The second part discusses utterances, iterations, and the way in which an uttering or ascribing is “abandoned” as soon as it happens.3 The product of an inscribing or uttering—namely, an inscription or utterance—can be iterated in another uttering with different force and truth-conditions from what was historically present in the original event. This iteration can still be a copy and so an iteration of the original uttering. While there can be exact reports of the force and truth-conditions of any utterance or inscription, no iteration of the sequence of words of a tensed sentence can do so. The essay adapts the concept of “copy” developed in an earlier work on textual identity to account for these phenomena.4 Being a copy of an uttering or inscription is iterating that very utterance or inscription. An iteration is a copy that says something close enough to an original to be saying the same thing.
I. Davidson’s account of meaning and its disseminative consequences
Decades ago, I argued that indeterminacy of interpretation, construed in the terminology of Husserl’s phenomenology and Saussure’s conception of language, was very close to Derrida’s “deconstruction.”5 I have come to see that the very structure of Davidson’s account of language commits him to a version of “dissemination,” the fluidity and “play” of ascriptions of meaning. The core of Davidson’s account of language and interpretation guarantees that natural languages will be disseminative.
Husserl construed meanings as entities that in principle could be common to different languages. Frege’s “senses,” the Analytic tradition’s version of Platonic forms, were similar metaphysical equipment. Languages were ways of expressing such meanings.
Derrida and Davidson attacked trans-linguistic meanings. Derrida treated metaphysical trans-linguistic meanings historically, as an aspect of philosophy’s obsession with Presence, which had shaped the history of metaphysics. Davidson had a research project focused on what a systematic account of understanding a language must be, connecting interpretation with action and intention. Both Derrida and Davidson doubted that there could be a complete account of a language.6
Both Derrida and Davidson argued that force and intention could not be expressed in truth-conditions (Davidson) or included in a “code” for meanings (Derrida).7 Davidson’s argument was that, if there were a word or stress-pattern that signaled sincerity, it could be used by an actor on the stage.8 Derrida puts the point differently, by the metaphor that an utterance, having been made, is out of the speaker’s control. The audience can take an utterance with different force than intended, and nothing about the utterance can guard it from such misinterpretation.
Davidson adapts Tarski’s account of a truth-definition.9 He proposes that a truth-definition is an adequate account of meaning.10 A truth-definition takes elementary parts of a language, particular expressions, and elementary ways of combining those expressions, and defines an iterated procedure by which an infinity of sentences is assigned meanings. Assigning a meaning to a sentence is giving a sentence in the interpreting language that would have the same truth-value. A theorem of a truth-definition is a sentence in which an utterance-type of the speaker is mentioned and what the world would be like if it were true is given. “‘Grass is green’ would be true if and only if grass were green.”11 Note that the second occurrence of “grass is green” is being used by the interpreting clause, not mentioned. An expression of the speaker being interpreted is mentioned (referred to) on the left side, and the interpreter uses one of their sentences to say how the world would be if the speaker’s sentence were true.
To understand a speaker’s language is to have an account such that any possible utterance of the speaker (at a time) is paired with a sentence of the interpreter’s language which would have the same truth-value. The empirical theory of the speaker, couched in the interpreter’s language, gives the meanings of the interpreted individual’s sentences. A speaker has an unlimited repertoire of possible utterances. A truth-definition provides the meaning of each of them, and so must be compositional. The contributions of expressions to truth-conditions must be tracked as expressions become more complex, ending with truth-conditions of complete sentences, the theorems of the theory.12
The meanings assigned are sentences of the interpreter’s language. So, of course, different interpreters will give different accounts. Those accounts can be accurate and equally right. If there are no trans-linguistic meanings, this is what “giving the meaning of a person’s utterance” amounts to.
Tarski showed how to construct such an algorithm for artificial languages whose elementary parts and constructions are given artifacts. Davidson’s idea was to construct such an algorithm for actual natural languages. So, the elements, both words and the constructions that built sentences with truth-conditions, had to be derived from what speakers say in various situations. Davidsonian truth-definition, interpreting agents speaking for reasons, has as its basis speech-actions of the individual being interpreted. Understanding a language is a special case of understanding intentional actions.
According to the Davidsonian truth-definitional theory of meaning, expressions of the interpreter’s idiolect at the moment fill the role of Fregean senses, Platonic Forms, and other versions of notion that there are trans-linguistic meanings which expressions of natural languages express. Davidson thinks that an interpreter’s idiolect at a time, however fluid and constantly changing, is the only ground for communication and understanding another. It works pretty well, but there is no real possibility of a language or interpretation scheme which does better. I and my resident squirrels share a world in which we recognize the presence of acorns. We have different degrees of interest in them. But we are able to interpret squirrel behavior as intentional action, without supposing that squirrels have a “concept” of “acorn” or thoughts about the coming winter. We can undertake much more detailed attempts to understand humans, especially when they are producing speech for reasons. That’s what truth-definitions do. Squirrels seek acorns for comprehensible reasons. People say things for comprehensible, obscure reasons. The next sections discuss limits to the degree of detail and reliability of our understanding of those reasons.13
Davidson’s account of language learning and interpretation uses the notion of “triangulation” among a speaker, an interpreter, and components of their shared world.14 The common world of the interpreter (language-learner) and the speaker or inscriber (trainer) is central.15 The interpreter sees speech actions, presentations of sentences, happening in a shared environment.16 The interpreter assigns meaning to parts of the speaker’s sentences in the interpreter’s own language. In effect, the language of the interpreter replaces the traditional trans-linguistic meanings as what the speaker’s utterings express.
The learner or interpreter conjectures forces and intentions of speech actions in order to construct a theory of truth-conditions. The learner-interpreter must also assign referents to demonstratives and indexicals. Forces and intentions are not encoded in the linguistic objects being interpreted, as we discuss at length. Referents of demonstratives and some indexicals (“we” for instance) are linguistically restricted, but not determined linguistically. Tenses are indexicals, so ascribing a referent to an indexical is always a part of interpretation. An interpreter likewise has to guess which Tom the speaker is referring to with “Tom.”17
Referents of names, demonstratives, and indexicals are parts of inscribings and utterings that are not available in their linguistic products, utterances and inscriptions. However, unlike the force with which an utterance is presented, the referents of demonstratives and indexicals are part of the truth-conditions of linguistic actions. “That man has four children” is true or false depending on who the speaker has in mind.18
On the basis of interpreting speech-actions, an interpreter conjectures simultaneously truth-conditions, sometimes guessing referents of demonstratives and indexicals, and the forces with which those truth-conditions were presented. The interpreter is guided by the consideration that the speaker is an agent with mostly true beliefs and values that are comprehensible. The theory is constrained and guided by the fact that, if the event is meaningful, the speaker or inscriber is an agent producing expressions on purpose. Interpreting an agent as doing things on purpose in the world requires treating the agent as having comprehensible desires and an understanding of the world in which action can achieve desires. Speech actions can bring about intended results. Applying the principles of the intentional system of concepts, the interpreter constructs a theory of truth-conditions for the speaker at the time.19
Truth-conditions of sentences make them equipment for speech actions with various forces. “The door will be closed at five” has truth-conditions which determine what is commanded or predicted. Which action the speaker is doing cannot be not encoded in truth-conditions. But the content of what is commanded or predicted depends on the truth-conditions of the utterance. The utterance may be either a command that the door will be shut or a prediction that the door will be shut. The truth-conditions deliver what the command would be and what the prediction would be.20 The theory generating those truth-conditions is a truth-definition for a speaker at a time. That theory is based on past speech-actions of the speaker, taken in context, etc.21 Ideally, the theory of the truth-conditions of the speaker’s utterances, actual and possible at the moment, is accurate.
But when the speaker produces new utterances, the basis for assigning those truth-conditions has changed. The speaker is using those truth-conditions for novel actions. Even if a truth-definition correctly applies to a speaker at a time, the speaker is at liberty to use those truth-conditions for whatever purposes, including non-literal figures, extensions beyond previous applications, and so on. But the occurrence of these new actions changes the data on the basis of which truth-conditions were assigned. The speech action basis for interpretation, based on the earlier data of interpreted actions, has altered. The truth-definition for the speaker at the moment does not thoroughly survive the first utterance which it interprets. This is the Davidsonian expression of “différance,” the fact that given an ideal truth-definition, that truth-definition is not quite right as soon as the interpreted speaker begins to add another speech-act into the database from which a truth-definition must be constructed.22 A truth-definition is always already aufgehoben.
Thus, even given an ideal truth-definition that optimally takes into account the speaker’s speech actions up to the moment, the speaker can use those truth-conditions for speech-actions which extend the application of a predicate in novel ways or apply a term as a figure.23 The speaker thus adds new data to the base and renders the truth-definition possibly not accurate. An account of meaning, a truth-definition, can only be completely optimal, accounting for every speech-action data-point, before a speaker speaks. When there is a best truth-definition for a speaker at a time, any new uttering or inscribing will add novel data making that truth-definition not quite adequate to the data. The truth-definition must in principle be re-calculated for the new database during every new inscribing.24
Truth-conditions are tools that speakers and inscribers use to make meaningful speech actions and inscribings. The action, a speaking for a reason, depends on truth-conditions, but the intent cannot be part of truth-conditions. The actor trying to tell us that there is a fire in the theatre by shouting “There is a fire in the theatre” is not aided by “really” or “believe me,” which can also be part of the script. Derrida and Davidson agree that a central part of meaning, the force with which an expression with given truth-conditions is presented, is part of the uttering or inscribing but cannot be part of the utterance, the linguistic product, the text.
Davidson’s account of language use and understanding thus builds dissemination into its foundation. Intentional actions determine truth-conditions, and truth-conditions are applied in novel actions, determining possibly different truth-conditions applied to yet newer speech actions, and so on. Truth-definitions are derived from speech actions, which depend for their nature on prior truth-definitions. This circle in Davidson between actions as data for truth-definition construction and the freedom of speakers to use expressions for a variety of purposes means that language-meaning is guaranteed to be fluid. Davidson refers to truth-definitions as “passing theories.”25 I think he was well aware of the circle and its disseminative consequences.
Language change is not words coming to express different meanings, as it would be for Frege. Fluidity of meaning is entailed by any account that is naturalistic and recognizes that force cannot be encoded and that every account of meaning is couched in a language whose interpretation rests on the same sort of data as does the interpretation of the speaker being interpreted. It is transparently a consequence of Davidson’s basic picture. There is a sort of ground, namely the shared objective world in which we learn to speak by observing what people say when, but that ground does not provide what senses and noemata do. A language of thought into which natural language utterances are paraphrased would give determinate results. A domain of Platonic Forms as metaphysical under-pinning of trans-linguistic meanings would likewise give determinate results, given an account of the mind’s access to such entities.
Davidsonian dissemination, as we have described it so far, accounts for the non-surprising fact that languages evolve and that terms and expressions come to have different meanings.26 It does so without supposing a stable ground of meanings relative to which correct interpretations of expressions come to be different over time. Without trans-linguistic meanings, “language evolution” is the fact that, given a fluid metalanguage, the interpretation of an utterance in an object language will vary. On the account of which meanings are metaphysical entities expressions express, language evolution is just something that happens. Derrida and Davidson show that drift is not an accident but a consequence of there being no domain of meanings. If there is no domain of trans-linguistic meaning the interpreter’s language, with its drift, has to fill the role. It does, but it does not quite meet the expectations that trans-linguistic meanings would justify.
II. Intention, truth-conditions, and abandonment
Derrida’s notion of “iterability” is more than just that there can be multiple occurrences of the same word-sequence. We argue below that iterations are copies. When iterations can differ in force or truth-conditions from an uttering (or inscribing), that uttering is “abandoned” to reuse in ways that the agent cannot control. Those reuses can be iterations of that uttering or just duplicates. No iteration or duplicate of an uttering, even by the original speaker, exactly reproduces force and truth-conditions.27 Universal claims such as “Two is prime” or “Iron is a metal” are present tense. Still, there are other occurrences of the same or close to the same words which are iterations. They can differ from the original in many ways.
It is of course possible to utter or inscribe a sequence of words with exactly the same truth-conditions as an utterance; such utterings are reports, not iterations. They fail to be copies. Iterations are about words. And report-sequences differ too much. Suppose Fred says, “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country.” There are two ways you can say what Fred said. The first, you saying that “Fred said that on his honor he would do his best to do his duty to God and his country” does not iterate Fred’s uttering. It is not a copy. The actual words matter. The content of the “that”-clause has the very same truth-conditions as Fred’s uttering, but different pronouns and tenses. The other way is for you to say, “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country.” This utterance by you is a copy of that text Fred has recited, but the references of the indexicals “my” and the present tense differ from those of Fred’s uttering. Your uttering “On my honor …” and Fred’s uttering “On my honor …” have different truth-conditions but are iterations of some original inscribing or uttering. For such cases, both utterances are iterations, but the iterations are by chains to an original. Neither is an iteration of the other.
This section argues that one inscription (or utterance) x is an iteration of inscription y if and only if x is a copy of y.28 An inscribing may be a copy of another inscribing, and so an iteration, but not a word-for-word duplicate.29 An inscription may be a duplicate of another inscription but not an actual copy, and so not an iteration. A duplicate that is not a copy does not have the right relation to an original. Two electrons are duplicates but not copies of one another. Two simultaneous utterances of “It is five o’clock” may be duplicates while neither is an iteration of the other. The immediate mutated descendant of a virus is a copy of that virus but not a duplicate of it. We explicate Derrida’s notion of “iteration” in terms of the “copy of” relation.
Speech and writing actions differ from their products. We can call the actions utterings and inscribings. An uttering’s product is an utterance. An inscribing’s product is an inscription. An uttering or inscribing is “abandoned” because features of the uttering or inscribing are not linguistically available to the audience in the utterance or inscription. Iterations of what is linguistically available, whether by the speaker or others, differ in truth-conditions from the original simply because the present and past tenses are indexicals. The force of an original is not linguistically available, so every utterance or inscription is “abandoned.” Repetitions of utterances with indexicals generate expressions with different truth-conditions but may be copies, and so iterations. The referents of demonstratives are part of the uttering or inscribing, but not available in the linguistic object the speaker or inscriber presents. Someone’s “that” has a referent the speaker “has in mind” but the audience may mis-guess that referent.30
We argue that differences from an original in indexicals—when, where, or by whom an uttering or inscribing is made—do not always disqualify an iteration from being a perfect copy of an original. Likewise, differences in referents of terms and meanings of predicates do not always disqualify an utterance from being an iteration of the original uttering. How far an uttering by another can differ from the original in force or truth-conditions and still be a copy of that original is vague, as we discuss below. A re-occurrence of the same words with the same referents and same meanings of predicates may not be an iteration of the same uttering or inscribing if the utterance is not a copy of the uttering. We understand the “copy of” relation to be the iteration relation.
a. The “copy of” relation31
Whether a product that re-occurs in a use by a later speaker is an iteration, though intended differently or with different truth-conditions, depends in part on whether the re-occurrence is a copy or a duplicate.32 A word-for-word duplicate of an utterance or inscription need not be a copy, and so need not be an iteration. The numerous occurrences of “It is time for supper” are duplicates but not copies of some original speaker’s or inscriber’s utterance.
Tolhurst and Wheeler, whose 1979 view we adapt, held that a copy not only had to be connected by the right sort of chain of copyings of the words with their semantic form, but also had to have the same intention, the same force. They took for granted, as I do, that some rational agent’s intention is “behind” every meaningful uttering or inscribing.33 Their theory was in many respects a version of Knapp and Michaels’s.34 My view is that the “copy” relation requires a chain of the right sort between iterations, but that the copies may differ in force from the intention of the original producer. A copy can also differ in truth-conditions when the difference depends on indexicals.
“A is a copy of B” is not transitive. If A is a copy of B and B is a copy of C, then, pretty reliably, A is a copy of C.35 But a long enough chain of copies starting with Tristram Shandy, each having one typographical error, but each a copy of its predecessor, could start with Sterne and end with the Critique of Pure Reason. At some point, the copy ceases to be a copy of Tristram Shandy, even though each scribe is doing his best to transmit the assigned book itself.36
b. Iteration and differences
Since force, as both Derrida and Davidson argue, cannot be encoded in linguistic forms, matching the force of an uttering or inscribing cannot be a requirement for being an iteration. But the truth-conditions (the meaning) of an uttering or inscribing are also not completely given in the utterance or inscription. The available linguistic meaning of an utterance or inscription is the surface form of the utterance. That is what a potential iterator has to work with. A sequence of words may have differently referring expressions, determined by the covert intentions of the producer. The same sequence of words may have different truth-conditions in virtue of differences in semantic form or different meanings of homonyms. Referents of indexicals and demonstratives also yield different truth-conditions.
1. Different semantic form and homonyms
Utterances with the same words may have different truth-conditions by having different covert structure, or terms with multiple truth-definition clauses, different lexical meanings. An inscribing is an expression with its semantic form. “My daughter attends a pretty little girls’ school” has several different possible truth-conditions, readings, considering that there might be schools for pretty little girls, and so on.37 Copies of utterances of this sentence can get the reading wrong and still be copies and so iterations.38
“Pretty” in “My daughter attends a pretty little girls’ school” can mean “rather” rather than “attractive.” The structural ambiguities are still present, but different. Iterators getting structure or word-meaning wrong are still copying, but their copies may deviate too much to be an iteration.
2. Indexicals and demonstratives
Iterations of non-universal utterings and inscribings cannot have precisely the same truth-conditions as the events they iterate, even if the iteration is by the same speaker or inscriber, as noted above in reference to A Way of a Pilgrim. A person who recites the Scout Oath at one troop meeting utters a sentence with different truth-conditions when he recites it at the next meeting. Any iteration of an utterance has an indexical, its tense, which yields different truth-conditions when uttered at different times. Matching truth-conditions cannot be the criterion for a re-occurrence of an expression to be an iteration of an uttering, since that would make it impossible for anyone, including the original speaker, to iterate an utterance or inscription. Even you cannot utter an expression with the exactly same truth-conditions twice.
Indexicals that make claims beyond inserting different agents, times, or places can yield different utterances, with different iteration-conditions. When Fred says, “I am the best bridge-player in Connecticut,” and I repeat the same words, the repetition is not an iteration. “The best” can be true of only one individual. So, if Fred is the best, I cannot be. Both Fred and I can do our best.39
Different things are said and different iterations are produced when the utterances have demonstratives, rather than indexicals, with different references. When Becky says, “Tom is handsome,” speaking of Tom Snyder, and Eileen says “Tom is handsome,” speaking of Tom Smith, they are saying different things. “Tom” has a demonstrative component.40 Their utterances are word-for-word identical, but even if said in the same space in sequence, neither is a copy of the other. Their utterances are duplicate word sequences, but not copies and not iterations. Neither remark is a duplicate of what the other woman said.
Some re-utterings or re-inscribings are copies, and so are iterations even though the re-uttering has different truth-conditions. My recitation of “On my honor …” is a copy, a recitation of the first part of the Scout Oath. Following or simultaneous with Fred’s utterance, it is a copy and an iteration. But Becky’s and Eileen’s remarks are not. Demonstratives, “that,” “he,” and so forth allow different truth-conditions not depending just on who is speaking or inscribing but on covert referents available only to the speaker or inscriber. Indexicals, such as “I” and the tenses, are in principle overt. A speaker using “I,” “here,” or the present tense fixes referents that may be available to an audience from the circumstances of the inscribing or uttering. My iteration of what Fred said is inserting me for Fred and another present (since I repeat after him) in place of Fred’s indexicals. I have copied and produced an iteration, just as a newborn iterates a grimace when a facial expression is presented.41 Copying and imitation are “doing the same thing,” even though the agents, times, and places are different. Indexical differences yield copies, and so iterations.
Speech actions are actions. When I am demonstrating a yoga position, and you assume the same position, we have done the same thing. The events are different, and the participants are different, but the actions are the same. Indexicals depend for their reference of who, where, and when the speaker is.42 Copies of utterances and inscriptions with indexicals necessarily replace their referents with the producer, place, and time of the copier.43
c. What does it take to be a copy? Copying and naming
Tolhurst and Wheeler’s conception of “copy” was inspired by Kripke’s views about reference.44 Kripke held that the reference of a name depended on there being a chain of the right sort of connection between the referent and the name. Some chains of connection do not qualify. While there may be an historical source for Santa Claus, I was still mistaken until age four about whether Santa Claus is real. Kripke’s argument is compelling. There is reference. Reference does not depend on having any correct views about the entity referred to, no “analysis” of “refers to” in other terms will get the facts right. There are cases, such as whether Balboa was naming a bay or an ocean the “Pacific,” that are absolutely indeterminate. But some of my colleagues in the fire department have heard of Heinrich Biber because I mentioned once that I prefer Heinrich Biber to the Beatles. They may have forgotten where they heard the name. Their term “Biber” still refers to the seventeenth-century composer.45 Names have no descriptive content but refer to their bearers because there is the right connection.46
The notion of “x is an iteration of y” rests on an incomplete, irreducible notion, “is a copy of,” with puzzle cases and no sharp definition of the “copy of” relation.47 As with “name of,” “copy of” and so “is an iteration of” require pairs of word-sequence occurrences to be connected by the right sort of chain. “The right sort of chain” is an incomplete, irreducible notion of what it takes for someone’s use of a name to refer to an entity and what it takes for one inscription to be an iteration of the other.
There are puzzling cases where whether “is a copy of” applies is undecidable. In exactly the same way, Kripke’s account of the name relation resists definition. Puzzle cases are easy to construct, even though very many cases are clear in the absence of a theory.
This is not surprising. A term such as “table” cannot be defined in terms of configurations of molecules. There is no height in millimeters that is the shortest height a tall man can be.48 Referring and being an iteration are similar to being a table and being a tall man. Very few terms outside of mathematics and physics have the sharp criteria of application that would allow division of all possible cases into “yes” or “no.” Did Balboa name an ocean or a bay?
We conclude this section by presenting examples where one inscribing is clearly an iteration of an original but is an iteration intuitively. It is a copy, an iteration, but has a different force or truth-conditions from that intended by the original producer or with a different referent for a demonstrative. The producer’s act has “abandoned” its product in the sense that copies can differ in force and reference. That product can be copied, and the copy is an iteration and can itself be copied.
d. Examples of iterations of inscribings and utterances which have different force and reference
1. Genesis:
In Genesis 3:8–11, “The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze and hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’”49 “Walks” implies that God has a physical body and feet. God’s question indicates that God does not know where Adam is.
Genesis 1–2:4 precedes Genesis 3. Genesis 1–2:4 describes a God who creates by fiat. He commands that there be light, creates heaven and Earth, and makes man by fiat, not out of dust. Such a God does not plausibly have a physical body. Such a God would know where Adam was and what had happened. Interpreted as a single continuous inscription, Genesis 1–3 requires that “walking” is figurative and that the interrogative is a “rhetorical” question. God, being non-corporeal and omniscient, could not have walked and must have known where Adam was.
The original inscribing of Genesis 2:5–3, according to modern Biblical scholarship, supposed a God lacking omniscience and having a divine but physical existence. Genesis 2:5–3, as incorporated into Torah, describes God as God had come to be conceived by scribes some centuries after the original inscription. As part of Genesis as a whole, “walk” is figural and God’s question is rhetorical.50
On that understanding, given that both Genesis 1 and Genesis 3 were true, the real meaning of the iterations is not determined by the intentions of the original inscriber of Genesis 3 but by what Torah means. Torah as it now exists seems to have been in place since the time of Ezra, after the Babylonian Captivity. The evolving understandings of scribes between circa 1000 and 500 BCE became the understandings of Torah by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Modern Biblical scholarship has uncovered the force of the original inscriber(s) of Genesis 3. The original force was literal assertion. God’s question was a sincere request for Adam to reveal his whereabouts. That is different from what the iteration, as part of a larger inscription, means. The original inscriber’s inscribing, as an inscription, has been iterated in an inscribing that now means something other than what the inscriber intended.
2. Copies of the New Testament with different reference
Changes of reference in interpreters’ understanding of demonstratives and indexicals can have consequences. In Matthew, becoming a Christian is becoming a Jew who follows Jesus.51 A Christian convert is joining a sect, not changing religions.52 So, in Matthew 27:25–26, the referent of “the people” and “us and our children” in “And with one voice the people cried, ‘His blood be on us and on our children’” is the people present on the occasion.
“Us” is an expression with an indexical component (it is a plurality including the speaker or inscriber) but also has a demonstrative component (the intended other members of the plurality). So, the reference of “us” in Matthew depends on a demonstrative element in Matthew’s inscribing. We can reasonably conjecture the extension of “us” Matthew was reporting. “Us” combines indexical and demonstrative elements—a determinate speaker and a plurality that depends on who the speaker has in mind. When Matthew was written, Christians regarded themselves as of course Jews. Most Christians were Jews. Almost certainly, Matthew took the Jews calling on themselves this curse to be those present. Matthew, Peter, and the other disciples were all Jews, so he could hardly have taken the curse to apply to all Jews.
But in the decades between the writing of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John, converts to Christianity, thanks to Paul, have come to be largely Greek.53 So, in John, even a Jew converting to Christianity is no longer a Jew. “The Jews” throughout John are the opponents of the Christians. With that conception of “Jew,” and reading the Gospels as a single document, it is possible to read the referent of “the people” and “us and our children” in the Matthew 27 passage as referring to all Jews and their descendants.54 In much of the history of Christianity the inclusive reading of “us” was assigned as the reference. Monks copying the Gospels were copying “us” with the “inclusive” reading. There can be little question that Medieval scribes produced iterations of Matthew’s original inscription.55 There can be little question also that their copies of Matthew, even though word for word identical and intended as copies, differed from Matthew’s intention. A demonstrative had been gotten wrong, under the influence of a very powerful work, the Gospel of John. This re-understanding of the intended plurality of “us” differs little from the re-assignment of force to Genesis 3.
3. Senior English, 1962
The intended referent of a demonstrative: Mrs. Ackley had assigned a Beat poem, one of Ginsberg’s formless kvetchings. She asked my opinion. I said, “I think it was an experiment which failed.” Mrs. Ackley took my “it” to refer to her choice of assignment. I intended my “it” to refer to the poem, not its assignment. But I ended up at the principal’s office, despite protestations. Mrs. Ackley had misunderstood my uttering, but she reasonably understood my utterance. My uttering had become an utterance whose effective interpretation was in the hands of authority.
4. The Declaration of Independence
This document declares that it is self-evident that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The original writers and the endorsers can be taken as meaning by “men” “human being” and somehow forgetting about women, slaves, and children or, rather, taking the extension of “man” to be “adult free male.” When the phrase is quoted on the Fourth of July, it means “human being.” The founding fathers, like early writers of Biblical passages, necessarily abandoned their inscription, the product which, for similar reasons to those that motivated understandings of Biblical texts, later had to be true. If “all men are created equal,” as a founding document, has to be true, “men” means “human being.” Whether that was the intent of the signers’ inscription is another question. Whether a current citation of the Declaration of Independence is a duplicate or a copy is an interesting question, to which I have no answer.
5. The Pledge of Allegiance
Every monthly meeting of the Willington Hill Fire Department starts with a group recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Each member’s recitation is a copy of an original. The indexical “I” in each recitation refers to a distinct individual. The indexical determined by the present tense refers to the time of the beginning of this month’s meeting, which is different from last month’s meeting. Differences in force are also possible. My re-citation of “under God” and “with liberty and justice for all” may have different force from the recitations by my fellow fifty-year mates. I could have a covert “(I wish)” after “with liberty and justice for all,” altering its force. On other occasions when I feel more patriotic and hopeful, the force of my uttering may be a sincere assertion. I’m saying the Pledge of Allegiance, iterating an original by some chain. My recitation is a copy, even though the forces and referents of indexicals of many phrases of my uttering may differ from those of the composing committee and many of my fellow reciters.
6. The Haggadah and the Nicene Creed
There have been billions of recitations of Deuteronomy 28:5 (“My father was a wandering Aramaean …”) and of the Nicene Creed (“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen …”). The Haggadah and the Nicene Creed are paradigm iterable, recitable documents. The referent of “my” and “we” is different at different Seders and church services. The tense indexical components of “was” and “believe” are always different. Recitations of the Haggadah and the Nicene Creed are iterations of the Creed, despite differences in the referents of indexicals.
Notes
B) An exchange between Henry Staten (HS), Joshua Kates (JK), and Walter Benn Michaels that picks up an earlier part of their discussion.
C) Kates’s discursive response to Michaels’s response.
D) Michaels, in closing, answers both Kates and Staten.
A) Walter Benn Michaels (who begins by quoting Derrida from “Signature Event Context” [SEC])
“To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning … when I say ‘my future disappearance’ … I ought to be able to say my disappearance, pure and simple, my nonpresence in general, for instance the nonpresence of my intention of saying something meaningful ….”1
So, my piece argues that this cannot be true. One way that Steve [Knapp] and I have argued that it (or similar claims) can’t be true is an argument from identity—the idea that a text can have many (or any) meanings that are not the intended one requires some account of what the identity of the text consists in (such that, having many meanings it still counts as the same text). The point about the sign here is that if you think of the sign as signifier/signified, then (to take a classic example) “vegetable” understood to mean “growing” and understood to mean “vegetable” would be two different signs, not two different meaning of the same sign or two different meanings of the same text. Which is, in my view, a reason Derrida wants to get rid of the whole apparatus of the sign. So, the identity of the text (if you wanted to claim the same text had these different meanings) would consist in identity of signifier, not identity of signs. But while it’s obviously true that the same signifiers can have lots of different signifieds, it’s not obviously true that identity of signifier should count as identity of text (it’s closer to obviously false—see Pierre Menard).
But in this paper, I wanted to come at the problem through the account of the production of the text that is required to imagine the author as producing marks, not signs—the basic idea being that imagining the writer as producing a mark that can mean different things (produced and abandoned) instead of understanding the writer as meaning something (i.e., of imagining that the mark is the object of interpretation instead of the writer’s act being the object of interpretation) commits you to exactly the theory of action in which the intention is located outside the act. The problem with this is not exactly that it’s “mentalist” (in Henry’s terms) but that it treats the act on the model of event causality. Which is a mistake not because the act is removed from the world of cause and effect but because the intention cannot (or cannot only) be understood as the cause of the act but as its description. And the obvious way to get at the difference is by noting that every event has lots of causes, but every intention has only one (correct) description. So, it could be right to say that the heat caused Henry to open the window and maybe that his restlessness also caused him to open the window, but the correct description of what he did was he opened the window.
In the various things you guys have written, I don’t see a straightforward defense of the original Derridean position on “the nonpresence of my intention,” although what I take to be Henry’s defense of the idea that intention (when you identify it with “consciousness?”) plays some role, but not a dispositive one, seems closest. And I think Henry ends up committing himself to exactly the same view of intention as something outside the act that Derrida does—this is the mentalism that you think plays some role but a much diminished one. But (pace Josh’s nervousness about how to read Anscombe on mistakes), the relevance of intention here is built into any description of any act. It’s not like it matters what’s going on inside your head when you do anything—that is, there’s not some separate mental event going on when you open the window or when you say I’m opening the window. But it’s impossible to describe what you’re doing without the reference to what you’re intending to do. As you can see right away in the case of failure—I was trying to open the window is a description of what your intention was. So, if intention requires something mental, it’s a mentalism that no one can possibly avoid and that is not even sidestepped for a second by, say, not using the word “meaning.” Without the account of your intention, all you could say about a failed act of opening the window is that Henry pushed on the window for a while and then stopped. So, yeah, the possibility of failure is important, but precisely (as I say in the paper) because it makes clear the hegemony of intention. And a word like meaning only has the mentalist problems Henry associates with it if you’re committed to the idea of the intention as disarticulable from the text (which, of course, I argue that Derrida is and, indeed, is what he says in the quote at the head of this note and in the very idea of the abandoned text).
Josh—even more than Henry—seems to think that a more complicated account of intentionality will alter the basic Against Theory (AT) claim—the text means only and always what its author meant by it. But the uncontroversial fact that virtually everything we do (and therefore virtually everything we can possibly call an intention) is only possible because of a million things that exists independent of our intention is just the condition of possibility of our acting—I couldn’t open the window unless there were windows and a whole set of beliefs and desires related to windows, etc., but all that doesn’t complicate my opening a window—it just helps to explain what opening a window is (and therefore what I am doing). Same thing would be true for knowing, what, say a “novel” is—insofar as I understand myself as writing one, it will help in understanding what I’m doing. So, yes, genre is relevant if the author is trying to write in one. The invocation of “context” in general seems to me otiose since everything you want from context is built into our idea of action in the first place. And, according to me, the same goes for rules, etc. The question of the kind of relevance rules have is only a question about whether someone is trying to follow the rules. If you’re trying to use a code and you screw up, the code is as important to understanding what you were doing as the window you were trying to raise is. Indeed, code only enters my discussion at all because Derrida assigns to it a crucial role in the original and necessary break with intention, the readability that survives the nonpresence of my intention. The way to put this in relation to Derrida would be that the aporetic relation between code and context isn’t really aporetic, but also that context adds nothing to the general claim that the object of our interest is what the speaker is doing and that the relevance of the rules is also entirely a function of the speaker’s following (or not) those rules.
B) Henry Staten
HS: I wasn’t imputing a theory of consciousness to him [WM], I was arguing that he needs to explain how he does without such a theory; or, alternately, in your helpful formulation, he needs to confront the tautologous nature of his claim.2 The tautology, as I read it, is “the meaning of ‘meaning’ is simply what the utterer means.” But I’m arguing that positing this tautology requires an explanation of how this can be so. I think the vast majority of people would agree with this tautology, but if you asked them to explain why this was so, they would resort to mentalist talk (if they were articulate enough to even be able to explain). So, in a statistical sense, Walter could argue that this is indeed the meaning of “meaning.” But Wittgenstein’s argument that meaning is use isn’t about current statistics; it’s about how the concept of meaning had to have evolved, and what must be the case for there to be language: it’s about how classical mentalism is simply wrong.
WM (now commenting on an example HS had earlier offered): But I do think you’re not feeling the force of your own example. If someone were to say to your happy guy, “actually, I happen to know the late whoever was just screwing with you and actually meant the opposite of what he said,” the happy guy would spend his life worrying about it—that’s all the theory of “mental activity” anyone needs for this discussion.
HS: I assume you mean that all you have to do is say “he meant” and that constitutes all the theory we need. This is a perfect example of how you beg the question of “the meaning of ‘meaning.’” All you have to do is use the word, and the magic act is fulfilled: meaning originating in the utterer, somehow that doesn’t need to be explained, is transcendentally glued to the utterance. You’re like the magician who has his assistant stand on a chair, and then removes the chair and leaves the assistant floating in mid-air. (If we carried this discussion much further we’d be brought up against the Derridean question of the “pristine origin.”) Transcendentality means: no merely contingent factor, nothing empirical, no chance can befall THIS. That’s also what an “essence” is: a something/nothing that always is what it is, regardless of context. You want all the advantages of metaphysics while shunning the association.
WM: If you were to say to happy (now less happy) guy, “Dude, it doesn’t matter what was going on inside his head, what matters is that the scene of whatever makes what he said count as sincere (the sincerity being just as ‘mental’ as the lack of it) praise,” he would think you had entirely missed the point.
HS: Of course! Because what matters here is indeed what went on inside his head. That happens sometimes; when we’re talking about sincerity of course the crucial bit is what went on inside his head. I have no problem with that; I’m entirely comfortable with the notion of meaning-in-the head, and I know just how important that is. What I deny is that meaning-in-the-head can perform the transcendental role that you assign it because meaning-in-the-head is one thing, and meaning in the actualized sign is another, and the MEANING of “meaning” is derived from words in the world, not from words in the head; as Volosinov says, word is two-sided and derives all its form from outside. You want to collapse the empirical phenomenon of language and language use into the mere functioning of cause and effect and reserve the phenomenon of actual meaning for the mental part, which is a very respectable point of view with an ancient lineage, but you want to do without all of the metaphysical baggage that that point of view brings with it. Here, however, it sounds like you are saying that what matters is what went on inside is head, but you don’t want to explicitly commit to saying that.
WM: Which you would have. The question “was he complimenting me or not” does not require any special theory of mental activity, but it’s not about anything other than what the speaker meant.
HS: Here’s the collapse. No need to tie it to mental activity because “what the speaker meant” just means THIS (the infrangible what-you-mean-is-what-you-mean, and no need to worry about how this can be, or how it articulates with all the philosophical debates about meaning). Which I admire as a bold and noble enterprise that has held my interest for a long time—comparable to Wittgenstein’s positing “meaning is use” in a way that simply sidestepped classical theory of mind. But that’s a big bite to chew off.
C) Joshua Kates
Walter, your latest account of where you’re at gives a powerful restatement of your own position in respect to what you call “the identity of the text” and the role that intention must play in it. Your arguments go awry, however, in your discussion of the two authors you treat: Derrida and Anscombe—branding Derrida’s position wrong and Anscombe’s right. Neither, however, say what you say they say and these incongruities, in turn, let be identified the central problems with your own stance.
1) Derrida
Your criticism of Derrida culminates in the provocative portmanteau claim: a) that Derrida locates “intention … outside the act” of making a mark; and b) that Derrida’s so placing of intention outside the act gives a causal efficacy (like billiard balls) to the marks themselves. Neither of these can be right.
The first amounts to the kind of linguisticism all too common in poor interpretations of Derrida over the years. The principal problem any interpretation of the mark and writing faces is how they relate, not just to language but to its employment, to a message as well as to a code. Derrida’s notion of writing (and also the mark), whatever else it is, refers to a discursive instance, to language put to use; it is something done, something that happens, not a stand-alone structure or rule or so on. Many early readers of Derrida overlooked this and took Derrida’s writing basically as equivalent to language on its own—something like a signifier, or a supersignifier.
This same error appears in your submission, Walter, when you approach the mark specifically by way of code. You say of Derrida that “he thinks that because the speaker’s intended meaning only counts as an utterance insofar as it is structured ‘in conformity to a code’ and since the code counts as a code only insofar as it is readable without any reference to (in the absolute absence of) the writer, the intended meaning is itself a kind of idealization that the utterance breaks with right from the start: ‘understanding the intended meaning’ of the utterance is itself ‘problematical.’”
You here assert that Derrida denies “intended meaning” any weight since the supervening part played by code negates the role of intention “right from the start.” But were this Derrida’s conception, why talk of a mark or writing at all? The code, you say, makes the mark subject to multiple interpretations; it governs the text immediately and breaks with speakers (and presumably receivers), so what then is Derrida’s specific aim in talking of intentions and authors and their marks and inscriptions, even if the former two are somehow abandoned? Similarly, why—not to mention how—go on to discuss context and eventually signature?
Of course, your idea, the one underlying your title, Walter, is that, on Derrida’s scheme, an intention and a producer are needed in order to turn over the engine, as it were, to generate the marks or inscriptions in the first place (hence produced and abandoned). But what causes all the ruckus, what governs, on this scenario is not the mark, writing, or the inscription, but, again, the code, which amounts to saying that language gives the text its identity and everything else falls by the wayside.
Writing, the mark, however, are different from a code or even its instantiation. (Derrida later in SEC calls code their “condition of possibility and impossibility.”) Not the intentionless mark, some piece of code or language, operates (potentially in absolute absence), but rather what has been itself intentionally invested—hence Derrida’s continued talk of writing, the mark, and of the “written syntagma.” (Note in the omitted portions of the passage from SEC that you quote that Derrida always speaks of the “present” intention as what is missing—including cases of inattention—not the intention simpliciter, as he used to like to say.) The point of the mark (and of early deconstruction more generally) is that the intentional field, as Derrida was sometimes wont to put this, ultimately exceeds any individual’s intentional act and even all consciousness. A certain transcendental writing leads to a rethinking and a transumption of intention as a field—thanks to the former’s alliance with absolute otherness (“ … the ‘effect’ of transcendentality is linked necessarily to the possibility of writing” [SEC 8]). Here and in all his early work, Derrida thus combines the force of speech with the force of language, in part to account for the peculiar ontology of language (which requires a sort of transcendental difference, the rethinking of which writing also allows), none of which is captured in your talk of the mark.
Speaking of marks having a causal force, as Henry powerfully points out in some of his contributions, is, then, wholly out of line with, yes, Derrida’s intentions. The latter only holds if the mark and writing have been emptied of any act-character whatsoever, again raising the question of why talk about the mark or writing at all, not to mention contexts, events, and signatures. The text so understood becomes entirely foreign to any instance of genuine understanding, rather than being what includes and accounts for such understanding (as well as being something more, a certain excess)—Derrida wanting both.
You want to establish the identity of the text, Walter, because without such an identity, you fear whether an interpretation is right or wrong will be impossible, meaningless. Given the foregoing, it is far from clear, however, that marks as conceived by Derrida do comprise a text’s identity in your sense. This would be not because the text has no identity but because Derrida frames it as having both an identity and something other than an identity, and the latter—not because intention is taken out of it, but because intention is taken out of itself—is different from what it is usually thought to be. That the text should be both identical and not may be foolish—it may lead too easily to the notion that a text is mere marks about which one can say anything (as Henry also points out); it may even be impossible, but these are different judgements than yours that marks (based on a code) for Derrida simply are the text’s identity and that they function causally.
2) Anscombe
Once more, let’s ask along with you Walter, in what, then, does the identity of a text consist? What is a text? The three of us—you, Henry, and I—all agree a text is not a signifier, a sign, a piece of language or code. Is it thing-like at all? Perhaps a tool (or conglomeration of tools) of some kind informed by a techne handed down across generations, as Henry, I believe, suggests?
I say no: it is not a thing of any sort. You, Walter, agree, I think: the ontology of text for you consists in it being an intention. In your work with Knapp and for a while after, your recourse to intention, however, merely pushed the problem back a step; you and Knapp systematically avoided the question posed by intention’s own ontology. More recently, you have turned to a theory of action to account for intention’s ontology. The ontology of action now remains unplumbed, and as is evident in your response (see below), you reify action and hence reify the non-reifed text under new terms.
Of course, you specifically appeal to Anscombe for your theory of action. But just as with Derrida, so with Anscombe, you frame her teaching on terms counter to her own account.
More specifically, you say that there can only be one answer and thus one intention, on which basis you wish to affirm the self-same text: “every intention,” you write “has only one (correct) description.” For Anscombe however, actions are events under a description, a description that indeed involves why what happens happens, which is where the intention part comes in. This does not, however, prevent there being multiple descriptions of a given action, multiple intentions on the part of those doing them, nor on the part of those describing, which are not always or even usually the ones doing the actions.
Anscombe indeed allows that there can be multiple descriptions of someone doing what is otherwise the same thing. She speaks of a person crossing a road and says that most of what people do falls under the intentional, just by dint of being identified or described, by us—“to call an action intentional is to say it is intentional under some description that we give (or could give) of it.”3 Such intentionality clearly allows for multiple imputations and multiple descriptions of someone’s act: he is crossing the road; he is going to the store; he is avoiding his neighbor; and so on.
This conflicts not with your claim, Walter, that it is impossible to describe what someone is doing without speaking of their intention, without granting them first person authority—the agent in question may say I wasn’t trying to avoid so-and-so, and that description might be discredited, though, as Henry points out, this could also lead to a longer conversation if the person nevertheless crossed the road repeatedly when so-and-so came into view; intention is not the exclusive provenance of the agent.
Anscombe’s own account denies that the author/speaker always and necessarily has a privileged role in offering a description of their action; it also and equally denies that there is always a single such description. In respect to her most central and discussed example, Anscombe indeed has something more complex to say than you about what could be called the univocity of the act.
Anscombe’s most famous example is that of a man pumping poisoned water into a house to kill its (evil) inhabitants at the behest and pay of someone else. In discussing it, she offers a hierarchy of descriptions, acts, and thus intentions, that integrates some, and not other, acts into a single act, while all are otherwise intentional: pumping the water, arranging the hose, beating out a rhythm while doing so, etc. Many intentions and acts can thus describe a single event, here one which in part takes place simultaneously and also over time (the poisoning).
Taking Anscombe at her word, then, how many more intentional acts and possible descriptions of same, Walter, would be furnished by a novel or a poem, which unfolds over time both in being written and being read by multiple readers on multiple occasions? Literature just is more complicated than opening a window. And though some such acts as described may be folded into an overarching one—Shakespeare gives us Edmund to contrast with Edgar—it is unlikely all are, and this is especially the case, since, again, these descriptions (of the author’s intentional acts, of their text) are ones, though not exclusively, that “we could offer.”
Your main pushback against me falls on this possibility of multiple readings, each answering, to various degrees, to what an author did and meant. It centers on context, which for you further takes in (linguistic) rules and conventions, all being subordinated to a univocal intention. For you, rules, code, conventions, language are all built into the action and only relevant insofar as this is the case. (“The question of the kind of relevance rules have,” you write, “is only a question about whether someone is trying to follow the rules. If you’re trying to use a code and you screw up, the code is as important to understanding what you were doing as the window you were trying to raise is.”)
You let yourself too easily off the hook here, however. I have long thought and still think you have a real problem in the manner in which you take into account codes, conventions, and languages in AT and in all your subsequent writings. Unlike my own view, which denies them any relevance at all, since not just texts but all discourse transpires entirely as an event, you acknowledge codes, conventions, and rules—here as a “condition of possibility” alongside “a million other things.”
Your position in respect to language and code so qualified, however, is precisely the reverse of the one that you impute to Derrida: for you codes and the such-like only count insofar as they are governed, not abandoned by the intentional act of the penperson (the writer/author); for Derrida, you claim, codes and conventions are the broader category that supersedes the intentional act and survives its abandonment. Either scenario, however, makes no difference, and you yourself necessarily fail into the same problem that you accuse Derrida of succumbing to.
Granting your stipulation about intention’s governing, the problem remains of what to say about code, language, rules themselves—indeed of how to speak about them at all. Even as a condition of possibility, you must grant that conventions, rules, codes exist and are identifiable in their own right. Yet this flies in the face of what you have long denied: namely that someone could treat a text simply as a piece of language, an instance of code or convention. Though you would insist that they are not interpreting if they do this—they only interpret when they interpret what the author intended by using the conventions, codes, and so on—as long as there are codes and so forth, readers could take the texts to be governed by the codes or language and dispense with the intention (even if this may mean choosing among languages). But if, to this extent, interpreting the text as language or code is even merely possible, intention must be outside, or at least not inside, the text.
Recall in AT signifiers in the wave poem only resembled signifiers. Should not, then, instances of code, convention, or language, divorced from their intention not be code, convention, or language at all—only resemble same? But then how to talk about them in their own right or grant them any currency, including as a condition of possibility?
In my submission, I unfold further how to eliminate any role for languages or code and so on when conceiving texts and discourse more generally, a position which baldly stated appears counter-intuitive. (In other recent essays, I also suggest that the manner in which something like the force of language and its signifiers can be registered is in the always necessarily retroactive fashion sketched by Shannon’s information entropy.)
My account requires context; it makes the sentence and larger wholes the units of expression, and it requires context in both other things said, other instances of discourse, but also in the world in its familiarity, as well as its unfamiliarity. The idea is that discourse, writing as well as speech, are of a sort that they can never stand alone (are not things of any sort, not even ones standing in some identifiable techne) but are always coeval with something other than themselves, the worldly affairs, circumstances, aims that they are about and express. For this reason, discourse is not reifiable, not objectifiable as a thing or system or structure—only in more speech, in more writing with their own contexts, in a citationality without reserve, as I suggest in my submission’s second part, can it be charted.
Only in this way can a text be an action, if it is an event in this sense. Anscombe’s own burden when it comes to action (generally) in fact is showing how it can be at once an event (what happens, in her case involving causal relations, which I do not believe pertain directly to discourse) and also something I do, something subject to a description involving an answer to the question why, and thus intentional. You downplay this aspect of Anscombe’s thinking, including how for her, actions involve contexts, causes, and effects in order to adapt her theory to texts; you also dispense, of course, with the whole business of it being (often) we who offer descriptions that identify agents’ intentions. So proceeding, as Henry also suggests, you again make the act absolute, effectively reifying and mystifying the (almost wholly) non-reifiable. There is, however, no need when speaking of texts to pushback against what some, like Derrida, at least at moments, deem the absolutely ungovernable by insisting that intention can never be abandoned. The governed and the ungoverned, the abandoned and not, instead, are always at work together every time that there is discourse.
D) Walter Benn Michaels’s Closing Response
There are lots of questions raised in these closing comments but several seem to me to stand out: what kind of difference (if any) is made when the action in question is, say, writing a novel rather than opening a window; what the contribution of the reader is; what the relation between code and intention is and, as Henry vividly puts it, whether anyone can say “what you mean is what you mean” without producing an account of what they mean by meaning.
Josh makes the “Literature just is more complicated than opening a window” argument by adducing Anscombe’s example of the man pumping water where, in contrast to our man opening the window, there are at least four descriptions (moving his arm, operating the pump, replenishing the water supply, poisoning the inhabitants) of what he’s doing. But Anscombe’s point is not that there are four descriptions instead of just one, it’s that that “we can speak equally well of four corresponding intentions, or of one intention” because the first three are “swallowed up” by the fourth. So, to understand the first three is to understand them as the “means” to the fourth, the “end.” If you don’t understand the end, you haven’t understood the action. And insofar as there are also descriptions that don’t form part of the “series” of means toward that end—say, the man is “beating out the rhythm of God Save the Queen in the clicking of the pump”—the correct description of that is equally an account of what he means to be doing.
So, if we take this multiplicity as a model for writing a novel or a poem, we haven’t for a moment produced anything that takes us away from the intentionalist claim that understanding complicated and even conflicting acts is nothing but understanding (the complicated and conflicting) things the agent is doing. And we haven’t moved one step in the direction of deconstruction’s “essential drift.” To go there, we would have to trade in means and ends for causes and effects, which would include the act’s consequences in its description and make intention relevant in precisely the way I say Derrida does—not as an agent’s answer to the question “why” but as a cause.
Josh’s further concern is not just with how many descriptions of an action there can be but also with who gets to give them. He reminds us that it’s “we” who are coming up with our account of what the man is doing and reprimands me for dispensing with “the whole business of it being (often) we who offer descriptions that identify agent’s intentions.” But, when we’re reading a text—which is to say, explaining what someone else has done—who else could it be? And what difference does it make? If I understand Anscombe’s man clicking out God Save the Queen as proclaiming his allegiance to the Crown while he poisons the bad “party chiefs” (in hopes of putting in the “good” ones), that’s my description of his action. And if you understand him as making a joke about his dislike of the Queen, whom he considers actually to be one of the bad ones, that’s your description. But they’re both descriptions of his action. And whatever he was doing, it’s not altered by what we think he was doing. Which would be true even if one of our descriptions seemed to us (and maybe even to him) better than the description the man himself gave. Someone who explains my behavior better than I do does not thereby alter the behavior he explains.
But what if God Save the Queen were in code, maybe a warning to the about-to-be poisoned? Derrida says that a code cannot be structurally secret, that it must be able to function in the “radical absence” of every addressee and of every producer. Josh thinks that when Derrida insists that the text breaks with the intention of the writer he means “the present intention,” not intention as such, that he leaves room for “what has been intentionally invested.” Presumably this means something like what people have meant or ordinarily mean when they utter the words in question? But in Derrida’s insistence on a “secret cypher” known only by “two ‘subjects’” and necessarily able to function in the radical absence of both, there’s no intentional investment to be found. Indeed, in Spurs, there’s only “one subject,” the point in both texts being that “I have forgotten my umbrella” is “structurally liberated from any living meaning,” that it must function without the invocation of any intention.4 And it’s only because he imagines this absolute separation of the text from any intention that he can also imagine the text as “indefinitely open.”5
But how then should we understand what Josh describes as Derrida’s own commitment to the (intentional) act, to “language,” as Josh says, “put to use.” That’s actually the question addressed by “Produced and Abandoned,” the question of what kind of act Derrida understands writing to be. And the answer I give is that he assigns intention a causal role, and that it’s in this causal role that intention has its place but is unable to govern, which is what it means to think of the utterance as “abandoned” or “structurally liberated” (same description, different affect).
That’s why I’m not saying that intention does govern—scenes of writing, codes, or anything else. Or that it can never be abandoned, or that we need to push back against the “absolutely ungovernable.” The whole melodrama of governance (with the cast of characters celebrated in Josh’s closing peroration: “the governed and the ungoverned, the abandoned and not … always at work all together every time”) is precisely what’s created by the imagination of intention as something either addable to or subtractable from the text, as governing or failing to govern. Once you think of intention as governing (or not) and of meaning as being governed (or not), you’re committed (whether you want to be or not) to what Anscombe called the imagination of intention as an “extra property” of actions rather than a “form of description of events.”
Henry’s persistent worry—that I ought to explain what I think meaning is and not just keep on saying something like “the meaning of ‘meaning’ is simply what the utterer means,” and that I need to be able to do so without resorting to “mentalist talk”—seems helpful to me here in a way that maybe my response to his irony example didn’t bring out. Not because I can say what he wants me to but because the identification of the meaning of a text with what its author means emerges from what we do regardless of what we say about it.
Part of the problem with the mean teacher is that it’s more plausible to think of him as just lying, in which case there’s no issue about what he meant, just about how he really felt. But in situations where our understanding of what someone said (as opposed to our belief in the truth of what someone said) is foregrounded, the question of intention is too. When, for example, we produce conflicting interpretations of a text, what are we disagreeing about? We might occasionally understand ourselves as disagreeing about the meaning of a word in the sense that we disagree about its definition. And we could end that disagreement by looking it up in the dictionary. This would at least put a little distance between our sense of a word’s meaning and our sense of what the speaker meant by it.
But not very often and not for long. Not for long because resolving our disagreement about what the word means in the language would leave open the question of whether the speaker was using it to mean what it means in the language. And not very often because our characteristic disagreements are precisely about how the speaker was using it. The dictionary doesn’t tell us whether Wordsworth’s “rocks and stones” are inanimate objects or living bits of nature. And the dictionary won’t tell us whether Milton was of the Devil’s party or whether the ghosts at Bly are figments of the governess’s imagination. Those disagreements are about how words are being used in a particular text. In other words, the identification of meaning with what the writer/speaker means is already in place whenever we disagree (or agree) about the meaning of a text, and it doesn’t matter what most people would say or whether they would resort to mentalist talk. Just as, in an only slightly different way, it doesn’t matter if Derrida isn’t talking about ordinary meaning but is denying the absolute fullness of meaning. Because if the absolutely full meaning he denies is the text that can’t be misunderstood, that’s the conflation of meaning and communicating that I criticize. And if it isn’t the text that can’t be misunderstood, then the denial is mistaken—no meaning is ever not full.
Another way to get at this is just to say that the identification of what the text means with what the author intends is already in place without our having any recourse to a theory of intention or to a positive account of intention as a mental state. While the work that it does in place—determining the act—makes clear the mistake in imagining that the text we write could be either controlled by or liberated from what we meant.
Notes
HS had written: Consider: I say something ironically, but say it in a serious tone, and am completely convincing in my seriousness, and nothing ever happens to make anyone think I wasn’t serious. I smile and say to a student, “you’re the smartest student in the class,” when I think he’s a moron, and I clasp his shoulder affectionately and give him an A on his paper; and I privately enjoy having bamboozled this moron in this way. What’s the status of the private irony? This is a curious fact about my psychological weirdness, not anything having to do with “meaning.”
HS: Normally, if we mean an utterance ironically, we give an outward sign that this is the case—either by saying it in an ironic tone, or by a facial expression, or some other sign, perhaps not to the person I’m addressing but to someone else who is present, a sly sideways look, for example, that the addressee doesn’t see. But suppose in this case we say it, and act, in a way that is exactly how we would do it if we meant it seriously. Something has happened “in my head” here, something that we can definitely call “merely mental,” which is completely divorced from what I propose we call the scene of utterance. Have I successfully meant “you’re so smart” ironically? I meant it that way “in my head,” but did the actual utterance in its context mean that?
Now suppose immediately after I say this the addressee walks out the door, and within seconds I have a heart attack and die. And suppose further that I’m a world-famous philosopher, and my addressee had a voice recorder in his pocket because he wanted a record of having talked personally with me, and he takes it home and plays what I said to him for his friends, and they congratulate him, and he keeps the recording permanently and treasures it the rest of his life, and passes it down to his heirs, who also treasure it for generation after generation. What is the relation of my conscious sense that I meant it ironically to the worldly reception of my words? Did I successfully mean it ironically, regardless of the fact that no one ever would be able to guess this, and despite the fact that I executed the speech-act of its utterance in a way that checks off all the boxes of what Austin considered a happy speech-act?
WM: Answer to the last question—yes. A happy misinterpretation!
HS: That means you subscribe to a purely mentalistic theory of meaning.
WM: Is the difference between, say, something done accidentally and something done on purpose problematically mental in your view? Nothing is done at all in anyone’s head—but the question of the purpose of any action is not reducible to what other people think it is. And, if it were, they’d still be deploying the concept of purpose. As they do in your example where everybody takes the sentence as an expression of the speaker’s intention. That’s why the guy’s so happy! Your example doesn’t abandon intention for a millisecond. It just substitutes what’s plausible for them to believe about what the speaker meant for what he actually meant.
HS (Self-cite): I found the following in some old screed of mine, commenting on Iseminger’s article in his important collection Intention and Interpretation, and I thought it was relevant to the current debate. Iseminger writes, “what would make it the case … would be some fact about … that person’s thoughts … at the time.”1 (Car ran out of gas. But compare: my car is out of gas, and I want a ride to the gas station, but I’m a literary theorist and when someone picks me up, I concentrate on meaning “my car emerged from a cloud of argon” when I say “my cloud ran out of gas.” Now what follows? Say the other guy says, “I’ll take you down the road to the next service station.” I could then reply, “Oh, I meant …,” in which case puzzlement ensues. Or I say, yes, I do need gas also, but that wasn’t what I meant, I meant ….” Again, puzzlement ensues; I will now have to explain that I’m a literary theorist who wanted to prove …)
What this shows is that the ontological mode of positing theses about meaning collapses the complexity of the scene of meaning in a way that falsifies rather than illuminates it. I can mentally “mean” whatever I like when I say these words, but it is only to the degree that this mental act engages the scene of meaning that it is connected with the language game with the word “meaning” as this language game has evolved outside of the language game of theoretical speculation. There is, as Wittgenstein says, a before and an after of the punctual use of language, and this before and after, and not the punctual mental act accompanying the utterance, are constitutive of meaning.
HS: One last thing. I didn’t answer your question about the difference between something done on purpose and something done accidentally. I think it depends on the particular occasion. It might have everything to do with conscious intention, and it might require a more nuanced analysis, but in a standard case, it would require a reference to conscious volition somewhere along the line. For example, I might work on an assembly line and do the same operation many times per day, then screw it up one time. It might by this time have become completely automatic so that I spend my time daydreaming while I work; so nothing need have gone on in my consciousness (more accurate than ‘in my head’) when I screw it up. But I’m mortified that I did it, and this is because it’s my standing intention to do it right and lose my job. Further, when I was learning to do it, I put a great deal of conscious intention into the learning. In other cases, conscious volition might be operating the whole time. The invocation of the mental isn’t something I categorically reject; it’s just not the be-all and end-all that traditional mentalism takes it to be. What’s your analysis?
WM: The question of relative degrees of consciousness seems to me beside the theoretical point—if it’s done on purpose, you can’t explain what was done without recourse to the category of intention. So, insofar as we understand every text to be the product of an act, understanding the text involves understanding the act—not understanding some distinct mental event going on inside someone’s head, but understanding what someone was doing. When I raise my arm to reach for a dish on a high shelf, my intention is not some additional or prior act taking place inside my head (maybe I’m thinking about it, maybe I’m not—doesn’t matter). And it’s not something that can be added to (or subtracted from) the motion of my arm (Wittgenstein’s famous point). It’s built into the description of what I’m doing by moving my arm, the answer I can give to the question why. Although you say this involves question begging, it’s just as essential to your own analysis as it is to mine.
And the whole attempt to imagine the text as if no one had produced it—an attempt that’s foundational for Derrida since he regards it as built in even when of course someone did produce it—can’t help but position what the author was doing as not the explanation of the text but the cause of it—which is why he and you end up locating the intention outside the text. This is Derrida’s mistake. What he understands as radical about his account of the speech act (the necessary displacement of the “governing” intention) is in fact what’s most traditional about it—the location of the intention in a “place” from which it seeks to govern but, of course, can’t. (Obviously, it’s not the fact that it’s traditional that’s the problem.) In other words, once your options are governing/not governing, you’re screwed.
Joshua Kates (JK): I’m with you on all of this; I don’t think consciousness has anything to do with it, and I don’t think that you think consciousness has anything to do with it. But when you speak of description a little later in your second to last remark, I think things become more difficult for you. I, Anscombe, Heidegger, others—and Henry’s reference to Wittgenstein fits here—claim such descriptions arise in a context, without which 1) the doer could not hold the intention they had—in which they could not describe themselves as doing x or y; and 2) that context also includes, to varying degree, others who can also describe the doer as having such an intention without any explicit regard to the doer themselves. You seem uncomfortable with this possibility and this stipulation, unless I am mistaken.
I also don’t get what you are doing here with Derrida. The reason Derrida does not think intentions are governing is because he thinks the condition of having a (linguistic or semiotic) one entails a form of repeatability that the intention cannot fully master. Yet there also cannot be any text-y things, written or spoken or semiotic, without intention playing some role. Moreover, as an interpreter, Derrida wants both: he wants to interpret faithfully the intention, as Henry pointed out, and read what is not available as an intention but inscribed in a text (which reading also produces). Not one or the other, but BOTH. Whether this is finally viable, to some extent, is always only ascertainable in the readings—sometimes it works, in Derrida’s reading of Rousseau, sometimes not so much, in his reading of Benjamin, for example. Why Derrida wants this and what, then, is a text for him is another question … but I don’t think his project can be jammed into the causal-non-intentional box you fashion for it.
WM: Yeah, 2 (which I think is false) in no way follows from 1 (which is obviously true and which no one denies or probably has ever denied).
HS: Walter, I’m not sure what you mean when you say that 2 doesn’t follow from 1, I mean where that leaves you with what you’re agreeing and what you’re disagreeing with.
WM: So I think 1) is uncontroversial and the part of 2) that doesn’t follow from 1 is “without any explicit regard to the doer themselves.” Actually, now that I look at it again, I’m not quite sure what it means. An account of what the doer did necessarily involves regard to the doer (not sure that “explicit” matters?). And any account of what a text means just is an account of what the doer did. Which is just to say that the context the reader is in may well have an impact on what the reader understands or misunderstands the text to mean but has no impact at all on what it actually means.
This is one of the reasons I’m leery of all the context talk. Back in the day, I was a big context-is-everything guy, and in fact, when I would first teach these texts and understood myself to be in agreement with them, Derrida’s insistence on context was crucial. But as I started to think that all context could usefully mean was stuff that influenced your account of what the speaker meant and that “not saturable” could only coherently be an epistemological point, I stopped thinking that the assertion that context mattered was saying anything helpful.
HS: Good stuff, thanks for the clarification.
JK: On “without any explicit regard to the doer themselves,” how about this? The three of us, Josh, Walter, and Henry, are continuing our discussion in the backroom of a dive bar where it is hot. In the middle of making a point, Henry gets up and walks to a window that only he is positioned to see and opens it. I say to Henry, yes, I was hot too. Henry, however, was thinking about his point concerning Wittgenstein the whole time and never thought anything about the temperature of the room. Nevertheless, following Anscombe we can say Henry intended to cool down the room; he opened the window to make the room cooler. Of course, he might say, “oh, yeah” in response to me, or he might just keep talking about Wittgenstein—either way, however, we have his action under a certain description, which gives us his intention.
Reading literature—or again, really anything—Hobbes, Plato, the constitution—is a little like that, by my lights. This part of the text appears there for a purpose, which means we view it as part of the author’s intention—it’s an intentional object in this sense. Sometimes we find other parts of a text that make us think we got the first description wrong or that we need to tweak it somehow. Though in some cases, possibly Plato or Spinoza—we might think the contradiction or conflict is on purpose. The difference between most texts and other long discourses and Henry’s opening the window is that no one can account for all of the former and so different descriptions, from different readers, at different times may proliferate, though not without bounds or without overlap, and all are descriptions of the author’s intention.
WM: What was Henry doing? He was opening the window. Why was he doing it? Because he was hot and intended to make the room cooler. Does it matter what he was thinking of while he was doing it? No. So maybe we all agree on this (although I can’t for the life of me see how this is without any regard to the doer). But if we do agree on this, and we do see it as the same kind of thing involved in understanding literary texts, you guys should just start calling yourselves intentionalists like me. And if your idea of literary interpretation is that it’s descriptions of the author’s intention—some of which are compatible because we’re describing different aspects of that intention (so there’s no conflict), and some of which (insofar as we’re differing about what she was trying to do) are incompatible (so they can’t both be true—no pluralism allowed), I don’t see how a single syllable of that isn’t just straight Against Theory.
HS: I agree with Josh’s 2, in his reply to this.
Additionally, I remark that the action he describes is validly analyzed in terms of cause and effect. My body felt uncomfortably hot, and this caused me unthinkingly to get up and open the window. We say I opened it intentionally because it was no accident, but if one respects the nuances of the grammar of use, it’s clear that this use of “intention” is different from those in which there isn’t this kind of strong physical element and no conscious thought. (Although it seems to me that we do have to introduce the notion of degrees of consciousness here because I had to be in some sense conscious of what I was doing, “subliminally,” one might say, although not in my focal consciousness. I really do think that Husserl would be relevant here, especially the Logical Investigations, but also Ideas I, where he does such a profound analysis of the structure of intentionality. And that reminds me: Josh, when you use “intentional object” to mean “my purpose, the aim of my speech or action,” you’re talking in a very non-Husserlian way). You, Walter, want to reduce all intentional action to one simple structure, but this is just to sweep a whole boatload of necessary distinctions under the rug.
As far as what I call myself, I don’t actually call myself an intentionalist because I think that’s a term that can only create confusion, as I explained in my Syndicate response to Walter (also why I avoid talking about meaning).2 I think these terms automatically evoke traditional mentalism, and there’s no point in pretending we can just re-define them and throw them out there. I do speak of intention, but I’m careful to call it “techne-intention.” So, in my account, intention is mediated by the know-how that has been wired into the brain-body by culture; whereas Walter wants intentionality to function in a way that needs no mediation. Derrida, of course, sees language as the differantial medium of thought itself, “in the head.” The first pages of his discussion of Rousseau in Grammatology are the best place to see how he thinks about this. (There’s important new work on Peirce that is adding new dimensions to how I think about this.) One of these technai is of course language, which is considerably more than a mere code. I just re-read Culler’s pp. 18–19 in Structuralist Poetics in which he talks about Saussure and Mounin on the sign, which nicely states why language is much harder to pin down than code.3 The basic thing that I find relevant here is that the sign is defined by Saussure as “the combination of a concept and an acoustic image.” The dicey bit is the concept. Walter’s notion, as near as I can figure out, is that when I use a chain of signifiers, they automatically come married to their accompanying concepts. But 1) a concept, in Saussure’s conception, is a mental something, so I need Walter to define the structure of the sign in his non-Saussurean use of it, such that concepts/ideas play no role in the definition and 2) since Saussure’s definition (which he expands by comparing the relation of sign and signified to the recto and verso of a sheet of paper) implies that, as Culler says, “for every signifier there’s a particular positive concept hidden behind it.” Mounin then runs with this definition by talking about “decoding language.” As Culler then comments, “this is a version of Derrida’s ‘metaphysics of presence’ which longs for a truth behind every sign: a moment of original plenitude when form and meaning were simultaneously present to consciousness and not to be distinguished …. It is assumed that we should still try to pass through the signifier to the meaning that is the truth and origin of the sign and of which the signifier is but the visible mark, the outer shell.”
So, my question, Walter, is how you define the sign in a way that isn’t subject to this response.
Also, I’m a bit puzzled by your refusal to allow the mental dimension any place in your analysis. To me, it looks like you’re so avid for immediacy that you won’t even brook such a mediation as thought itself—maybe because you’ve taken to heart Derrida’s argument that thought itself is already riven by differance.
JK: a) Obviously, I am not Walter, but I think he and I don’t invoke the mental precisely to avoid the issues pertaining to consciousness that you yourself raise. That is not to say that different degrees of awareness (consciousness, if you want) can play a role in different situations, but the main point, as you say, is that meaning is not the effect of some ghostly operation, some mental event, again, neither for me nor, I think, for Walter (though in his essay on Anscombe I think he inflects her work a bit in this direction). I also don’t think Walter is interested in signs, except as they appear in use by a speaker or author, where they do not play a regulative role—sort of like Grice. (It would take too long now, but maybe I’ll come back to it, but I read Saussure very differently from you and Culler, if I am following. The concept/signified is not the difficult part—as you say, it’s always linked to a signifier, and is also located in the collective repository of a language synchronically and collectively understood—so there is no mentalism; it’s with the signifier and its status that the difficulty for Derrida and in a different way Walter lies—and yet in a different way still for me.)
b) You write: “‘I’m careful to call it ‘techne-intention.’ So in my account, intention is mediated by the know-how that has been wired into the brain-body by culture.” This is also a long discussion, but I would point out that Anscombe distances herself from techne when discussing Aristotle’s practical syllogism (62–63 of her Intention). She does this because technai, she argues, only get us general rules, hence nothing that can be active in a context, in a situation, where intention alone emerges. We might have conditionals: if we want a low-acid wine, pick the grapes early. Yet for Aristotle and her, you also need someone wanting something on an occasion (here a low-acid wine) to have praxis imbued with intention. This is important, I think, and I alluded to this when writing to Walter since it is difficult to identify the actions and expressions in use with what they are when not being used (see Charles Travis’s and others’ occasionalism). I take this to be Wittgenstein’s point in paragraph 48ff of Philosophical Investigations (with the colored squares) when discussing names. Names only name something when used to talk about something (in some language game); without use, they do not actually name. (Are there in RRBGGGRWW, where each names a colored square in a 9×9 grid, 9 names or 4? Witt says it doesn’t matter as long as there is no confusion when playing the game, but this is a different case from the name in use.)
P.S. My last point is probably better and certainly more succinctly put by noting the following. Rugs were once made by hand; you can get a machine to make rugs, transform the techne; but you can’t get a machine to want to make one, nor then can you get it to intend to make one.
HS: If I get into your remarks, which raise a whole BOATLOAD of new problems, I would start to sink into an endless debate, so I’m going to try to ignore most of it, except to say that Walter does have recourse early in his piece to the notion of the signified’s being tied to the signifier, which means concept to sound, and all I’m asking for from him is that he gives me his non-mentalist definition of “concept.” As far as Anscombe and intention, if you guys spent as much time studying Wittgenstein as you’ve spent following Anscombe, you’d be much better off. But in any case, I’ve developed the notion of a techne far beyond anything that she imagines, so what she thinks about techne is irrelevant.
HS: Walt, a simple yes or no question, to which I will only accept a simple yes or no answer. Can I say “blah blah blah” and mean “the wind sprang up at 4 o’clock?”
JK: Let’s say I have been playing a game, with you, or perhaps better, a child. Each of us has said “the wind sprang up at 4 o’clock” ten times in turn. If at that point I say “blah blah blah,” it could well mean “the wind sprang up at 4 o’clock,” and under the right circumstances, it might again mean that in the future.
HS: That’s not my question. All you’ve done is posit a case in which “blah blah” has become coded for a particular group, whereas what I’m asking is whether my intention alone can make it mean that.
JK: Well, I don’t see it that way. Everything we say and write comes from exposure to what other individuals—and to this degree, groups—have said and done. In the case of “blah blah blah,” we have ways of using this phrase, though I gave you a way it could be used. (Sort of like Derrida’s citationality all the way down.) Many other unprecedented uses can be envisioned—”a full blast” when we have a full-suited deck of cards [i.e., 4] and so on. No one is saying, certainly not me, but I don’t think Walter, that there are intentions without expressions. The question is the status of the latter: are they codes, linguistic systems and so on, all of which to me seem to lead back to ideality of some stripe. (Previously I tried to frame a version of this question for you in terms of a discussion of Wittgenstein’s in PI: I don’t know if you missed that, did not want to respond, or had none.)
WM: Trying to stay out of this for now but quick observation—the example is, as Henry presents it and in his terms, a mentalist fantasy of a speech act. Anscombe talks about someone trying to move some object without touching it by concentrating on it real hard and willing it to move and then points out that you also can’t move your arm by concentrating on it real hard and willing it to move. The speaker in Henry’s example isn’t meaning anything because she isn’t even trying to mean something.
HS: What would constitute actually trying to mean it? Here’s another example. When I get migraines, it completely scrambles my verbal faculty, so that I’m not only unable to utter actual words (it just comes out a jumble of sounds) or even to THINK the words; yet I know just what I meant by the inarticulate jumble. On your account, I take it, that would mean that that’s what the jumble meant. Is that right?
JK: I am not sure at this point what the larger argument is (especially if you, Henry, are now suggesting that you can know what you mean without any words? Or am I mistaking you?)
To me, it would be helpful to take a step back:
a) You, Walter, want to say a text is an intention and to explain how that can be you draw on Anscombe’s account of intention as action under a description, here presumably the description being what the author intended. (As an action it requires words, terms or something, I believe that are expressed/used, no?)
b) You, Henry, take a text to be some sort of physical expressions or symbols, meaning what they do owing to the employment of a techne, thus allowing others, not just the author’s understanding to constitute meaning.
c) For what it’s worth, I myself take a text to be an event, wherein receivers establish the descriptions that allow for identifying what an author intended; these descriptions depend upon context, which includes worldly things and other things that have been said or written (which explains the role played by tokens or words without any appeal to types or codes).
In the case of Henry, I don’t see how what is found in techne relates to what is said or written without abandoning reference to things in the world. Such reference demands use, action. You will say techne allows this because it’s a learned practice, but I don’t see how the symbols or tokens in use and those in the techne can be mapped onto one another. The endeavors I know to map a speech act back onto a code or even a practice generally conceived all fail. (I thought that was part of being a Wittgensteinian—disallowing such a translation from use to anything else, to anything like what Peirce calls thirdness.)
In the case of Walter, almost the reverse: you stress intention and action but embrace some kind of (linguistic) conventions, no? Though for you these only are what they are in use, you give them some footing of their own, since you talk about them in their own right. I don’t see how you do that unless you accept intentionless codes, languages, signifiers, and so on.
HS: Josh, you move too fast into too deep waters for me, especially at this point in our discussion. I’m trying to posit simply instances in which precise problems arise and trying to get answers from Walter—and you, if it were possible—that stick to the immediate example without deploying a whole theory around it. So, in this case, the answer is yes, I know perfectly well what I want to say, but it won’t come out my mouth—or in the form of words in my head either. This isn’t a theory, it’s an experience. Same with my physical movements. I want to zip up my jacket, but my hands bumble around and can’t do it. I can’t command my actions any better than my words. I suppose this might give Walter grist for his mill since it will suggest to him support for his notion that meaning is just an action like any other, but that’s my experience.
As far as your formulation of what I think a text is, I think I can accept your brief statement of it, but not your statement that I allow both sides to “constitute meaning,” because I deny that there’s any such thing as meaning (and no, I don’t mean a physical thing, I mean whatever self-identical whatever it is that mentalists and Walter in his own, purportedly non-mentalist way, think meaning is). As I keep saying, meaning is a word-concept that we deploy in a variety of ways for a variety of uses. Very simply, I adhere to Wittgenstein’s “meaning is use.”
WM: Side note (exasperated)—meaning is whatever, when you say I misunderstand SEC, you think I’m misunderstanding. Which is how we use meaning all the time, and when recourse to “meaning as use” means we can’t use it for whatever’s being misunderstood, it’s lost its point. Follow up (not exasperated at all)—the jacket thing is of course grist for my mill. You can fail to mean just like you can fail to do anything else. And you can’t button your jacket either in your head or without intending to. And the fact that you can always fail to mean does not mean that you must always fail to mean (Derrida) or that when you do fail to mean, the text you produced somehow gets to mean something else.
HS: Whoa! “You can fail to mean just like you can fail to do anything else.” I distinctly remember your saying earlier in our discussion that you cannot fail to mean. Did I dream it? You raise for me all sorts of interesting “grammatical” questions. You think the grammar of “mean” is the same as that of “do,” but don’t you also treat “intend” as having the same grammar? “I intended x” is analogous to “I meant x,” or even synonymous with it, no? But is intending also a form of doing? Isn’t there all the difference in the world between intending x and doing x? So then, either the grammar of “mean” is not analogous to that of “do,” or it isn’t analogous to that of “intend.”
Here’s more: if I mean x, do I have to know that I mean x? Can I mean x without knowing that I do? Without combing back through SEC, I’m pretty sure Derrida does not exactly say that “you always fail to mean.” What he says is directed against the metaphysics of presence (something that you continually elide, an elision that makes all discussion of SEC extremely limited and misleading), and his point is that meaning is never a “plenum,” an “absolute fullness.” I understand that you’re not interested in the metaphysical questions, but in all fairness, you should grant that that is, after all, his real target and that your arguments are tangential to his concerns. I think there’s a real value in what you do, and I think this value would come out much more effectively if you didn’t waste your energy convicting Derrida of saying things that he doesn’t actually say in the sense that you take them. I think The Purveyor of Truth says it in the most concise and quotable way: he’s writing against Lacan’s “a letter ALWAYS reaches its destination,” and he doesn’t say in reply that it NEVER reaches its destination—he says even if it arrives it continues to be tormented by the internal possibility of its non-arrival. I see this as a bit of darkly French over-subtlety, but very cool, nevertheless, as another way of saying that the sign as long as it persists can disseminate further, like a seed that lies dormant for a thousand years before sprouting. What I don’t think you give him credit for is his central concern with the productive nature of the sign. On the other hand, it’s true that his work had a huge negative influence in the way that it was received, as though he were actually saying that everything is language and that therefore everything is interpretation and that we can interpret things in whatever way we or our “interpretive community” decide to interpret them, with no regard for what they were intended to mean. That’s why I’m basically in accord with what you do, Walter, because I loathe that stuff. And although Jacques did try to some degree to correct this misreading, he didn’t try nearly hard enough. The simple minds of humanity can only encompass two polar antitheses: either meaning is a metaphysical presence/fullness, or there’s no holds barred.
As far as your first sentence, I completely agree. Meaning is what we call what we try to understand in a text like SEC, a discursive text that is positing theses. But I find it misleading to say that meaning is what we’re looking for when we read a poem. Brooks says reading a poem is an experience, like experiencing dance or music, and I find that a much richer notion.
JK: If this is supposed to be me, Walter, it’s not my position: “when recourse to ‘meaning as use’ means we can’t use it for whatever’s being misunderstood, it’s lost its point.”
(In practice, I don’t think it’s any of our positions, which is why we keep going round and around.)
HS: What Josh said.
Notes
According to Derrida, “To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning, offering things and itself to be read and to be rewritten.”1 If there is something a little strange about the beginning of this definition—to draw is equally to produce a mark; why isn’t to write to produce, say, a sign? And if drawing might also be understood as producing a sign, why isn’t to write to produce a linguistic sign?—Derrida’s turn to the mark instead of the sign is already being motivated by the second half of the sentence: the description of the mark as offering itself to be rewritten in a way that the sign (its meaning fixed by the signifier’s particular relation to the signified) could not. The sign, if there were such a thing, would just mean what it meant; the mark never just means what it means.
But it’s not just the deployment of the mark that’s striking here, it’s also the relation between this description and some of the other accounts of writing he gives in both “Signature Event Context” (SEC) and Limited Inc. For example, a page later he describes the “sign” as “readable” (that’s part of its “functioning”) “even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moment he wrote it, i.e., abandoned it to its essential drift” (LI, 9). And this equation of producing a mark with abandoning it is anticipated a few pages earlier when he describes the writer’s “absence” “from the mark that he abandons, and which cuts itself off from him and continues to produce effects independently of his presence and of the present actuality of his intentions” (LI, 5). Finally, this description of writing as producing a mark and of producing a mark as abandoning a mark is reprised in the reference to Nietzsche’s “‘I forgot my umbrella,’” “abandoned like an island among [his] unpublished writings” (LI, 63).
The description of writing as abandoning is not, of course, a psychological one, but it does bring out the degree to which Derrida’s account of writing involves (maybe assumes) a theory of action or, at least, an account of the kind of action writing is. And that theory is made explicit in the simultaneous insistence on the importance of the writer’s “intentions” in producing the mark and on the fact that those intentions are compromised by its “functioning,” that is, by its producing “effects” that may have nothing to do with whatever the writer’s intentions are. The “category of intention,” Derrida says, cannot “disappear”; “it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance” (LI, 18).
Why can’t it disappear? “Let’s be serious” (LI, 65). Is Derrida being serious? “No criterion that is simply inherent in the manifest utterance is capable of distinguishing an utterance when it is serious from the same utterance when it is not. Solely intention can decide this …” (LI, 68).”2 So, all ironic utterances are ironic in virtue of being intended ironically, and all serious utterances are serious in virtue of being intended seriously. This for Derrida marks the inadequacy of “code”; on the one hand, no utterance can even count for him as an utterance (as “readable”) unless it deploys some set of syntactic and semantic rules (his argument for the importance of code); on the other hand, no set of syntactic and semantic rules can ever determine whether the utterance is serious. And since an utterance like “let’s be serious” must be either serious or not (or some complicated version of the two), intention will have its place.
Then why can’t it govern? This question is in a way easy to answer—governing is very different from (almost the opposite of) abandoning. But govern (commander) is in its own way as striking a description as abandon is since it’s not clear what exactly it would mean for someone’s intention to govern the scene of utterance. Or maybe what’s not clear is what exactly the scene of utterance is. For example, suppose someone takes my exhortation to “be serious” seriously when I meant it ironically. Insofar as what I was trying to do was communicate with this person, I have failed, and if this is what it means for my intention to be unable to govern the scene of utterance, it seems pretty clear that Derrida is right. I said something designed to produce something like a knowing skepticism; instead, it produced an earnest credulity, and perhaps the hearer who was supposed to be amused instead comes to feel embarrassed. In other words, the effect of my utterance was very different from the effect intended. Which is at least part of what Derrida means when he says on numerous occasions that for the mark to be able to function as a mark, it must be able to produce effects in the absence of the intentions of the author and thus unintended by the author, as, for example, when he says that Searle’s “evaluative decrees” “tend to produce determinate effects, often quite different from those apparently intended” (LI, 39).
But the claim that a text can produce effects utterly unintended by the author—or, to put the point in relation to governing—that the intention of the author cannot control the effect of his text on his readers—is utterly uncontroversial and is not really the point Derrida is making. Or, anyway, not only the point he is making. For the difference between the meaning of an utterance and its effect (at least the difference between the intended meaning of the utterance and its effect, a difference that, as we’ll see, is relevant whether or not the actual effect is the intended one) that underlies my previous paragraph is not one that Derrida accepts. Rather, he thinks that because the speaker’s intended meaning only counts as an utterance insofar as it is structured in “conformity to [a] code” and, since the code counts as a code only insofar as it is readable without any reference to (in the absolute absence of) the writer,3 the intended meaning is itself a kind of idealization that the utterance breaks with right from the start: “understanding the intended meaning” of the utterance is itself “problematical” (LI, 76). More strongly, the necessity of the utterance to be in “conformity to the code” is “incommensurate with the adequate understanding of intended meaning.” On this account, the meaning of the utterance and its effect cannot be separated. So, the apparently anodyne fact that the utterance can always have unintended effects gets its bite from the idea that meaning itself is a kind of effect which, precisely because the writer cannot control the effects, means the utterance can always have unintended meanings. It might make sense from this standpoint to talk about an author’s intended meaning as his preferred meaning—but even to produce the effect you sought to produce would not be the same as being understood. Thus, for Derrida, there’s a difficulty with the very idea of understanding the intended meaning, and that difficulty is related to the way that understanding (like misunderstanding) is itself a kind of effect; hence as Derrida puts it, his “substitution” of “intentional effect for intention” and of “‘mark’ for ‘sign,’” and, more generally, of “the functioning of the mark” for the “‘understanding’” of the “‘written utterance’” (LI, 61).
Here we begin to see why in Derrida the production of the mark is at the same time its abandonment. Writing is the production of a mark that the writer intends (let us say) seriously but that because he cannot control how the reader understands it (or, say, how others will cite it) may be taken to be unserious. It’s in this sense that the production of the mark is at the same time its abandonment. Because the mark is produced with the intention to communicate, the writer’s intention is fundamental. But because, to function even in the way in which it was intended, the mark must be able to produce effects that are unintended, the place of intention is always displaced. In other words, because it is relevant only insofar as it produces the cause of all those effects (and indeed could do so unintentionally), it can’t be said to fix the meaning of the utterance which, in Derrida, would be the same thing as controlling the effect. Thus, to produce a mark that you intend to produce one effect is at the same time to abandon the mark to the infinite number of different effects it might also produce.
But here we also begin to see the problems raised by writing as abandoning. Derrida indignantly denies Searle’s claim that he relies on “a notion of intention as something separable, intrinsic, and ‘behind’ the ‘expression’” (LI, 66). But his point that nothing “simply inherent” in an utterance can tell us whether that utterance is ironic or not, and that “Nothing can distinguish a serious or sincere promise from the same ‘promise’ that is nonserious or insincere except for the intention which informs and animates it” (LI, 68–69) complicates that denial. On the one hand, the idea that the intention animates the utterance supports his denial that it’s somehow behind it, separable from it. On the other hand, if the intention animates the utterance (if it’s not behind it but in it), how can the ironic and non-ironic utterance be the “same utterance” (LI, 68)? What’s the same is just “let’s be serious,” with the question of whether it’s serious or ironic determinable by an intention that is not inherent in and therefore must be somewhere outside the utterance.
It was the New Critical version of this scenario that, in a predeconstructive essay, Paul de Man criticized for misunderstanding the nature of intentionality.4 In “The Intentional Fallacy,” Wimsatt and Beardsley described the text as “detached from the author at birth” and going “about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.”5 Of course, deconstruction was not New Criticism, and “detached from” is a little more upbeat than “abandoned by.”6 But Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s identification of intending with controlling and their denial of intention’s “power” to control does have a relation to Derrida’s claim that, properly understood, intention “will no longer be able to govern.” And, although de Man would himself become committed to the separability of the text from the speech act, what he criticizes in “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism” is precisely the way in which, changing “the literary act into a literary object,” the New Critics turn intention into “an outside force” (BI, 25).
Properly understood, he argues (which is to say, in order to be the kind of thing that demands to be understood), a poem must be recognized as “an intentional object” rather than a “natural object” (BI, 24). Natural objects (his example is a stone) have no “‘meaning’’” beyond “the totality of their sensory appearance,” and the scarequotes he puts around meaning are meant to suggest that they don’t really mean at all. By contrast, an intentional object (the example is a chair) seems “meaningless” only if you leave out the crucial (“constitutive”) “part”—that it is “destined to be sat on” (BI, 25). The mistake the New Critics make is to see “‘intent’”
by analogy with a physical model, as a transfer from a psychic or mental content that exists in the mind of the poet to the mind of a reader, somewhat as one would pour wine from a jar into a glass. A certain content has to be transferred elsewhere, and the energy necessary to effect the transfer has to come from an outside source called intention. (BI, 25)
In reality, however, the “concept of intentionality is neither physical nor psychological but structural … The structure of the chair is determined in all its components by the fact that it is destined to be sat on, but this structure in no way depends on the state of mind of the carpenter who is in the process of assembling its parts” (BI, 25).
The problem he sees here is the identification of the intention as a mental state and thus as something outside the object, which is the picture that Derrida explicitly repudiates but is nonetheless required by the description of the sincere and the ironic “let’s be serious” as the same utterance. Above we treated Derrida’s assertion that the question of whether the utterance was ironic could not be determined by anything “inherent” in it as a critique of the power of code, which it is. There is no sincerity convention, and if there were, it would be the gateway to its own ironization (That’s the point of “let’s be serious”).7 But now we can also see that Derrida’s idea of what is inherent in the text is what’s in it in virtue of its participation in the code. So, what’s not inherent (what the code can’t provide, the intention that makes the difference between serious and ironic) can only be where de Man criticizes the New Critics for putting it—outside.8
The point of inside and outside here is not to deny that the author and the text are separate; it’s to deny that the way to understand the intention is as the cause of the text. A thought experiment like the wave poem in “Against Theory” was meant to bring out the necessity of intention to meaning by removing it altogether, but Wimsatt and Beardsley make a version of the same point in their simultaneous acknowledgment that “a poem comes out of a head not a hat” and their insistence on the irrelevance of that fact. Indeed, following Jennifer Ashton’s revisionary reading of “The Intentional Fallacy” as the effort to argue above all the irrelevance of the cause of the text to its meaning, they could be understood as making the same argument as de Man but just failing to see that their target was not intention as such but intention as cause.9 For the point of de Man’s calling the chair an intentional object is not to acknowledge its causal history (that it was made by someone who intended something). That’s just “a poem comes out of a head not a hat.” De Man’s point (what he means by calling the intention structural) is that to understand what the chair is—to see it as a chair and not as an assemblage of wood and metal—is to understand what it was made to do. The intention is relevant not as the cause of the act but as its description, its meaning. Because the chair is indeed separate from the person who made it, we can, with Derrida, imagine a sense in which it’s abandoned. We could, for example, not worry about it being a chair and use it as a ladder, or a desk. But the carpenter hasn’t failed to make a chair because the chair gets used as a desk. The question of how we use it is different from the question of how we understand it.
But maybe it’s different for texts; de Man acknowledges that “the case of the work of literature is of course more complex” than the chair but maybe, according to Derrida, it’s different in kind. For, on Derrida’s account, the displacement of intention is internal to any text in a way that it isn’t to de Man’s chair. It’s perhaps true to say that the chair could only function as a chair if it could function without our understanding it as intended by the carpenter to be a chair, but it isn’t at all true to say that it could be identified as a chair without our understanding it as made to be a chair. With texts, however, Derrida argues that the very existence of the text as text is dependent upon the possibility of it being disconnected from its author. Indeed, what he describes as the “point of departure of Sec’s argumentation” (LI, 63) is “[t]he fact that even [in Searle’s words] if one breaks ‘with the strategy of understanding the sentence as the utterance of a man’ … who meant something by it … as one always can” then (in his own words) “the mark still does not cease functioning …. A minimum of legibility or intelligibility remains” (LI, 63).
The idea here is that if we break with the strategy of understanding “let’s be serious” as the utterance of someone who was either being or not being ironic (since both involve somebody meaning something) we are still left with something—the “minimum of legibility or intelligibility”—that enables the marks to keep functioning and, moreover, to keep functioning as the same utterance. It’s trivially true that the same marks can be used for different utterances—I say “let’s be serious” seriously and you quote me ironically—but that’s only because we’re not breaking at all with understanding it as the utterance of someone who meant something by it. What Derrida is interested in (more generally, what everyone committed to the idea that a text can mean something more than or other than what its author means by it) is the idea that “let’s be serious” is legible as the same text (same utterance) when it’s serious and when it’s not, that is, legible as the same text independent of its being used by someone to mean something. So, what makes it the same?
It can’t be that the signs “let’s be serious” are the same since the sign consists of signifier and signified, and the whole point is that they don’t have the same signifieds—one means something like “let’s not be serious.” This is why Derrida wants to move from the sign to the mark. And indeed, all the way through SEC/Limited Inc, it’s this repetition or identity of the mark (i.e., whatever makes the marks rather than the signs the same) that underwrites the idea that there’s a minimum of legibility belonging to the utterance irrespective of what someone meant by it, the minimum that survives no one meaning anything by it.10
But how is the mark (as opposed to the sign11) even minimally legible? The answer for Searle is simpler than for Derrida—for Searle, the mark in itself is a sign or at least a word. Indeed, for Searle, if the marks look like words in English, then they are words in English no matter how or by whom they were produced. Derrida’s claim is narrower—they’re “legible” as words in English. But this serves more to highlight the problem than to solve it. Suppose we invent a language where the words look like they do in English, call it Schmenglish, but have different meanings. The marks are now legible in two languages and, of course, we could invent more. So, what language are they in? At this point the force of insisting that they really are words in English or Schmenglish becomes unclear, since any marks will really be words in any language we might invent. In other words, if the language the writer was using (what the writer meant by the words she produced) doesn’t determine the language the text is in (which it can’t if we suspend the question of her intention), nothing does. This is what it means to imagine the act of writing as a kind of abandoning. To produce marks in English is to abandon them to the possibility of being treated as marks in Schmenglish.
On the one hand, the writer has her place—there’s no mark at all without her. On the other hand, for the mark to be able to function, it must be able to produce effects that are unintended by her. And because the intention is relevant only insofar as it plays a role in producing the mark that causes all those effects (intended or not), it can’t be said to fix the meaning of the utterance, which Derrida treats as controlling the effect. Hence even though Derrida invokes “legibility” and “intelligibility,” he is suspicious of “understanding,” which he wants to replace with “force.” What’s crucial for him here is the difference between understanding what someone has done and being affected (he sometimes calls it “touched”) by what someone has done. Even when they are the same, experiencing the intended effect is not the same as understanding the intended meaning, and what Derrida wants is not exactly to conflate meaning with effect but to insist that what we think of as the meaning of a text is better thought of as the effects it can produce. Those effects are what can’t be fully controlled by the writer. But it’s this redescription of writing as causing an effect that makes the intention into some kind of mental entity. Thus, although he understands very well that it’s a mistake to treat the intention as if it were outside or behind the utterance, his treating it as the cause of the utterance—the production of a mark rather than the writing of a text—nonetheless consigns it to the outside (to what’s not “inherent” in the utterance) and builds abandonment in. And thus—turning the meaning of the utterance into its more or less intended effect—he understands the inability to control the effect of the utterance as the inability to control its meaning.
2.
But it seems pretty clear that the failure to communicate what you mean can’t be identified with the failure to mean it, and we can perhaps get at both the problem with thinking of the intention as a form of control and with thinking of the failure to control as a problem about the intention by this route. Suppose I send a note asking two people to meet me at the bank in the afternoon. When I get there, one of them is waiting; the other never shows up. When I see him the next day, he says he did in fact go to the bank to meet me. But where I meant for him to meet me at the First National Bank, he understood me to be setting up a meeting by the side of the river.12 So, one of my readers understood my note; the other didn’t.
We can bracket the question of why the river-goer misunderstood me, especially since the first reader didn’t. The point is just that I successfully communicated with one reader and failed to communicate with the other (since one reader understood what I meant while the other didn’t) and that the simultaneous success and failure gives us two different descriptions of what I did—I wrote a text that meant meet me at the (First National) bank and I wrote a text that communicated that meaning (to at least one interpreter). The difference between these two descriptions is brought out by a third. I can also say of the same act that I wrote a text that meant meet me at the (First National Bank) and that I failed to communicate it to a reader.
The first point of the example is just to make clear this difference and the fact that in characterizing it we are completely reliant on a distinction between meaning and communicating, a distinction that we can then see would survive even if neither of my readers had understood me. Suppose they both knew I liked to go swimming on summer afternoons and both (very reasonably) took bank to be river. They were wrong. I meant First National; the meaning of what I wrote is just as unaltered by the fact that two people didn’t understand it as it was when only one didn’t. And suppose the text survives and becomes part of my published correspondence (“I forgot my umbrella”) and no one ever understands it. Just as its meaning was unaffected by the first misreader, it will be equally unaffected by all his successors.
The second point of this example is to raise the question of what consequences (if any) my failure to communicate should have for an understanding of my success in communicating. Derrida says that failure is a necessary possibility of every speech act. The question here is what the fact that someone can always misunderstand a text’s meaning tells us about our idea of what textual meaning is.
We can begin by asking why Derrida insists on this necessity—what’s at stake in denying that there could be a speech act or text that not only didn’t but couldn’t fail? The object of his critique is a certain ideal scenario of how meaning/communication works, an ideal that, whether or not it is ever achieved, is nonetheless at work, he thinks, in the accounts of communication he means to problematize. This “philosophical ‘ideal,’” he says, is “the presence to self of a total context, the transparency of intentions, the presence of meaning (vouloir-dire) to the absolutely singular uniqueness of a speech act” (LI, 17). It’s this ideal—of the transparency of the intention to the writer and to the reader—that Derrida denies, and he denies it not because it’s unrealistic or even impossible but because, were it somehow to be possible, there would be no such thing as either an utterance or a text. (Actually, there would be no such thing as meaning, since what the text means is treated here as if meaning could be independent of the text, but there can be no question of what a text means if there is no text.)
Rather, in order for my “written communication” to retain its function as writing, i.e., its readability,”—that is, for it to be readable in the first place—“it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver …. A writing that is not structurally readable—iterable—beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing. … Imagine a writing whose code would be so idiomatic as to be established and known, as secret cipher, by only two ‘subjects.’ Could we maintain that, following the death of the receiver, or even of both partners, the mark left by one of them is still writing? Yes, to the extent that, organized by a code… it is constituted in its identity as mark by its iterability, in the absence of … every empirically determined ‘subject.’ This implies that there is no such thing as a code—organon of iterability—which could be structurally secret” (LI, 7–8). And if the code implies “the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general,” it does the same, and “for the same reasons, for the sender or the producer.” So, to “write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning … I ought to be able to say my disappearance, pure and simple, my nonpresence in general, for instance the nonpresence of my intention of saying something meaningful … of my wish to communicate” (LI, 8).13
How does the mark continue to function in the absence of both producer and receiver? Take Derrida’s case of the code known only to two subjects. They invented a code; one sent the other a message in the code; they’re both gone, and we have the text. The text can function as a text only because its participation in a code makes it at least potentially readable to us regardless of the fact that we cannot know what it was intended by its producer and understood by its recipient to mean or even if was intended to mean something. That is, the text follows some set of rules or conventions, and we can, at least in principle, figure out what those rules are without ever knowing anything about or even interesting ourselves in the text’s author. This is what’s meant by the nonpresence of my intention of saying something meaningful.
But how, if we’re trying to decipher the code, can what the author meant actually be irrelevant? How can it not be (just the opposite) completely dispositive? Suppose, just to keep things simple, that the code she invented was a Caesar shift—every letter in the text stood for the letter two places before it in the Latin alphabet. So, e.g., “o” means “m,” “g” is “e.” The text reads oggv og cv vjg dcpm; when we decipher it, what we get is “meet me at the bank.” Is the intention of the writer irrelevant to or superseded by this functioning of the code? After all, it’s the code, not the writer, that requires those transformations. But the code only requires those transformations because the writer is using the code—that is, trying to decipher it just is trying to figure out what code the writer was using. The fact that it’s in a code makes this kind of procedure possible—we’re not being asked to figure out from a bunch of marks on a page what the producer of those marks was thinking when she made them (we’re not being asked to approximate the “ideal” scene of communication); we’re being asked to read what she wrote. But even though the fact that it’s in a code detaches it from what the producer was thinking, that fact in no way detaches it from what she was doing since although she may be dead and gone, the question of what code she was using is as relevant as it would be if she were alive and waiting for us at the bank.
The further point here would be that the code only functions with reference to a language: e.g., dcpm encrypted with a two-letter shift is “bank,” with a 24-letter shift it’s “fero,” which, in Esperanto, means “iron.” If our text had just this one word, deciphering would not just involve figuring what code the writer was using but whether she was speaking English or Esperanto. If we think of the language as also a kind of code, then maybe we can make more sense out of the claim that because the message is (and must be) in a code (that is, written according to a structurally readable set of semantic and syntactic rules), it is right from the start disconnected from the writer’s intentions and necessarily able to function in the radical absence of those intentions? After all, unlike the Caesar cipher, which the writer has constructed, the language she’s speaking is English, and she didn’t construct that. English has a certain autonomy from the speaker; when she writes “meet me at the bank,” those marks already have meanings not determined by her in a code not invented by her.
But why should the fact that bank has several meanings in English make the sentence “meet me at the bank” function in the absence of anybody meaning anything by it, in the radical absence of the author’s intention? Supposedly, it’s because the “sign” (in this case “bank”) “possesses the characteristic of being readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moment he wrote it, i.e. abandoned it to its essential drift” (LI, 9). But even to think of it as a sign—or, given Derrida’s suspicion of the sign—to think of it as an iterable mark (i.e., one that’s organized according to a code)—is to refuse the idea that the moment of its production is irrevocably lost. Just the opposite; any account of what it is is at the same time an account of what it was meant to be. Because insofar as a code is a set of rules (x means y, which is to say, when I say x, I mean y), to treat the mark as belonging to a code is to treat it as having been produced by a writer who was following those rules. If you think of the mark as coded, not only do you not think of the moment of its production as irrevocably lost, you are already producing at least a partial account of that moment. The supposedly aporetic relation between intention and code is undone; any account of the code is already the account of an action.14
Here we again see the entailments of writing as abandoning. Derrida treats the writer of the sign the way Donald Davidson famously treats (among many examples) the driver braking her car: what she does is not brake the car but press her foot on the pedal—whether the car actually slows down is not up to her. Her action functions as the cause (she hopes) of the car slowing down. Which is the way the intention matters for Derrida. That’s why it makes sense for him to insist that “the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but … it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance” (LI, 18). Davidson puts his version of the point more epigrammatically: “We never do more than move our bodies: the rest is up to nature.”15 Maybe we could say for Derrida, all we ever do is produce/abandon the mark; the rest is up to the essential drift.
Which is a not implausible way to think about writing if we’re thinking of it as nothing but a form of communication: I tell you to meet me at the bank, and I hope you understand what I’ve meant. But, as we’ve already seen, it’s not a very plausible way to think about writing if we’re interested in the question of what the text means rather than of what it does or doesn’t communicate. Because the question of whether I’ve succeeded in meaning something has nothing to do with the question of whether you or anyone else has succeeded in understanding it. Or, to put the point the other way around, the fact that it must be possible for you to understand it (that I must have actually produced a speech act and done so following some set of practices that you could in principle figure out—no structural secrecy) has nothing to do with the question of whether you actually do understand it.
I write “I am going to the bank” with the intention to get my readers to believe I will be at the bank by getting them to recognize my intention to tell them I will be at the bank. The self-reflexivity is crucial because there are other ways they might come to believe I was going to the bank (I might be packing my bathing suit), but the speech act does not just involve their getting information about where I’ll be; it gives them information by getting them to recognize that I am giving them this information. How might this fail? It might fail because I don’t succeed in getting them to believe what I told them. It hasn’t produced what Austin called the relevant perlocutionary effect. We could say here that I have successfully communicated with my readers but have failed to get the desired uptake—their belief in, say, my sincerity.
Or it might fail for what would be a more basic reason—they don’t understand what I’m saying. They think I’m telling them I’m going to the riverbank (presumably for a swim, a reasonable interpretation, given the bathing suit) but in fact the bank I mean is the First National. So, here too I have failed to produce the effect I was trying to produce—but in this case, the failure is not perlocutionary but illocutionary. It’s not that they don’t believe what I told them. It’s that they don’t understand what I told them. So, if the first failure is a failure to get them to believe me, the second is a failure to get them to understand me, a failure to communicate.
But is it a failure to mean? Here is where the original scenario—one reader understands, the other doesn’t—has its relevance, since its point is that the failure to communicate is a failure to get people to understand what I mean, not a failure to mean. And that the failure to produce the intended uptake (or, put differently, the fact that an utterly unintended uptake was produced instead) only counts as a failure because the meaning of my utterance is autonomous with respect to uptake of any kind. Indeed, the failures of uptake only count as failures because we take the meaning of my utterance to be whatever I meant by it, and we take me successfully to have meant whatever I meant.16
Failures to communicate—failures to produce the intended effect—are not as such failures to mean. Producing unintended effects is not producing unintended meanings. This is just one way of getting out what I’ve been trying to suggest is at the heart of Derrida’s argument in SEC/Limited Inc—his commitment to describing the act of writing on the model of event causality and his consequent insistence on the open-endedness built into the drift of cause and effect. It’s because he himself sees quite clearly what follows from that model that he is skeptical of the idea of understanding an utterance: he sees what we call understanding as just one possible effect among others. Which makes the normativity of understanding something, in the end, arbitrary, and which makes sense of his memorable account of the “arbitrariness” involved in his decision (“contingent, artificial, and external”) to divide the text of Limited Inc abc into the twenty-six sections determined by the letters of the alphabet. Once we abandon ourselves to the infinite drift of cause and effect, he argues, wherever we stop must be in some sense arbitrary: “Must the surface of the paper, the contents of the time at our disposal, etc. all be integrated into our calculations? If so, what about the ink remaining in my typewriter ribbon? And yet: why not? That is the question” (LI, 45).
The paper, the time, the ink are all (in relation to the project of writing) even more arbitrary and contingent than the decision to go by the alphabet, which is at least a decision. They’re just the conditions under which he happened to write. And, of course, they are meant to raise the question of why, once one’s started down that path, one should stop there. Reading a written utterance, why not take into account the quality of the paper as well as its surface, the spaces between written lines, or the font? And, of course, we can easily imagine the ways in which, say, the use of a hard-to-read font like this one might be something we did indeed need to take into account. But the ease of the example just makes obvious the answer to Derrida’s question, “why not?” The font matters when it’s supposed to matter. A material description of any act (what Davidson calls “nature,” what Anscombe calls “physics”) can go on for a very long time. But it’s precisely because the very identification of an act as an act makes some of those material conditions matter differently from others that the question of why you stop where you stop (as opposed to where to stop) is easy. If the only font I have is Blackmoor LET, the fact that I’m using it is a lot less likely to count as something we need to take into account just because we’re a lot less likely to believe that we’re meant to take it into account. Of course, we might be. The point here is not that refusing a causal theory of action helps us either write or read better; it’s that it explains why writing and reading are what they are. And that to refuse the normativity built into “is supposed to” is to redescribe writing as abandoning and disconnect reading from understanding.
This really is the point made by Derrida himself in his more extended discussion of the abandoned “I have forgotten my umbrella” in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, a discussion all of which is pitched in opposition to the “hermeneut,” committed to the idea that “I have lost my umbrella” “must mean something” and searching for the “true sense of the text” (S, 131, 107). By contrast, under the “regime of quotation marks” (the marks that break with any given context), “[r]eading is freed from the horizon of the meaning or truth of being” (S, 107). And, as we began by noting, this isn’t just an epistemological point. The “hermeneut ontologist,” committed to the idea that “I have lost my umbrella” “must mean something,” searches for the “true sense of the text” (S, 131, 107). Because “a thousand possibilities remain open,” he can’t find it. It might, for example, be written in “some more or less secret code,” less because no code can be structurally secret, more because when the author dies, it will nonetheless be “undecipherable.” But this only “withdraw[s] it from any assured horizon of a hermeneutic question” (S, 127). That is, for the “hermeneut ontologist,” it poses an epistemological problem (how will we ever know?) but leaves the ontological commitment (to a “true sense of the text”) intact.
The real critique of the hermeneut is not that he can’t find the one “true sense” but that he’s mistaken to think there is one. Indeed, there aren’t even several. Rather than making the pluralist point that there can be many understandings of the sentence (that’s the polysemy he rejects for dissemination), Derrida is arguing instead that, strictly speaking, there can be no understanding of it, that whatever the reader makes of the text will not count as an understanding of it.17 Whether it’s the writer’s effort to “control” the meaning or the reader’s effort to “impose” it, the “limit [of] the will to mean” is built into meaning itself (S, 133).
The problem, as we’ve already begun to see, is that once you’re committed to the idea that meaning is something you try to control and/or that it’s something you impose, you’re committed also to an account of the text in which the intention must be (what Derrida rightly denies it can be) outside of it. Indeed, this is exactly what the reduction of the text to the mark requires since the act of writing is here conceived as the writer’s effort to impose a meaning on the mark she has made and since the act of reading involves the impositions of other meanings, which need not be the same as the writer’s. The reason the mark is abandoned is because that imposition necessarily fails, leaving a remainder that remains necessarily “open.”
But it’s not like the act of writing can be plausibly imagined as making some marks and somehow adding to them the meaning you supposedly have in your head. Or that reading can be understood as looking at some marks and adding the meaning to them. More fundamentally, there is no such thing as the imposition of meaning. Rather than impose a meaning on the marks she produces, the writer means something by them. One way to put this is to say she produces not marks but sentences. And what the reader either understands or misunderstands is those sentences. Indeed, if the differences between readers could best be described in terms of their imposing different meanings on the same marks, the very possibility of misunderstanding (the failure of communication that Derrida rightly insists is crucial to any account of its success) would actually be an impossibility. Which is a point that Derrida himself makes when, urging us not “to dissociate questions of ‘power relations’ or of ‘rhetorical coercion’ from questions of the determinacy or indeterminacy of ‘meaning,’” he insists that “[w]ithout play in and among these questions, there would be no space for conflicts of force,” and that the “imposition of a meaning supposes a certain play or latitude in its determination” (LI, 144–45). The scare quotes around meaning and the identification of its “imposition” with “conflicts of force” suggest the degree to which questions about what the text means have here been replaced by questions about what we make it mean and therefore the degree to which the normativity intrinsic to disagreements in interpretation has been replaced by the questions of force intrinsic to competing impositions. Indeed, this is precisely what Derrida admired in Austin, what he took to be Austin’s freeing his analysis from the “authority of the truth value” and “the true/false opposition” and substituting for it “the value of force, of difference of force” (LI, 13).
The problem here is not that Derrida has a cynical or nihilist account of interpretation, in which force replaces reason. It’s that, in the effort to put intention in its place (as the cause of the text rather than as its purpose and as the hope for some particular effect rather than as an explanation), he has had to produce an account of reading and writing in which there’s no place for interpretation—in which, because there’s no “true/false opposition,” there can be no such thing as understanding or misunderstanding. This is because (when it comes to action) understanding and misunderstanding go with intention—the intention is what’s understood or misunderstood. The fact that every speech act can be misunderstood is not a function of the limit of the speaker’s intention (what it can’t control) but of its hegemony—if the text didn’t mean what the author intended, it could never be misunderstood. It’s one thing not to feel the force of an act; it’s another not to understand its meaning.
“What if” Nietzsche “meant to say nothing,” Derrida asks, “or at least not much of anything, or anything whatever?” (S, 125–27). What if he “was only pretending to say something?” Or what if he wrote in “some more or less secret code?” Or what if the sentence, which is after all, in quotation marks, “is not his [n’est pas de part en part ‘de lui,’ comme on dit]”? “We will never know,” Derrida says, or, “At least it is possible that we will never know” (S, 127). But the relevant point here is not that we may never know (which of course is true); it’s what we may never know—what Nietzsche was doing. No account of what “I have forgotten my umbrella” means (including meaning nothing at all) is anything other than an account of what Nietzsche was doing: pretending, quoting, misquoting, etc. And even if, as Derrida suggests, we take the quotation marks as evidence of the way the lost umbrella’s “readability” makes it available to “expropriate,” the difference between what it means outside quotes and what it means inside quotes is just the difference between saying something and quoting someone saying something. Expropriating is also an act.
Notes
Near the beginning of his response to John Searle’s critique of “Signature Event Context,” (hereafter referred to as SEC), Derrida transforms “Searle” into a kind of corporation—a “Sarl”—whose generic name becomes part of the title of Derrida’s essay: “Limited Inc a b c ….”1 More precisely, Derrida announces that he is going “to give the presumed and collective author” of Searle’s text “the French name ‘Société à responsabilité limitée’—literally, ‘Society with Limited Responsibility’ (or Limited Liability)—which is normally abbreviated to Sarl [S.à.r.l.]” in francophone countries (LI, 36). In the U.S., we call this type of legal entity an LLC—a limited liability company—which is a mutation of the private corporate form with even more tax avoidance strategies than a public corporation. Derrida enacts this performative naming, he explains, to fold in two other people mentioned in Searle’s acknowledgments: “H. Dreyfus and D. Searle.” In combination with John Searle, all three become the “more or less anonymous company or corporation [par une société plus ou moins anonyme] (three + n authors)” (LI, 36). Complicating this corporation of three, the “+ n authors” include Derrida himself via his “old friend, H. Dreyfus,” through whom Derrida “too, can claim a stake in the ‘action’ or ‘obligation,’ the stocks and bonds, of this holding company, the Copyright Trust” (LI, 31). Summing up: to defend the argument of SEC against Searle’s attack, Derrida performatively creates a version of the corporation—Limited, Inc—and addresses that corporation for another seventy-odd pages.
I want to argue that Derrida’s provocative invocation of a corporation reveals certain premises that deconstruction shares with the corporate legal form and that both mistakenly assume—in their theorizing—that intentions are causes. More specifically, Derrida’s picture of communication was already, for late-nineteenth-century legal theorists, their problem of corporate intention. How should people understand what is happening when they negotiate with vast collective social agents whose intentions seem unreliable or unknowable? The eminent legal thinker and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. could see that the capitalist corporation’s obvious, single-minded demand for profit did not necessarily entail that the corporation could express an intention about the events it caused or the things it made. What Derrida will later describe as communication’s mechanization, “radical absence,” and “iterability” were, as it turned out, essential characteristics of the corporation—a situation with dire consequences for anyone trying to communicate with that entity. Searching for a solution to this problem, Holmes attempts to avoid talking about intentions in his legal theorizing, shaping his theory to the corpus and metaphysics of corporate persons and their language, in what eventually becomes the doctrine of constitutionally-protected corporate speech.
I traced Holmes’s project in Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (2020).2 Here, I want to focus on Derrida’s version of that project, which will be to say that the problem and solution that gives us the defense of corporate contracts in the late nineteenth century, and corporate speech in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), also gives us the defense of différance.
No doubt there are various other reasons why Derrida produces a corporate renaming of Searle. By invoking the corporate form, he can playfully characterize Searle as an author already “divided, multiplied, conjugated, shared,” while also enabling Derrida to riff on the literal copyright mark placed by Searle on Searle’s “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida” (LI, 31). By inserting his argument into a corporate legal context beyond any author’s control, Searle (implies Derrida) unwittingly signifies the instability of his own authorship (LI, 30–31). Also, the potential inclusiveness and flexibility of the corporate form offers Derrida a handy model for an audience that overlaps with the author, as he notes in his published letter to Gerald Graff (“The anonymous society, the corporation of these readers …”) (LI, 113). Moreover, because French lacks a phonetic distinction between the signifiers “S.à.r.l.” and “Searle,” Derrida can also invoke Searle’s proper name to keep our focus on the difference (actually, the différance) between oral speech and writing, one of his abiding concerns. And then there is the rhetorical slight of misnaming or labeling one’s opponent, a riposte to Searle’s insult in the opening sentence of “Reiterating the Differences”: “It would be a mistake, I think, to regard Derrida’s discussion of [J.L.] Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions … because [Derrida] has misunderstood and misstated Austin’s position at several crucial points … and thus the confrontation never quite takes place.”3 Searle implies that Derrida is neither renowned nor clearsighted enough, nor are his arguments relevant enough, to begin to test Austin’s philosophical authority.
As interesting or entertaining as these reasons are, because they do not capture the essential issue I’m mostly going to bracket them here. Instead, I want to show how Derrida’s decision to create and speak to a corporate form in “Limited, Inc a b c …” is the logical consequence of the claims of SEC, a result more or less predicted by Holmes in the late nineteenth century. Holmes’s refusal to integrate a theory of intention into his pragmatic accounts of signs and interpretation eased interactions with corporations while inadvertently undermining an account of meaning; deconstruction made Holmes’s anti-intentionalism familiar and provocative. In a sense, then, Derrida is correct that his account of communication leads us to a particular use of language, as when he writes, near the end of SEC, that “[w]e are witnessing … the increasingly powerful historical expansion of a general writing, of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc., would be only an effect, and should be analyzed as such” (LI, 20). Were this meant merely as a sociological-historical observation of the conventional understanding of language in ordinary business discourse (at least since the beginning of the twentieth century), it would be unassailable for reasons described below.4 But clearly in SEC, Derrida has other sights in view (such as information theory).
Moreover, the claims that Derrida understands to extend from his position—the analytical and normative arguments about communication—do not follow from a sociological-historical account of writing as “only an effect.” Such claims include his argument that intention must be demoted, “no longer … able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance”; that writing “is not means of transference of meaning, the exchange of intentions and meanings”; nor is it “the site … of a hermeneutic deciphering, the decoding of a meaning or truth” (LI, 18, 20, 21). That is, Derrida is correctly observing the long-term effects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century “communication,” which is to say (although he would never put it in these terms) the long-term effects of the corporate-writing phenomenon. But because he sees these effects as a comprehensive, constitutive quality of language, he consequently misidentifies their cause, normative force, and broader significance. We are indeed “witnessing … the increasingly historical expansion” of what is contractual, commodified, and so-called corporate “speech,” a use of language that tries to function as “only an effect” of some cause. The incidence of that language use probably feels as inescapable today as it did in the 1970s (if we’re being honest, exponentially more so now compared to then—Derrida was always ahead of his time). But none of that tells us what writing must be; it only tells us what corporate and commodified speech wants to be.
My argument is that both Derrida and Holmes assumed that intentions were causes and that their accounts of intention were essentially flawed despite having certain tantalizing advantages. But I am not claiming (for reasons that hopefully are sufficiently obvious) that the projects of these two radically different thinkers were identical. Nor do I want to imply that they were able to successfully enact this belief about intentions-as-causes in their own work. Indeed, the more basic point is that it is never possible to write or to mean without intentions, that intentions cannot be turned into causes (this is why I’m saying their thinking on this point was flawed). For that reason, my primary aim in this essay is to trace how Derrida makes his argument in SEC: to understand the basic premises that must support his other claims (premises Holmes shared), and that lead, as Derrida understood, to the essay “Limited Inc a b c ….” and to the corporation, Limited, Inc.
Causing Corporate Speech
Over the course of the twentieth century, corporations have been granted not only property and contract rights, as well as certain civil and criminal rights (subsidizing and accelerating their accretion of power and wealth), but also certain revered qualities of human beings: the capacity to make and carry out complex and purposeful plans, express ideas in speech, and hold moral and religious beliefs. In Corporate Persons, I explore the genealogy of this phenomenon, tracing its emergence from a strange, ongoing debate about the possibility that large collective organizations might mean to do what they do and might mean like actual persons. Since the 1880s, the dispute about whether or not corporations could produce meanings in the world appeared in a myriad of materials, disciplines, and media: not only legal cases and jurisprudence but also philosophy, political cartoons, photographs, poems, and novels. This problem of corporate meaning and intention—as well as the serious attempts to resolve it by Holmes, Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, and John Dewey among others—paved the way for damaging U.S. Supreme Court decisions, such as Citizens United (2010), Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), and Masterpiece Cakeshop, Limited v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018).5
Holmes’s theorizing and jurisprudence were especially transformative. Recognizing the philosophical and practical issues with the way contract law was conceptualizing agreements between parties, he offered something arguably more knowable and predictable—but also far more problematic—in its place. Contract formation “depends not on the agreement of two minds in one intention,” he writes in “The Path of the Law” (1897), “but on the agreement of two sets of external signs,—not on the parties having meant the same thing but on their having said the same thing.”6 His reasoning is that if the kinds of entities you are contracting with are huge corporations, then relying on an agreed-upon intention with them is perilous (who exactly have you agreed with?). It might seem better to avoid the notion of intention entirely and just stick with a contract’s signifiers (note that in Holmes’s idiosyncratic terminology, before the Saussurian revolution, he called signifiers “external signs”). Holmes’s argument eventually becomes the doctrinal source for free speech as a commodity: language as a set of “external signs” without necessarily corresponding to meaning. This is what he is getting at when he makes a distinction between what the parties “said” versus what the parties “meant.” What the parties “said” (regardless of what they were intending by saying what they did) caused the contract to be made; what the parties “meant” (what they intended to mean and say) did not. In Corporate Persons, I trace how Holmes on contractual intention silently underwrites the majority’s opinion in Citizens United, with its invocation of corporate personhood and its equation of free speech with money.7
As I further suggest (and most relevantly here), Holmes’s solution also anticipates a major literary-theoretical dispute about deconstruction on the materiality of the signifier and the status of intention. Holmes, we should note, is trying to theorize the contractual event that caused but might or might not have intentionally meant “two sets of external signs” to exist in the world. Similarly, Derrida reasons from the premise that there exists language in the world that seems to function as the effect of a cause rather than the expression of an intention. (I will develop this claim below.) This entails allowing that that there are “effects of speech (as opposed to writing in the traditional sense),” effects like “the divided instance of the juridic signature” that is both “tether[ed] to the source” of the writing body but also, simultaneously, “able to be detached from the present and singular intention of its production” (LI, 19, 20). A legal signature on a contract thus functions, for Derrida, as an instance of writing as the outcome (effect) or result of a bodily cause: inevitably contingent and temporally—not formally, not transcendentally—detached from its origin of the writer’s hand. Once detached, what makes that signature “function, that is, to be readable” is that it possesses “a repeatable, iterable, imitable form” (LI, 20). Not a person writing, but their signature as mark, according to Derrida; not a person speaking, but “speech,” according to the U.S. Supreme Court. Derrida’s juridical signatures operate like (or in) Holmes’s signed contracts, which manifest agreement not because the parties “meant the same thing” but because the parties “said the same thing,” with the “said” referring to signifying marks rather than signs.8
Consider, for a moment, the apparent benefits of this way of theorizing meaning. By challenging conventional institutional structures (whether of law or language), both Holmes and Derrida seek an account of linguistic interpretation that forgoes idealism in favor of pragmatism and empiricism. It’s not an unreasonable aim. Holmes wants a contractual interpretation that won’t perpetually screw over the little guy in the guise of a legally perfect formal contract; Derrida wants a hermeneutics that acknowledges the real “condition of possibility” for how we use and phenomenologically experience writing, and for the language we are subjected to daily (LI, 20) (“rather than a subverter of common sense,” Stanley Fish observes of SEC, “this Derrida is very much a philosopher of common sense” and even “of ordinary language”).9 Holmes’s and Derrida’s aims make even more sense when one considers reams of boilerplate receipts from Best Buy, click-through “Terms and Conditions” contracts, political robocalls and automated texts, and endless spam emails generated by unknown company algorithms. And, since my focus here is on Derrida rather than Holmes, it is worth mentioning the many unobjectionable and insightful points that Derrida makes in SEC, illustrating why we inevitably focus on actual writing and the role of context to make sense of anything, and how that does not necessarily make interpretation any simpler. For example, he is surely correct that: we can use the signifier “communication” to refer to both semantic and non-semantic meaning; constraining context might help us clarify a meaning; the limits of context are “never absolutely determinable”; the notion of “writing” as represented in philosophy has required absence; Austin’s performative depends on an account of intention despite his apparent focus on context (LI, 1, 2, 3, 4–7, 13–19). And so on—this is not an exhaustive list.
But in order to claim, as he explicitly does, that “communication … is not the means of transference of meaning, the exchange of intentions and meanings” (LI, 20) and that “writing” is not “a hermeneutic deciphering, the decoding of a meaning or truth” (LI, 21), Derrida also needs to prove something far more difficult, something that (I, and others, would argue) he can’t prove: that intention is just a species of cause, and one of many causes, that produces writing effects. That is how he can say that “the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance” (LI, 18). This is a critical moment in his theorizing. “Intention,” as a concept, is being radically altered here, although he downplays what it is happening when he notes that it is not disappearing but only being put in “that place” from which “it will no longer be able to govern ….” But once placed in that ungoverning spot, the idea of intention has already turned into something else. It is no longer the answer to a certain type of why question that mentions past history, interprets the action, or implies something about the future.10 It is, rather, simply one more phenomenon impacting writing or speech, perhaps providing evidence or stating a cause. That is, put in “its place,” unable “to govern,” intention becomes just one more context (in “its place”) of many different kinds in the larger, potentially non-human context of language’s happenings. On this point Derrida really is at odds with Austin, for whom performative utterances must be “included as a part of” the “performance of an action,” and “[a]ctions can only be performed by persons.”11 In contrast, for Derrida in SEC, utterances and writing are events that happen. Rather than meant as intentional speech—a human speech by a necessarily human actor—utterances (according to SEC) are produced in the world due to some still-to-be-determined set of causes. (Causality means that effects arise out of their causes and nothing in SEC suggests that Derrida disagrees with this definition.12)
Perhaps because the consequences of this claim are major, Derrida’s other texts from this period tend to carefully finesse the point to avoid its most obvious vulnerabilities. In “Différance” (1967), for example, his invention of the “trace” serves to sidestep discussion of causes and effects, as well as intentions and actions. Although it is beyond what I can tackle here, it would also be productive to show how, in deliberately avoiding these critical terms, Derrida’s “trace” finds another language to establish the essential materiality of the signifier (to put this in Walter Benn Michaels’s terms), while only succeeding in returning to the same issues of causes and effects in another form, without using these terms.13 Be that as it may, whereas “Différance” and Of Grammatology extensively develop the “trace,” that term plays only a minor role in SEC. Instead, Derrida deploys ordinary language philosophy’s language of speech acts. This decision offers a certain analytical clarity, but it also opens up his argument to questions of intention and causality, questions he deflects by rendering speech acts as events and then arguing that these events (somehow) do not follow the usual patterns of causes and effects.
These are the basic moves of the “Parasites” section of SEC (LI, 13–19), which aims to reveal why Austin’s performative utterance is not (yet) deconstructive, why it does not reveal the communication-as-event that Derrida depicts (the later Searle/Derrida debate about Austin largely misses this point).14 Here, Derrida substitutes the notion of the speech act and replaces it with phrases such as “event of discourse,” “original event-utterance[],” or “discursive event” (LI, 18, 19). He also clarifies that he sees these kinds of discursive events as part of a larger set of “concerns” about “the status of events in general … of the strange logic they entail and that often passes unseen” (LI, 18). Like the moment when intention is put in “that place” from which it cannot govern, this swapping out of “acts” for “events,” along with the emphasis placed on “the eventhood of [the] event” (LI, 17), carries substantial theoretical weight. An “event of discourse” (a phrase more often attributed to Foucault) serves as a sociologically distanced way of avoiding or undermining intentionality while seeming not to. That is because like any event or happening, the “event of discourse” must have at least one cause producing the effect of that speech event, and likely many more: events in the world tend not to have single causes but many causes with different relative impacts.15 Once the speech act has been transformed into the writing event, then all aspects of the background of the event look relevant. Any major or minor circumstance is potentially pertinent to an event’s causation. In other words, once the speech act becomes the event-utterance, once writing becomes the event of the signature, then there is nowhere to look but context to find the source of the causes and contingencies that impact all aspects of that event, including the event of someone putting pen to paper (the topic of the next section of Derrida’s essay).
Deconstructing communication in SEC thus consists of two interrelated moves taken up as the “trace” in his other writings (and, for that reason, are harder to see in texts other than SEC for the work they are actually doing). The first move is to consistently transform or recharacterize instances of intention into causes, whether that means the cause of an “event of discourse” or the cause of a “writing effect,” as when he describes “the intention animating the utterance” (LI, 18). Think about how that phrase, “the intention animating the utterance,” functions. Whatever such a phrase might have meant for Husserl, from whom Derrida adopts it, “the utterance” here is not described as an expression of the speaker’s intention; rather, “the intention” enlivens “the utterance” (“animating the utterance”) as if what it means to intend is to trigger (to cause) a lifeless signifier to look alive. Derrida’s second move is to steadily show that context is already everywhere and so cannot be definitively settled, as he states early in the essay: “I shall try to demonstrate why a context is never absolutely determinable” (LI, 3). For that reason, contexts also cannot possibly be kept at one node in a causal chain—they are everywhere. In combination, the first move makes causality determinant, and the second deploys contexts to show that causality can, at best, only “determine[]” limited effects (“effects of semantic communication … that are particular, secondary, inscribed, and supplementary”) (LI, 3). This is a version of the now-classic deconstructive “double gesture,” which “put[s] into practice a reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system” in order to “interven[e] in the field of oppositions it criticizes” (LI, 21).
Even the essay’s title, “Signature Event Context,” might hint at the deconstructive double gesture. With it, Derrida implicitly invokes (in order to challenge) the conventional—albeit, I’m arguing, deeply misguided—understanding of intention as a causal sequence beginning with an idea in the mind, then formulated as a possible speech act, and eventually scrawled down on paper (content —> speech act —> writing). Instead of simply reversing its order, Derrida also alters and radically undermines each element in that potential sequence. That is, rather than provide us with a clean sequential reversal (writing —> speech act —> content), he first swaps out the terms (signature [for writing] —> event [for speech act] —> context [for content]). And then he breaks the causal chain, displacing the system, to reveal context infiltrating signature and event before the sequence can even get going. I take it that is also why there are no commas between the words in the title: punctuation would resolve the semantic, syntactical, and thus logical relationships between the words. So, the disrupted causal chain of “Signature Event Context,” by the essay’s end, looks more like this:
And, as this diagram is intended to demonstrate, to perform the double gesture—to reverse, displace, and intervene—Derrida keeps his theorizing securely in the realm of causes (whether those causes can be determined, partially determined, or will remain indeterminate), which he does from the essay’s very start.
Meaning Machines
Derrida holds us in this causal realm by conflating two different things: meanings with natural causes (e.g., thunder means rain) and intentional meanings expressed in human language (e.g., what I mean in this sentence). Even the essay’s very first sentence (after the Austin quote) does this, building an argument for a kind of communication that can incorporate both kinds of meaning with the signifier “communication” (LI, 1). He begins with a skeptical, rhetorical question that challenges the conventional definition of “communication”: “Is it certain that to the word communication corresponds a concept that is unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a word, communicable” (LI, 1)? The implication is that if we cannot manage to communicate what the word “communication” means, particularly without having to delimit or “anticipate” the word’s context and “semantic domain” in advance, how could we ever hope to non-contextually signify the meaning of any other word? Then he notes that the word “communication” can “designat[e] nonsemantic movements as well … one can, for instance, communicate a movement or that a tremor, a shock, a displacement of force can be communicated—that is propagated, transmitted.” “Talking” is one signifier and “displacing force” is another, both potential signifieds of the signifier “communication.” These physical senses of communication do “not involve phenomena of meaning or signification,” he observes. That is, he’s saying that the event or phenomenom of communicatation can happen without someone signifying anything at all. Because, however, such events or phenomena do involve causes and effects, he implies that “communicating” (that larger sweep of an idea) might be more like an event producing a cause.
As I explore in Corporate Persons, this conflation of what philosopher H. P. Grice distinguished as natural versus nonnatural meaning is a common feature of legal discussions of corporate speech, building on an interpretation of Holmes’s “marketplace of ideas” (words become literal commodities to be bought and sold).16 And, in both jurisprudence on corporate speech and in SEC, a kind of automation of the concept of speech logically follows from conflating these two types of meaning. Derrida develops this sense of automation in a discussion of philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), which he reads as showing how “the history of writing will conform to a law of mechanical economy,” in which writing is reduced to its “homogeneous and mechanical character” (LI, 4, 5).17 Although Derrida is, at this moment, criticizing Condillac’s account for its failure to correctly “characterize” or “style this absence” in writing (LI, 7), he does not criticize the mechanical per se. Indeed, the mechanical aspect supports his idea that absence and iterability structure “the mark of writing itself,” as if it is a requirement of communication that language have aspects that can never be under anyone’s total control (LI, 5–7). Or, as Derrida states: “to write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning, offering things and itself to be read and to be rewritten” (LI, 8).18 Once writing is characterized as a productive machine, communication has become at least partially automated. Needing no one to substantively run it, “the nonpresence of my intention of saying something meaningful” becomes a possible way for the writing machine to run (LI, 8). (I will momentarily bracket what it might mean to think about intention as a presence or absence, and what it could actually mean to write while one’s intention is nonpresent.)
Recall, once more, that for theorists of the corporation starting in the late-nineteenth century, the basic scenario that Derrida presents (as the conditions of possibility for communication and writing as a mark-producing machine) was their problem of corporate intention. Corporations were clearly megalomaniacal in their drive for profit; Thorstein Veblen analyzes this sociological phenomenon skillfully in The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904). But just because a corporation made commodities, or made things happen, did not mean that the corporation or anyone acting for it would be able to express an intention about the things it made or the events it caused. Someone might be able to do so under certain circumstances—or might not under others. In discussions of corporate intention, this problem was typically represented as the question of whether a corporation has a soul (like a human being) or not (like a brute or beast). Corporate ontology, in other words, was a way to capture the unstable expressive capacities of the corporation as sometimes able to express an intention and sometimes not. Frequent mindlessness, automaticity, absence of consciousness, and mechanical iterability thus looked like real, albeit hazardous, qualities of the corporate form. And that reality very quickly raised all sorts of unhappy questions about any kind of human interaction—say, a negotiated and signed contract—with a corporation. It was this situation that led Holmes to forgo looking for intention at all when it came to writings that the corporation generates and to assume that there was no other alternative to the corporate-contractual model.
By titling his essay “Limited Inc a b c …,” Derrida hints that something about the entire technological scenario of modernity, this human confrontation with the contractual, commodifying entity known as the corporation, relates to his conception of communication as a system. Perhaps in assuming that there is some quality here more fundamental about the way all human institutions work, he sees this situation as an instance of the essentially inescapable and logical structure of writing. In SEC, he recharacterizes the “nonpresence” of intention as the way the so-called writing machine must work, rather than seeing it as an incidental or damaging feature of inchoate phenomena like boilerplate “Terms and Conditions” contracts (which we click through without reading not because the words are meaningless but because we already know that they are intended as a wall of words that might subdue us, a flagrant exhibition of a company’s arbitrary economic dominance).19 For Derrida, not only does communication function without a presence, without an intending person, it is designed to work without anyone intending, such that “every sign … presupposes a certain absence (to be determined)” (LI, 7). Although Michel Foucault and Derrida were to disagree on many points, including the theorization of authorial absence, there is a sense in which Derrida’s communication machine finds its analogue in Foucault’s roughly contemporaneous theorizing of Bentham’s disciplinary apparatus: “Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine,” writes Foucault, referring to the panopticon: “it does not matter what motive animates him.”20 The architecturally hollow panopticon, like the communication writing machine, is structured with a constitutive, unmotivated, absence of intention at its core. While the corporation manifests that absence in the social damage and the financial profit of the capitalist engine at work (the consequence of limiting personal liability), Derrida’s and Foucault’s models make that absence substantial, productive, and forceful throughout society.21
What remains assumed (and unsupported) in both of their accounts is how exactly the analogy of the machine, for writing, is supposed to operate. On this point, the brilliant and still underappreciated British philosopher Mary Midgley offers the best challenge to the ubiquitous machine metaphor, explaining why it is so attractive and also why it is deeply flawed. The “central point” of this metaphor was to establish “continuity with one’s surroundings” (what Derrida would call context).22 But the analogy quickly breaks down when we try to expand it to people: machine cogs are separate but inactive objects, “not distinct subjects” acting in the world.23 Her further point is that this world-as-machine model still could seem plausible when God was assumed to be the “active, external figure” designing the universe, but it becomes obscure and incoherent when God’s presence is questionable.24 Midgley continues her critique, exposing the futility of using this model of mechanization “to cover intentional human action.” The problem is that doing so “raises a sharp puzzle about the position of the understanders themselves … [who begin to] look as if they are really agents somehow standing right outside the processes that they are studying.”25 She questions how it makes sense to see certain enlightened people “function[ing] as the only real agents around, those responsible for running the human machine.”26
Midgley’s target is the machine metaphor used by contemporary scientists and social scientists, but we can extend her argument to cover critical and cultural theorists too, including Foucault and Derrida.27 Their machine metaphor, I’m suggesting, is doing the same kind of work, smuggling in an active agent through the structure; they then performatively hollow out that structure (via “absence”), yet without forgoing the insights and principal vantage point the structure offered in the first place. (Richard Rorty makes a similar point when identifying the danger of “philosophical closure” Derrida constantly flirts with: “You can’t have a ground without a figure, a margin without a page of text.”28 ) In Derrida’s case, this means producing an astonishing, and often compelling, vision of language, as if coming across a totally foreign phenomenon, observed from an impossibly distant sociological perspective. It is as if one could look at language like an alien who possesses a radically divergent understanding of intention and expression, as in Octavia Butler’s short story “Amnesty” (2003), with the alien shrub-like “Communities” who envelop and constantly touch and hurt you to “communicate.”29 As in that science fictional thought experiment, expressing an intention is reimagined as merely an optional aspect of language use, standing along other aspects of variables or qualities of language use, like force, artificiality, arbitrariness, and the production of uncontrollable effects. It is true that if intention were to be irreducibly absent (LI, 19), then language and writing would be something extremely strange and alien. Yet all that really tells us is that without intention, language and writing would not be language and writing but would be something we don’t know and, aside from science fiction, have not imagined.
In SEC, as in various of his other early essays, Derrida immediately shifts from the notion of writing as “a sort of machine” to intention as partially automated and mechanical; the idea is that we have as little control over our unconscious intentions as we do a machine we are observing from the outside.30 Writing “must continue to ‘act” and to be readable” when the author is no longer present, for whatever reason, whether temporarily, permanently (because of death), or “because he has not employed his absolutely actual and present intention or attention, the plentitude of his desire to say what he means, in order to sustain what seems to be written ‘in his name’” (LI, 8). Under such arduous conditions, it seems, authors are invariably either partially absent or momentarily vacant when they write, machine-like despite themselves. The mechanical quality of intention is thus another guise (or maybe a function, or effect) of the Freudian unconscious (an observation Derrida had already elaborated in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” [1967]), potentially concealing an aspect of one’s will that the writer will never be able to access.31 In that essay, Derrida renders such concealment and absence as a necessary characteristic of writing: “[w]riting is unthinkable without repression.”32 Necessarily writing while repressed, the author inevitably misses out on essential sources of her intention; without access to all of these foundational events, she can only intuit, but not fully know, what she intends. All she (or we) can know is that the writing event, generated by a sort of machine, produces a forceful effect in the world: “a written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context … this breaking force is not an accidental predicate but the very structure of the written text” (LI, 9). Interpretation, by extension, could not mean trying to understand a text’s meaning, but identifying and evaluating the myriad root causes of that powerful force.
On Intentional Actions versus Causal Events
I have been arguing that the deconstructive moves of SEC—to incorporate communication that functions, in the end, as the effect of contexts (themselves the effect of forces)—require recharacterizing intention as another species of causation. Context could then be shown to suffuse all causes and all “intentions.” I have also suggested that Holmes used a version of the same move in the late nineteenth century to contend with the basic problem of corporate intention. Rightly concerned about the power of large-scale businesses, and the inequitable contracts instantiated by their commodities, Holmes offered a way to avoid having to theorize intentions in his accounts of how legal promises work. Later, Holmes’s flawed solution was re-incorporated as the dominant account of contractual interpretation and, eventually, constitutionally-protected corporate free speech. Since then, all of these arguments have been logically available, whether in deconstruction or in jurisprudence of corporate speech, only waiting to be made. Derrida’s performative creation of the corporation “Sarl” for “Searle” in “Limited, Inc” is an entirely consistent part of this history, a late manifestation of still dominant capitalist forms and attempts to understand them.
Lastly, let me underscore a point that has been explored at length elsewhere, and that hopefully is already obvious—namely, why a person’s intended action is not, and could not be, identical with an event’s cause.33 On some level this idea should be intuitive, as Elizabeth Anscombe observes in “The Causation of Action” (1983) when she contrasts two answers to the question “How did the door shut?”: (1) “by the operation of magnets and weights,” versus (2) “Jones shut the door” (CA, 91). As she notes, the answer “by pushing it’ may be a perfectly adequate answer to ‘How did Jones shut the door?,’” but no one would think that means that Jones is “a door-shutting mechanism which works by a pushing action” (CA, 92). What Anscombe is interested in capturing with this contrast are the two, implicit, and distinct kinds of inquiries operating here. With one kind “we are interested in picking out ‘chains’ of causality going back in time” (the weights and magnets version). But there is also a different sort of inquiry implied by the question of how Jones shut the door, one more precisely represented by the question “Why did he shut the door?,” and that question generates “a different sort of answer” (CA, 94). It has been tempting for thinkers to assume that this is not a different kind of question and answer, says Anscombe. But it is clearly wrong to explain how “actions by volition and intention” happen by “what thinkers of modern times call ‘causal’ explanation” (CA, 95). They are conflating two things into “just one single sort of explanation.” Her point is that there are really two separate kinds of explanation always at work in these scenarios: causation on the one hand, and intention on the other. “The mistake” is to think that something done intentionally “is a causal relation between act and intention” (CA, 95). And this is virtually the identical move (or, to use Anscombe’s language, “the mistake”) that I have been describing as Derrida’s in SEC and Holmes’s in contractual theorizing of the corporate form.
There are many more careful steps in Anscombe’s analysis, as she explains precisely why “the teleology of conscious action is not to be explained as efficient causality” by some desire or state of mind (CA, 96). She then anticipates and staves off counter-challenges that might depict her investigation as phenomenological or behaviorist (CA, 97–99). But finally she arrives, almost in passing (it seems so obvious to her) at the point that Holmes, Derrida, and Foucault could not see:
So: fill up that gap how you will. I mean, of course, suppose it filled up how you will. No way of filling it up … will fill it up with intentions, beliefs, wants, aims, volitions, or desires. For you are in pursuit of a type of causal history in which those things do not belong at all. … There might come a point at which there is no further puzzle about how each link in the causal chain produces the next one. And still nothing has been said about intentions, beliefs, thoughts or decisions. (CA, 100)
We could explore these causal chains forever, says Anscombe. Maybe someday we will even understand all the links in the causal chain (it seems unlikely yet it is not theoretically impossible). In the process of turning intentions into causes, speech acts into events that are determined by, and produce more, contexts, Derrida’s prodigious, many decades-long deconstructions performatively attempted to fill up the “gap” while revealing how it emptied itself out all over again—pondering the perpetually half-sinking ship called language. But, Anscombe says, even were we to fill out this chain successfully, everything relevant about writing, language, and meaning would be left off the table: “And still nothing has been said about intentions, beliefs, thoughts or decisions.” Forever constructing and deconstructing the causal chains does not get us to intention.
Derrida is thus in agreement with Anscombe in one sense: like her, he sees the attraction of causation to explain events (non-human actions), and he sees the real complexity of doing so. And he is in complete disagreement with her in another sense because she insists that intentions and causations are non-identical, that we are missing something critical if we think that intentional human actions are merely events. That is why, in the end, we should modify my earlier diagram of SEC to put it in its proper relation with intention (fig. 2). Which is, to be clear, a relation and not a context at all.
Notes
I would like to mark the recent fiftieth anniversary of “Signature Event Context” (SEC) by looking at some of the varied contexts for this paper on the problem of context and by treating SEC as part of Derrida’s wider engagement with the problem of history.
In an important and timely article, Joshua Kates has recently argued that when it comes to the question of history, Derrida both rejects the constrictions of historicism and affirms the transformations of historicity.1 For Kates, the tension between these two gestures makes it difficult for Derrida to adhere to the conventions needed for a viable historiography: Derrida’s thought is too open to allow for the determinations of place, event, and testimony that enable the methods and veracities of writing history.
I would argue that while Derrida’s “historicity” attempts to resist the equivocal legacies of the cul-de-sacs of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger on the question of history, this openness—as a thinking of possibility—does not preclude and discount Derrida’s recognition of the problems of writing “mundane” history. Unlike Heidegger, Derrida does not privilege the original purity of history “itself” (Geschichte) over the derivative science of mere historiography (Historie).2
After SEC, the writing of history remained an open problem and a suspended experiment for Derrida, explored again and again in the relation between “context,” “memory,” and “narrative.”3 In broad terms, he placed the problem of history under the rubric of “ex-appropriation,” or what he called “the interminable appropriation of an irreducible nonproper, which at the same time conditions, constitutes, and limits every and any process of appropriation.”4 Ex-appropriation is neither the denial of a viable historiography nor the advocacy of some elusive transcendental historicity. It describes the limits of writing history—and its possibilities.
2
The last word on SEC was given on 31st December 2003 by Derrida, less than a year before his death, in a paper celebrating the life and work of Paul Ricoeur.5 As Derrida recalls, at the 1971 Montreal conference devoted to “communication,” Ricoeur had given the opening paper, “Discours et communication,” on the evening of 29th August.6 This was followed the next morning by Derrida delivering “Signature Événement Contexte.” It is Derrida himself that gives us the first context for SEC: “after the other presentations, the roundtable lasted for two hours. It was largely dominated by what the chair of the discussion called a ‘singular amicable fight’ between Ricoeur and me.”7 Derrida and Ricoeur conducted their “amicable fight” over the place and status of the event in a theory of discourse. Kates has given us an invaluable account of the nuanced debates at the time over “discourse” in another recent paper.8
As far as I am aware, SEC is the first time that Derrida referred to J. L. Austin. Perhaps Austin’s time had come in the Francophone world, as Ricoeur also discussed Austin in his paper at the Montreal conference. 9 With his suggestive distinction between constative and performative statements, Austin will remain part of Derrida’s writings over the next thirty years. As Derrida would observe in 2003, “Austin has said and I constantly repeat, only a sentence, not a word, has meaning.”10 In the aftermath of SEC, Derrida is “constantly” repeating Austin and his introduction of the problem of context into the philosophy of language.
As we are beginning to understand with the recent publication of Le Calcul des langues (2020), an unfinished work based on the 1971–1972 seminar, “Philosophie et rhétorique au XVIII siècle: Condillac et Rousseau,” Derrida’s response to Austin was part of a wider project on the relation between philosophy and rhetoric.11 Derrida turns back to Condillac, who has a place in SEC, to explore the complicity between the attempted regulation of language and the limits of empiricism.12 In the mid-1960s, Derrida had treated empiricism as the lure of a false exit from metaphysics.13 Empiricism is the dream of the simple outside. By the early 1970s, chiefly through Condillac, we are given a more nuanced picture.
Condillac can be seen as an ordinary language philosopher avant la lettre. He makes the case for a “common language” that can find its clarity through “circumstances” as the basis for a new philosophy.14 As Condillac remarks in the 1740s: “We have become so familiar with the use of words that we have no doubt others grasp our thought the moment we speak the words, as if the ideas would necessarily be the same in speaker and hearer. Instead of remedying these abuses, philosophers have themselves shown a partiality for obscurity.”15 As an empiricist, Condillac offers a complex genesis of language that embraces a structural ideal: language begins with actions and must end with signs. As we know from The Archaeology of the Frivolous (1973), another fragment of the 1971–1972 seminar, Derrida will focus on the status of metaphor to address the fault lines between language, philosophy, rhetoric, and empiricism.
In Le Calcul des langues, Derrida suggests that metaphor links and disrupts the relation between philosophy and rhetoric: part of the gestural, figurative, and sensible origins of language, metaphor already disturbs the rational calculations of rhetoric and its tropes and reinforces the instability of a “rhetorical philosophy.” For Condillac, the best way to strike a balance between philosophy and rhetoric is to rely on what Derrida calls the ideality of analogy. As Derrida succinctly observes, “analogy passes through the body and touches [puts the finger on] language [met le doigt à la langue].”16 Analogy describes the facility for connection and invention and, most of all, for finding the essential sameness in difference.17 In Derrida’s terms, analogy becomes the possibility and ruin of a viable empiricism as the foundation for a “rhetorical philosophy.”
Empiricism can be described as the pathos of hoping that we have time, that we have the time to calculate on our senses. If we treat the same as the identical, there are a host of idealised analogies that give us all the time that we need to move from the five senses to reasoning and logic. But this also means that empiricism relies on a non-empirical ideality. As Hume recognised, a pure empiricism always has gaps that must be filled by the virtual and the less than sensible. And perhaps this is the source of Derrida’s most basic objection to Austin’s project: there just isn’t enough time for ordinary language philosophy.
3
Derrida announces at the outset of his paper that the question of communication—the theme of the conference—will be addressed as “the problem of context.”18 For Derrida, there are always contexts, but context should not be determinate or determining. I would describe this context as a mi-lieu, as a half-placing rather than a complete determination.19 One of the mi-lieus for SEC is Gilles Lane’s French translation of Austin’s How to Do Things With Words, Quand dire, c’est faire, which appeared in January 1970.20
In SEC, Derrida refers to what he sees as Austin’s reliance on “the total context” (SEC, 322, 325). In Alan Bass’s English translation, the reference to “total context” is followed by the citation in the footnotes of two pages from Austin’s work (HTD, 52, 147). On these pages, Austin speaks of the need to “consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued—the total speech act,” and of “the total speech act in the total speech situation.” However, in Derrida’s original French text, using Gilles Lane’s translation of Austin, not two but eight pages are cited in this footnote.21
On neither of the two pages cited in the English translation does Austin actually refer to “the total context.” Rather, he speaks of “the total situation.” Is “the total situation” the same as “the total context?” In fact, Derrida does not even cite one of these pages. The page he cites refers directly to “context.” Austin writes: “for some years we have been realizing more and more clearly that the occasion of an utterance matters seriously, and that the words used are to some extent to be ‘explained’ by the ‘context’ in which they are designed to be or have actually been spoken in linguistic interchange” (HTD, 100). With all his customary qualifications and cares, Austin is addressing the proposition that words can, “to some extent,” be understood more accurately and effectively by the context of their use.
The second page in the footnotes of the English translation is cited in the French text, but the French translation does not use the phrase “the total speech act in the total speech situation” but rather “l’acte de discours integral, dans la situation intégrale de discours,” which could also be translated as “the whole speech act, in the complete situation of discourse.” This translation is justified because Austin is referring here to the overall relation between performative and constative speech acts and locutionary and illocutionary speech acts (QD, 151; HTD, 147).22 This complex quadrangle is the “whole speech act, in the complete situation of discourse.”
Why did Alan Bass exclude the other six pages referenced by Derrida in his original footnote? Because they come from Gilles Lane’s introduction.23 Gilles Lane (1929–2007), a Canadian academic who studied in Paris in the 1960s, is part of the mi-lieu of SEC.24 One would like to think that Lane himself attended the 1971 Montreal conference. Derrida starts his reading of Austin by quoting Lane and by acknowledging his debt to a Quebecois academic’s work at a conference taking place in Montreal (SEC, 321). As he had done before, Derrida elegantly begins by marking the place and wider context of his paper.
Some of the other pages that Derrida cites from Lane’s fulsome introduction are also worth noting, as they are part of Derrida’s interpretation of Austin. From Sense and Sensibilia, Austin rebukes A. J. Ayer and logical positivism in general, observing: “I should like to emphasize, however, how fatal it always is to embark on explaining the use of a word without seriously considering more than a tiny fraction of the contexts in which it is actually used” (QD, 15).25 Derrida recognizes that what makes Austin’s project significant is that it introduces the problem of context into an emphatically acontextual philosophy. Lane gives Derrida both Austin’s criticism of acontextuality and his recognition of totality. It is Lane who quotes Austin’s call for the need to “consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued—the total speech act” (QD, 15; HTD, 52). From this perspective, the “total context” in Austin’s project can be seen as a tension between the acceptance of variability and the search for assurance in speech acts.
The acceptance of variability and the search for assurance is perhaps also our best mi-lieu for SEC as we think, somewhat hubristically, about the next fifty years. To take one example, thanks to the remarkable archive at Princeton of Derrida’s complete library at the time of his death, we have a digital glimpse of his copy of Quand dire, c’est faire. The book is heavily annotated.26 There are a number of bookmarks. Of course, we do not know if these bookmarks were used for SEC or for the later “Limited Inc” or the other re-readings of Austin over the years.27 But the possible list of topics from these bookmarked pages is tantalizing: the promise, the apology, the bet, the tone of voice that cannot be written, the status of the quotation, the difference between warning and deterring, and, perhaps most of all, Austin’s astute dictum, which Derrida heartily accepted: “What will not survive […] is the notion of the purity of performatives.”28
4
I cannot begin to think of the fragile place of SEC in an ever-widening sea of polemics over the next fifty years, without thinking that 2024 will also mark the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jacques Derrida. But this was also already part of the mi-lieu of SEC. It informs the context of communication as writing: “To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a kind of machine that is in turn productive, that my future disappearance in principle will not prevent from functioning” (SEC, 316). As a piece of writing, SEC is a “machine” that keeps “functioning.” Fifty years later, it keeps “functioning.” It had a distinctive context when it was written and it goes on, beyond that context, to other contexts.
For Derrida, we should recall, the “first time” is first: an unprogrammed, unforeseen event takes place, has taken place. However, as Husserl recognized, for this event to be registered as the “first time” it must also be open to repetition.29 Each time that the event is repeated—re-presented, re-called and re-narrated—it re-marks itself as itself. This “first time” is at once the “same” and no longer identical: it is the same and other. The caveat for Derrida is that this “first time” was not uniquely present to itself as itself in the first place or simply the “same” from the outset. As Derrida observed in 1966, “A sign which does not repeat itself, which is not already divided by repetition in its ‘first time,’ is not a sign.”30 A context or mi-lieu is part of what marks this division and this difference. It is worth recalling what Derrida said in the late 1980s:
Once again (and this probably makes a thousand times I have had to repeat this, but when will it finally be heard, and why this resistance?): as I understand it (and I have explained why), the text is not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself confined to the library. It does not suspend reference—to history, to the world, to reality, to being, and especially not to the other, since to say of history, of the world, of reality, that they always appear in an experience, hence in a movement of interpretation which contextualizes them according to a network of differences and hence of referral to the other, is surely to recall that alterity (difference) is irreducible. Différance is a reference and vice versa.31
We have a better understanding of Derrida’s engagement with history since the publication in 2013 of his 1964–1965 seminar on Heidegger, the question of Being, and history. As I have already suggested, Derrida did not follow Heidegger in giving history itself a transcendental privilege in relation to historiography and the “mere” recording, reconstituting, and relating of historical events. After SEC, one can see Derrida returning to the singular historical event, with its distinctive contexts and its necessary and always fraught relation to narrating this event, which opens other contexts and other questions. From the 1960s, Derrida was thinking about the relation between history and historiography. As contexts and questions change in the history of the writing of history, one can speak of the future of the past without invalidating the historical event.
As I believe we will soon see when Derrida’s seminars from the early 1990s on testimony and the witness (part of which I attended) are published, twenty years after SEC Derrida remained interested in how one weighs and judges the testimony of the witness—and treats the historian as a witness of the witness—when the communication is from the past, with all its distances, absences and fractured and interested archives.
As I often say to my students, you cannot treat the novels of Jane Austen as historical objects of regency England: no one dies in Austen’s novels, and yet she herself was surrounded by death. Is there any death in ordinary language philosophy? Is there any death in the work of the other Austin, and author of Sense and Sensibilia? In that posthumous work, How To Do Things With Words, there is “the death of a donkey” and “the death of the rabbit” (HTD, 111, 114). But when Austin speaks of “the circumstances of the utterance,” he also offers a compelling example: “the context of the words ‘I shall die some day,’ ‘I shall leave you my watch,’ in particular the health of the speaker, make a difference [in] how we shall understand them” (HTD, 76). This is another mi-lieu in Derrida’s reading of Austin.
5
As I have suggested, beyond the long shadow of A. J. Ayer and the brief brilliance of J. L. Austin, and the endless analytical polemics over the status of language, its logic, its truths, its exacting constative statements, and its febrile performative contexts, Derrida had long been interested in the problem of history. I do not believe that this is a mi-lieu that Derrida and Austin shared. For Derrida, the problem of context was also a question of history. As a philosophical question, the possibility of history must contend with the legacy of the history of philosophy (and its presumptuous conceptual field for history) and with the philosophy of history (treated as a kind of immaculate conception for historiography). From the early 1950s, as a student of Jean Hyppolite, Derrida had been questioning this tradition.32
Derrida had also addressed the question of context before SEC. In an essay from 1967 on Georges Bataille, he warns against two traps when it comes to the concept of context. The first trap is the self-sufficient context that enables concepts to act “as if they were their own context.”33 The second trap is the sovereign context in which “contextual attentiveness and differences of signification” are submitted “to a system of meaning per-mitting or promising an absolute formal mastery.”34 In another work from 1967 on Husserl, Derrida also speaks of the importance of taking note of “the circumstances of the discourse, the context, and situation.”35 For Derrida, these are necessary warnings about the ways context can be used as a vehicle of autonomy or totality. A few years after SEC, Derrida describes context as both a constraint and an opening. This double perspective is perhaps the best way to think about his approach to the problem of context in SEC.36
Communication, he says at the beginning of SEC, “opens a semantic field which precisely is not limited to semantics, semiotics, and even less to linguistics” (SEC, 309). He then offers some examples of the communication of “nonsemantic movements” (SEC, 309). “It is also said,” he writes, “that different or distant places can communicate between each other by means of a given passageway or opening” (SEC, 309). What are these passageways or openings? How do we communicate with or listen to distant places—or to the distant past? How is history, as a discipline and a practice of writing, possible? “What happens in this case, what is transmitted or communicated,” Derrida argues, “are not phenomena of meaning or signification” (SEC, 309). If we are trying to communicate with or, more importantly, to listen to this distant past, there are traces or fragments of the past that resist immediate significance or comprehensible meaning but are still telling us something of historical value. It is from these traces that we write history.
How can one speak of a “passageway or opening” from the distant past that communicates without the “phenomena of meaning or signification?” It is worth recalling what Levinas said of the trace. For Levinas, the trace resists the phenomenological imperium of phenomenality. “A trace is not a sign like any other,” he insists.37 A trace can be taken for a sign, for example, Levinas says, when “a historian discovers ancient civilizations which form the horizon of our world on the basis of the vestiges left by their existence.”38 These are the conventional tracks or signs of the past. But a trace also exceeds the structure of the sign and its signification. A trace “signifies outside of every intention of signaling and outside of every project of which it would be the aim.”39 To think of the trace differently, Levinas offers a compelling example: “the fingerprints left by someone who wanted to wipe away his traces and commit the perfect crime.” And he concludes: “He who left traces in wiping out his traces did not mean to say or do anything by the traces he left.”40
These inadvertent traces of the past can function as “witnesses in spite of themselves,” to use the historian Marc Bloch’s superb expression.41 They communicate without the “phenomena of meaning or signification.” They also structure the task of the historian as a witness of the witnesses of the past. For Derrida, “writing” is a term that engages with the problem and possibility of what we can glimpse from far away. This is why he acknowledges that writing extends or opens communication to “a much greater range” (SEC, 311). As with distant places, so with distant times, and so with most historical and literary studies. In this sense, we are all Casaubons. What interests Derrida in SEC is what interests the historian: something happens to “meaning” when it is carried “over a much greater distance” (SEC, 311).
Historiography is confronted by an absence that it is always trying to overcome or, at the very least, to accept with good grace. What is at stake is the possibility of reading the historical past, which begins with “[t]he absence of the sender, the addressor, from the marks that he abandons, which are cut off from him and continue to produce effects beyond his presence and beyond the present actuality of his meaning, that is, beyond his life itself” (SEC, 313). The “certain absolute degree of absence” that Derrida discerns in the communication of writing accounts for the conditions of writing history (SEC, 315). It is a question not simply of a “presence that is distant,” a powerful conceit in the history of writing history, but also of responding to “a certain absolute degree of absence” (SEC, 315). If a charge is to be made against Derrida, perhaps it is raising the question of the possibility of history in the midst of a conference on communication. And, we might add, of raising the question of the possibility of history in the midst of other questions about writing, literature, intersubjectivity and ethics.
6
How does one respond to the distant past? For Derrida, it is a question of a writing that has the facility and vulnerability to stretch and wander between presence and absence. As he says, “this distance, this gap, this delay, this différance must be brought to a certain absolute of absence for the structure of writing” (SEC, 315).42 Whatever history “carries” cannot simply be determined as an historical object, submitting it to a naive historicism. But nor can it remain untouched; it catches on the snags and eddies of other contexts and other mi-lieus.
In attempting to address this challenge, Derrida turns to fractured, mobile, and transferrable contexts. “The possibility of extraction and of citational grafting” is the possibility of citation and quotation opening “infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion” (SEC, 320). The weight of the past can also be turned to the futures of the past. This is a necessary conceit in any historiographical project. Derrida had first spoken of extraction and sampling in his 1969 paper on Mallarmé, in which there are “an infinite number of booklets enclosing and fitting inside other booklets, which are only able to issue forth by grafting, sampling, citations, exergues, references, etc.”43
If Derrida were addressing a problem of history in the passage I have just quoted from SEC, rather than Husserl’s account of pure logical grammar, I think he may have spoken somewhat differently. The history of literature, allowing that a literary work is not a historical object like a chair, invites a history of quotation and citation, of books lurking inside other books. Historiography certainly has its citationality and its dissemination. But the history of historiography also makes other demands, as Derrida recognizes in later works, and requires other responses, not least the narrative of the event and the event of its narration, the veracity of documents, the testimony of witnesses, and the institution of the archive. As Derrida himself remarks in SEC, different contexts are required when we turn to the status of the event (SEC, 326).
Historiography requires that the remote past, even the unverifiable inscriptions on the ancient monuments, be legible. There must be something we can read, even if it is the inadvertent disturbance of an erasure. As Derrida remarks—then and now—“My ‘written communication’ must, if you will, remain legible despite the absolute disappearance of every determined addressee in general for it to function as writing” (SEC, 315). Derrida’s understanding of “writing” lends itself to confronting the historical archive: the letter is torn, the archive damaged, the records lost, and the context is no longer simply given as whole and complete and as an easy determination for historicism and its empirical underpinnings (SEC, 316). All writing, he insists, “must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general” (SEC, 315–16).
What Austin brings to thinking about the writing of history is the insight that the performative speech act both “produces or transforms a situation” and finds itself in a multitude of possible situations (SEC, 321). For Derrida, as a “difference of force,” a phrase used by Austin which also evokes Deleuze’s splendid reading of Nietzsche, the performative “does not essentially limit itself to transporting an already constituted semantic content guarded by its own aiming at truth” (SEC, 322; HTD, 72–73, 100).44 The performative both opens a context and finds itself transformed by other contexts. We can call this recognition of limits and evocation of excess “historicity,” as Joshua Kates has done; but it is a “historicity” that remains engaged with the dilemmas of mundane history: context, memory, and narrative. No doubt many historians would object to such a philosophical description of historiography. But Derrida was a philosopher who remained interested in the problem of history.
Notes
What do we mean, though, these days when we talk about context? Is context a surface formation or a depth discovery? Is it essential to the meaning of a work or merely incidental to it? Given the renewed importance of concepts of context to recent debates about how we read or ought to be reading, it seems to me that it might be worthwhile to return to a strong theoretical position on context, a deconstructive one, to see what it can contribute to our present ways of thinking. Simultaneously, we can observe what happens to familiar deconstructive arguments when our present critical contexts are brought to bear on them.
In what follows, I will take up Derrida’s “Signature Event Context” with both of these motivations in mind. The text hardly needs an introduction here; it’s known for being Derrida’s most extended engagement with analytic philosophy, in particular with J.L. Austin’s theorization of performative language, and it gained a certain notoriety because of the debate with John Searle that ensued, in part reprinted in Limited, Inc and which I will largely be bracketing here. Rather, I’ll focus on the earlier text in order to consider what Derrida understood there by context and by the act of contextualizing.
“Signature Event Context” (SEC, Signature événement contexte) puts questions of context front and center: “this particular communication,” Derrida writes, “will be concerned with the problem of context and with the question of determining exactly how writing relates to context in general.”2 SEC also works through a notion of writing that is developed at greater length in Of Grammatology and other pieces of Derrida’s from this period, systematically showing how a generalized conception of writing, as Derrida articulates it, disturbs, transforms, and inhabits from within the three terms in the essay’s title. “Writing,” over the course of the essay, is shown to transform what we ordinarily understand by signatures, events, and—most importantly for the purpose of my argument—contexts.
The essay was first given as a talk in 1971 at a French-language conference on the theme of “Communication.” Derrida begins the essay by recursively gesturing to the context of his talk (or in French, communication, the standard term for a talk or conference paper), asking about the meaning of the conference’s keyword: is it certain that the meaning of the word “communication” is something “unique, “univocal,” “controllable,” or “transmittable”; is it “determinate,” “identifiable,” or “describable?” He draws our attention to at least three possible meanings: “communication” can refer to a transmission of meaning, in the sense that I communicate my thoughts by means of this essay; it can refer to a physical proximity, in the sense of communicating rooms; or it can describe a transfer of force, in the sense that one ball communicates its motion to another in a game of billiards. In pointing this out, Derrida signals that he will bring to bear on his discussion not only considerations of meaning, but also considerations of force. What we usually assume can limit the equivocity of a word’s meaning, he goes on, is the context in which it is used (SEC, 2/368). Context is thus introduced in connection to a notion of limit and to the task of limiting. Context renders the meaning of a word or utterance controllable and identifiable; it determines, in the sense of its etymology from the Classical Latin determinare, to bound or to set limits.
Context determines, or rather, as we will see, context raises the problem of determinability. “But are the requirements [les réquisits] of a context ever absolutely determinable?” Derrida asks. “This is, fundamentally, the most general question that I shall endeavor to elaborate. Is there a rigorous and scientific concept of context?” (SEC, 2–3/369). As he proceeds, it becomes clearer that there are at least two sorts of determination at stake. Derrida will be concerned with whether context is determining the meaning of a given utterance, and he will be concerned with whether context itself is determinable.
He unfolds both questions as part of his broader consideration of writing. Working through a reading of Condillac, Derrida undertakes the task in the first part of his essay of defining writing, or rather, as he says, of determining it: “What are in effect the essential predicates in a minimal determination of the classical concept of writing?” (SEC, 9/377). Derrida uses the term “determination” in a traditional way here, equating it with predication, the kind of predication that ascribes properties to a subject in order to define it. And he draws on the framework of the genus-species relation when he notes that Condillac treats writing as a “species” of communication, a species being that which “admit[s] a relative specificity within a genre,” a type belonging to a general kind and drawing part of its identity from its difference from other types (SEC, 6/374).
Seeking a determination of writing, then, Derrida looks to identify its specific difference from other types of communication. This task becomes a strange one, however, when Derrida names “absence” as writing’s “essential predicate.” How can absence serve as a predicate of any sort? Moreover, how is this absence itself determined? When Derrida first refers to the idea of “absence” as a predicate, he notes that it is yet “to be determined.” So he writes: “let us attempt… to characterize the absence”; “how do we qualify this absence?” (SEC, 7/374).3
The move Derrida makes, extending Condillac’s argument and causing some confusion for Searle and others, is from an empirical possibility to a structural necessity. Whereas Condillac describes writing as a form of communication that can reach “persons who are absent,” Derrida argues that such an absence is not merely possible or incidental but pertains to the nature of writing as such: the possibility of absence constitutes the structure of writing in its specific difference from other forms of communication (SEC, 7/374). What is more, we see that Derrida extends Condillac’s statement about “persons who are absent” to at least three different determinations, or to three different figures. While Condillac refers only to absent receivers, Derrida adds to this the notions of an absent sender and an absent context. He reasons by analogy: “what holds for the receiver holds also … for the sender or the producer” (SEC, 8/376). Writing is a mark that can subsist in the absence of a sender, a receiver, or a context; writing is what subsists as a mark of difference from this absence.
Derrida enumerates three characteristics of writing over and against what is absent (he literally enumerates them, in one of many sections in this essay where he feels the need to number his points): writing is characterized by a “subsistence” [une marque qui reste], by a “spacing,” and by a “force of rupture” (SEC, 9/376). For reasons that will become clearer later, I think that these three notions—subsistence, spacing, and rupture—are best grasped as describing differential relations, though Derrida identifies them with “absence” as such. Regardless, in his definition of subsistence, spacing, and rupture, a multi-faceted image of context appears. “Spacing,” for example, entails the separation of a written sign “from other elements of the internal contextual chain.” By “context,” here, we are given to understand that Derrida at least sometimes has in mind those marks accompanying the mark in question and which together are internal to a signifying chain, text, or work. This is a notion of context as internal to a text. Spacing also separates the mark, Derrida further remarks, “from all forms of … reference,” so that we can also file “all forms of reference” under the heading of what counts as context. Finally, when Derrida writes that the written sign implicates a “force that breaks with its context,” he goes on to gloss context quite broadly as “an allegedly real context [that] includes a certain ‘present’ of the inscription, the presence of the writer to what he has written, the entire environment and the horizon of his experience, and above all the intention, the wanting-to-say-what-he-means [le vouloir dire], which animates his inscription at a given moment” (SEC, 9/377). In this passage, we bear witness to a capacious notion of context, one that absorbs what Derrida earlier referred to as sender as well as receiver. What is called context now allegedly includes: physical presence, temporal presence, physical environment, experience, consciousness, intention, will, and the real.
What would it mean to subtract context from writing, in each and every sense of “context” that Derrida proposes here? And would this be a remotely helpful exercise for thinking about the relation between text and context in literary studies? It’s hard to see how it could be. Even the strongest statements I can think of urging critics to turn away from context—take Rita Felski’s essay “Context Stinks!,” the last chapter of her Limits of Critique, or Joseph North’s arguments against the historicist/contextualist paradigm in Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History—even these apparently hardline positions in no way advocate for a total absenting of every form of contextual consideration. Rather, each seeks to limit appeals to certain contexts in order to boost the visibility of others. North, for example, seeks to challenge the priority placed on historical scholarship in order to shed light on present contexts of aesthetic education. For him, historical scholarship has become overly specialized and no longer realizes its vocation “to intervene in the ‘culture as a whole.’”4 Felski, for her part, wants to tamp down what she calls “fealty to the clarifying power of historical context” because she sees such fealty as engaging in a sort of one-upmanship of insight.5 Against the ascendency of historicist claims, she argues that we would do better to stay open to “the messy, mundane realities of how and why we read,” which includes the contexts of texts’ reception as well as their potential “future affinities.”6 For both Felski and North, in short, context as such is not the problem. Rather each seeks to shift from one version of context to another, more ample one.
Returning to Derrida, and to the role of absence in Derrida’s characterization of context, let us consider Derrida’s reference to the possibility that a producer or receiver of a written text may be absent. The first thing I would observe is that the absence to which Derrida repeatedly refers has the contours of a determinate absence. When Derrida argues that writing subsists “in the absence of such and such a person, and hence ultimately of every empirically determined ‘subject,’” or when he argues that writing remains readable “in the absence… of the empirically determined subject who… has emitted or produced it,” he describes the absent receiver and sender as empirically determined or determinable figures (SEC, 7/375, 9/377). In each passage, then, the absence Derrida cites is obtained through the negation of an empirical figure. True, he speaks of an absence of empirically determined figures “in general,” but this generality, though it is not itself empirical, is conceived on the basis of the empirically determinate; “in general” here means in every case. Derrida also refers to an “absolute” absence, but what is “absolute” is the independence of each determinate absence from any recourse to presence, whether distant or deferred. Indeed, Derrida’s focus in these passages is on limiting the claims of presence, not on absence per se.7
Now for Derrida’s argument about absence to be convincing, it matters how Derrida figures these particular receivers, senders, or producers, and I think the debates over meaning and intention that have taken place in the wake of this essay—with Searle’s disagreement being only one of them, and Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s 1982 essay “Against Theory” being another, one which reiterates Searle’s position to a certain extent and which opens a line of argument that has found a home in the present journal, among other places—debates over intention very much rest on how intention is figured in each case. For Knapp and Michaels, who draw on analytic philosophy of language, the absence of intention is figured as the absence of intentionality as such, which the authors equate with an absence of meaning. Hence, they paint the picture of a Wordsworth poem absurdly washing up on a beach, as if it were a product of nature; if we subtract any possible structure of human intending, the words become mere squiggles in the sand. For Derrida, however, who draws on continental phenomenology, the absence of intention is repeatedly figured as the absence of a particular determinate intention or set of intentions. Derrida further characterizes intention in terms of consciousness, will, or desire, as for example when he refers to “what [the] alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moment he wrote it” or to “my intention of saying something meaningful … my wish to communicate” (mon vouloir-dire, mon intention-de-signification, mon vouloir-communiquer-ceci) (SEC, 9/377, 8/376). Figured in this way, as a conscious desire bound to the moment of inscription, intention can be subtracted without a total collapse of the structure of intentionality as such.8 Indeed, as Derrida points out subsequently in “Limited Inc a b c…,” “[A]t no time does SEC [“Signature Event Context”] invoke the absence, pure and simple, of intentionality.”9 Derrida never argues for the latter but envisions instead a “differential typology” in which “the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance” (SEC, 18/389).
I think literary scholars employ such “differential typologies” of intention all the time, where the delimited subtraction of one set of intentions makes possible an investigation into others. Excluding “what an author had in mind” as a standard of interpretation, for example, as Wimsatt and Beardsley argued, need not entail—and almost never does entail—a rejection of intentionality as such. It yields a shift in what we look for when we read or research, a shift away from forms of agency figured in terms of individuality, subjectivity, or consciousness, toward other agential forms; toward intentions that can, for example, be multiple or divided against themselves; towards forces of cultural production or institutional norms understood as intentional actors in a broader sense; towards forms of agency belonging to the unconscious or to a social milieu. To emphasize any one of these forms is to construct its difference from another. In none of these examples is intentionality dismissed tout court. In this sense, what Derrida describes as an “absence” of intention would be another name for the finitude of any given intention, and in turn the finitude of its explanatory power. What it does not describe is the exclusion of the total field of every possible intention. Poems are not natural objects; they are intended—I agree with Knapp and Michaels here—but every alleged intention or set of intentions is finite. The absence “in general” that Derrida describes would be another name for the generalization of this structure of finitude that inhabits writing.
As we return to Derrida’s remarks on context, it’s helpful to consider them in light of this reading of intention. While it’s true that Derrida seems to reject context in fairly strong terms, writing, for example, that “the sign possesses the characteristic of being readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost …. No context can entirely enclose it” (SEC, 9/377)—we should avoid the patent absurdity of taking this to mean that Derrida conceives of a writing that would break with every possible context at every moment. Joshua Kates argues that what first appears in Derrida’s argument as the absence of context is later affirmed as “an irreducible multiplicity of contexts,” and I think this phrasing of an “irreducible multiplicity” is particularly helpful.10 As Derrida writes, “The possibility of disengagement … which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring” (SEC, 12/381).11 If we consider context along the same lines as intention, we arrive at the idea that something like the finitude of any given context is what gives rise to an “irreducible multiplicity” of contexts in the plural, and in turn to what Derrida calls writing’s iterability. That is, the separability of writing from a particular determinate context is what makes possible writing’s iteration in another, just as the separability of writing from an intentional sender or receiver makes possible writing’s re-attachment to other forms of intention, to other moments of production or reception. Separability and iterability go hand in hand.
What does it mean, more precisely, to talk about the finitude of context? Derrida does not use this expression; and in fact, it may sound like he is describing something like the opposite when he says that the goal of his essay is to “demonstrate why a context is never absolutely determinable” (SEC, 3/369). This part of his argument develops through his engagement with Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, where Derrida seeks to show how the predicates he has just ascribed to writing are generalizable not only to speech but also to that kind of speech that is closest to action, to what Austin at least initially calls performative language.
Examining how it is that language can successfully do something in the act of its being spoken—Austin’s examples famously include wedding vows, which accomplish the action of marrying in their being uttered—Austin emphasizes the role played by convention. Speech acts succeed where conventions exist, he argues, and where they can be appropriately mapped onto the people and circumstances involved. Conventions and circumstances, rather than the intentions of the speaker, turn out to be the determining factors in whether or not a speech act is achieved.12 In this way, explaining the force of a speech act would seem to entail, as Jonathan Culler puts it, “set[ting] forth the conventions that make it possible.”13
But where exactly do conditions, conventions, or context begin and end? How do we determine which contextual factors count as the determining ones? Logically, we cannot simply defer to convention to answer the question of what counts as convention, unless we want to end up with an infinite regress, an infinity of nested boxes of conventions. In his reading of Austin, Derrida works through Austin’s exclusion of so-called non-serious performatives such as “joking,” “acting a part,” or “writing poetry,” ostensibly with the aim of showing how assumptions about intention actually underwrite Austin’s argument, despite Austin’s claims to the contrary.14 For distinctions between serious and non-serious speech would seem to imply some recourse to speakers’ intentions. By extension, I would argue, the same must be true for distinctions between relevant and non-relevant elements of context: what counts as relevant would have to be decided with recourse to a given speaker’s intentions, or at least to the intentions that listeners impute to her. This is another way of saying that a speaker must be able understand and make use of context, convention, and circumstance in order for her speech act to succeed, and her audience must be able do the same in order to understand it. As Knapp and Michaels put it in “Against Theory 2,” where they argue that intention, and not convention, determines the meaning of an act, “following conventions is only one way of doing what is essential, namely, giving clues to your intention.”15 Derrida does not elaborate his point in this way, but he seems to see something of this logic at work in Austin’s text when he claims that Austin surreptitiously identifies context with the intentions of the speaker, with “a free consciousness present to the totality of the operation” of the speech act (SEC, 15/384). Though Austin claims to treat communication as a species of force and action, Derrida shows him to be drawing on a traditional understanding of communication as a transmission of consciously intended meaning (SEC, 14/383). In this framework, context is determinable because intentions determine it.
I will come back to this point about the determining role of intention in the second part of my essay. For now, let me simply point out the pivotal place of intention in Derrida’s argument. Despite readings of Derrida that would claim the contrary, intentions persist in Derrida’s account of speech and writing; but to grasp the particular nature of these intentions, we have to grasp the fact that they are inhabited by what Derrida calls “writing.” Derrida uses this term in both an empirical and a transcendental sense. In its transcendental sense, “writing” names the structure of language as such, a structure characterized by self-difference. The iterability of any empirical utterance or speech act—its constitutive repeatability, the fact that it is subject to citation and redeployment—divides any given iteration from itself, to the extent that this very self-division defines the condition of possibility of language. “Writing” is another name for this condition, and it accounts not only for empirical speech and writing but also, we note, for the intentions that permeate them. Indeed, Derrida goes so far as to assert that the structure characterizing writing is valid “not only for all orders of ‘signs’ and for all languages in general but moreover … for the entire field of what philosophy would call experience” (SEC, 9/377). Because this structure entails iterability, it introduces a fissure into any given experience, intention, or iteration, as part of the meaning of the iteration lies in past or future occurrences. Thus, in the case of intention, Derrida writes, “the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content. The iteration structuring it a priori introduces into it a dehiscence and a cleft [brisure] which are essential” (SEC, 18/389). In turn, we reason, the same is true for context. Because it is identified with intention as its “determining center,” it must likewise be divided from within by its own iterability. “This essential absence of intention to the actuality of the utterance,” Derrida writes, “this structural unconsciousness, if you like, prohibits any saturation of the context” (SEC, 18/389).
In Derrida’s account, iterability yields the non-coincidence of context with itself, an internal lack or difference that makes it unavailable to a totalizing determination. For Derrida, context is indeterminable, then, not because it is too large empirically speaking, but because it is too problematic epistemologically speaking. It lacks a determining center in the form of an intentional consciousness that could determine it neatly and entirely. Derrida draws out this distinction between empirical excess and structural indetermination in a later essay, “Living On,” when he asserts the following about context: “This is my starting point: no meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation. What I am referring to here is not richness of substance, semantic fertility, but rather structure: the structure of the remnant or of iteration.”16 What is worth highlighting here is the particular reason that context is indeterminable—and indeterminable not in practice, but in principle. The reason lies not with a given context’s being too rich or consisting in too many empirical details to be captured adequately in a description. It lies with the structural indeterminacy of context and with the fact that context, like intention, is the kind of thing to which iterability applies.
Derrida’s comments in “Living On” recall his reading of Levi-Strauss in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” where he describes two ways of conceiving the limits of totalization in the project of a structuralist anthropology. In one, Derrida points out, totalization is impossible for empirical reasons because “there is too much, more than one can say.” In the other, totalization is impossible for reasons of language, “not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field—that is, language and a finite language—excludes totalization … instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.”17 In our case, again, this center would be an intentional consciousness that could organize elements of a context into a meaningful totality, one that could be brought to bear on a literary work without excess, contradiction, or remainder.
Is all this to say that we should give up on context because we can have no purchase on it? I think it is rather a way of pointing to the constitutively incomplete nature of what is still the necessary task of making sense of texts in context. For every context that fails to determine its text completely because it, itself, is structurally indeterminate, new contexts come to impose their force and their relevance. The flip side of Derrida’s claim that every text ruptures with its context is his assertion that texts are citable and reinscribable in other contexts, for belonging to the structure of every mark is both “the possibility of disengagement and citational graft” (SEC, 12/381).18 Here, the limitations of a given context would not refer to the meaninglessness or uselessness of the concept of context, just as the finitude of intention does not refer to the meaningless or uselessness of the concept of intentionality. It would refer to the limited and provisional nature of the intentional act that determines any given context, for a particular purpose, in support of particular interpretive claims.
What do literary scholars mean by “context” when we talk about context? I think we usually do not mean an indifferent heap of empirical facts. We usually do mean a meaningful assemblage of circumstances and events, norms and conventions, that we believe are relevant to the interpretation of a text at hand or of some other object of knowledge. In this sense, contextual claims are a form of evidentiary procedure. And if in using the expression “we mean,” I bring consciousness or intention back into the discussion, I do so because I want to underscore the role that intentions play in the making of what we call context, and of what we expect context to do. Contexts are not given; they are not natural kinds; they are made, and they are objects of our intending. And if we follow a Derridean line of thinking, they are made of something called writing.
***
Writing is the determination of context: this would seem to be the insight of deconstruction. In the preceding section, I arrived at two entwined claims, the second a consequence of the first. First, I noted the way Derrida associates context with intention in his reading of Austin. As Derrida sees it, only when context is fully present to an intentional consciousness is context in turn able to determine the meaning of a speech act, according to the logic of Austin’s account. Second, I noted the limitations of context. Derrida shows context to be indeterminable, or at least as having a determination that is “never entirely certain or saturated,” because, like intention, context is divided from itself, riven because it is written (SEC, 3/369). Intention determines context, then, but intention also fails to determine context completely or certainly because both are constituted by writing, understood here as a structure of difference and deferral.
Let me first unpack the consequences of describing context as a fundamentally written phenomenon. We might feel like this position is essentially skeptical, one that somehow makes context less “real.” We might recall that overly cited and poorly understood line from Of Grammatology, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” translated controversially by Spivak as “there is nothing outside the text,” and which has been held up, out of context, as evidence of Derrida’s flat-footed denial of the existence of history or the real outside of its representation.19 But if we retain the Derridean sense of writing as a transcendental structure, then we are obliged to jettison any pre-theoretical identification of writing with representation; writing would rather be the mark that makes possible the difference between representation and represented, signifier and signified, or text and context, and Derrida’s statement would refer to the impossibility of any position independent of this structure.
“Writing,” in fact, would name the necessity of context—the necessity of there being something other than the text—and the necessary limits of any particular text in its confrontation with, and relation to, something other than itself. The structure of writing, which is a differential structure, requires that there be context, that speech acts and written texts take place in relation to other texts as well as to the material world, where they are subject to norms, power dynamics, and material events, including the event of inscription.
While Derrida tends to characterize writing in terms of absence, spacing, and rupture, I noted earlier that it might be useful to describe writing as a differential relation. To emphasize its relational character is also to emphasize its productive nature: the active, putting-in-to relation that writing necessarily effects. In this sense, to claim that context is written is to claim that it is posited—or, I would argue, performed—in relation to a text and that the determination of both text and context depends on this performance. That is, the act of determining a context can be described as a performative speech act, an act of language drawing on conventional systems of meaning and behavior and producing concrete effects in the world.20
When I describe the act of determining a context as performative, I do not mean to advocate for a voluntaristic model of criticism, one where each critic would be free to pursue the construction of context however she wishes. Performativity appears this way only if we take the conscious, self-possessed individual to be the sole possible figure of intentionality. But if we retain Derrida’s insistence on intention’s non-coincidence with itself, and hence on the category of intention’s being subject to a differential typology, one that I suggested would include agents of the unconscious as well as institutional norms and social groups, then we arrive at a more comprehensive picture of performative utterances. Such utterances can be both intended in the ordinary sense and bound by multiple constraints. Moreover, we open up discussions of the persuasive nature of performative speech, of the way such speech serves to convince or transform others or comes to include or exclude other forms of intention.
Highlighting the persuasive aspect of claims about context gives us a way to understand why context is subject to so many different descriptions and figurations. Is context a box or a network? Does it reduce or amplify a text? Is it displayed on the surface or hidden below it? These spatializing figures, so prevalent in literary-critical debates, come into view more clearly as figures when we begin with a notion of context itself as a performative utterance. I mentioned above Felski’s writings on context. Her work is a particularly interesting case to consider because of the way it transports Bruno Latour’s language from sociology to literary studies. In Reassembling the Social, Latour rails against appeals to “social context” that would treat as a determining framework for various phenomena what should rather be an object of inquiry for the social sciences, namely “society.”21 For Latour, unlike most literary critics who make arguments for or against context, what is at issue is not “historical context” but an explanatory framework, or as we might call it, “theory.”22 Hence “context stinks,” Latour can claim in the words of Rem Koolhaas, because it is “simply a way of stopping the description when you are tired or too lazy to go on.”23 Felski makes a parallel move when she faults literary historicism for its efforts to control the narrative of what a text means, “to box it into a moment of origin, to lock it up in a temporal container.”24 Yet, as we observed earlier, what she advocates is not at all a jettisoning of context in favor of a narrower focus on the text “itself,” but rather an expansion of our considerations to include “the fact of association, the coming together of phenomena to create assemblages, affinities, and networks.”25 Felski seeks to replace one image of context—context as box—with another—context as network, and she clearly states her preference for the latter. What she prefers, more precisely, in the connection between text and context, are relations of contiguity and proximity over relations of determination or identification; for her, the text is “imprisoned” by historicist readings because it is identified with its historical context without remainder. At the level of rhetorical figures, we observe a preference for what we might call metonymic associations over metaphoric substitutions.26
The same preference appears in a number of literary critics’ objections to contextualizing claims. The relation of context to text is often portrayed as overly deterministic, with Marxist criticism serving as a familiar target. Raymond Williams, for example, in his 1977 book Marxism and Literature, describes a caricature of Marxist literary criticism in which it is seen as “a necessarily reductive and determinist kind of theory: no cultural activity is allowed to be real and significant in itself, but is always reduced to a direct or indirect expression of some preceding and controlling economic content.”27 More recently, Christopher Lane has referred dismissively to the “deterministic net” of contextual analysis,28 while Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best have valorized “surface reading” as a form of “sustained proximity to the text” against Fredric Jameson’s injunction to critics to “rewrite” the text “in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretive code.”29
Again, it is attentiveness to the nature of the text-context relation as a performative relation that enables us to see these figures of context as figures, revealing the value judgments that trail in their wake, and allowing us to imagine the possibility of their being written or performed otherwise. What do critics stand to gain, we might ask, from their choice of metonymic figures over metaphorical ones? The language of metonymy is the language of chance encounter and fortuitous association—of “communication” in the particular sense of communicating a force. Paraphrasing Derrida, we might say that this associative context is “said to be pertinent [relevant] when it touches: the object to which it seems to refer, but also … its addressee, upon whom it produces certain effects.”30 This is a spatializing language that emphasizes the bald contiguity of things, whereas the language of metaphor, in contrast, refers us to the synthetic, mental activity of identifying and understanding—to “communication” in the sense of communicating semantic content. Metonymy is a language of power, then, more suited to descriptions of the natural world, while metaphor is a language of meaning, more suited to the world of consciousness and intention. There is a certain caché, I think, in denying our interpretive role as critics, positioning texts as “agents” (Felski) and ourselves as passive and receptive (Best and Marcus). It lends a veneer of natural necessity to our practice. But even those critics who hold up contextual claims under the sign of sheer proximity, who point to the relevance of historical details because of their contiguity in space or time, do so under the assumption that this contiguity will be a meaningful one. I see here a sort of anticipatory grammar of context, a formalism of the contextual act, in which the text-context relation is expected to be legible.
Derrida, at the end of his essay, likewise trades on the value of a language of power when he describes deconstruction as a “labor,” one that can “intervene” in a “field of nondiscursive forces” and “displace a conceptual order” (SEC, 21/392). Yet in his reading of Austin, we see a different path open up, one where power gives way to meaning. For while Austin turns to speech act theory to free language from evaluations of truth and falsity and open it to an analysis of force—an analysis of how language can “perform” or effect a change in circumstances—Derrida shows that Austin still reserves a central role for intention. On Derrida’s account, the total situation of the speech act in context is still underwritten by the conscious, intentional presence of a speaker. Extrapolating this insight to a literary-critical register, I draw the lesson not only that our literary contexts are constructed rather than discovered, but that they are constructed intentionally, in the service of particular interpretive claims or scholarly interests. What the analysis of context as performative utterance brings out is the way that both relations of force and relations of meaning are at work in acts of contextualization. These acts produce effects in the material world, but they also function as vehicles for intentional meaning. Contextualizing claims made by critics are performative because they are intentional acts, buoyed or constrained by convention, and subject to the same structural indeterminacies as other kinds of intentional acts. This is not to say that context does not matter but rather to suggest that the way it matters, the force that it has, and for whom, remains to be determined in our acts of reading.
Notes
I am grateful to Rob Lehman and Joshua Kates for their insightful feedback, as well as to Abigail Culpepper, Émile Levesque-Jalbert, and other members of the French Theory Reading Group at Brown University for their helpful responses to this essay.
These topics appear worth revisiting now, however, in part since what remains of these questions, the fallback stances taken by many critics when pressed about them, tend to be some version of Derrida’s appraisals, especially those that Derrida set out in “Signature Event Context” (SEC).2 SEC, if nothing else, provides a set of handy takeaways, shorthand theses, upon which not only critics but Derrida himself subsequently relied.
In SEC, to put it in the parlance, Derrida’s early approach to matters textual and linguistic became “sedimented.” Sedimentation is a notion borrowed from Edmund Husserl. It designates a circumstance where a discourse and its subject matter no longer are engaged from the ground up, in respect both to the total chain of reasoning standing behind the conclusions pertaining to them, as well as the topic’s most foundational aspects and appearances. In physics, for example, no one now examines the requirement to describe motion in mathematical formalisms; that requirement has become sedimented.
In SEC, Derrida’s own thinking about language and discourse, I suggest, suffers the same fate. Situated apart from his reflections on the continental philosophical tradition, treating a philosophical school with which he is less familiar, and forced to present his results in a fashion unusually positive, the deepest roots of Derrida’s own thinking fall from view. The compression of more involved and nuanced arguments and the obscuring of the underlying matters they concern become still more acute when successors adopt Derrida’s conclusions.3
The impact of its sedimented views is not the sole reason to return to SEC. SEC gives expression to a conviction, almost an intuition, common among those who work in literary studies, concerning textuality. SEC’s neologisms have entered into the lexicon of many critics and theorists usually because they buttress and ramify a seemingly implacable practical belief pertaining to what texts are and how they should be approached.
A hoary but still relevant example from the beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology, with which I will begin, lets this common, powerful conviction be made explicit, along with some of the questions it leaves unanswered.4 That discussion introduces my examination of Derrida’s own approach to writing and the text in part one of SEC. Derrida, to be clear, does not himself, of course, fail to reflect on what many critics merely assume; taking his earlier findings as results, his notions of iterability and “signifying form”—the latter in SEC almost entirely unexplicated—nevertheless encourage Derrida to skip some of these issues’ broader and deeper contexts. Austin’s own program, with its very different starting points for approaching speech and writing, helps highlight the partially unacknowledged ground on which Derrida’s conceptualizations move. At the same time, Derrida’s criticism of Austin in part two of SEC—namely, that Austin cannot account for literary and other sorts of supposedly non-serious speech—is also, to my mind, cogent. Hence, after first raising some questions about Derrida’s depictions of writing and textuality, in the second part of the present essay I lay out a new view of literature and literary criticism, spurred by Derrida’s concerns, which ultimately takes on board aspects of both his and Austin’s approaches.
1. Ideality and Iterability
In the first chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes down the statement “now is night,” offered in response to the question “what is now?” Hegel’s aim is to debunk the claim of “sense-certainty,” the first entry in the Phenomenology’s survey of candidates for absolute truth. To delegitimate sense-certainty’s insistence that truth is equivalent to sensuous immediacy, Hegel underscores the legibility of his inscription and what it states. “Now is night” speaks and lays claim to being true even when it is no longer night, when it is day. Hegel thereby exhibits the gap between what sense-certainty identifies as its truth-maker (what is now) and the expressions and concepts it employs.5
The ramifications of Hegel’s demonstration for his own thought cannot be further entered on here. “Now is night,” the appearance it yields, does, however, exemplify what still seems true about writing and language to many critics. What is written down, as Hegel points out, and they would concur, has the ability to stand untethered from all circumstances, apart from any “other-being [Anderssein],” as Hegel puts it. Once inscribed, the statement operates on its own, entirely independently of any context. Accordingly, language, meaning, and texts operate at a distinct remove from all “sensuous being”—technically here they are its negation—and from what in other contexts would be called the real. The inscription “now is night” floats free of all such reference points, while itself remaining “preserved [aufbewahrt],” as Hegel says.6
The question arises, however, of whether what is set down in writing genuinely is capable of such independence, whether written statements or anything else can exist and function without regard to a temporal and spatial situation, as in Hegel’s example.7 Are there, for instance, universals or concepts of some sort that find their way into and somehow underpin language and discourse? Do writing (and language) express, and may themselves even be, instances of the ideal? Ideal entities are presumed not to be spatio-temporally individuated, in contrast to those that are, the real.8 “2+2=4” (or, for that matter, “2+2=5”), on this view, is said to express the same, single, self-identical sense to all who come across it, regardless of circumstances. Its meaning is one, while its apprehensions are many. Were this not so, no understanding or discussion of what it says would be possible, it is maintained.9 Similarly with texts, were its expressions and what they express not ideal, we could only talk about similar texts, not the same ones—many Moby Dick’s, not a single one—and use only similar words, with no guarantee that their meaning is or can be shared.
Most critics, to be sure, do not place themselves in the idealist camp; they appeal to language, to signifiers, and to related reference points. Nevertheless, even these accounts invoke or imply the ideal to a much greater degree than is often believed. Appeals to linguistic structure, to words, to signs all conjure on the ideal.
Of course, the physical inscription, the fact of being set down in ink on paper appears to give a material basis for how statements can last and mean in the manner Hegel describes. Ink or pixels, however, cannot yield what we call a text, no less its meaning and signification, when taken in their own sensuous immediacy. This is because physical signifiers, or so-called tokens, are not able, on their own terms, to form identifiable classes that might permit signification to occur on their basis. Some actual signifier, a so-called token—one of the “the’s” printed on this page, for example—may indeed be something real, pixels or ink; accordingly, the hope would be that by recognizing this instance as like other physical instances, what each signifies (their self-same meaning or signified or concept) also can appear. Being one of a class, thanks to a physical likeness, a token could convey what is not simply physical, its meaning or sense, without any need to appeal to the ideal.
Nothing, however, warrants believing that a token conceived on a simply material or physical basis belongs to a language or to the same language (e.g., “four” is found in both French and English). Nor is it obvious that tokens so conceived necessarily belong to any language at all—otherwise an ant tracing a line in the sand might be referring to itself in English, perhaps beginning to perform the cogito. Moreover, being phonic and graphic and gestural, signifiers don’t share any genuine physical resemblances. This remains true, though less evident, even within a single signifying medium. Let Stalk Strine is the title of a guide to Australian pronunciation. Individual physical inscriptions and utterances comprise neither a recognizable nor a relevant class when taken in their own right.10 Accordingly, pixels, ink, and so forth cannot allow signification to come to pass; they do not permit conveying expressions independently of the ideal as many believe.11
Some of those who hold these views certainly think that their stances proceed from Derrida’s writings. His earliest accounts, however, are far subtler than the foregoing. For example, in Of Grammatology, when glossing Saussure’s claim that the signifier is a “psychic image,” Derrida insists, against Saussure, that the signifier be understood in terms of Husserl’s phenomenological epoché, which by definition involves an intentional component. Signifiers can never be studied by a “mundane science,” Derrida declares, breaking with all linguisticism and also from any straightforward or reductive materialism.12
Neither in Of Grammatology nor in SEC does Derrida endorse ideality, of course, not even in the guise of affirming language’s or the mundane signifier’s role, as do many of his followers. Derrida does not underwrite ideality; he does, however, deconstruct it. That or any deconstruction’s workings, moreover, entail that, while not subscribing to ideality, Derrida does not simply wholly reject it, as do I or many in the analytic tradition. Rather, deconstruction leaves a certain amount of running room or leeway for ideality and its achievements. Deconstruction as a practice, broadly, lets “philosophemes” such as ideality be affirmed within their own domain and limits, while arguing for these notions’ inclusion in still greater, more comprehensive wholes that contest the values, ends, and origins that purportedly give birth to and that guide these same conceptions—above all, the values of presence and self-presence. In part one of SEC, accordingly, Derrida clearly attempts to go ideality one better: he wishes to unbind its scope—to broaden the array of instances the repeatability it seemingly guarantees covers—while offering an alternative construal of ideality’s workings, beyond any appeal to meaning, to consciousness, or to context, thereby putting into doubt ideality’s philosophical framing.13
Derrida’s strategic retention of ideality shows up in SEC’s leading notion of iterability; it becomes further evident and undergoes a new twist at the end of part one of SEC in an instance of grafting that Derrida offers by treating an example from Husserl’s Logical Investigations. With the latter, the central problem of SEC, by mine and also by Derrida’s lights, emerges: the status of context (SEC, 2).
a) Iterability
Derrida’s overall strategy in respect to iterability falls out of his interrogation of a discussion of the origin of language and writing by the Abbé de Condillac. Condillac effectively establishes the still current understanding of “communication,” according to Derrida, precisely in terms of ideality. “Communication,” in Condillac’s wake, consists in “circulat(ing) a representation as an ideal content (meaning).” “Writing,” Derrida adds, is considered “a species of this general communication” (SEC, 6).
To arrive at iterability, then, Derrida undoes what Condillac has wrought: namely, the subordination of writing to communication more broadly understood, including this ideal component. Derrida denies writing’s determination as “a species of … general communication” organized around the ideal.14 Simultaneously, Derrida conceives of writing—and, with it, ideality or ideality’s effects—on new terms. Viewing writing as intrinsically tied to absence, Derrida frames a notion of iterability more encompassing than ideality, wherein writing stands as the genus of which Condillac’s communication emerges as species.
Derrida’s reversal (of species and genus) and reinscription (of writing) accords with a description of deconstruction that Derrida repeatedly offers and explicitly recurs to later in SEC.15 Here this operation pivots on writing’s purported ability to function in the radical absence of a receiver (and eventually of a sender). Writing entails a “certain absoluteness of absence” (“un certain absolu de l’absence”), as Derrida puts it, that Condillac ignores (SEC, 7; Marges, 374).
Derrida’s demonstration of writing’s absence’s absoluteness (a depiction that may conjure up Hegel’s “now is night”) initially depends on the notion of code. Following “the death of the receiver, or even of both partners, the mark left by one of them is still writing,” Derrida affirms, and then adds, only “to the extent that, organized by a code, even an unknown and nonlinguistic one, it is constituted in its identity as mark by its iterability” (SEC, 7).
Writing’s alliance with an absolute absence, its operation in the absence of a sender or receiver, thus corresponds to its being “organized by a code,” even if that code is also unknown. Neither the inscription’s physical disposition, nor those “causal” powers some attribute to Derridean écriture, at least at this moment, account for this capacity. Instead, the marks, writing, function thanks to their appurtenance to a code, a code which, Derrida will further tell us, though perhaps available, can never be “structurally secret” (SEC, 8).
Derrida’s argument at this moment is novel in the context of his own work, and it also may finally not be wholly persuasive, including in SEC’s context, as Derrida will soon distance himself from code. Code’s stamp on writing and iterability for Derrida, nevertheless, at this juncture gives writing and iterability an unparalleled scope or reach, one crafted to include, while undermining, ideality and its functioning.
More specifically, inscriptions and all relevant marks on the foregoing basis are conceived by Derrida as “communicable, transmittable, decipherable … for every possible user in general” (SEC, 8); similarly, these inscriptions are said to continue to operate “in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general” (SEC, 8).16
Derrida’s somewhat unusual use of both “every” and “in general” attests to the breadth that Derrida assigns to code’s potential functioning. Ideality’s deconstruction requires such an affirmation, however. Iterability must outstrip the ideal, while accounting for all of ideality’s effects. Iterability must make possible ideality’s allowing the same understanding by all (“every possible user in general”), even as it contests the ideal as such, thanks to its commerce with an absolute and fundamental absence.
By my lights, however, Derrida at this moment grants too much to ideality to begin with, even as he aims to contest its significance and the terms of its functioning. Languages and codes are themselves, after all, all finite, empirical; they come into and go out of existence. Hence, communications employing languages, or depending on codes that have been invented (whether or not known), can never even in principle pertain to “every empirical receiver” and operate for “all possible users in general.”
Many codes—signals, for instance, or book codes—are not so decipherable and may thus remain permanently, or “structurally,” secret. For example, a spy may agree with their mole to turn a red light on in their house every Friday to signal a meeting on the following Tuesday. If spy and mole both die on an intervening Sunday, even if the red light happens to be on, there is no reason to suppose that their code is still recognizable as a code by anyone.
Similarly, a code may depend on an arrangement of books in a shop window; seeing it no one not apprised of the code will know it is an instance of a code at all. Still more gravely, witness the huge number of indigenous languages that have and are everywhere disappearing. These languages’ “decipherability” ceases in the absence of certain empirical receivers and users, their native speakers. Nor does their writing when similarly situated always betray its having once proceeded from a code or language. Whether certain inscriptions are or are not instances of what is sometimes called “asemic writing” can remain unknown, as can whether entire manuscripts are products of languages or code at all, as with the so-called “Voynich manuscript.”17
Derrida’s positioning in SEC, then, arguably initially gives too much fealty to the ideal—to Hegel’s “preservation” and the ability for inscriptions to be available for every empirical receiver and to all possible users in general. So proceeding, Derrida misprizes the temporal character of codes, languages, and discourse themselves.
Derrida’s affirmations concerning code’s scope become arguably still more questionable as his discussion unfolds. Derrida soon introduces the notion of “grafting,” which he defines as “a written syntagma[’s]” capacity to be “detached from the chain in which it is inserted” (SEC, 9). As subject to grafting, writing so understood, he tells us, is capable of breaking with “all possibility of communicating” (if not “all possibility of functioning”). On this basis, Derrida, accordingly, emphasizes what he calls a mark’s “force of rupture” and its “essential drift” (SEC, 9).
At this moment, however, marks and writing, now distanced from “any possibility of “communicating” seemingly are no longer decipherable by anyone, no less everyone. They have ceased being decipherable at all. To be sure, Derrida’s idea is that such grafting takes place after writing and the mark have been constituted thanks to reference to a code. Hence grafting requires now viewing code as “the possibility and impossibility of writing, of its essential iterability” (SEC, 9). Writing’s capacity to be repeated, its very identity, however, purportedly recurred to its being “organized by a code.” If that identity now turns out to be owed neither to its physical shape nor to any actual code (since the latter is also its condition of impossibility), nothing seemingly any longer lets the mark be a mark, writing be writing, rather than a random gash or an ant’s pathway. With code and its decipherability out of the picture, the grafted mark’s identity completely disappears as well.
Of course, this may in part be Derrida’s point, since marks and inscriptions otherwise would not function beyond meaning; they could not be affirmed to exceed “every horizon of semio-linguistic communication,” as Derrida will soon put it (SEC, 12). Code and iterability, accordingly, must operate with this duality—decipherable for all possible users while also at some point not being decipherable for anyone—to fulfill Derrida’s aim to encompass and undermine ideality at once.
b) Signifying form and context
The foregoing considerations, in the end, may have worried Derrida himself since he next dispenses with code. Developing further the possibility of “the graft” or “grafting,” Derrida confesses: “I prefer not to become too involved here with this concept of code which does not seem very reliable to me.” Instead, “we must be able to recognize the identity, roughly speaking, of a signifying form” (SEC, 10).
Apart from its recognizability through all “empirical variations,” as he puts it—again echoing the ideal—what signifying form may otherwise be remains in the dark in SEC, nor, clearly, does it cover non-linguistic cases as code did. And should signifying form itself somehow recur to languages or a language, the ideal, as found in linguistic structure, would not be avoidable, not to mention why we would need iterability at all, language now turning up as the latter’s ultimate reference point.
Nevertheless, despite the obscurity attendant upon signifying form, an important development follows from it in which a decisive new aspect of the mark’s functioning comes on the scene: its relation to context. On the basis of signifying form, Derrida pursues the notion of the graft as it relates to context, ultimately by way of an example taken from Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Context’s treatment raises rather different problems than those previously discussed.
More specifically, after affirming that the iterable “mark” can appear across an “infinity of contexts”—the appeal to a positive “infinity” being yet another trace of ideality’s erstwhile operation—Derrida now adds that this “does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring [ancrage]” (SEC, 12). No mark, Derrida now indicates, is valid outside of a context, no message or inscription functions apart from one. Earlier, however, seemingly to the contrary, Derrida, speaking of the mark’s “force of rupture,” declared that “no context can entirely enclose [the mark]” (SEC, 9). Hence Derrida in SEC seems to affirm both that the mark breaks with all context and that it is always found in one. From this perhaps also results the belief that the effects of marks are somehow causal.
Whether or not two contradictory characterizations of the mark on Derrida’s part appear in SEC, in the present context, his present account of context raises a still more fundamental issue. On this last construal, after all, Derrida’s stipulation that the mark lacks absolute anchorage is finally irrelevant and inconsequential. Once context is deemed necessarily at work in every instance, once it is granted that a communication—an utterance or inscription of some sort—always operates in some context, as Derrida has just affirmed, how can what might happen in some other context matter and what weight can talk of anchorage, absolute or not, have? What happens, or could happen elsewhere, on another occasion has no bearing once the importance of its context for a mark or writing is granted, once it is granted that no marks are ever valid “outside” some context. That a waitress, after her shift, might say “my dogs are tired” and so also might, on another occasion, the owner of some aging Weimaraners—these clearly have no effect, no force in respect to one another; something all the more true, if in some contexts some marks cease meaning anything at all, as Derrida also indicates.
Derrida’s own invocation of context in fact ultimately shows why context’s role cannot be maintained and the universality that ideality bequeaths to iterability sustained. If context is decisive—as it must be once physical features, codes, and unexplained, stable (verbal) meanings are set aside—then speaking of an unbounded, infinite repetition of some writing or mark seems both impossible (since what is being repeated can no longer be identified across these instances) or relevant (since within these series of valid contexts no one event bears on any of the others—except of course in yet another context which brings them together and makes the case for them being so related). Accordingly, by the present lights, Derrida’s appeal to radical contextualization must be embraced, while dispensing with what seems but a pure, empty repeatability, bordering on the ideal, a repeatability that stands at a distance from all operative writing and discourse.
The alternative here beginning to be proposed, as well as what Derrida himself concretely has in mind, can both be better grasped thanks to the example of grafting that Derrida in the light of the foregoing offers from Husserl. At issue in Husserl’s text is how specifically logical, and, for him, necessarily ideal, meanings, Bedeutungen, function in the propositions that they comprise. Derrida departs from Husserl’s treatment of such Bedeutungen by focusing on an instance of what Husserl calls “agrammaticality” and claiming that this instance is still subject to that repurposing that we have seen Derrida call grafting.18 For Husserl, by contrast, agrammatical employments entail a complete loss of sense such that their character as meaningful and their corresponding ideality and/or repeatability wholly cease to function. Husserl’s example of this kind of foreclosed and shut down proposition is “the green is or.” In this expression, a so-called syncategoramatic term, or logical operator, “or,” appears in the wrong grammatical slot. Thanks to this, for Husserl, “or” itself, as well as the rest of the proposition’s components, say nothing at all and necessarily fall short of the ideal’s, or any, mode of being (SEC, 12). They fail to express any thought in Gottlob Frege’s sense.19
Derrida insists, however, that even in this instance where all standard semantic capacity seemingly fails, and an expression and its signifying form on the face of it lack any plausible “vouloir-dire” (“meaning,” or “wanting to say”), the marks in question may still operate. For Derrida, Husserl’s example remains viable, albeit as agrammatical, strictly speaking meaning nothing at all.
More specifically, Derrida points out, first, that in French “the green is or” retains significance, owing to the ambiguity of “ou” “or,” which in French can also mean “where,” yielding “the green is where.” Derrida further claims that Husserl’s phrase may continue to function, though not mean, by being used as an example of agrammaticality (SEC, 12).
“The green is ‘or’” is Derrida’s sole example in SEC of grafting, the only instance he offers illustrating the repurposing of “the written syntagma.” Yet both of Derrida’s proposals, insofar as they work in, and need context, appear at odds with his own stipulations. For one, the phrase’s French gloss, “the green is where,” obviously depends on an accident owed to an existing historical language, namely French, thanks to which it is not agrammatical at all. Moreover, should Husserl’s phrase really not mean anything and still serve as an example of agrammaticality, it seems unclear even for Derrida himself, how far its status as such extends, Derrida’s point now being that context is always needed: does this example operate only for those aware of this debate; of Derrida’s contestation of Husserl; for all German speakers; or actually for everyone, somehow for all possible users in general?
In both cases, the fate of “the green is or” seems limited to the occasion of its use and is certainly not available across an unbounded repetition; it functions only in some circumstances and not others. A portion of Derrida’s concerns at this moment are well aimed, however. Husserl’s original distinction between contradictory and agrammatical “propositions” makes of the logos, the grammatical statement, the benchmark of all meaning and all discourse, something which is true more generally for Husserl. By contesting Husserl’s treatment of agrammaticality, Derrida, accordingly, wants to call into doubt the logos’s traditional authority, the statement’s claim to govern the rights of all modes of writing and speech.
Derrida’s own alternative, by aiming to comprehend the logos and its traditional capacities on different terms, while granting their workings and their authority within limits, unfortunately ends up landing in obscurity. Another route exists, however, for contesting the logos’s rights that also recognizes context’s force and (wholly) eschews the ideal.
To stay with Derrida’s example, an interior decorator might well be imagined, who, when poring over color samples, exclaims “the green is or” and adds “but I what I want is and! That yellow over there, that’s and, not or.” Husserl’s phrase may indeed be repurposed, grafted if one wishes, while both its use and what it says prove new, such that its reach or significance would not be confined to the logos, to Bedeutungen as traditionally understood. For “the green is or” to function in this way, however, requires context—it only works thanks to the above or a similar scenario, such that no break or force of rupture with all contexts nor a structural appurtenance to a positive infinity of them can be affirmed. Contexts can be envisioned, after all, in which Husserl’s phrase can’t be repeated or thought to operate. “The green is or” won’t be repeatable in response to someone asking “please pass the salt” nor, more than likely, at the beginning of a U.S. State of the Union address.20
Derrida himself, of course, doesn’t settle for this modest version of dispensing with all “absolute anchoring.” I am suggesting he does not because ideality (here and in all such instances) would simply cease to be relevant and lose its purported rights and thus would iterability as well. Only individual instances in individual contexts of use would matter, to be sorted out as they may—by readers and speakers, authors and auditors on a given occasion.
To be sure, context, the very concept of context, Derrida also insists in SEC, recurs to presence, to presence to a consciousness; substituting context for the framework of the ideal thus for Derrida finally accomplishes nothing. It is relatively easy to show, however, that context’s fealty to consciousness does not hold in Austin’s account nor, then, the present one. Austin portrays speaking—doing things with words—as a kind of action, subject to the same constraints and evaluations as are all the other acts we perform. All such acts, however, can and do, at least at times, function without regard to an individual’s conscious thoughts or beliefs. Austin, accordingly, explicitly rejects having recourse to “inward and spiritual” acts to determine these acts’ validity, specifically with respect to promises.21
Derrida’s commitment to outstripping the ideal, then, accounts for Derrida’s reluctance to countenance context in all its radicality and his claiming both that the mark entails rupture with context or an appurtenance to a positive infinity of them. Were the phrase and whether it is being repeated adjudicated solely on individual occasions of use, as is actually the case, ideality and iterability both would cease to matter; what is said or written in a given context alone would be available and it would suffice.
2. Quotation and Literature
Iterability, however, is not so easily dispensed with. Whatever their theoretical weaknesses, the iterable mark, and the corresponding possibility of unlimited grafting, seem singularly able to account for Derrida’s own interpretative practice and also for that of literary criticism and other scholarship in the humanities. Since iterability focuses on use, on discourse, it extends beyond the contribution of language and does not wholly forfeit a text’s connection to a moment of production—to an author and an intention in some guise—while also allowing the text to operate beyond them.22 Iterability, accordingly, seems to explain the unique combination of faithfulness and innovation characteristic of literary criticism and of textual interpretation more generally. It and related conceptions make evident both why attention is warranted to the context of a text’s production and to the author’s role, as well as to considerations that exceed these same parameters.
When it comes to accounting for literature and literary criticism, the ability of Austin, of so-called Ordinary Language Philosophy, and indeed of any context-based theory more generally to do the same work is less clear. To be sure, Stanley Cavell, Charles Altieri, Cora Diamond, Alice Crary, and numerous others have taken bites out of this very apple. Their success, however, has been scattershot: literature in these contexts is often viewed in an overly realist vein, and ignored or downplayed is that verbal experimentation and excessiveness that a notion like iterability appears designed to capture. Many, though not all, of these critics and thinkers, moreover, like Austin himself, grant a relative priority to non-literary employments of language.23 They affirm pre-existing modes of speech in more familiar contexts and with established ends, as found in primary senses, mother tongues, and so on. In this way, literature’s scope is narrowed, along with that of literary analysis and textual interpretation themselves.
To be clear, even in the present instance, something like the foregoing may hold—at the very least, literature’s subject matter will be something rather than nothing (though the former may include literature itself, as well as the aesthetic). Nevertheless, what is here being set out departs from the foregoing attempts in that it dispenses entirely with any jumping-off points or guardrails in prior customary or conventional modes of discourse. Thanks to this, literature and the literary text end up furnishing the primary instance and best mapping of discourse’s operation, thereby opening the door to literary writing and reading of essentially unprecedented sorts.
Concerns about literature’s standing in many context-oriented accounts obviously align with Derrida’s own stated worries in SEC’s second part, when he discusses Austin’s analysis of performatives. As is well-known, Derrida questions Austin’s failure to consider uses of performatives when “said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy,” employments which Austin himself seemingly discounts under the headings of “sea-change,” “the ‘non-serious,’” “parasitism,” “etiolation,” “the non-ordinary” (SEC, 16). At this moment, Derrida, slightly tweaking his own previous focus, suggests that the broader category under which all of Austin’s exclusions fall is “quotation.” Austin’s talk of the non-serious, the etiolated, and so on effectively rejects, Derrida asserts, “the possibility for every performative utterance (and a priori every other utterance) to be ‘quoted’” (SEC, 16).
From Derrida’s account of quotation and the further possibilities that it raises, the present understanding of literature and text eventually emerges. Before turning there, note, however, that though Derrida condemns Austin’s exclusion from his analysis of literary and similar instances—he questions what he deems Austin’s drawing “a ditch” around some uses of language and omitting others when framing his theory of speech-acts (SEC, 17)—Derrida himself eventually grants validity to these same distinctions. In line with what was said at the outset about Derrida conceding the functioning of standard philosophical conceptualizations and self-evidences, ultimately within new limits and on a new (contestatory) basis, Derrida himself denies “that citationality in this case [of a performative used in everyday life]” finally “is of the same sort as in a theatrical play, a philosophical reference, or the recitation of a poem”; he indeed affirms, along with Austin, “a relative specificity, as Austin says, a ‘relative purity’ of performatives” (SEC, 18). Though “general iterability,” as conceived by Derrida, encompasses both classes, literary instances and everyday uses nevertheless answer to different “kinds of iteration” (SEC, 17).
In the present debate, then, both Austin and Derrida distinguish literary and related uses from more standard ones, and neither, as it happens, give an account of literary employments, at least in their present texts.24 In turn, the line that Derrida and Austin both draw becomes effaced here, ultimately thanks to some hints given by Austin at the end of How to Do Things with Words as well as certain suggestions made by Derrida. The latter’s focus on citation or quotation enables the unfolding of literary discourse’s features—features which ultimately pertain to every discourse, to all employments of language.
Potentially a fertile notion, citation, in Derrida’s own hands, suffers a problematic fate, one allied to context’s obscurities. Derrida in section I, it became clear, maintains the role of context, while also affirming the mark’s force of rupture or break with it. In part II, Derrida again backs off from context: he does so now by eliding the difference between quotations, or citations, which necessarily refer to (prior) contexts, and applications of codes, structures, or conventions.
Quotations, though repetitions, indeed further entail a concrete occasion on which the phrase in question has previously been used. (John said, “I hate that color,” when I showed him my new rug.) By contrast, employments of a code or convention are not usually deemed quotations or citations, precisely because they don’t imply a prior actual moment when the phrase was used; instead, these uses recur to a rule, procedure, or algorithm. Quotations are thus repetitions that invoke prior contexts, while conventions and codes and their instances don’t require such contexts.25
Derrida himself, however, while criticizing Austin’s omission of the citational, elides this distinction and conflates conventions with quotations or citations as such (SEC, 15). He reworks the notion of a coded utterance, now revived and again identified with the iterable, making it coincide with an actual quotation. “Could a performative utterance succeed,” Derrida asks, “if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’ or iterable utterance … if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a ‘citation?’” (SEC, 18).26
Having brought Austin’s exclusion of literary and other instances under the umbrella of citation or quotation, Derrida attempts to make the latter notion converge with his own iterability. If, however, this distinction is kept intact and no recourse to an unbounded and context-rupturing iterable mark is had, a working picture of literature and of all discourse can be achieved. Taken at its word, Derrida’s invocation of quotation indeed indicates how literary texts in their specificity operate, as well as how all other discourses do—literature finally, on the present view, serving as a better example of language’s operation than paradigms that focus on single-sentence expressions, whether constative or performative.
More concretely, quotation, citationality as occurring in and through contexts (and thus not entailing any rupture with context), in truth backstops all discourse including all understanding and production of (literary) texts—a fact that not only places literature on the same footing as other discourses but entails that literary discourses supply their joint best example.
Literature’s foregrounding, thanks to a radical embrace of (quotation in) context, to be sure, will also come with a cost. To make quotation, the repetition of a phrase used in context, central to literary and other discourse, requires affirming reference (to some possible worldly subject matter) as ineluctably intertwined with what texts and other expressions say. With ideality’s dismissal, and literature and its repetitions proceeding always in contexts, expressions and understanding not only refer to prior instances of what is said but also refer to some matters previously talked about, some subject or topic or aim, which, like the usages themselves, function both as precedented and not.
To see why this may be the case, it is worthwhile recurring briefly to work done by Mary Louise Pratt quite a while back, in her Toward A Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Pratt there had already focused on citations in life and literature and insisted on breaking down the barrier between the two. To explain the workings of fictional narratives, Pratt more specifically contests the distinction between the illocutions employed to tell stories in everyday life and those found in fiction. In the case of the former, “[w]ithout the slightest hint of infelicity,” Pratt avers, “I can recount an anecdote I heard from someone else whose name I can’t remember to an audience I don’t know about events I didn’t witness that happened somewhere I have never been.”27
Citations in literature and in life share the same footing for Pratt; in both, speakers and authors may lack knowledge of the subjects to which they refer, while in both quotations can still function equally well, without “any infelicity,” as she puts it.
Yet even if quotation in ordinary circumstances and in literature operate identically for Pratt, for her, both also recur to non-citational instances and governing rules of the sort that she takes Austin to analyze, the ones that he (and also Derrida) recognize “in their relative purity.” In the absence of H. P. Grice’s “axioms” (as she calls them), as well as of Austin’s illocutionary rules, neither in literature nor in life could one know what is being talked about when speaking of marrying or promising and so forth—when using performatives and other illocutions more generally. Grice’s and Austin’s analyses thus establish these speech-acts’ original and primary contours—ones that quotations and citations assume, whether in literature or elsewhere.
Literature’s priority and originality as discourse for Pratt reaches a limit, then, in such (pragmatic) conventions, all of which refer back to standard, non-literary speech situations. Consequently, if literature is to be conceived as on entirely the same footing as other discourse, no less given an exemplary status, it is clearly necessary to go Pratt one better by insisting on the following. Everything, including our ordinary usage, must begin from quotation, with conventions, codes, and so on (pragmatic or not) playing no regulative or constitutive role. All verbal performances and their identification depend solely on prior encounters, some earlier commerce, with employments of what in a new context are taken to be the relevant phrases—hence forming one-time series, each with their own “historicity,” as I call it. Conventions of speech of a strong and controlling kind do not exist—from tokens and signifiers up to propositions themselves.28 All discourse instead relies on citation: uses of language with their various achievements deemed having actually previously occurred, even if not necessarily fully recalled as such—hence on a citationality without reserve, as it might be called, since this capacity explicitly lacks any other conditions, inputs, or guardrails.29
Alongside such citationality, as part and parcel of discourse’s historicity, it is also necessary, as already noted, to embrace what Austin’s work makes available: the role of context and worldly reference in all writing and speech—today sometimes referred to as occasionalism. Occasionalism, as attributed to Austin, is a conception that pertains to statements, propositions (though as we will see literature proves a still more apt case). Statements, truth claims, such as 2+2=4, for Husserl, Frege, and others, again, are taken to be necessarily ideal, non-spatio-temporally individuated meanings. Austin contests the ideal’s status by insisting that such claims have sense and can be adjudicated as true or false solely in contexts, in what he deemed “historic situations.” Austin thus would reject Husserl’s insistence, to which Derrida as we have seen also subscribes, that “the flat mountain is golden” or other such utterances can be seen to be false based on their meanings alone. Instead, whatever is being expressed, spoken or written, needs contexts of some sort to be legible in the first place. No stand-alone meanings or expressions exist. (In the above case of “the flat mountain,” one might, after all, be referring to a butte.)
Austin’s occasionalism and its consequences for literature and literary interpretation become clearest in Austin’s views of truth, of “is true,” both prior to HTDTWW and when he recurs to this topic at its end. Austin himself glosses “is true,” it should underscored, in terms of quotation. “Is true” designates (or controversially “describes”) the successful coordination in some given “historic situation” of an expression’s indexical, referential capacity with its descriptive potential. To say of some statement that it “is true” is to affirm that when some claim was once actually used, it melded description and reference appropriately. A statement’s being branded true thus always harbors a quotational or citational vector. Austin pushes back rather radically against the proposition and its framework by tying the notion of something being true to an occasion in this fashion.30
In turn, Austin’s initial mapping of “is true” directly sheds light on literature’s and literary criticism’s operation, as does also its subsequent fate in HTDTWW. Even in the simpler instance of single claims, Austin rejects identifying one part of what is said as indexical and referential and another portion as descriptive. Only the sentence or phrase in use as a whole, he insists, refers and describes.
This holistic requirement, however, is much more evident in literature than elsewhere. A text’s worldly points of captation, its primary references and themes, in literary interpretation, are always gauged through its descriptive aspects, by working through different descriptions it offers, while the reverse is also true: what is said in such passages requires an eye to what may be being talked about, to possible candidates for reference. The text’s referent and what it says about that subject matter (its descriptions) in literature are always parsed together; descriptions direct our eye toward possible reference, while what such descriptions actually say or intimate can only be determined along with that to which they might refer. Literary interpretation is a sorting and articulating of both reference and description.
In the case of literary works, this leaves open an extraordinarily wide range of topics and interests. One can read Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, for example, as telling us something about childhood, or narrative form, or late nineteenth-century England, and so on. It will, however, in its own fashion be understood to be saying something about something, and this will, to varying degrees, relate to the contexts of both its readers and James. One might well perform a “feminist” reading of Screw, largely but not wholly emphasizing the reader’s stance, or “queer” James, but one won’t be taking Screw as a commentary on Hittite burial practices or Schroedinger’s equations. Austin’s account makes clear how and why that is so.
In criticism, as here viewed, then, readers articulate a work’s or corpus’s subject matters, some of its themes and interests—pertaining to various features of human life, historical events, technological developments, and so on—while also unfolding what the author says and shows about them (including how they do so), a task that also can be informed by the precursors that the author’s text’s own citationality affords within these contexts.31 Criticism takes into account not only a given text and what happens in it and to what it refers, possibly along with other texts by the same author, but also texts prior to the present one and the circumstances and ideas that they might treat. Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, for example, taken with an eye to its own workings, as well as to other texts by James, such as Portrait of a Lady, in part, clearly concerns promising, just like HTDTWW. Whether James is interested in promising in the first place and what he says and shows about this topic, as well as finally the critic’s own appraisal of James’s treatment and these subject matters, in turn, are necessarily approached together: is Casamassima ultimately canned Kant, insightful social commentary, neither, or both—the different possible takes in play, here only examples, by no means being mutually exclusive.
No single piece of criticism, of course, can account for all of a text’s relevant aspects; none can grapple with everything a given literary text may say and be about, given the open-ended citationality here evinced. Hence the understandable proliferation of criticism that surrounds most well-known literary texts and corpuses. This same interplay of precedence (of the texts and circumstances that provide a given text’s contexts) and novelty (in what it says and its descriptions), best instanced in literature, nevertheless does not foreclose discussions concerning whether some single, given interpretation is more or less successful or convincing. With a given reference in view, a reading of a novel or poem can turn out to be implausible or even incorrect.
Still more worrisome in the context of current literary studies than the possibility of declaring some interpretations wrong-headed may be the necessity to approach literature in terms of Austin’s chosen predicate at all: to regard literary works and corpuses as showing or expressing or saying something possibly “true.” This determination more than likely is not the one that today first leaps to mind when considering literature and literary discourse. Veridical concerns appear radically foreign to contemporary criticism, despite the fact that literature is more and more being read with an eye toward its referents—race, money, sexuality, income inequality, the environment, and so on—and it is so read, one assumes, with the aim of arriving at some sort of insight or takeaway, or illumination, that is, some truth or insight, in respect to these same themes, even if one pertaining solely to the depth and urgency of the problems they pose.
Turning to Austin’s final brush with truth and “is true” in HTDTWW, by way of conclusion, allows for elucidating truth’s workings as presently understood, rendering the present account of literary study’s work more complete. In the closing pages of HTDTWW, Austin takes a decisive step: he ceases to view questions of truth (assessments of worldly circumstances, of what is the case) and assessments of other sorts (pertaining to “value” broadly understood) as fundamentally distinct. Austin suggests, instead, that all discourse draws on both facts (truth) and values (other sorts of assessments), at this moment dissolving the distinction between constative and performatives (HTDTWW, 148).32 Performative utterances rely on and sometimes explicitly include assessments that would be traditionally assigned to claims and judgments—as, in the case of a bet, that a race is indeed taking place at two o’clock today or that a given horse is actually running in it. Claims and statements, in turn, necessarily imply and sometimes explicitly incorporate other sorts of evaluations: of what is interesting, appropriate, or in some other way relevant on some occasion. The assertion that “France is hexagonal,” Austin points out, possesses neither truth nor falsity apart from such an evaluation (HTDTWW, 142).
His own analysis, Austin concludes, pertains, then, not to constatives or performatives, but to what he calls “the total speech act in the total speech situation” (HTDTWW, 148). The act so characterized is the genuine unit of expression and the concrete object of his inquiry. Despite its repetition of the word “total,” this phrase does not at all amount to the totalitarian paean to consciousness that Derrida makes it out to be at the beginning of SEC part II (SEC, 14n6, 17). Perhaps ironically, given Derrida’s own taking this phrase out of context, Austin with it instead announces his most radical affirmation of context and his most mature position on “is true.” True/false, he avows, in contrast to his earlier characterization, does not refer to “anything simple at all”; these are “not names for relations [or] qualities” (HTDTWW, 144, 149).
This final, quite open-ended, situating of truth at which Austin arrives more fully illuminates how truth’s consideration operates in criticism and literature. A text’s and its author’s assessments (of what is desirable, required, abhorrent, and so on), along with the subject matters to which those assessments relate, and the worldly circumstances and affairs they invoke, are and must be, Austin indicates, confronted all at once, and this is why the critic too cannot help but engage with what is being said and whether and how it is insightful. Every instance of literature and every interpretation, that is, involves both what is meant by values and facts, and critics must wrestle, ultimately simultaneously, with the aptness of both sorts of determinations. The difference in literature’s case from most speech is that both of these dimensions are always explicitly on the table, often in complex, albeit concrete settings, scenarios, and narratives. To be sure, some critics, like some authors, will be more concerned with assessments that classically would be those of value—ultimately plumping for some looks at the world and critiquing others; other critics and authors will stress various registers of description. Yet in all these instances, these vectors are interwoven, such that a description of what is putatively the case always implies some interest and viewpoint; in turn, affirmations or critiques of some project, plan, or program, always imply some estimations of circumstances and what actually is the case. Literature and literary critical performances necessarily engage at once with aptnesses pertaining to value and to truth and this holds sway whether they concern the future, past, or present.
Criticism, on this view, then, never could be restricted to a discussion of the author’s own viewpoint, which does not mean that such intentions are simply irrelevant. For similar reasons, ascertaining what a text and author says often invites reflection on their positioning within greater social, cultural, or historical milieux.33 The genre in which a text functions, its style, as well as its expressed and implicit concerns may all open on to reflection on topics of wider scope.
None of what the text says and is about can be determined beginning from such considerations, however; texts are not functions of cultural, social, or historical “structures” or “logics.” Such suppositions erase the text itself, by subordinating it to new and again unexplained systems or structures, implicitly resurrecting the ideal. Appeals to structures or logics necessarily trade on otherwise unexplained ideal last instances, ones hailing now not from language but from society, history, the economy, and so on.34 Their invocation thus renders the text in question effectively equivalent to the common understanding of “now is night,” an inscription somehow without a writer, receiver or context—subordinating it to a new ideal instance and thereby depriving it of its status as an authored text.35
In sum, then, SEC’s legacy, on the present view, will be to have gone furthest, along with a few others, in engaging propositionality’s paradoxes and ideality’s seeming inevitabilities in the hope of arriving at what may lie beyond them. Doing so, Derrida’s piece invites a moment when ideality and propositionality, structures and constitutive conventions, have entirely departed from our thinking and the question of what other instances speak when we do ceases to be posed.36 Even when the interest in what or who else speaks abates, it will still remain true, however, that another speech, a different instance of writing and thought, always precedes our own—that all discourses and their topics remain related to earlier instances of speech, understandings, and encounters with things that they do not fully master—and thus that no discourse ever entirely has either a first or a last word.
Notes
What the trailer made clear was that as far as the film was concerned, the 1963 March on Washington, in which he did play a crucial part, was the Alpha and Omega of Rustin’s career. His politics and his role in the crucial debates over ways forward from the legislative victories of 1964 and 1965—which are arguably what’s most important about Rustin for making sense of our time—don’t come up in this story because it conveniently ends with the 1963 march.
Predictably then, Rustin opens with a montage of staged reconstructions of iconic images of “stoic protesters surrounded by screaming racists” from the high period of activism in the southern civil rights movement, including a live-action version of Norman Rockwell’s painting of Ruby Bridges walking (in the film, skipping), surrounded by U.S. marshals, to desegregate William Frantz elementary school in New Orleans in 1960.1 Manohla Dargis describes this opening move as a gesture at “a little historical scene-setting,” but to the extent that popular understanding of the civil rights movement goes no deeper than those and other disconnected images of the bad old-timey times, the scene set is at best of questionable value.2
In characterizing the film as “a work of reclamation and celebration,” Dargis notes that it “seeks to put its subject front and center in the history he helped to make and from which he has, at times, been elided, partly because, as an openly gay man, he challenged both convention and the law.”3 That’s the film in a nutshell. But even with its small-bore aims, the film fails on virtually every front.
Dargis again is astute:
The largest problem with the movie is that it’s finally too conventional, formally and politically, to do full justice to the complexities of either the civil-rights movement or Rustin, a socialist whose activism was rooted in his Quakerism and was informed both by his moral beliefs and by economic analysis. When Rustin and other activists on the Left first planned the march, economics was at the fore. “The dynamic that has motivated” Black Americans in their own fight against racism, the plan read, “may now be the catalyst which mobilizes all workers behind the demands for a broad and fundamental program for economic justice.”4
In its effort to establish his importance, Rustin falsely attributes to him principal responsibility for proposing and executing the March on Washington, which originated with A. Philip Randolph and was largely organized by Randolph’s Negro American Labor Council. In what feels like an ass-covering gesture intended to thwart such a criticism, the Obamas’ and director George C. Wolfe’s Rustin gives substantial screen time to Cleveland Robinson, then Secretary-Treasurer of District 65 Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Workers Union and a founding officer of the NALC, as well as Randolph’s successor as president. However, it depicts him, oddly (perhaps because Robinson was Jamaican?), as an avatar of a Garveyite-like bombastic race man politics. The film also downplays the larger role of the labor movement in organizing the March, treating the unions off-handedly, mainly as obstructionist. Yet two months before the March, the United Auto Workers were central in organizing a 125,000-strong Detroit Walk to Freedom, which was essentially a trial run for the later event. (As also suits this moment, the place of trade unionists in the film is taken by smart, energetic young people.) Randolph and Rustin, as Dargis indicates, originally conceived the March’s focal point as a demand for jobs but broadened its scope to accommodate the southern movement’s paramount concern with attacking Jim Crow. Randolph said at the March, “Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practices Act, but what good will it do if profit-generated automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, black and white?”
Ending the film at the March sidesteps consideration of Randolph and Rustin’s prime commitment to full employment and social wage policy, which three years later they crafted systematically and agitated for in the “Freedom Budget” for All Americans. Some of Rustin’s most significant political interventions occurred after the March, in particular his 1965 (“From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement”) and 1966 (“‘Black Power’ and Coalition Politics”) Commentary essays. The first argued that with the legislative victories of the mid-’60s the black movement had crossed a major threshold that called for a shift to working with labor and liberals to advance a broadly social-democratic agenda; the second examined the limits of Black Power sensibility. In contrasting Black Power to the Freedom Budget, he noted that “advocates of ‘black power’ have no such programs in mind; what they are arguing for (perhaps unconsciously) is the creation of a new black establishment.” It would be interesting, but far too close to home, for the Obama vehicle to reflect on that assessment nearly sixty years down the road.
Those elisions may reflect the film’s “malicious presentism” in its desire to create an exalted Rustin more amenable to contemporary neoliberal sensibilities. One clear illustration of that tendency is when, in an early meeting to discuss the March idea with NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins, Rustin scores him for “counting on the courts to eradicate racial inequity.” Rustin would certainly have referred to “inequality,” not the terminology of neoliberal race relations engineers. In a later scene, affirming a companion’s lament about the excessive constraints of black middle-class social norms, Rustin remarks on “the suffocating chains of Negro respectability.” In current antiracist patter that phrase has become a cliché expressing a quasi-populist sensibility critical of putative black elite adherence, implicitly inauthentic racially, to conventional (“white”) standards of propriety in public self-presentation. However, neither Rustin, Randolph, nor King would have shared that critical perspective, which was fundamentally at odds with their own default ways of being in the world and their standards for participating in movement actions, including the March on Washington and, as I discuss below, the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
But this line of criticism is in a way for leftists the low-hanging fruit, certainly the tack readers would expect me to take. There never was any reason to believe that a vehicle bearing the Obamas’ nihil obstat would come within a zip code of lauding working-class based, social-democratic politics. However, the film is problematic and revealing, and deeply pernicious, in other ways as well.
The project of “reclamation and celebration” proceeds from a common impulse to rediscover/invent black Greats who by force of their own will make “change” or “contributions.” In Ava Duvernay’s Selma Martin Luther King Jr. shows up and exudes a beatific glow that makes things happen.5 These films and filmmakers have no clue how movements are reproduced as mass projects, from the bottom up and top down, in a trajectory plotted by continuously improvised response to and anticipation of layers of internal and external pressures. But that’s not their point. Rustin isn’t interested in illuminating the intricacies of the civil rights movement; it wants us to recognize its subject’s place in a pantheon of black and American Greats. Toward that end, it keeps telling us—over and over—how close Rustin was personally to King and his family, as though propinquity to Universally Recognized Greatness cements his place in the pantheon. An irony is that the March on Washington became King’s event, as historian William P. Jones points out, only after the fact. I know at least two people who attended the March but left before King spoke: it was late August in Washington, D.C.; people were dressed up, and he was, after all, another southern Baptist preacher.
Bayard Rustin was a brilliant organizer and strategist, not least because he was motivated by a practical utopian vision of the society he wanted to realize. That vision and his clarity regarding a path toward it helped him to parse in a distinctively clear way tensions and contradictions within the movement, particularly as it faced the major crossroad in the mid-1960s. Disconnecting him from that vision has enabled characterizing him as an advocate of “coalition politics,” as though that were itself a political principle. That characterization comes with a timestamp; it grew out of the debate over Black Power in the late 1960s for which an animating question was “Can blacks attain freedom or racial justice on their own?” The question was always wrongheaded, not least because it begged several others—e.g., which voices count as those of “blacks”? What does “freedom” mean concretely in policy and programmatic terms?—that Rustin stood out among his contemporaries in posing because he had a clear vision of the world that should be.
He was probably not, as the film has Randolph say to Wilkins in discussing the March idea, the “only one person who can organize an event of this scale”; no one ever is. He was crucially instrumental in organizing it, though, and in other important initiatives and controversies in the period. He was also the consummate staff person who understood his role as executing collectively defined objectives and maintained a keen eye for potential trade-offs between long-term and short-term objectives. That characteristic earned him the enmity of many radicals when he sought to persuade the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party contingent at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City to accept the in some ways distasteful compromise the Johnson administration offered for seating delegates.
The staff mentality typically does not lead to assignment to the pantheon of larger-than-life Greats, whose personae float high above the realm of mundane horse trading. Unfortunately, in the hegemony of a culture that looks for The One—from John Galt and Bill Gates to Neo and T’Challa to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to Barack Obama and DeRay McKesson—appreciation of Rustin requires attempting to shoehorn him into the Justice League or an All-Star roster of inspiring Black Leaders and Exemplars, not grappling with him as an agent within the history he lived. This is a context in relation to which we should consider the film’s treatment of Rustin’s sexuality.
His openness as a gay man is one of the personally remarkable things about Rustin, an expression of the courage that comes from simply refusing to be cowed. In Rustin his sexuality and the now-standard narrative lamenting the impact of others’ homophobia on his not having gotten his due recognition—and the reality there is more complex than that narrative: what would due recognition have looked like, then or now, and who confers or controls access to it?—work to blur the distinction between Rustin as a political operative and as an individual. (I understand that that distinction has been under attack since literature professors began imagining in the 1980s that their academic practice is a subversive politics. It isn’t, and the distinction is both real and important.) The film even invents a risky affair with a young, married, and closeted minister and NAACP field organizer as a leitmotiv to keep his sexuality at the center of its narrative. The move also provides a vehicle to displace a whole range of problems into the unequivocal moral universe of ‘the dangers of being a black, gay man in the ’60s,’ which in turn reinforces the barely subliminal neoliberal exhortation to register “oh god, look how much we’ve progressed.”
It is only to be expected that people may speculate as to whether Rustin’s sexuality informed his political perspective in one way or another. And it may well be that, like being black or being a Quaker, being gay buttressed Rustin’s sense of injustice at inequality. Being black and the child of sharecroppers no doubt had some influence on shaping SNCC chair John Lewis’s politics; or being the child of left-leaning professors influenced Julian Bond’s; or being a certain sort of Catholic contributed to Philip Murray’s and Michael Harrington’s; or for that matter being another sort of Catholic shaped Phyllis Schlafly’s or Pat Buchanan’s.
The key point, however, is that we know and care about Bayard Rustin as a gay man only because of his prominence as a civil rights and social justice activist. There were no doubt openly gay postal workers, bricklayers, and merchant seamen who were Rustin’s contemporaries; we don’t know about them because they were not public figures. As Chris Rock (who Dargis observes in polite understatement was miscast as Roy Wilkins in the film) said during the O.J. Simpson hysteria, the murder case drew national attention not because of race but because of fame. “If O.J. drove a bus, he wouldn’t even be O.J.; he’d be Orenthal, the bus-driving murderer.” Similarly, in the late 1930s, as I report in The South, my grandmother breached local Jim Crow etiquette in public transit in the voluntarist way that common folklore attributes erroneously to Rosa Parks. On her own and for whatever reason, she decided one day to violate the norm that whites should board the streetcar before blacks. Precisely because she did it spontaneously in the way of the mythology of Rosa Parks, no one outside our family has ever heard of Elizabeth Collins Macdonald, and there has never been any discussion of recognizing her “place” in a broader stream of African American or American history.
Moreover, the idea of “place in” or “contribution to” may be the most insidious feature of an understanding of history as allegory that “goes to the past as a source of often cherry-picked ‘lessons’ for the present, a trove of inspiring and uplifting stories, or ‘anticipations’ and cautionary tales.”6 This is what underlies the project of “reclamation and celebration” that Rustin exemplifies. The impulse to find or recover individuals and situate them in their “proper” places in history—that is, how they should have been recognized were it not for benighted features of bygone days—dominates academic as well as popular examination of the past and is so thoroughly hegemonic that no one even notices the tendentious, ideological premises regarding past, present, and the idea of historicity itself from which it proceeds. Rarely does anyone—again, among scholars, game-show hosts, or anyone in between—ever ask what it means to have a “place in history” or who decides what those places are and determines who belongs where or what counts as “contributions” and who deserves credit for having made them or, for that matter, what counts as credit.
A simple contrast may bring this point home. When the National Baseball Hall of Fame decided in 2022 to accord Major League status to seven Negro professional Leagues that existed between 1920 and 1948, parameters for determining contributions to baseball, although debatable at the margins, were explicit and concrete. Performance-based criteria, universally recognized throughout the world of baseball, were available for grounding judgments regarding which leagues qualified and which individuals were eligible to join the Hall’s singular honorees. Claims that Josh Gibson and Leon Day, for example, belong in the Hall of Fame rested ultimately on assertions based on their hitting, fielding, and pitching prowess, which are the core performances of baseball. But belated recognition, absent a Wayback Machine, doesn’t alter the past: Gibson was inducted into the Hall twenty-five years after his death and Day six days before his. The point instead is to legitimize the present through gestural absorption of past exclusions.
Setting the historical record straight to recognize the exemplary accomplishments of black ballplayers who had been excluded from the Major Leagues by segregation is certainly defensible, even laudable. The Hall of Fame’s explicit purpose is to honor those whose history of performance qualifies them as greats in the sport. But it is worth noting that by the 1980s and 1990s, some fans, aficionados, and wags had begun suggesting that perhaps the statistics of white players whose careers ended before 1947 should be affixed with asterisks (and real baseball fans know the talismanic power of the asterisk) because they had been shielded artificially from facing the toughest competition.7 Bringing the Negro Leagues into the Majors resolved that issue as well. In addition to giving the black players what feels like their due, it also avoids besmirching the standing of Babe Ruth, Hank Greenberg, Jimmie Foxx, or “Big Train” Johnson. But, what of areas of life that, unlike baseball, do not unfold along clearly delimited criteria? What does “greatness” or “contribution” mean? Or “place” among what arrangements?
Beyond its intellectual limitations, the reclamation and celebration narrative is yet more problematic as it mimes a politics. It is Orwellian in reinventing the past with formulations and outcomes more agreeable to presentist sensibilities. It feigns to correct the past’s injustices partly by narrowing what we understand them to have been in a way that fits the moral compass of contemporary neoliberalism. In 2018 The New York Times introduced a feature called “the Overlooked,” which it described as “obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times,” that is, people whose otherwise considerable lives were not recognized because of race, gender, sexual orientation, or other characteristics then, but no longer, suppressed as non-normative. As I indicate above, Rustin invents the gay affair to underscore how difficult it was to be a black gay man in 1963 but also by definition how much better it is to be one now. It unquestionably is, in many ways, for many gay people. Yet in making Rustin’s sexual orientation the film’s centerpiece, to the extent of never once discussing the specific objectives of the 1963 March and having Tom Kahn’s character trivialize disagreements about direction in the movement (“SNCC, CORE, the NAACP kids, we’re all fighting over agendas and slogans and songs”), “reclaiming” Rustin is also celebrating triumph of a thin neoliberal conception of social justice that is fundamentally at odds with the social-democratic vision Rustin actually pursued.
The anachronistic appropriation of the discourse of “respectability politics” that pops up in the film’s bar chat does point to a presentist material foundation for the place and contribution narrative, perhaps a reason it seems so powerful symbolically while devoid of specific content. Those who inveigh against the injustice of respectability politics commonly adduce the case of Claudette Colvin, the fifteen-year-old who was originally considered a possible test case for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Organizers dropped her from consideration when they learned that she was pregnant and unwed and eventually replaced her with Rosa Parks. Efforts to reclaim and celebrate Colvin give away the crude and presentist class character of this politics of reclamation and celebration: its model is an awards competition. The claim that Colvin was wronged by having been deprived of the opportunity to realize her (rightful?) place in history is equivalent to an assertion that boycott leadership took away her winning lottery ticket. It turns the relation between participating in the movement and recognition for having done so on its head, as though the point of participation were gaining the recognition. That is, it reads today’s career path to becoming a freelance Racial Voice back into the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In a familiar move, those who represent Colvin as the victim of respectability politics flail around for convincing justifications for grievance on her behalf—she was too dark-skinned, not sufficiently attractive by white standards, not well enough connected—none of which, even if true, had prevented her from being considered in the first place. The direct explanation for Colvin’s replacement, that the movement’s opponents were primed to attack the character of its prominent participants in order to discredit it without challenging the justice of its demands and that Colvin’s condition would have made her an unnecessary liability, is unpersuasive to those who insist she was wronged. For them, instrumental political arguments do not register because, in their purview, the goal of the civil rights movement was not altering legislation or policy but attaining recognition for exemplary black people.8 In this sense search for “contributions” not only substitutes role-modeling and uplift ideology for a redistributive politics (Rustin wins recognition, not a full employment economy); it also holds out the neoliberal promise for commoditizing the self, the activist/role model as entrepreneur. No wonder “activist” is now a standard item on professors’ and entertainers’ bios.
This brings me to the issue of Rustin’s shift rightward. I’ve been asked several times, mainly from members of my age cohort, why I don’t discuss it. The main reason I haven’t derives from my aversion to the “place” and “contributions” narrative. Assessing Rustin’s political shifts and what drove them is a proper concern for those interested in Rustin’s life or political biography; several useful and informative studies are available to aid pursuit of such interests, none better than John D’Emilio’s Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. My interest in the sweep of Rustin’s life is more ancillary or passing curiosity than principal focus. My concern has never been to find or vindicate Rustin’s place in history. He belongs to his history; we belong to ours. Nor has it been to enter a summary moral judgment about him or to distill lessons we can take from him, positive or negative.
My interest in Rustin centers on his specific interventions at a crucial point in debates in the mid-1960s over how to build out from the civil rights movement’s great legislative victories. The full import of those debates would become clear only decades after the fact, and in ways that don’t line up ideologically as many radicals believed they did at the time. In retrospect, those mid-’60s debates, which I have written about often,9 laid out two distinct directions and strategies for a left or progressive politics in the United States, one anchored to a broadly social-democratic vision and an effort to construct a mass black-labor-liberal-left politics and the other a performatively radical black ethnic pluralism, embellished with anti-colonial, Third Worldist imagery and a rhetoric of “self-determination.” Revisiting that debate is important today because doing so challenges two profound mystifications that undercut development of serious left politics: 1) the erasure of political economy and class from accounts of American political history, especially post-World War II and 2) the bizarre notion that nothing of any significance has changed for black Americans or regarding race in American politics since 1965. From the perspective of challenging those colossal mystifications, Rustin was probably the most astute and incisive participant in those debates.
New Left-inclined radicals at the time saw the cleavage as between, on the one hand, Rustin and other advocates of an essentially conservative racial integrationist politics that would dilute blacks’ power in a Democratic coalition and a revolutionary Third-Worldist sensibility on the other.10 I understand very well how that deeply sedimented conviction regarding the stakes of the mid-1960s debate encourages catechizing me now on my characterization, which presents what we understood to be radical as the right-wing tendency and what we understood as conservative to be the defeated left alternative. I was 17 at the time of the Democratic convention in Atlantic City and was aware of the controversy over seating the MFDP; I was also frustrated that I wasn’t old enough to vote for Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. Within two years, the War in Vietnam had escalated to the point where nearly 400,000 troops were deployed, and I was swept up like so many others, especially on college campuses, in the energy of Black Power and Third Worldist politics. Over the years, settled assurance that Rustin was a conservative and that we who opposed him were radicals apparently had become for many tightly woven into a basic sense of self and one’s own fundamental political identity. However, critical reflection on the intervening decades, e.g., the emergence of the Black Power tendency, as Rustin had cautioned early on, into a new black political class that has evolved within neoliberalism and whose reductionist antiracist politics defines its version of a left, should facilitate acknowledging that we were wrong then—even in the categories through which we tried to understand the stakes of the debate. In fairness, it was possible to know how things were going to turn out only after the fact because history, perhaps especially political history, is dynamic and processual.
This points to another problem with Rustin’s conservative shift. SNCC radicals and others in the MFDP camp decided Rustin was a conservative, or anti-radical, because of his role as go-between in Atlantic City, when he just as easily could have been seen as trying to sell a purely tactical compromise. Because some radicals were predisposed to see him as conservative already after Atlantic City, it was that much easier to dismiss his 1965 and 1966 arguments in that way. Then nearly a decade later, when Rustin operated in effect as a pro-Israeli goon in pressuring black public figures to sign his B.A.S.I.C. (Black Americans to Support Israel Committee) statement, that could be seen as consistent with the earlier two moments. But is there any reason to assume a connection between his later actions on behalf of Israeli interests and his earlier arguments for a social-democratic politics or even urging the MFDP to accept the Johnson administration’s compromise? Determining whether that’s the case may be an academically interesting matter but, for my political purposes, is beside the point; the answer’s significance would not justify the effort required to generate it—unless the point were somehow to situate or support judgments about Rustin the individual, which leads back to the logic of reclaiming and celebrating, and displacement of history by human interest or morality play. And even Rustin’s motives for agitating for the B.A.S.I.C. statement were likely complex and connected to his relationships within Social Democrats, USA and how its politics was moving. From this perspective, it’s not clear that expatiating on Rustin’s conservative turn is as as clean or direct as it may seem, and pursuing it wouldn’t tell us much in any case. It might seem straightforward and easy to plot a story of Rustin’s conservative turn teleologically, reading from the B.A.S.I.C. statement backward to the MFDP controversy. However, in the old Mississippi Delta folk wisdom, “seems like ain’t is,” and it’s good in political as well as academic life to recall, and avoid, the seductions of the post hoc, propter hoc fallacy.
Finally, to return to Rustin, the most charitable description of that essentially Bookerite biopic narrative that is now standard is Great POC You Should Know About Who Accomplished Much (i.e., Was Successfully Great) Against All Odds And It’s Uplifting To Know That You Could Be the Same If You Work Hard and Apply Yourself and Pursue Your Dreams Whatever They Might Be Against All Odds; Then the Force of Your Exemplary Character Will Show Through and Things Will Change (the Voting Rights Act Will Pass, You’ll Make the NBA or the Red Carpet, or Be Able to Buy a House on Those Nurses’ Aide Wages—Whatever) and You’ll Be a Success At Least in Your Own Mind.
And that is why this iteration, like the others, is most deeply reactionary.
Notes
Paula Peatross’s work requires some explanation of how it’s made, although that only goes so far to explain how it feels. This may be true of all art to some extent, but in Peatross’s work the truth is complicated by the way in which how it feels seems to be much more the result of the work’s physical production than is usually the case. We all want to know as much as possible about how works of art are made but, as noted, that usually doesn’t turn out to tell us all that much about how they affect us. Violin music, for example, is made by a horsehair bow being dragged across catgut strings. This explains something, but not much, because it is what is done with the sound that results rather than just the sound generically that seduces us with its magic and leads us, or lets us lead ourselves, into an experience that may depend on the bow and the strings but also causes us not to think about them all that much. I think, then, that I’ll first describe the way she works and then talk about the effect: perceptions that are caused by the way the physical structure makes them possible but are in practice perceptions not of structure but of movement. Her reliefs emphasize the physical in order not to remain grounded in it, instead being almost all about the ephemeral, something which may be experienced but not demonstrated. There are few things in art as manifestly physical as a relief, which presents the space of painting as much more of a thing than the usual web of drawn lines and their accompaniments on a flat rectangular surface. Peatross’s reliefs exist not to be physical but rather to emphatically declare their physicality and then cause one’s experience to deny it involuntarily, not to notice it but instead to turn the experience into its opposite: the emphatically physical makes possible an experience of the non-physical, of movement rather than solidity, weightlessness as opposed to weight and tangibility. That is where I’ll end up.
I think, like quite a few other people, that there are broadly speaking two kinds of art. One is made for and out of propaganda; the other is made with contemplation in mind. All religious and political art belongs to the first category. It tells a story one already knows; the purpose of the art is to give it some specific bias or interpretation that one may or may not already know. The second is not a narrative at all. Instead, it encourages one’s mind to wander, to allow the audience to think and feel for itself. Peatross’s art is of this second sort. There is no story there, no attempt to find Jesus’s face in the pizza.
This is not a distinction between nonrepresentational and representational art, but it is one between narrative and nearly everything else. And Peatross’s reliefs are unambiguously nonrepresentational. In addition to not being narratives (stories) of any sort, they are made without reference to anything else outside themselves, such as a landscape, the sole exception to that general rule being that they do preserve the limits and inflexions of her body. That aside, as the artist herself puts it, “Each one is itself.”
The finished works are made out of three or four layers of 3/8” plywood with paint applied in layers of as many as fifteen coats, but they begin with mostly freehand drawings on posterboard. When she ends up with something she likes and can use, it’s transferred to plywood using her Bosch electric saw. Each layer of plywood is likely to contain more than one image, the first layer being the bottom one, touching the wall while the next two or three are built onto it. The works are generally quite small, 28.5 x 25.5 x 1 ½ (4 x 3/8)” for example. The color is rich and intense, as one might expect given the number of layers of paint, which is generally oil paint supplemented in some parts by her use of pearlescent color (Jacquards Lumiere metallic and pearlescent color) and the addition of Dorland’s dry wax to everything.
Paula worked on a grid for much of her career, but around 2016 she abandoned that and has since worked with and from gestures. This was a major change in that it announced a move from a stable structure, perhaps architectonic, to one founded in movement, where internal relationships between the forms are relationships between speeds rather than stabilities, differences between forms rather than a homogenous rhythm in all parts of the relief. I don’t think Paula was ever what could be called a Minimalist, but to the extent that her earlier work could be said to be close to it in some respects—the aforementioned homogeneity of the kind of movement that characterized it, for instance—her more recent work is quite far from it. It is now an affair of gestural relationships which are in no obvious sense derived from one another. The sweeping forms that seem to be the basis of many of the works are supported and elaborated by others. Some of these are neither sweeping nor obviously derived from movements of the body but are small and rectangular and in that even more geometric. Added to these are shapes that are also signs. These fall into two types: stars, which are wobbly but almost static, and arrows, which (as all arrows do) point the eye in directions which, in Peatross’s works, often contradict one another. These forms or shapes which are also signs are often brightly colored, and when not bright are certainly intense. If not red, then they are a darkish violet. Most of the colors in a Peatross occur as a system of complementariness, which means lots of green to balance the reds or violets. Most of the color is in a lower mid-tone that, as I have already noted, is intensified by being made of successively applied layers which end up being shiny and thus more intense than they might otherwise be by adding wax to everything. Color, like music, goes straight into one’s body. The absence of a referent—something that is illustrated rather than embodied in the painted object—makes the work into an experience one can only register and be judged as phenomena rather than interpreted as a sort of picture. Phenomena are direct rather than indirect effects. What to make of it is never expressible except as an experience which can only be approximately described.
The colors are often deep, reminiscent of the organic while quite metallic, and the reliefs are small enough to suck you in even as the general condition of the relief is to keep you at a distance through its physicality. Being quite small and very visually active, the reliefs may encourage one to compare them with Frank Stella’s reliefs, the earliest of which were made out of cut-up beer cans, but Paula’s works are less crowded than Stella’s, so the components have more room to move and are in that more or differently mobile, perhaps, and certainly they employ a contrast between deep color, which slows things down, and gestural, or gesture-inflected, drawing which does the opposite. Stella never applied fifteen layers of paint to anything either, so if density is a quality found in the works of both artists, it is not the same kind of density. The layering in hers is of a kind that causes one’s eye to rest on the separate components of the work, while Stella’s is of the sort that encourages one to see the whole as a concatenation of repeated affects, which do not require individual attention. Composition in Peatross tends to be heterogeneous while I think Stella’s retains minimalism’s characteristic homogeneity even when it’s organic in reference or aspiration—his small reliefs are named for birds.
The works in the current show are mostly made after a gap in Peatross’s production that was caused by her having cataracts that needed treatment that had to be deferred as we were in the middle of the COVID pandemic. When she was able to work, the reliefs, which seem to have started before she had to stop and wait for the cataract surgery, were perhaps more filled with, or by, movement than they were before. To return now to a point I made at the beginning, the works are contemplative and, like musical works, they require one to make sense of what one sees without trying to relate it to anything as if they were illustrations of it. She is one of those artists who works with what the materials are and can do. The sound of the instruments, the shape of the forms, are in music on the one hand and in her work on the other, where the basis of meaning is to be found but not where its affect is. Peatross’s reliefs are full of moves which to a large degree are consequences of the diversity of the materials that have gone into it: the relief is itself a more complex object than a stretcher, as noted; the reliefs are made out of three kinds of paint—oil; the pearlescent and metallic paint, which comes as powder she mixes in with the wax paste; and the enamel paint with which she paints the exposed edges of the forms; and drawing which while mostly founded in free hand can also include passages that may have come into being with the use of a ruler. The range of materials itself generates expectations and a context for forms which leads one from large curvy forms to small forms which set up vibrations through repetition and contrasting colors, to an exceptional shape or form which is subdivided into brushstrokes. # 1 (2017) has all this plus two red arrows and two green stars (fig. 5). While making use of the wall that surrounds and also shows through it, the relief is an object that defeats its own objectness to become a space made out of quite awkward combinations of things that are no longer things. They are instead planes that assume some volumetric properties, and on the right of # 1, lemon yellow crops up to expand the tonal range of the work while introducing into it a color which by definition—which is to say for everyone and involuntarily (you have no choice about whether or how it enters your body)—detaches itself from its ground, becoming vaporous and free from gravity. Some colors more or less cling to the form (the pinks for instance), others are quite closely spatially identified with the shapes which they color (the stars and arrows), and others are colored in a way that breaks them up and encourages one to see them as interior coloration. Everything that should imply heaviness—the darker colors and the wax—come to do the opposite. This is painting without an obvious message having to do with the artist, although it may unavoidably have one that is implied about the culture. It may imply that the culture as a whole has room for events that are more complex than they might seem at first glance, that are exciting but not trapped in a narrative about, for instance, agency, and which speak to one through the action of their materials rather than any meaning anyone might attribute to them. Kant’s notion of the autonomous work of art, of “purposefulness with no purpose” is what Peatross works or plays with. When you leave her show there should be plenty to remember, but none of it will be what it represented; it will be instead what it presented. A presence like that of an animal maybe or a plant perhaps, in so far as it is clearly not devoid of sense but is at the same time not representing an idea. The sense it makes is sensuality as such. All that goes into laboriously making the work is there to disappear, having prepared the way for experiencing the possibility of movement in an ambiguous space, enjoyment of and in the not thoroughly namable—or maybe the not nameable at all when one comes down to it.
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