ENGL 6166: Rhetorical Theory » April 4th: Jacques Derrida’s Positions

April 4th: Jacques Derrida’s Positions

Plan for the Class

Derrida’s Positions

The three interviews shouldn’t be considered a totality of Derrida’s ideas; nor should we think all of deconstruction is answered. As he was quoted in his obituary, “deconstruction requires work”; therefore, its meaning can’t be handed to you.

Terms to Define

I think the following terms need to be defined, so we’re all (somewhat) on the same page. This discussion is our introduction to Derrida, but his influence will be felt for quite some time:

  • Phenomenology: the study of the structure of experience; reflection of consciousness.
  • Existentialism: the idea that human (individual) existence comes from experience, that of the individual.
  • Structuralism: studying culture as a system made up of identifiable connections that are all related to a grand structure, an overarching paradigm.
  • Post-Structuralism: well, this is structuralism “deconstructed.” What? Refer to p. 41 in Positions.
  • Liguistic terms
    • grammatology: writing doesn’t reproduce speech (the window pane theory); instead, everything to do with writing constructs/affects meaning.
    • phoneme: basic (smallest) unit in a language that builds words. (think phonetic…do re mi)
    • grapheme: words, punctuation, numbers–they don’t carry meaning themselves
  • Absolutist/Monolithic Critiques
    • logocentrism: the Western assumption that “the word” is the superior conveyor of meaning, one that has an identifiable in an ideal form.
    • différance:
      1) “the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other” (p. 27)
      2) “reference to a present reality [or meaning] [is] always deferred” (p. 29)
    • trace: Because the meaning of a sign is generated from the difference it has from other signs, especially the other half of its binary pairs, the sign itself contains a trace of what it does not mean.
  • transcendental signified: the first cause or zero point–absolute origin.
  • psychologism: mathematical concepts and/or truths are grounded in, derived from or explained by psychological facts or laws.
  • phonologism: the study of sounds in a system of language.
  • diacritical: marks on letters; from the dictionary: a mark near or through an orthographic or phonetic character or combination of characters indicating a phonetic value different from that given the unmarked or otherwise marked element.

Now, we just need to figure out where to go next. If I haven’t already, let me mention my approach to Derrida and, more importantly, teaching Derrida. Maybe one of my mentors can help us out…

Maybe we ought to watch the School of Life video on Jacques Derrida.

More Context for Derrida

I went ahead and put up the notes for Knoblauch’s Ch. 7 “Deconstructive Rhetoric” on our last class’s webpage on April 25th. Those of you joining the New Media class this fall arr getting a preview of these aspects of Derrida:

  • p. 95: logocentrism: “the reliance on fixed a priori transcendental meanings”
    • phonocentrism: “the priority given to sounds and speech over writing in explaining the generation of meaning”
    • “…privileging speech relies on the untenable idea that there is direct access to truth and stable meaning.”
  • p. 96: différance–difference and deferral
  • p. 97: archewriting: “Writing is always already part of the outside of texts. Texts form the outside of texts. Texts are constitutive of their outsides.”
  • p. 98: “Deconstruction seeks to expose the….unacknowledged assumptions” of texts, which “include those places where a text’s rhetorical strategies work against the logic of its own assumptions”
    • Technology example: The field of Composition, which has a long history of attempting to create a liberatory pedagogy (or pedagogy of liberation), has uncritically embraced communication technologies that force students, teachers, schools, and parents to get on the conveyor belt of planned obsolescence–we need to buy (and upgrade) these items in order to participate in education.
    • Therefore, student loan debt combines with personal debt in order to keep us “plugged in.” Apple’s Macintosh 1984 commercial (Irony here because many people go into debt chained to Apple products and other consumer goods).
  • p. 101: “…since words do not refer to essences, identity is not a fixed universal ‘thing’ but a description in language”

From Barker, Chris and Emma A. Jane. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 5th ed., Sage, 2016.

Discussion Questions/Points

Derrida list several homonyms–words that sound alike but have different meanings (p. 40 and 42). Let’s consider some English words:

  • eight/ate
  • band/banned
  • beaut/butte
  • bight/bite/byte
  • brows/browse
  • whose/who’s

Derivatives of cat?

  • cat, catsup, Catawba, catch

Parles/z-tu/vous français? Española? Italiano?

What about cognates across Italian and English? (Beware of false friends!)

  • federazione–>federation
  • stazione–>station
  • folcloristico–>????
  • preservativo–>????

The linearity of Bob Dylan. “Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you” (“Baby Blue”)

Looking Closure at Derrida’s Interviews

It strikes me as ironic (at first) that a theorist as loquacious as Derrida has only a paragraph introduction for these republished interviews. Then again, I think about what an introductory is and how it frames a text. Introductions and the opposite, conclusions, bookend a text, which reproduces the idea–that Derrida works against–that the physical book, the writing between the covers of a book is the complete story. Therefore, the introduction and conclusion aren’t well defined, and “What is held within the demarcated closure may continue indefinitely” (Derrida 13).

Of course, I still would like more of an “Introduction”! Derrida does give us some context in that short introduction when he identifies that “these three interviews….form…the gesture of an active interpretation,” which are “arrested here” (p. vii).

“Implications” Interview with Henri Ronse

  • p. 5: Concerning the three texts he cites, “All these texts, which are doubtless the interminable preface to another text that one day I would like to have the force to write, or still the epigraph to another I would never have the audacity to write…”
    • I think…I propose…that this statement might be a way of acknowledging, if not the arbitrariness of beginning and ending one’s writing, then the situation of writing within a deconstructive context: Whatever words writers put down differ meaning, so wouldn’t that also mean different topics could begin (or end…or come in the middle) of a text?
  • p. 6: “what is dead wields a very specific power.”
    • And, as Bob Dylan tells us, “Forget the dead you left / they will not follow you” (“Baby Blue”)
  • p. 8: “First, différance refers to the (active and passive)…deferring by means of delay, delegation, reprieve, referral, detour, postponement, reserving….What defers presence, on the contrary, is the very basis on which presence is announced or desired in what represents it, its sign, its trace…”
  • p. 10: ontico-ontological
    • ontico: pertaining to real
    • ontological: the study of being
  • p. 13-14: “writing does not begin. It is even on the basis of writing…that one can put into question the search for an archie, an absolute beginning, an origin. Writing can no more begin, therefore, than the book can end…
  • p. 14: “To risk meaning nothing is to start to play, and first to enter into the play of différance which prevents any word, any concept, any major enunciation from coming to summarize and to govern from the theological presence of a center the movement and textual spacing of differences.”

“Semiology and Grammatology” Interview with Julia Kristeva

Let’s start off by thinking about the different meanings of “metaphysics”:

  • philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world.
  • Modern, non-empirical inquiry into the nature of existence.

I should also point out this interview was first published in Information sur les sciences sociales. How would you define “social sciences”?

  • p. 17: “All gestures here are necessarily equivocal.”
  • p. 19: “‘everyday language’ is not innocent or neutral. It is the language of Western metaphysics.”
  • pp. 19-20: “‘transcendental signified,’ which in and of itself, in its essence, would refer to no signifier, would exceed the chain of signs, and would no longer itself function as a signifier.”
  • p. 20: On translation…”We will never have, and in fact have never had, to do with some ‘transport’ of pure signifieds from one language to another, or within one and the same language, that the signifying instrument would leave virgin and untouched.”
  • p. 24: Goal of deconstruction–“Like the concept of the sign–and therefore semiology–it can simultaneously confirm and shake logocentric and ethnocentric assuredness.”
    • “transform concepts, to displace them, to turn them against their presuppositions, to reinscribe them in other chains, and little by little to modify the terrain of our work and thereby produce new configurations.”
  • p. 31: “‘meaning is an intelligible or spiritual ideality…”
  • p. 32: “Language is determined as expression–the expulsion of the intimacy of an inside…”

“Positions” Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta

  • p. 41: “One of the two terms governs the other…or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment.”
  • p. 42: “…the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself.”
  • p. 49: “‘thought’ means nothing.”
  • p. 44: the irreducibility of texts.
  • p. 57: “The metaphysical character of the concept of history is not only linked to linearity, but to an entire system of implications (teleology, eschatology…a certain type of traditionality, a certain concept of continuity, of truth, etc.)”

Deconstruction

Let’s try to deconstruct, if possible, the following passage from the preface of Ashley Montagu and Floyd Matson’s The Dehumanization of Man:

It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record—and its potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the “Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.” Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization (p. xi).

Barthes’ “Death of An Author”

I have two translations of an important part of Barthes’s text. The first is from the copy, translated by Richard Howard, I put on Canvas, and the other is from Barthes’s Music-Image-Text (1977), translated by Stephen Heath:

  • We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. (p. 4, Howard translation)
  • We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” (p. 146, Heath translation)

What else can we say about this essay? How about “Death of a Martian”?

  • p. 2: “The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions.”
  • p. 4: The author’s “hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin.”
  • p. 4: “Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.”
  • p. 5: “Once the Author is gone, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.”
    • To impose upon a text…
  • p. 5: “this is because the true locus of writing is reading.”
    • Remember, there is no distinction (for us) between reading and interpreting. Even stop signs are interpreted…
  • p. 6: “we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.”
  • p. 6: “The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes.”

I assume Barthes believes men and women and trans and non-binary individuals can be authors.

Barthes on Rhetoric

Previously, I assigned two books from Barthes but have settled on “Death of an Author” and the essay “Novels and Children,” which comes from the book Mythologies, a compilation of essays he wrote and published in 1957 (1972 is when the English translation came out).

What can Barthes teach us about rhetoric? He has an example on p. 136, and on p. 150, he identifies what he means by “rhetoric“:

  • “a set of fixed, regulated, insistent figures, according to which the varied forms of the mythical signifier arrange themselves….It is through their rhetoric that bourgeois myths outline the general prospect of this pseudo-physis which defines the dream of the contemporary bourgeois world.”

Some other words to define:

  • physis: nature
    From Greek: the material we can sense in the cosmos.
  • anti-physis: what we can’t sense (but we think we do)
  • pseudo-physis: ideologically real

Barthes’s Mythologies

A few terms to define from the preface:

Key quotations from the preface:

  • p. 9: First theoretical framework is “an ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture.”
    • Second theoretical framework is “a first attempt to analyse semiologically the mechanics of this language.”
  • p. 11: Barthes’s motivation for Mythologies is “a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up reality which…is undoubtedly determined by history.”
  • p. 11: “myth is a language”
  • p. 12: a paraphrase of a paraphrase: things repeated are culturally significant.
  • p. 12: “I cannot countenance [definition #3] the traditional belief which postulates a natural dichotomy between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a ‘freedom’ and the latter with a ‘vocation’ equally suitable for spiriting away or sublimating the actual limitations of their situation. What I claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.“

“Novels and Children”

Those of you joining the New Media class in the fall will probably revisit my 2021 SEACS presentation, which eventually became the short article “The Ethos of Motherhood: Nominating Amy Coney Barrett and Kamala Harris” in Convergences.

Barthes identifies gender reproduction in Elle magazine’s decision to photograph female novelists alongside their children. He argues this is what patriarchy (unconsciously…although many would easily argue this is overt sexism) expects: Women can work, but they have to fulfill their “natural” role as mothers.

Nancy Pelosi, first Madame Speaker of the House

Take a look at these images of Nancy Pelosi and the fact that she had been surrounded by children when she took over the position of Speaker of the house (1/4/2007):

What might Barthes say about the choice of children surrounding her?
From where does female power come?

Notice the background when John Boehner takes over as Speaker of the House, 2011 (there used to be more readily available online). Then, Paul Ryan takes the gavel, 2015.

***Yes, there is a picture of Boehner holding a baby when he takes over as Speaker, and there are pictures of children in the audience when Ryan takes over. But to not recognize the OVERWHELMING presence of children during Pelosi’s first time taking over as Speaker of the House is willfully ignoring the gendered message that was just as obvious to Barthes in the 1950s.

Next Week’s Reading

We have two more class meetings, but next week isn’t one of them. I’ll be at a conference, but I’ll have up notes for Knoblauch’s Ch. 4 and 5, and you’ll have a discussion post due by Friday, 4/12, 11:00pm (no sense in making it Thursday if we’re not meeting in class. In two weeks (4/18) we’ll read Barbara Biesecker’s “Towards a Transactional View of Rhetorical and Feminist Theory” and Nancy Myers’s “Cicero’s (S)Trumpet: Roman Women and the Second Philippic.” I actually meet Myers at a conference. Then, we’ll finish up Cy Knoblauch’s book (Ch. 6, 7, and “Afterword”) for our last class meeting (4/25).

Then, you’ll just have to do a presentation…let’s discuss that.