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'On not using Derrida' |
Below is the text of a lecture that I gave to research students on the RNUAL (Research Network University of the Arts London) programme (pronouned 'Renewal'), March 2006.
- why: by virtue of a short presentation that I did… passing allusion to my PhD research, which among other things, involved a critique of Derrida (audaciously…). But I was not then, nor am I now, a Derridean or a deconstructionist…- (my PhD also involved a substantial use of Richard Rorty)… So: ‘how’ I am here today…
- I finished my PhD over 5 years ago, and there is some distance between me and it in more than just a temporal sense. I’ve moved on, or elsewhere. Now I am very interested in the area of ‘social art practices’ – ‘post-autonomous’ art - more widely known via terms such as ‘relational aesthetics’. For me, there is a strong connection between my PhD research and my current preoccupations, if most strongly via the motif of inversion. That is to say: in my PhD research, I was looking broadly at the idea of the ‘social in the artist’ – the artist as contingent upon a multifarious array of circumstances – social and political is a shorthand way of putting them but really they reach far beyond this. And now I am looking at ‘the artist in the social’.
In some respects it feels very odd – and even painful - revisiting this territory, but the distance is also useful (has enabled me to recast the issues a little, beneficially, but also identify the problems that I couldn’t put my finger on then. Which I won’t speak of now – maybe at the end – one very useful insight. Also: it feels strange because doing a PhD then was very different then…)
[‘How would I describe myself? If I’m not a ‘deconstructionist’ what am I? Not a Levinasian? An artist (this is too easy)… a meta-theorist? (Too precocious? Something like an artist-reflecting upon the use and role of theory? A ‘reflective practitioner – but one that reflects by way of a lot of fairly heavy-duty quasi-philosophy?]
My work with – or through – Derrida began with an ethical relation to art practice.
I was captivated by the contention (which was not up for grabs) that ‘art’ should be regarded as a dis-unity – a field of radical diversity.
What do I mean by this?
It began with a frustration. Or: a desire. A desire that my practice should respond to and recognise the contingency of experience: the subject’s immersion in the diversity of the world. A protest about the ‘singularising’ structures of dominant regimes of art, especially at the level of the oeuvre (the signature style…) [Say why here, especially?]
Philosophically: a protest against ‘essentialism’… as this applies to the concept of ‘art’ as that, in turn implicates a notion of the subject’s experience.
If experience is diverse then practice should reflect this, - at the level of the oeuvre. What this refuses is a certain appearance of art as an essence – at an institutional level; for instance in the market, where ‘art’ requires the artist to produce their ‘identity’ via the distinctive mark of their signature.
So: my ‘oeuvre’ pursued the production of a radical diversity - a play of differences with no unifying qualities. Or at least it tried to. The failure of this project was often hostage to my ‘presence’ with the work… as colleagues, class-mates and others furiously projected my (perceived) identity upon the work. Or so I would argue.
I don’t want to presume that ‘theory’ is just reading and writing…
- given that I wanted to propose a particular way of seeing art’s oeuvre, (as the scene of diversity, as originating in diversity) the question that I then wanted to put to the field was: how was this accommodated or not in contemporary theory? - i.e. if I’m going to offer a new theory of the oeuvre – as much as a model in practice – I have to prove its originality. (My PhD was both in practice and in theory – like doing 2 PhDs. [expand])
I did much work on defining the scope of ‘contemporary theory’. A lot of work looking at postmodernist and poststructuralist theories, and as part of the same ‘episteme’ much writing within the various traditions of modernism.
Moreover, ‘contemporary theory’ as I defined it, seldom engaged directly with questions of ‘the oeuvre’ – Foucault being a notable exception. But as much of it – e.g. Lyotard, various forms of feminism, post-colonialism, and various forms of structuralism (e.g. Barthes) engaged with question of signification and the origin of that, and moreover, in terms of a play of ‘singularity and difference’, ‘unity’ and ‘diversity’, I had some manoeuvring (hmm) to do. In what follows – regarding Derrida – I am going to talk about the ‘origin of meaning’ – the phrase I used loosely to define the area of investigation for contemporary theory. (This is not a phrase that Derrida would use – rather he would talk about ‘signification’, and would problematise a common-sense notion of ‘origin’.) So I use theories of the ‘origin of meaning’ to understand the structure of the oeuvre as it might be construed by contemporary theory. (It’s possible to argue that ‘the oeuvre’ is a signifying unit… just a different level from the word, as the word is from the work.)
(There are quite a lot of leaps and bounds here and as I revisit them I am getting somewhat queasy with a kind of intellectual sea-sickness…)
In my trawl of contemporary – mainly post-structural - theorists for the purposes of seeing if my theory of the oeuvre was already ‘written’, the work of Derrida appeared to inscribe, most of all, something that approached my notion of ‘radical diversity’ – diversity without any unity.
If I started by talking about the ‘diversity of experience’, for Derrida there is no experience outside ‘the text’. Or, more precisely, ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (Of Grammatology p. 158) – not there is nothing outside of the text, but there is no outside of the text. For to claim that there is ‘nothing’ outside the text is of course, to posit an outside in which a thing could exist, and Derrida does not want to do this. What does it mean to say that there is ‘no outside of the text’? That ‘the text comes before experience?’ First we should note that ‘the text’ is not just material instances of writing – empirical texts – but ‘writing’ conceived as a system of inscription that takes place everywhere; the condition of language and systems of so-called ‘representation’ in general.
Stocks – presence held in reserve – deferred presence. (‘Jam tomorrow and Jam yesterday but never Jam today’.) Also DNA as a type of writing but not ‘originary’ writing for Derrida.
In writing ‘writing’ in this way, Derrida is re-writing (both writing ‘re’ and writing ‘differently’) Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist credited with ‘founding’ semiology – the science of signs, or modern linguistics. (And as aside, it is worth noting that Derrida’s relation to Saussure – as a form of debt and prompt for debate – recurs at a structural level throughout much of his work. Most of Derrida’s writing is constructed in dialogue with other well-known writers and thinkers: Plato, Hegel, Rousseau, Levi-Strauss, Heidegger – to name just a few. This, it can be argued, is a literalisation of there being no outside to the text, for Derrida.)
So: how does this debate with Saussure take place? What is Saussure’s linguistics? Not surprisingly, Derrida himself provides us with an ‘account’… in an essay – or the script of a lecture – entitled ‘Différance’. (As we will see, ‘différance’ is another name for ‘writing’ – except that to call it a ‘name’ – to name it as a name – is problematic, if a name implies a ‘thing’ before it. And for now – I am holding back on the term ‘différance’ – we’ll come to that.) (As another aside: in writing about – or ‘on’ Derrida’ – in writing ‘Derrida’ – for that is all that we can ever do, according to Derrida – I am struck, time and time again, by the insistence of a non-Derridean sensibility; a non-Derridean thinking. That is to say: the very way of thinking that Derrida is questioning – a way that is ingrained in our culture – returns as the terms of our analysis and commentary. On the other hand – as any of you who have read any (sympathetic) writing on Derrida will know – there is a deconstructive turn of phrase / a way of writing that is highly infectious: I think I have caught it here…apologies… the worst of both worlds? The turns but not the terms…?)
Derrida ‘says’, or writes, as we find it in writing in a double sense - (because, let’s not forget, writing is the structure or condition of all signifying systems – writing comes before speech and, in ‘Différance’ we are reading the text of a lecture):
‘Let us cite Saussure only at the point which interests us: “The conceptual side of value [both ‘of signification’ and ‘of what interests us’ what is of ‘value to us’?] – [The conceptual side of value] is made up solely of relations and differences with respect to the other terms of language, and the same can be said of its material side… Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. [My emphasis] Even more important, a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it.”’ (‘Différance’ in The Derrida Reader ed. P Kamuf p. 63.)
We can see, here, the basis of Derrida’s ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ as Saussure refuses an origin of language – as a system of signs - ‘before the system’. As ‘the sign’ comprises both a ‘signifier’ which Saussure identifies with the material support of language – the ‘s-i-g-n’ – and the signified – which for Saussure, is the conceptual aspect of the sign – what it signifies, or means – the sign does not originate in what it names but rather, in what both the signifier and the signified are not. We could say that (and I’m not sure that either Saussure or Derrida say this in so many words) that, for Saussure, signs presence a negation.
[somewhere – the arbitrary character of the sign?]
If Derrida left things there, we could call him a ‘structuralist’. But of course he does not.
Derrida takes issue with Saussure’s implicit understanding of the sign as (solely) structural difference; or: with the ‘idea’ of language as a ‘static’ system. For Derrida, as much as the sign is ‘different’ as a function of its place in the structure of the linguistic system, so it plays within ‘difference’ as an aspect of its temporality. It is not what it’s been and what it comes to be. Or to put this colloquially ‘meaning changes’. (But note: this is not a mandate for a work to mean anything – to say that it will mean very, very ‘different things to different people’ as for Derrida, signification is a social, not completely subjective, act.)
Using some of Derrida’s copious array of terms, writing is thus both ‘temporization’ (deferment) and ‘spacing’ (something which takes place through structural difference). He (also) calls this writing ‘différance’ which at least as written, marks its difference from Saussure’s term – reflexively.
[what I’ve omitted here: something about the way in which D finds différance already in Saussure – the terms of his elaboration / the rest of ‘Diff’… / Derrida and the social…]
In French as in English, ‘différance’ is a made-up word – a neologism (‘new-word’) – [even a ‘portmanteau’ word which brings two substantives together, one which didn’t exist before, in French – ‘différance’ as ‘deferment’.]
Différence in French means ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’ unlike English – there are not two different words but both meanings contained in the same word.
You can’t say ‘deferral’ or ‘deferment’ in French.
But given that Derrida has made from the infinitive form of the verb ‘to differ / to defer’ a noun, you now can… (but how would you know in French that this is being said? Is it just through Derrida naming it as such?). Semantically, in terms of its meaning, this noun witnesses the conjunction of spatial and temporal difference. And Derrida announces in ‘Différance’: ‘Différance as temporization, différance as spacing.’ NB difference / distinction between ‘temporization’ and ‘temporalization’. ‘Temporization’ – ‘of deferral’ and ‘temporalization’ ‘taking place in time’.
Différance only registered in writing – and remember that writing-in-general is the condition of speech.
Différance is both the scene of writing as temporization and writing as space, and itself, instantiates that – as ‘différance’ is not ‘difference’ and also defers ‘difference’ – according to ‘différance’.
In ‘Différance’, Derrida writes:
‘Such a play, différance, is thus no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general. For the same reason, différance, which is not a concept, is not simply a word, that is, what is generally represented as the calm, present, and self-referential unity of concept and phonic material.’ (p. 63).
Différance is a structuring principle – not a thing. Or to quote Geoff Bennington, writing about Derrida and ‘deconstruction’ as another word for ‘différance’, ‘Deconstruction is not what you think. If what you think is present to mind’. (The New Modernism p. 6) [J p. 49]
Now, moving back towards the issue of my engagement with Derrida…
Recalling that this was my enquiry, we need to acknowledge that, as Derrida contends, deconstruction marks:
‘…the impossibility that a sign, the unity of signifier and a signified by produced within the plenitude or a present and absolute presence. That is why there is no full speech, however much one might wish to restore it with or against psychoanalysis. Before thinking to reduce it or to restore the meaning of full speech which claims to truth, one must ask the question of meaning and of its origin in difference […]’
(Of Grammatology pp. 69-70)
When meaning ‘originates in difference’ (which is no origin), ‘meaning’, or ‘signification’, is endlessly deferred, by the empirical instances of writing-in-general. This does not mean that ‘meaning’ is impossible, or ineffable – inexpressible. For as Derrida reminds us in The Truth in Painting ‘you can always try to translate’. ‘You can always try to translate’. (Reference?)
In proposing that ‘meaning’ for Derrida is subject to an endless play of ‘différance’, it might appear there was a basis for some agreement with my version of the artist’s experience of (the origin of) meaning – in radical diversity. For after all, what does difference entail if not diversity of meaning?
Moreover, in reviewing contemporary theory for its possible convergence with my theory of the origin of meaning, I was also regarding it to see if it, in any way, preserved a role for the intentional artist. For my model of the artist was a rather complex one. As well as conceiving of the artist as a site of multifarious contingencies, I also wanted to preserve a space for the ‘self-expressive’ subject in this model – if only on pragmatic grounds: it is useful to believe that, as an artist, we have some ‘free will’ or call it what you will. And – strange as it may seem – this subject is invoked by deconstruction – at least, by Derrida in the essay ‘Signature Event Context’ (the first text of his I read, and struggled with for years).
In that essay Derrida describes a ‘typology of forms of iteration’. We have not addressed the term ‘iteration’ – though it’s a necessary supplement to the play of ‘différance’ in history. For in order to defer, (to change its meaning, slipping at each point of use), the sign needs an ‘ideality’ – a sameness. As such the sign is different and the same at once. Its ‘sameness’ means that it is ‘iterable’ – repeatable. . The sign’s ‘iterability’ appears, in the passage I’m about to quote, to be associated with the presence of intention in an utterance: (but by inversion?) In the passage that follows, it’s ‘singularity’ (the ‘difference’ of the sign) that is associated with ‘intention’. Derrida is writing about the construction of a ‘typology’ of ‘forms of interation’:
‘In this typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from this place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and the entire system of utterances. […] The first consequence of this would be the following: given this structure of iteration, the intention that animates utterance will never be completely present in itself and its content’. (‘Signature Event Context’ p. 104-5.)
The question that I then had: was, finally, how does the work of Derrida accommodate the notion of a radical diversity (minus intentionality) in ‘différance’?
My stark conclusion was that it didn’t.
Rather, while we might acknowledge that a given sign diversifies its meaning in the history of writing, diversity is still, well, in writing. And as such we could say that it isn’t a radical diversity – diversity without sameness – as, in taking place in ‘general writing’, it is unified – even by a thing which ‘is not’ (writing – deconstruction – différance). This is difficult to put… other than to say that if différance ‘is not’, every form of writing – including art’s – has at its inessential core, a process of negation. This was not what I was looking for – although of all the recent theory I’d considered, it came closest.
[the absence of Deleuze and Guattari…]
Not that this being Derrida, things are that simple. There is a sort of coda or appendix to this debate that complicates it to the point of paradox as Derrida makes highly contradictory claims regarding différance – in the same text – appropriately enough: in ‘Difference’. I will not elaborate – but rather point you to the space, which is also a temporal interval, between pages twenty four and five of ‘Signature Event Context’.
So I looked at Derrida but found I could not ‘use’ him to support my (artist’s) theory of the origin of meaning – except as a part of my critique (of recent theory). Likewise the ‘textual’ method of my written thesis, and of the visual work, referred to Derridean textual tropes, but only to embody a set of differentiated turns; one that strove for singularity without a thread of iteration. Hence in both its aspects the thesis’ cacophonous array of different – well… as many things as I could entertain.
However, it’s important to point out that, properly, ‘deconstruction’ can’t be ‘used’. Not that I am claiming any sort of clever, deconstructive gesture in my non-use of Derrida. There is nothing deconstructive in my sideways step. But:
In ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ Derrida writes: ‘deconstruction is not a method’. (‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ p. 273 DR). This may seem strange – but according to Derrida, deconstruction simply happens. Deconstruction is the processes at work in a text (and all other forms of inscription); it is not a proposition about the text. As such there is no ‘outside’ to deconstruction; it cannot be reified and hence, cannot be ‘used’ for in order to ‘use’ something we would necessarily sustain a relation of outsideness – as a subject to an object – with that thing.
Hence, in other ways, my title: ‘On not using Derrida’. (And another aside, when I mentioned to a friend that I was doing a seminar on ‘using Derrida’ as I put it rather sloppily, he replied ‘I always thought Derrida used us.’) AND AS THERE IS NO OUTSIDE OF DECONSTRUCTION, THERE IS NO POINT AT WHICH WE CAN ‘ADAPT’ DECONSTRUCTION FOR OUR OWN ENDS. OR: if you decide that the writing around deconstruction is ‘just another theory’ you have broken faith with deconstruction and it is not deconstruction that you are critiquing. You are an apostate of a non-religion.
[Is the writing around deconstruction hence paradoxical? That is to say: if what Derrida ‘identifies’ as deconstruction happens, then it happens to his text about it and hence it cannot ‘happen’ as he says it does. Except that for Derrida, this might paradoxically instantiate deconstruction.]
So, when deconstruction is subjected to critique, it is not deconstruction, properly. If I open deconstruction to an outside, it is not deconstruction I am thus opening.
But I did, or I tried to, as I countered the ‘negative infinity’ of deconstruction with the concept of a ‘positive infinity’ that better approached, as I thought, at the time, a ‘radical diversity’.
Very near the end of my thesis (especially near the end of the written bit which came before the exhibition) I came across some comments in a book on Derrida that seemed to give conceptual sanction - validation - to my ‘issues’ with deconstruction; the struggle I was having to express why Derrida would not do, and what I meant by ‘radical diversity’. The book was Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines by Marian Hobson. There she identified the endless deferral of deconstruction with a ‘negative infinity’. She wrote – or writes:
‘Negative or potential infinity is an infinity of process, in the sense that it never stops – as in the infinite set of natural numbers, given any determinate number, however large, there is always another, the set is never closed.’ (p. 44)
And indeed, a similar metaphor for deconstruction appears in one of Derrida’s early texts – Speech and Phenomena. There, he writes of (deconstruction as) ‘the impossibility of beginning at the beginning of a straight line, as it is assigned by the logic of transcendental reflection’. (p. 75.) The image of the straight line of ‘natural number’s comes to mind – from minus infinity to positive infinity.
That this notion of infinity – negative infinity – does by virtue of a simile include the terms ‘negative and positive infinity’ should not confuse things. We could say, pursuing the numerical analogy, that what’s important about both ‘+4’ and ‘-4’ is that they are, respectively, not all the other numbers in the chain of natural numbers.
Properly, ‘positive infinity’ is another thing altogether. Marian Hobson writes:
‘Positive infinity has traditionally been defined as that infinity which is always absolutely more, unrelatably other; it is self-sufficient in some sense given as a completed whole, though evidently not conceptualizable, since it is infinite.’ (p. 44)
And here, I should note that, within the Western philosophical tradition, these are not the only ‘infinities’. Not that there are infinite infinities, but that the question of how one ‘thinks’ infinity is not readily settled. Although, as Hobson indicates, the possibility of ‘thinking’ infinity may be impossible, especially in its more transcendental forms.
Positive infinity, as the excerpt from Hobson suggests, is just such a form. And while it appears in the writings of Derrida, it is key to the work of Levinas. (Derrida was taught by Levinas and ‘deconstruction’ could be seen to take issue with his intellectual patrimony, and in the phase ‘take issue’ I intend an ambiguity.
Placing Derrida’s preferred – or more habitual – ‘negative infinity’ in the context of the positive infinity in Levinas, Hobson writes:
‘By making of the infinitely other the positive infinite, Levinas has excised from it its negativity, its work (the reference is to Hegel’s ‘work of the negative’); he has refused the infinite as indefinite, that which is merely not finite.’
So the ‘unity’ of Derrida’s ‘negation’ – the perpetual dependence of deconstruction on the ‘is not’ is – I thought – usefully avoided in this formulation of infinity. At the time, it seemed to me that positive infinity might better ‘fit’ with my concept of a ‘radical diversity’ (for origin), at least in the sense that it refused a medium – the medium of différance. And in the way that I understood it then, I think it did. My PhD research concluded with a mere indication of the notion of positive infinity as a positive critique of Derrida. That is not a pun – rather it is to identify a wish I had to put something in the place of Derrida: to offer an alternative beyond my gesture of rejection.
But when I really started reading Levinas, after I had finished my PhD, I realised that his ‘positive infinity’ diverged from my understanding of the term via Hobson, who also, again, with hindsight and ironically - supplies the terms of Levinas’ lack with reference to my notion of a ‘radical diversity’. I quote from her:
‘For ethical reasons, for the best of reasons, Levinas [in thinking a person] has impatiently jumped over the interminable navigation through location and determinateness imposed by language and by history.’ (p. 44)
In short: if Levinas’ version of Derrida avoids the ‘reduction’ to the negative, it also avoids the specificity of differences (and hence diversity).
Beyond reflecting on the differences between Derrida and Levinas regarding, well to try to summarise, the question of ‘origin’, I’d like to propose that this session has also been about the place of ‘theory’ as a form of philosophy / or systematic thought[?] in an artist’s practice. A way of understanding the relationship between the two.
Not only did my work / PhD
- use practice to critique a specific range of theory - but it also
- used practice to question the adequacy of theory per se…
At the same time, the written part – as it was intended to do so – informed the visual work. Indeed, while I would contend that it was an artist’s PhD, that it worked towards the (making of the artwork), I was also concerned that both parts functioned with a degree of independence – such that they could stand alone.
As I have not come to talk about the ins and outs of ‘practice-based research’ – a term I’m not sure I like* – I will not say any more, but leave you with a question mark hanging over that, as doubtless much else.
By way of a ‘last’ (deferred) word, I quote from Derrida:
‘I do not profess to bring to these questions anything more than a beginning of an answer, perhaps only the beginning of an elaboration, limited to the preliminary organization of a question.’ (Of Grammatology p. 97)
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Last modified: 17.06.06 by MaryAnne
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