Jacques Derrida (1967)
Of Grammatology
Source: Of Grammatology, publ. John Hopkins University Press., 1974. Chapter Two, with one section deleted.
2 Linguistics and Grammatology
Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre that one gives more care to the determining of the image than to the object. - J.-J. Rousseau, Fragment inédit d'un essai sur les langues.
The concept of writing should define the field of a science. But can it be determined by scholars outside of all the historico-metaphysical predeterminations that we have just situated so clinically? What can a science of writing begin to signify, if it is granted:
1. that the very idea of science was born in a certain epoch of writing;
2. that it was thought and formulated, as task, idea, project, in a language implying a certain kind of structurally and axiologically determined relationship between speech and writing;
3. that, to that extent, it was first related to the concept and the adventure of phonetic writing, valorised as the telos of all writing, even though what was always the exemplary model of scientificity — mathematics — constantly moved away from that goal;
4. that the strictest notion of a general science of writing was born, for nonfortuitous reasons, during a certain period of the world's history (beginning around the eighteenth century) and within a certain determined s stem of relationships between “living” speech and inscription;
5. that writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service of science and possibly its object — but first, as Husserl in particular pointed out in The Origin of Geometry, the condition of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity. Before being its object, writing is the condition of the epistémè.
6. that historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the possibility of writing in general, beyond those particular forms of writing in the name of which we have long spoken of peoples without writing and without history. Before being the object of a history — of an historical science — writing opens the field of history — of historical becoming. And the former (Historie in German) presupposes the latter (Geschichte).
The science of writing should therefore look for its object at the roots of scientificity,. The history of writing should turn back toward the origin of historicity. , A science of the possibility of science? A science of science which would no longer have the form of logic but that of grammatics? A history of the possibility of history which would no longer be an archaeology, a philosophy of history or a history of philosophy?
The positive and the classical sciences of writing are obliged to repress this sort of question. Up to a certain point, such repression is even necessary to the progress of positive investigation. Beside the fact that it would still be held within a philosophising logic, the ontophenomenological question of essence, that is to say of the origin of writing, could, by itself, only paralyse or sterilise the typological or historical research of facts.
My intention, therefore, is not to weigh that prejudicial question, that dry, necessary, and somewhat facile question of right, against the power and efficacy of the positive researches which we may witness today. The genesis and system of scripts bad never led to such profound, extended, and assured explorations. It is not really a matter of weighing the question against the importance of the discovery; since the questions are imponderable, they cannot be weighed. If the issue is not quite that, it is perhaps because its repression has real consequences in the very content of the researches that, in the present case and in a privileged way, are always arranged around problems of definition and beginning.
The grammatologist least of all can avoid questioning himself about the essence of his object in the form of a question of origin: “What is writing?” means “where and when does writing begin?” The responses generally come very quickly. They circulate within concepts that are seldom criticised and move within evidence which always seems self-evident. It is around these responses that a typology of and a perspective on the growth of writing are always organised. All works dealing with the history of writing are composed along the same lines: a philosophical and teleological classification exhausts the critical problems in a few pages; one passes next to an exposition of facts. We have a contrast between the theoretical fragility of the reconstructions and the historical, archaeological, ethnological, philosophical wealth of information.
The question of the origin of writing and the question of the origin of language are difficult to separate. Grammatologists, who are generally by training historians, epigraphists, and archaeologists, seldom relate their researches to the modem science of language. It is all the more surprising that, among the “sciences of man,” linguistics is the one science whose scientificity is given as an example with a zealous and insistent unanimity.
Has grammatology, then, the right to expect from linguistics an essential assistance that it has almost never looked for? On the contrary, does one not find efficaciously at work, in the very movement by which linguistics is instituted as a science, a metaphysical presupposition about the relationship between speech and writing? Would that presupposition not binder the constitution of a general science of writing? Is not the lifting of that presupposition an overthrowing of the landscape upon which the science of language is peacefully installed? For better and for worse? For blindness as well as for productivity? This is the second type of question that I now wish to outlines To develop this question, I should like to approach, as a privileged example, the project and texts of Ferdinand de Saussure. That the particularity of the example does not interfere with the generality of my argument is a point which I shall occasionally — try not merely to take for granted.
Linguistics thus wishes to be the science of language. Let us set aside all the implicit decisions that have established such a project and all the questions about its own origin that the fecundity of this science allows to remain dormant. Let us first simply consider that the scientificity of that science is often acknowledged because of its phonological foundations. Phonology, it is often said today, communicates its scientificity to linguistics, which in turn serves as the epistemological model for all the sciences of man. Since the deliberate and systematic phonological orientation of linguistics (Troubetzkoy, Jakobson, Martinet) carries out an intention which was originally Saussure's, I shall, at least provisionally, confine my-self to the latter. Will my argument be equally applicable a fortiori to the most accentuated forms of phonologism? The problem at least be stated.
The science of linguistics determines language — its field of objectivity — in the last instance and in the irreducible simplicity of its essence, as the unity of the phonè, the glossa, and the logos. This determination is by rights anterior to all the eventual differentiations that could arise within the systems of terminology of the different schools (language/speech [langue/parole]; code/message; scheme/usage; linguistic/logic; phonology/phonematics/phonetics/glossematics). And even if one wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and contingent signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not purely sensible), it would have to be admitted that the immediate and privileged unity which founds significance and the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense within the phonic. With regard to this unity, writing would always be derivative, accidental, particular, exterior, doubling the signifier: phonetic. “Sign of a sign,” said Aristotle, Rousseau, and Hegel.
Yet, the intention that institutes general linguistics ,is a science remains in this respect within a contradiction. Its declared purpose indeed confirms, saying what goes without saying, the subordination of grammatology, the historico-metaphysical reduction of writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full and originarily spoken language. But another gesture (not another statement of purpose, for here what does not go without saying is done without being said, written without being uttered) liberates the future of a general grammatology of which linguistics-phonology would be only a dependent and circumscribed area. Let us follow this tension between gesture and statement in Saussure.
The Outsideand the Inside
On the one hand, true to the Western tradition that controls not only in theory, but in practice (in the principle of its practice) the relationships between speech and writing, Saussure does not recognise in the latter more than a narrow and derivative function. Narrow because it is nothing but one modality among others, a modality of the events which can befall a language whose essence, as the facts seem to show, can remain forever uncontaminated by writing. “Language does have an oral tradition that is independent of writing” (Cours de linguistique générale). Derivative because representative signifier of the first signifier, representation of the self-present voice, of the immediate, natural, and direct signification of the meaning (of the signified, of the concept, of the ideal object or what have you). Saussure takes up the traditional definition of writing which, already in Plato and Aristotle, was restricted to the model of phonetic script and the language of words. Let us recall the Aristotelian definition: “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words.” Saussure: “Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first”. This representative determination, beside communicating without a doubt essentially with the idea of the sign, does not translate a choice or an evaluation, does not betray a psychological or metaphysical presupposition peculiar to Saussure; it describes or rather reflects the structure of a certain type of writing: phonetic writing, which we use and within whose element the epistémè in general (science and philosophy), and linguistics in particular, could be founded. One should, moreover, say mode, rather than structure; it is not a question of a system constructed and functioning perfectly, but of an ideal explicitly directing a functioning which in fact is never completely phonetic. In fact, but also for reasons of essence to which I shall frequently return. To be sure this factum of phonetic writing is massive; it commands our entire culture and our entire science, and it is certainly not just one fact among others. Nevertheless it does not respond to any necessity of an absolute and universal essence. Using this as a point of departure, Saussure defines the project and object of general linguistics: “The linguistic object is not defined by the combination of the written word and the spoken word: the spoken form alone constitutes the object”.
The form of the question to which he responded thus entailed the response. It was a matter of knowing what sort of word is the object of linguistics and what the relationships arc between the atomic unities that are the written and the spoken word. Now the word (vox) is already a unity of sense and sound, of concept and voice, or, to speak a more rigorously Saussurian language, of the signified and the signifier. This last terminology was moreover first proposed in the domain of spoken language alone, of linguistics in the narrow sense and not in the domain of semiology (“I propose to retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified [signifié] and signifier [signifiant]”). The word is thus already, a constituted unity, an effect of “the somewhat mysterious fact ... that 'thought-sound' implies divisions”. Even if the word is in its turn articulated, even if it implies other divisions, as long as one poses the question of the relationships between speech and writing in the light of the indivisible units of the “thought-sound,” there will always be the ready response. Writing will be “phonetic,” it will be the outside, the exterior representation of language and of this “thought-sound.” It must necessarily operate from already constituted units of signification, in the formation of which it has played no part.
Perhaps the objection will be made that writing up to the present has not on]y not contradicted, but indeed, confirmed the linguistics of the word. Hitherto I seem to have maintained that only the fascination of the unit called word has prevented giving to writing the attention that it merited. By that I seemed to suppose that, by ceasing to accord an absolute privilege to the word, modern linguistics would become that much more attentive to writing and would finally cease to regard it with suspicion. ...
It is clear that the concepts of stability,, permanence, and duration, which here assist thinking the relationships between speech and writing, are too lax and open to every uncritical investiture. They would require more attentive and minute analyses. The same is applicable to an explanation according to which “most people pay more attention to visual impressions simply because these are sharper and more lasting than aural impressions. This explanation of “usurpation” is not only empirical in its form, it is problematic in its content, it refers to a metaphysics and to an old physiology, of sensory faculties constantly, disproved by science, as by the experience of language and by the body proper as language. It imprudently makes of visibility the tangible, simple, and essential element of writing. Above all, in considering the audible as the natural milieu within which language must naturally fragment and articulate its instituted signs, thus exercising its arbitrariness, this explanation excludes all possibility,, of some natural relationship between speech and writing at the, very moment that it affirms it. Instead of deliberately dismissing the notions of nature and institution that it constantly uses, which ought to be done first, it thus confuses the two. It finally and most importantly contradicts the principal affirmation according to which “the thing that constitutes language [l'essentiel de la langue] is . . . unrelated to the phonic character of the linguistic sign”. This affirmation will soon occupy us; within it the other side of the Saussurian proposition denouncing the “illusions of script” comes to the fore.
What do these limits and presuppositions signify? First that a linguistics is not general as long as it defines its outside and inside in terms of determined linguistic models; as long as it does not rigorously distinguish essence from fact in their respective degrees of generality. The system of writing in general is not exterior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the division between exterior and interior passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently alien to its system. For the same reason, writing in general is not “image” or “figuration” of language in general, except if the nature, the logic, and the functioning of the image within the system from which one wishes to exclude it be reconsidered. Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true. If every sign refers to a sign, and if “sign of a sign” signifies writing, certain conclusions — which I shall consider at the appropriate moment will become inevitable. What Saussure saw without seeing, knew without being able to take into account, following in that the entire metaphysical tradition, is that a certain model of writing was necessarily but provisionally imposed (but for the inaccuracy in principle, insufficiency of fact, and the permanent usurpation) as instrument and technique of representation of a system of language. And that this movement, unique in style, was so profound that it permitted the thinking, within language, of concepts like those of the sign, technique, representation, language. The system of language associated with phonetic-alphabetic writing is that within which logocentric metaphysics, determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced. This logocentrism, this epoch of the full speech, has always placed in parenthesis, suspended, and suppressed for essential reasons, all free reflection on the origin and status of writing, all science of writing which was not technology and the history of a technique, itself leaning upon a mythology and a metaphor of a natural writing. It is this logocentrism which, limiting the internal system of language in general by a bad abstraction, prevents Saussure and the majority of his successors from determining fully and explicitly that which is called “the integral and concrete object of linguistics”
But conversely, as I announced above, it is when he is not expressly dealing with writing, when he feels be has closed the parentheses on that subject, that Saussure opens the field of a general grammatology. Which would not only no longer be excluded from general linguistics, but would dominate it and contain it within itself. Then one realises that what was chased off limits, the wandering outcast of linguistics, has indeed never ceased to haunt language as its primary and most intimate possibility. Then something which was never spoken and which is nothing other than writing itself as the origin of language writes itself within Saussure's discourse. Then we glimpse the germ of a profound but indirect explanation of the usurpation and the traps condemned in Chapter VI. This explanation will overthrow even the form of the question to which it was a premature reply.
The Outside Isthe Inside
The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign (so grossly misnamed, and not only for the reasons Saussure himself recognises) must forbid a radical distinction between the linguistic and the graphic sign. No doubt this thesis concerns only the necessity of relationships between specific signifiers and signifieds within an allegedly natural relationship between the voice and sense in general, between the order of phonic signifiers and the content of the signifieds (“the only natural bond, the only true bond, the bond of sound”). Only these relationships between specific signifiers and signifieds would be regulated by arbitrariness. Within the “natural” relationship between phonic signifiers and their signifieds in general, the relationship between each determined signifier and its determined signified would be “arbitrary”.
Now from the moment that one considers the totality of determined signs, spoken, and a fortiori written, as unmotivated institutions, one must exclude any relationship of natural subordination, any natural hierarchy among signifiers or orders of signifiers. If “writing” signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of a sign (and that is the only irreducible kernel of the concept of writing), writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs. In that field a certain sort of instituted signifiers may then appear, “graphic” in the narrow and derivative sense of the word, ordered by a certain relationship with other instituted — hence “written,” even if they are “phonic” — signifiers. The very idea of institution — hence of the arbitrariness of the sign — is unthinkable before the possibility of writing and outside of its horizon. Quite simply, that is, outside of the horizon itself, outside the world as space of inscription, as the opening to the emission and to the spatial distribution of signs, to the regulated play of their differences, even if they are “phonic.”
Let us now persist in using this opposition of nature and institution, of physis and nomos (which also means, of course, a distribution and division regulated in fact by law) which a meditation on writing should disturb although it functions everywhere as self-evident, particularly in the discourse of linguistics. We must then conclude that only the signs called natural, those that Hegel and Saussure call “symbols,” escape semiology as grammatology. But they fall a fortiori outside the field of linguistics as the region of general semiology. The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign thus indirectly but irrevocably contests Saussure's declared proposition when he chases writing to the outer darkness of language. This thesis successfully accounts for a conventional relationship between the phoneme and the grapheme (in phonetic writing, between the phoneme, signifier-signified, and the grapheme, pure signifier), but by the same token it forbids that the latter be an “image” of the former. Now it was indispensable to the exclusion of writing as “external system,” that it come to impose an “image,” a “representation,” or a “figuration,” an exterior reflection of the reality of language.
It matters little, here at least, that there is in fact an ideographic filiation of the alphabet. This important question is much debated by historians of writing. What matters here is that in the synchronic structure and systematic principle of alphabetic writing — and phonetic writing in general — no relationship of “natural” representation, none of resemblance or participation, no “symbolic” relationship in the Hegelian-Saussurian sense, no “iconographic” relationship in the Peircian sense, be implied.
One must therefore challenge, in the very name of the arbitrariness of the sign, the Saussurian definition of writing as “image” — hence as natural symbol — of language. Not to mention the fact that the phoneme is the unimaginable itself, and no visibility can resemble it, it suffices to take into account what Saussure says about the difference between the symbol and the sign in order to be completely baffled as to how he can at the same time say of writing that it is an “Image” or “figuration” of language and define language and writing elsewhere as “two distinct systems of signs”. For the property of the sign is not to be an image. By a process exposed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, Saussure thus accumulates contradictory arguments to bring about a satisfactory decision: the exclusion of writing. In fact, even within so-called phonetic writing, the “graphic” signifier refers to the phoneme through a web of many dimensions which binds it, like all signifiers, to other written and oral signifiers, within a “total” system open, let us say, to all possible investments of sense. We must begin with the possibility of that total system.
Saussure was thus never able to think that writing was truly an “Image,” a “figuration,” a “representation” of the spoken language, a symbol. If one considers that be nonetheless needed these inadequate notions to decide upon the exteriority of writing, one must conclude that an entire stratum of his discourse, the intention of Chapter VI (“Graphic Representation of Language”), was not at all scientific. When I say this, my quarry is not primarily Ferdinand de Saussure's intention or motivation, but rather the entire uncritical tradition which he inherits. To what zone of discourse does this strange functioning of argumentation belong, this coherence of desire producing itself in a near-oneiric way — although it clarifies the dream rather than allow itself to be clarified by it — through a contradictory logic? How is this functioning articulated with the entirety of theoretical discourse, throughout the history of science? Better yet, bow does it work from within the concept of science itself? It is only when this question is elaborated if it is some day — when the concepts required by this functioning are defined outside of all psychology (as of all sciences of man), outside metaphysics (which can now be “Marxist” or “structuralist”); when one is able to respect all its levels of generality and articulation — it is only then that one will be able to state rigorously the problem of the articulated appurtenance of a text (theoretical or otherwise) to an entire set: I obviously treat the Saussurian text at the moment only as a telling example within a given situation, without professing to use the concepts required by the functioning of which I have just spoken. My justification would be as follows: this and some other indices (in a general way the treatment of the concept of writing) already give us the assured means of broaching the de-construction of the greatest totality — the concept of the epistémè and logocentric metaphysics — within which are produced, without ever posing the radical question of writing, all the Western methods of analysis, explication, reading, or interpretation.
Now we must think that writing is at the same time more exterior to speech, not being its “image” or its “symbol,” and more interior to speech, which is already in itself a writing. Even before it is linked to incision, engraving, drawing, or the letter, to a signifier referring in general to a signifier signified by it, the concept of the graphic [unit of a possible graphic system] implies the framework of the instituted trace, as the possibility common to all systems of signification. My efforts will now be directed toward slowly detaching these two concepts from the classical discourse from which I necessarily borrow them. The effort will be laborious and we know a priori that its effectiveness will never be pure and absolute.
The instituted trace is “unmotivated” but not capricious. Like the word “arbitrary” according to Saussure, it “should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker”. Simply, it has no “natural attachment” to the signified within reality. For us, the rupture of that “natural attachment” puts in question the idea of naturalness rather than that of attachment. That is why the word “institution” should not be too quickly interpreted within the classical system of oppositions.
The instituted trace cannot be thought without thinking the retention of difference within a structure of reference where difference appears as such and thus permits a certain liberty of variations among the full terms. The absence of another here-and-now, of another transcendental present, of another origin of the world appearing as such, presenting itself as irreducible absence within the presence of the trace, is not a metaphysical formula substituted for a scientific concept of writing. This formula, beside the fact that it is the questioning of metaphysics itself, describes the structure implied by the “arbitrariness of the sign,” from the moment that one thinks of its possibility short of the derived opposition between nature and convention, symbol and sign, etc. These oppositions have meaning only after the possibility of the trace. The “unmotivatedness” of the sign requires a synthesis in which the completely other is announced as such without any simplicity, any identity, any resemblance or continuity — within what is not it. Is announced as such: there we have all history, from what metaphysics has defined as “non-living” up to “consciousness,” passing through all levels of animal organisation. The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility, in the entire field of the entity [étant], which metaphysics has defined as the being-present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thought before the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted, it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself. This formulation is not theological, as one might believe somewhat hastily. The “theological” is a determined moment in the total movement of the trace. The field of the entity, before being determined as the field of presence, is structured according to the diverse possibilities-genetic and structural — of the trace. The presentation of the other as such, that is to say the dissimulation of its “as such,” has always already begun and no structure of the entity escapes it.
That is why the movement of “unmotivatedness” passes from one structure to the other when the “sign” crosses the stage of the “symbol.” It is in a certain sense and according to a certain determined structure of the as such” that one is authorised to say that there is vet no immotivation in what Saussure calls “symbol” and which, according to him, does not at least provisionally — interest semiology. The general structure of the unmotivated trace connects within the same possibility, and they cannot be separated except by abstraction, the structure of the relationship with the other, the movement of temporalisation, and language as writing. Without referring back to a “nature,” the immotivation of the trace has always become. In fact, there is no unmotivated trace: the trace is indefinitely its own becoming-unmotivated. In Saussurian language, what Saussure does not say would have to be said: there is neither symbol nor sign but a becoming-sign of the symbol.
Thus, as it goes without saving, the trace whereof I speak is not more natural (it is not the mark, the natural sign, or the index in the Husserlian sense) than cultural, not more physical than psychic, biological than spiritual. It is that starting from which a becoming-unmotivated of the sign, and with it all the ulterior oppositions between physis and its other, is possible.
In his project of semiotics, Peirce seems to have been more attentive than Saussure to the irreducibility of this becoming-unmotivated. In his terminology, one must speak of a becoming-unmotivated of the symbol, the notion of the symbol playing here a role analogous to that of the sign which Saussure opposes precisely to the symbol:
Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo. [Elements of Logic, Hartshorne and Weiss]
Peirce complies with two apparently incompatible exigencies. The mistake here would be to sacrifice one for the other. It must be recognised that the symbolic (in Peirce's sense: of “the arbitrariness of the sign”) is rooted in the non-symbolic, in an anterior and related order of signification: “Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs.” But these roots must not compromise the structural originality of the field of symbols, the autonomy of a domain, a production, and a play: “So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo.”
But in both cases, the genetic root-system refers from sign to sign. No ground of nonsignification — understood as insignificance or an intuition of a present truth — stretches out to give it foundation under the play and the coming into being of signs. Semiotics no longer depends on logic. Logic, according to Peirce, is only a semiotic: “Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I 'have shown, only another name for semiotics (semeiotike), the quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.” And logic in the classical sense, logic “properly speaking,” nonformal logic commanded by the value of truth, occupies in that semiotics only a determined and not a fundamental level. As in Husserl (but the analogy, although it is most thought-provoking, would stop there and one must apply it carefully), the lowest level, the foundation of the possibility of logic (or semiotics) corresponds to the project of the Grammatica speculative of Thomas d'Erfurt, falsely attributed to Duns Scotus. Like Husserl, Peirce expressly refers to it. It is a matter of elaborating, in both cases, a formal doctrine of conditions which a discourse must satisfy, in order to have a sense, in order to “mean,” even if it is false or contradictory. The general morphology of that meaning (Bedeutung, vouloir-dire) is independent of all logic of truth.
The science of semiotic has three branches. The first is called by Duns Scotus grammatica speculative. We may term it pure grammar. It has for its task to ascertain what must be true of the representamen used by every scientific intelligence in order that they may embody any meaning. The second is logic proper. It is the science of what is quasi-necessarily true of the repr...
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