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THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND SUBJECTIVITY 191

to things outside themselves. This autonomy of textual discourses rests
theoretically upon Derrida’s critical strategy of ‘reversal’, where he makes not
speech but writing primary—not the signified, but the signifier. A set of
problems seems to follow from this. In Derrida’s work the signifier itself
sometimes appears to have assumed a transcendental position. It provides its own
guarantee: ‘the condition of its ideality, what identifies it as signifier, and makes
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it function as such’. Similarly, the whole of history seems to be determined by
the movement of the trace, taking the autonomy of language to the extreme.
Our conclusion must be that Derrida has certainly re-established the radical
significance of Saussure’s principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign, and this
must be taken to exclude any a priori fixing of signifieds. It is therefore
illegitimate for semiology simply to assume a primary level of ‘denotation’, to be
represented in myth/ideologies. If denotations exist, they must be secondary
impositions, a retrospective ‘fixing’ of signifiers, which is an effect of the
ideological mechanism itself. This position is, in fact, argued by Barthes in his
later work, where denotation is used to describe the last in a chain of connotations
which are ideologically closed off. Conversely, however, it would be equally
untenable to argue that the principle of arbitrariness simply ‘appears’ at every
level of signifying practice. Clearly, there are secondary mechanisms which fix
and sustain ‘representation effects’ and the illusion of a transcendental signified,
both within specific social practices and at the level of individual subjects. This
is, however, to return to our previous question of the social determinations acting
upon language in general, as the linguistic signifiers enter the social and
historically specific realms of discursive practice. We need to go beyond
Derrida’s critique for an answer to these questions.
Derrida’s move away from representational theory of language based on
speech to a theory of language located in written texts (grammatology) displaces
the importance of the speaking subject in language. In rationalist discourse the
fixed concepts, which precede any actual speech act, have to be articulated via the
conscious intention of the individual speaking subject and the speech community
at large. In abandoning the notion of transcendental fixed signifieds and focusing
on traces of meaning within written texts, Derrida opens the way for a
reconceptualization of the speaking subject, not as the intending originator of
speech acts but as an effect of the structure of language.
This decentring of the subject, which is a mark of Derrida’s departure from
rationalist discourses, is shared by the other major contemporary theory of
language which challenges the primacy of rationalist consciousness. This is
Lacanian psychoanalysis, which insists on the importance of meaning in
unconscious thought processes. Whereas Derrida’s theory decentres but does not
retheorize the speaking subject, Lacan offers a general theory of the constitution
of the speaking subject in language and it is this theorization that we now go on
to look at in detail. In the light of both Derrida’s and Lacan’s work, other writers
(notably Julia Kristeva) have attempted an analysis of texts which rests on a
concept of the subject ‘in process’ —that is, as an effect of language (see below).