traditional notion of the absence as simply the negative of a presence of the receiver. Such a notion of absence, for Derrida, is yet again a presence of some sort: a distant or delayed presence. Derrida proposes that the absence that the written sign embodies is of a distinct nature where the distance, delay, deferral and divergence (différance) are more absolute. It is such a différance as writing that no longer remains a modification of presence (from other writings of Derrida we know that différance is an ‘aconcept’ that dismantles as soon as it sets up a correlation. In a way it is the interval of a spacing that it itself sets up between writing and thought.

It is this spacing that triggers the difference of writing, the

difference to this difference and the play of differences that follows). The absoluteness of the absence of the receiver arises not out of a deferred presence rather out of the absolute dispensability of the receiver as well as the sender. Writing seems to take upon an independent structure that once installed accrues meaning indefinitely and infinitely. It is such repeatability in spite of the absolute absence of the receiver that constitutes its iterability in the original sense of the word as to mean both again and other. The iteration of the written sign thus constitutes both its potential for reiteration (repeatability) as well as alteration. This iterability, Derrida shows, even after the death of both the sender as well as the receiver, is what constitutes writing. Repeatability, says Derrida, is the inherent structure of the most abstract of written signs (codes). Thus even the most secret of codes are decipherable,

transmittable and iterable for a third who no longer is significant to the existence of the code. Writing in its inexhaustible alterity is also a disruption of the authority of the code as a bearer of unified meaning as well as embodying a finite set of rules for its decipherment. The absence of the receiver could very well have been the absence of the sender in the above discussion for writing continues to operate as communication beyond the death of the sender and beyond his original intention. In other words, the writing breaks free from its originator and its context at the moment of its inscription. In the rupture from its original context, the written sign bears the possibility of being cited in any other context. This is what Derrida calls grafting. Writing therefore is, what I feel, an aconcept that is both possible as well as impossible as communication. The separation or rupture from its context creates a spacing that is the very essence of the mark, the written sign. Spacing, is an opening up of possibilities, a separation from all contexts of space and time, and an escape from the intention to pin down a sign to a unified meaning (a present reference). Spacing undermines the priority of time.

Sudipto Ghosh May 2, 2000