Page 83 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

DIFFERENCE

Working to this exemplary model, it is possible to claim that difference
is the foundation of meaning.
For Derrida, however, this is only the start of the problem, a start
signalled by spelling difference ‘incorrectly’ – ‘diffe ´rance’. Derrida
criticises what he calls the metaphysics of presence as a recurring theme
throughout Western philosophy. This is the ideal (metaphysical)
situation in which speech (but not writing) is supposed to yield up to
the speaker a pure, transparent correspondence between sound and
sense, i.e. between language and consciousness. In short, meaning
(thought) is self-present in speaking (language).
Derrida disagrees. For him, the traditional distinction between
speech and writing, privileging speech as somehow original or pure,
cannot be sustained. Writing, because of its distance (in space and
time) from its source, and because of its capacity for dissimulation, is a
traditional problem for Western philosophy – an impediment to the
desire or craving for language to act as the obedient vehicle for
thought. For Derrida, writing is not an impure ‘supplement’ but is its
precondition. The very characteristics of writing that led Saussure (and
the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl) to set it apart from speech are
those that Derrida finds it impossible to leave out. However, it is not
his aim to replace speech as the model of sense-making with writing;
his quarry is the opposition speech/writing in linguistic philosophy, and
the ‘metaphysical’ tradition which seeks to arbitrate between the two
terms in that opposition.
The notion of diffe ´rance is one that Derrida would certainly refuse to
call a concept, key or otherwise – his aim is not to settle or to define
meanings but to unsettle them. It encompasses the post-Saussurian idea
of differing, adds to it the Derridean idea of deferring (postponement
of what could be present to another time – an ‘absent presence’ of
meaning), and represents these paradoxical ideas (differing suggests
non-identity; deferring suggests sameness albeit postponed, perhaps
endlessly) in a word whose startling ‘misspelling’ can be discerned only
through writing (since diffe ´rance is pronounced orally the same way as
the word from which it differs, difference).
Derrida’s work was especially influential in the 1970s and early
1980s when the Saussurian terminology of signification was becoming
well known. After Derrida, it wasn’t possible to claim that signifiers
referred to signifieds (an absent presence); on the contrary, signifiers
refer only to themselves, and meaning is generated by a differential
play of signifiers in an endless, self-referential chain, beyond which it is
not possible to go for verification. That is to say, there is no
‘experience’ or ‘reality’ beyond signification which can act as a test or

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