Derrida Reframed

Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts

K. Malcolm Richards

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781845115463
• eBook ISBN: 9780857736345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Are your students baffled by Baudrillard? Dazed by Deleuze? Confused by Kristeva? Other beginners' guides can feel as impenetrable as the original texts to students who 'think in images'. "Contemporary Thinkers Reframed" instead uses the language of the arts to explore the usefulness in practice of complex ideas. Short, contemporary and accessible, these lively books utilise actual examples of artworks, films, television shows, works of architecture, fashion and even computer games to explain and explore the work of the most commonly taught thinkers. Conceived specifically for the visually minded, the series will prove invaluable to students right across the visual arts.'Deconstruction' is touted in every visual area from architecture to fashion, yet few really understand what Derrida's notorious concept means, much less his elusive idea of 'differance'. In fact Derrida's work can seem almost impenetrable.
This guide explains Derrida's key concepts through examples from across the whole spectrum of the arts, looking at the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi and Daniel Libeskind, fashion designers such as Ann Demeulemeister and at the work of artists as varied as Kara Walker, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Rachel Whiteread and Jeff Wall. Showing what Derrida's work really 'means' in practice, this short guide makes this thinker's complex work accessible to a wider public.

Chapter 1

Deconstruction and Of Grammatology: What is in a name?

Each book by Derrida published in 1967 (L’écriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil, 1967– Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978; La Voix et le phénomène, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967– Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973; and De la grammatologie, Paris: Minuit, 1967– Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) articulates an aspect of Derrida’s project of deconstruction. Writing and Difference collects essays by Derrida published between 1963 and 1966. Most of these texts appeared in issues of the experimental French literary journals Tel Quel and Critique. A lengthy essay on Husserl, Speech and Phenomena represents Derrida’s second major publication on the subject of his dissertation. The third work, Of Grammatology, is a lengthy study concerning linguistics.

In an interview (included in the collection Positions, Paris: Minuit, 1972– Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Derrida discusses his appropriation of the then seldom used French word déconstruir (in English, ‘to deconstruct’) in his early texts. He explains his choice of the term déconstruir in relation to his effort to translate a passage from the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), whose work was of great interest to Derrida. Heidegger was both a student of Husserl and also one of the key influences on French intellectual thought during the post-World War II era. Much of Jean-Paul Sartre’s own brand of existentialism owes its intellectual force to making accessible aspects of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein (literally, ‘there-being’; Dasein is a term Heidegger uses to differentiate his notion of ‘being’ from the traditional notion of Being within Western philosophy).

Specifically, Derrida was trying to translate Heidegger’s term Destruktion (‘de-structuring’) from the German to the French. For Derrida, Heidegger’s notion of Destruktion suggested not simply a negative act of destruction, but also a positive act, such as a clearing away of something no longer useful. Derrida’s decision to use the disused French word déconstruir allowed for layered associations not only to Heidegger’s term, but also to his own contentious relation with structuralism. The term ‘to deconstruct’ conjures an image of a structure or object in mid-air, suspended, all its parts visible. ‘Deconstruction’ can also conjure an image of something in the midst of collapse, not destroyed, but falling apart – a ruin, even. ‘To deconstruct’ something suggests that the act of taking something apart can be the first step toward understanding something anew.

Beyond the associations of the word, however, what does Derrida himself want to say through the term déconstruir? While this question could occupy several volumes, here I want to suggest that déconstruir is just one term among many that stands in for the underlying principles organising Derrida’s approach to the texts he analyses. Of Grammatology is an excellent place to see these procedures in action. Along with Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology formulates a great deal of Derrida’s theory as it relates to the traditions of philosophy and literature that he had been studying at this time.

At one level, these early texts offer an analysis of the relation between speech and writing. Derrida tries to show, in his presentation of this relation, how in the Western tradition there has been a consistent denigration of writing in comparison to speech. Speech is seen as being supreme because one is hearing someone speak to you live. (‘Is it live or is it Memorex?’ ‘Live’ is presumed to be the best.) Many positive terms are attributed to speech, forming an important strand within the labyrinthine tradition of Western philosophy going back to the ancient Greeks. Speech suggests presence, transparency, authenticity, uniqueness, while writing gets a bum rap as being a mark of absence, open to forgery, duplication, the need to interpret, to read. Derrida pulls on this strand of thought to unsettle the relation between writing and speech.

Derrida cites countless examples in his early texts to show how the relation between speech and writing deconstructs itself. Sometimes this happens by finding instances where writing is praised in opposition to speech, reversing the relation between these two terms. In isolating these examples, he notes the contradictions and anxieties such moments cause. These exceptions to the rule are marginalised and made to seem trivial or unimportant within the texts he is considering. Derrida takes these exceptions very seriously, however, and manages to show how these trivialised exceptions disrupt the entire system of beliefs ordering the Western tradition, allowing him to destabilise the oppositions he is considering. Derrida points to the materiality of sound as a physical trace indicating a potentially larger system of communication in the case of speech and writing. Both are dependent on a system of language requiring a physical trace, either a sound or mark. The materiality of these marks (even the smallest units, phonè for speech and graphie for writing)¹ reveal both speech and writing as systems of re-presentation dependent on a structure of mediation. The materiality, for Derrida, of the sign marks any form of communication as a representation. As systems of representation, writing and speech share a structural relation in re-presenting a thought through the mediation of either written marks or spoken sounds. Both speech and writing are forms of re-presentation dependent on a mediating system of language that Derrida terms écriture.

Ecriture: writing expanded

Ecriture as a term literally translates to ‘writing’, but in the work of Derrida écriture stands for an expanded notion of writing: one perceiving any physical trace, including a brushstroke, as something that can be thought of in terms of linguistics. In approaching linguistics, Derrida’s work takes up a tradition in continental Europe that had been galvanised by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Saussure’s work concerned the theory of signs. A sign is comprised of two parts: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the part we perceive, a sound or letters on a page. The signified is the meaning we associate with the perceived signifier. That is to say, language is made up of a series of marks having an established relation to one another that facilitates communication. The letters I present on this page, though mediated by countless hands, eyes and ears, end up being able to be read, if not fully comprehended, by the reader’s ability to recognise the juxtaposition of letters as words and the words as sentences. Individual words operate as signs. We recognise the signifier ‘dog’ through the conjunction of the letters ‘d’, ‘o’ and ‘g’. At its most basic level, the signified of ‘dog’ may be a four-legged animal with a tail. For dog lovers, ‘dog’ may suggest positive associations. For individuals who don’t care for dogs, ‘dog’ may suggest negative connotations.

At a structural level, however, the signified of ‘dog’ is dependent both on everything that a ‘dog’ is and everything that a ‘dog’ is not. The significance of the signifier ‘dog’ depends on its opposition to other signifiers. A dog is a dog not only for being a dog, but also for not being a cat. A dog is a dog because of its difference from a cat. Derrida latches onto this idea of how difference orders the relation between signifiers, and this has several important consequences, two of which I mention now. First, it reveals how self-identity, a critical concept to the tradition of Western philosophy that Derrida is critiquing, is not self-identical. Our identities depend not only on how we define ourselves, but also on how our identity is given to us by others. A Self becomes a Self only in relation to a pre-existent Other, and at least two Others, as we typically require two parents to be conceived, even if the age of cloning and artificial insemination greatly complicates matters.

Second, difference affects the construction of meaning. If a dog is defined by its relation to what is not a dog, then meaning arises only out of differences. These differences help to construct a system of beliefs, such as the belief that speech is better than writing. Moreover, Derrida points to two other key features within Saussure’s theory of the sign. First, the relation of the signifier to the signified is arbitrary. What does this mean? There is no necessary connection between a signifier and a signified. A word in one language can mean something else in another language, for example. A faux ami is a classic case of this. A faux ami or false friend is a word that is spelled exactly the same in both English and French, but the term means something completely different in the two languages. For instance, ‘car’ refers to a motor vehicle in English, but ‘car’ means ‘for’ or ‘because’ in French. Even within English a term from one side of the Atlantic can mean something completely different on the other side of the Atlantic, revealing the arbitrary quality of the signifier. An artist from Zimbabwe once related his embarrassment in asking an American student for a ‘rubber’ during a studio class in an American university. A ‘rubber’ in the United States is a contraceptive, whereas for my British-educated colleague it meant an eraser. The significance of the word ‘rubber’ depends on its context. It can stand for one idea in one context and for another idea in a different context. Beneath the surface, there is no essential relation between the signifier and what the signifier stands for outside a particular system of representation.

Second, in relation to his reading of Saussure’s idea of the sign, Derrida points to how the signified leads us to just more signifiers. Think about it. What do we do when we come across a word we don’t know? We go to a dictionary to find out what that word means. And there we find more words! For Derrida, this never-ending chain of signifiers points to the way that there is no closure to the process of interpreting signs and that the process of interpreting signs produces the signified. But this is a signified that is never total, never complete, and always open to change. We can even see this in dictionaries, as we can easily note that the way words have been spelled has changed over the centuries, as well as how the meaning, or signified, of these words has changed over the course of time. Language and the values we construct through language change over time and location.

Writing with a différance

Derrida develops a different take on difference, seeing difference arise not by default to some pure homogeneous origin but, rather, as the very place where we start. In echoing Heidegger’s use of terms such as Destruktion, Derrida begins to write différence differently, as différance. In French, différance sounds exactly the same as différence. By spelling it with an ‘a’, however, he willfully spells it incorrectly in order to activate the unsettling effects of deconstruction as performed by différance.

Difference fools the ear. Phonetically sounding correct, it is only later upon reading the text that we fully understand that our ear correctly heard something appearing incorrect in the text. In painting there is a tradition known as trompe l’oeil. These paintings are associated particularly with an illusionism that literally ‘fools the eye’. Trompe l’oeil paintings present us with moments where vision itself loses its power to judge. Seeing no longer is believing. For a moment, our eye may be fooled, pointing to the limits of what grounds visual reality, the eye. Within a culture of virtual reality, frequently it is only after a moment that we realise that what we are looking at is reality, only a reality somewhere else. Even within the premise of real-time technologies, an element of deconstructive difference is at play, as what we see in our mediated images of the world are screened realities constructed by interests vested in visual culture. If différance physically fools the ear by having the eye expose an ‘a’ instead of an ‘e’, the transformation is not simply an arbitrary occurrence.

When written with an ‘a’, différance alludes to how the French verb différer means not only ‘to differ’, but also ‘to defer’ or postpone, suggesting the idea of a deferred payment, a payment to be made later. The idea of delay is of particular importance, because it suggests a temporal experience of waiting for something anticipated. In financial terms, it is a payment. In spiritual terms, it can take on various forms whether one is Buddhist, Jewish, Hindi, Muslim or Christian. And, of course, within each system of belief there are multiple and conflicting visions.

In relation to différance in its manifestations in Derrida’s early work, the idea of delay can be thought of in the way the meaning of a work of art accrues only with time. When we examine works of art or popular culture closely and on more than one occasion, the meaning of the work will be different over time. If delay is one element to différance, then difference is the other. Derrida, in thinking through what it means to be different, suggests that difference is a relational construct. These relations of difference imply a spatial distance. Nevertheless, this spatial distance structuring our exterior relations to the world is simultaneously a structure dependent on internal constructs. These internal constructs framing our relation to the world collide with the myriad external structures that come to mediate our visual experience.

In this way, the visual arts seem a perfect place for vivre la différance, as the idea of différance takes on many different forms. Just as viewers in the Salon of 1865 could be shocked by Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), our own culture creates a sensation with a différance. The Saatchi collection stirred controversy differently in exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. The focus of controversy in London was Marcus Harvey’s Myra (1995), a portrait of the infamous child murderer Myra Hindley, while in New York it was Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996). The portrait of Hindley, whose deeds may be known to some Americans through the Smiths’ song ‘Suffer Little Children’, unsettles the viewer because of an added visual difference occurring when the painting is examined up close. The portrait is a composite image of children’s handprints, taking up a technique most closely associated with Chuck Close’s illusionistic portraits.

What is interesting in the case of Ofili is the role that American politics played in creating the sensation around his painting. As with the culture wars of the 1980s (the con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Deconstruction and Of Grammatology: What is in a name?
• Chapter 2. Framing The Truth in Painting
• Chapter 3. These boots were made for walking
• Chapter 4. Fashioning deconstruction
• Chapter 5. Comic reversals
• Chapter 6. Deconstructing the domestic
• Chapter 7. Deconstruction’s wake
• Chapter 8. Going postal: postcards and other identifying documents
• Chapter 9. Rites of looking
• Chapter 10. There is no happy medium: Derrida and the televisual
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected bibliography
• Glossary