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190 LANGUAGE

relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority. The meaning
of the outside was always present within the inside and vice versa. 16
What is at stake here is not simply a relationship between speech and writing; it
is the very status of the signified and signifier in Saussure’s concept of the sign.
For if writing affects speech, and if writing is to speech as a signifier is to a
signified, then it follows that the signifier is constitutive of the signified or,
conversely, that the ‘transcendental signified’ itself is at risk. In fact, Derrida
argues that the concept of the signified falls with the critique of representation
because ‘this reference to the meaning of a signified, thinkable and possible
outside of all signifiers, remains dependent upon the onto-theo-teleology
(logocentrism) that I have just evoked’. 17
The significance of Derrida’s argument is that it makes possible a critical
perspective on the whole problematic of the sign. It enables reconsideration of
the semiological tradition, which derives its method from Saussurean linguistics
and is based on a concept of representation. For example, Barthes’s distinction
between ‘language’ and ‘metalanguage’ (or myth) is premised on the assumption
that the latter ‘re-presents’ the former. In the reality effect, which Barthes
attempts to theorize, myth works on the basis of the primary linguistic sign, the
level of denotation, which has the implicit status of a transcendental signified to
which myth refers. The point which can be drawn from Derrida’s critique is that
if the mechanisms of representation are at work in the production of ideology,
these mechanisms are themselves ideological. There can be no primary
denotation, no unified sign to be represented, except in logocentric discourse.
Derrida replaces the a priori fixed signifieds of Saussure’s theory, which
writing represents, by a concept of ‘differance’. He uses the term to signify the
double meaning of the French word differénce: the differing and deferring of
meaning. It is the shared principle by which both speech and writing function
and, as such, enables spoken language to be reformulated in written discourse
and vice versa. In Saussure’s theory meaning functions according to the principle
of the difference between signs in the language chain. This difference is between
fixed signifieds which stand in a relation of non-identity to one another. Derrida
transforms and extends this principle. Meaning is no longer a function of the
difference between fixed signifieds. It is never fixed outside any textual location
or spoken utterance and is always in relation to other textual locations in which
the signifier has appeared on other occasions. Every articulation of a signifier
bears within it the trace of its previous articulations. There is no fixed
transcendental signified, since the meaning of concepts is constantly referred, via
the network of traces, to their articulations in other discourses: fixed meaning is
constantly deferred.
There is, currently, a reading of Derrida which would go so far as to reject any
concept of ‘representation’ to describe all types of discourse. Undoubtedly, some
of Derrida’s own formulations encourage this kind of reading—in particular, his
insistence on the total autonomy of texts, which may refer to one another but not