Page 124 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 115

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

language as ‘voice’, that is, as the expression of intentional human
meaning, and of writing as technology and technique. ‘The
system of writing...is not exterior to the system of language’,
he argued. Quite the contrary, the system of language associated
with western phonetic-alphabetic writing is precisely what has
made possible the production of ‘logocentric metaphysics’
(Derrida, 1976, p. 43). Just as for Saussure langue was more perm-
anent and durable than parole, so for Derrida writing outlives and
outlasts its supposed authors. But Derrida takes the argument a
stage further: where Saussure had privileged sign over referent,
Derrida privileges signifier over signified; so much so, in fact, that
writing consists, he says, not of signs, but of signifiers alone. Thus
for Derrida, the ‘meaning of meaning’ is an indefinite referral
of signifier to signifier ‘which gives signified meaning no respite
. . . so that it always signifies again’ (Derrida, 1978, p. 25). Linguis-
tic meaning thereby entails an ‘infinite equivocality’. Though
subject to later psychoanalytic reformulation as ‘phallogocen-
trism’, the critique of logocentrism has remained fundamental to
Derrida’s thought. The entire western philosophical tradition,
from Plato on, is judged ‘metaphysical’ insofar as it imagines
‘presence’ prior to discourse.
If ‘metaphysics’ is the problem, then ‘difference’ is the solution.
Derrida takes from Saussure the notion that language is founded
on difference, but coined the neologism, différance, to stress the
double meaning of the French verb, différer—to differ and to defer
or delay (Derrida, 1982, pp. 7–8). Thus difference is also the
deferral, for the moment at least, of other, alternative meanings.
‘What is written as différance’, he explained, ‘will be the playing
movement that “produces”... these differences, these effects of
difference’ in language (p. 11). Différance is thus ‘neither a word
nor a concept’, but rather a device by which to think strategically
‘what is most irreducible about our “era”’ (p. 7). That character-
istically Derridean device, the pun, is deployed precisely so as
to enable a remorseless worrying away at the other possible
meanings of words. Deconstruction itself is best understood as
pushing textual meaning to its limits, in order to discover the
differences within a text, the ways it fails to say what it means
to say. A distant but by no means entirely hostile observer has

115