The Devil is in the Derrida (Part 1)
If you think the rightwing hates Marx and CRT, hold onto your hats
A bit of cultural theory
Anyone who is reasonably familiar with the theories of Marx or Critical Race Theory likely cringes every time she hears some conservative politician or pundit rail against those perspectives. Why? Because it’s so painfully obvious that such people have no real idea what they’re talking about. Or, if they do, then they’re just lying in their characterizations of these approaches to social analysis.
Look no further than (Banana) Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, and his presidential-bid hobbyhorse: “Anti-Woke” policies. They are nonsensical. But then, they don’t need to make any sense to the voters he’s going after. And that’s just the point. As DeSantis’s for-profit conservative mischief-maker, Christopher Rufo, has admitted on Twitter, “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”
So much for academic integrity from this newly appointed member of the New College Board of Trustees.
Good thing the rightwing seems never to have heard of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). If they had, all other lefty bugbears and brainy boogeymen would be dropped in order to focus exclusively on denouncing this Destroyer of Western Civilization, this Great Satan Purveyor of Linguistic Pandemonium, this...well, you get the picture. The rightwing wouldn’t like him at all.
But I suspect that Derrida’s theories are too difficult for them even to misunderstand.
That’s why I write this week’s post with some trepidation. Derrida’s ideas can seem beyond convoluted. His writings, whether in the original French or translated, can read like tech manuals for mechanisms that are impossible to envision. (I recall instructions to stereo equipment in the 1980s having much the same effect.) Being a philosopher, Derrida does not much concern himself with explaining to readers any context for his theories. He just dives in and we’re expected to keep up. But, after a while (well, yes, maybe quite a while) of pounding your head against his prose, the key ideas start to emerge.
And when they do, they can be ground-shaking. Sea-changing. No less than a dagger to the heart of Plato’s cosmology—a cosmology that proclamations the Universe to be run by a divine and rational Being whose creation is both beautiful and Good (more details coming at the end of this post). In short, the upshot of Derrida’s theories heralds THE END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT.
What I attempt below, then, is a straightforward account—as straightforward as I can muster—of several of Derrida’s most influential theories. His ideas came to prominence in academia in the late 1960s. Since then, they’ve proved to be game-changers when it comes to thinking about human society. In the history of key developments in cultural theory during the 20th century, arguably few thinkers have changed the intellectual landscape more. Whether you love him or hate him or are just profoundly confused by him, wrestling with the viewpoints of Monsieur Derrida is inescapable. That is to say:
Even if you’re only looking to dip a toe into the troubled waters of contemporary cultural theory, you MUST be at least a little bit acquainted with the thinking of Derrida.
Applying this bit of cultural theory
Overview: Derrida takes a deep dive into how language functions. As a result of his investigations, Derrida arrives at two pretty damn big assertions about Western thought:
1) we mistakenly believe that language is stable
2) we mistakenly believe that human culture equals universal nature
By outlining here a series of Derrida’s major theories, I’ll try to provide something of a roadmap to how he arrives at these claims. Please be aware that I am very much simplifying these concepts—in effect, just cutting to the chase of what they indicate. I offer my true apologies to Derridean experts who might be appalled by how much I’m leaving out.
1) The Sign (on crack)
Derrida accepts and adopts Saussure’s Sign as the deep structure of language. That is, to refresh our memories from past postings, how a Signifier (Sr—that is, a sound-image such as “tree”) gets paired up by social convention with a Signified (Sd—in this case, the generalized concept of tree-ness) in order to produce a Sign (tree) that signals in our minds a perception about the world that exists outside of our minds. You will remember also how Saussure theorized the absolutely arbitrary nature of the Sign. That is, it is a completely made-up linguistic thing arising out of social custom. (For a review of these ideas, see my post “What’s in a Word?” from 15 March 2023.)
Saussure wasn’t overly interested in pursuing the social ramifications of the arbitrary nature of the Sign. He saw the Sr and the Sd as two sides of one piece of paper. They are so closely bonded together by linguistic habit, notes Saussure, that we might as well leave them alone. Derrida, on the other hand, is interested in pursuing nothing else than the splitting apart of Sr from Sd. And then he inspects closely what the collapse of their arbitrary and conventional bonds might mean for the civilization we construct on their rickety foundations. Thus:
Derrida explodes completely the idea of Sr + Sd = Sign ever having anything like complete, stable, or finished meaning.
How? Why? Please read on.
2) Différance (Derrida’s most crucial piece of language theory)
This term coined by Derrida is a pun in French. (Derrida seemed quite fond of puns. If we were French, we might be chuckling to ourselves right now in a pinched, nasal, haughty way.) The term différance is punning in that it combines two French words: différence (difference) and différer (both “to defer” and “to differ”). By différence, Derrida means exactly what Saussure means by difference: we only know what a sign means because it doesn’t mean any other sign we know (e.g. tree ≠ cat / dog / Studebaker / hash browns / about / fumbling / byte / peer...). By différer, Derrida means that the link between a Sr and a Sd is always deferred, at best ever provisional. That meaning for any given Sign is forever postponed, never finally arrived at.
Therefore, there is not now, nor will there ever be, a one-thing-only signification for a Sign. It will never mean anything that isn’t vulnerable to shifting into meaning something else. Derrida puts us forever adrift on an everchanging linguistic sea.
I’ll pose the question you might be thinking: Huh?
Here’s how this works according to Derrida.
3) Freeplay or Slippage (where the rubber never quite fully meets the road)
Barthes’ formation of a cultural myth comes in handy at this point. You’ll remember that Barthes analyzed how the Sign for an object (such as a rose) in an everyday language system can slip to become a new Signifier within a cultural myth system. In the case of the rose, it gets transformed from being a biological dirt-entity into a societal emblem for human love (as Barthes puts it, the passionified rose). The linguistic hocus-pocus occurring in this process is that the original Sign is drained of its everyday language meaning (dirt-entity rose) to become an empty Signifier that then gets refilled with a new cultural myth system Signified (the generalized concept of human passion) to become an entirely new Sign. (For a review of these ideas, see my post “Signs, Structures, and Myths” from 22 March 2023.)
Simply put (I know, a stupid phrase to use when talking about this stuff), Derrida contends that this slippy process is happening all the time for every word in every language system. This fundamental linguistic disorder is what Derrida means by différance. The terms freeplay and slippage likewise refer to this constant tumult of Signs dissolving into Signifiers to be paired with new Signifieds to become new Signs—and then the procedure begins all over again.
Here’s a visual representation of the workings of freeplay. In it, imagine each Sign walking off a cliff to become a new, hollowed-out Signifier getting fresh meaning.
Here’s a quick example:
While slang terms obviously provide great examples of slippage (do you know what folks used to mean by “the cat’s pajamas” or “the bee’s knees”?), all languages are slipping all the time. We usually just don’t notice it much, very like we don’t often notice a tree growing. But trees and languages are growing and changing all the time. Just as trees add new leaves and new branches and also discard withered leaves and drop dead branches (not to mention all the work going on underground that we don’t see), so too do languages add new words and idioms and syntax to express new things and concepts as well as drop old words and idioms and syntax that don’t pertain well to the social moment anymore.
Let’s consider passages from two literary works produced in the last quarter of the 14th century. The first is Geoffrey Chaucer from his The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale:
By God, if wommen hadde writen stories
As clerkes han withinne hire oratories
They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse
Than al the mark of Adam may redresse. (lines 693-696)
Here Chaucer writes in the voice of his main character, Alisoun, the Wife. She points out how if women were allowed literacy and the ability to write stories (which, back then, they generally were not), they would voice how wicked men can be—just as men, and specifically churchmen (clerkes), seem to do nothing but churn out stories about how wicked women are. You’re likely able to glean something of this meaning from Chaucer’s later Middle English, although a few of the key cultural details might elude you. You’re able to get the gist of this passage because our current-day English descends from the dialect of English in which Chaucer wrote and spoke. Namely, the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle (also known as the Golden Triangle) that has been for centuries the educational, governmental, financial, and cultural heart of England.
But compare Chaucer’s English to another dialect of English from the same time. This second passage comes from the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight written by an unknown poet:
Bot hit is no ferly thagh a fole madde,
And thurgh wyles of wymmen be wonen to sorwe,
For so watz Adam in erde with one bygyled,
And Salamon with fele sere, and Samson eftsonez—
Dalyda dalt hym hys wyrde—and Davyth therafter
Watz blended with Barsabe, that much bale tholed. (Part 4, lines 2414-2419)
Here our hero, Sir Gawain, speaks to the Green Knight in order to excuse himself from some bad behavior. Not very chivalrously (or perhaps exceedingly chivalrously), Sir Gawain blames women, with their well-known wicked wiles, for his misconduct. To support his claim of innocence, Sir Gawain also names a series of biblical incidents where good men were deceived by notorious women. Didn’t really get all that from these lines? Not surprising. This dialect of English, from northwestern England near the Welsh border, is one that withered and died.
My point here is obvious and the first of Derrida’s pretty damn big assertions about Western thought: if you think language is a permanent and stable affair, you might want to reconsider.
Granted, both passages bash women and, six centuries later, our culture remains appallingly predisposed to bashing women. The current Supreme Court has made it an art form. But the words themselves for this violence have changed considerably, as have the social mechanisms by which women are suppressed, as has the ability of women to fight back. So, in case you’re thinking that women-hating is a timeless concept and part of universal human nature, I will suggest instead that patriarchy is a powerful and persistent social invention founded on a pernicious cultural myth, as defined by Barthes, engineered against women. In other words, I would recommend as a guideline: don’t mistake the dominant for the universal.
So what?
As I mentioned at the start of this post, Derrida’s basic job description is: Philosopher. As such, he’s very much taking part in the European philosophical tradition. Yeah, that one full of Dead White Guys.
For example, when Derrida suggests that language has more influence over people than people have over language, he’s following in the theoretical footsteps of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Derrida’s views on language are also very much indebted to an earlier German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche is often seen as one of the true wild men of Western philosophy. To Nietzsche, humans fabricate a bunch of half-baked ideas about Everything, and then mistake those fabrications as facts. Well, as more than facts. Humans take them to be hard-and-fast Truth with a capital T.
And here’s where we arrive at the second of Derrida’s pretty damn big assertions about Western thought, namely: we mistakenly believe that human culture equals universal nature. These Big Ideas and so-called Truths we concoct—that is, human culture—often get turned into what we think is actually out there—that is, universal nature. Stuff like the world is flat or that the earth is the center of the universe or that everything needs to be brought under the control of the “Free” Market. How Derrida sees these Big Mistakes happening will be the subject of Part 2 of this post. For now, to conclude this post, I simply want to emphasize how Derrida, like Nietzsche, is very much into kicking that brand of capital-T Truth in the capital-T Teeth.
In the Western philosophical tradition, if you’re kicking Truth in the Teeth, you’re taking on Plato (428/427-348/347 BCE). You’re engaged in an ontological rumble with no less than The Big Daddy of Western Philosophy—if not Western Civilization.
Quick definition: ontology—of and pertaining to the nature of existence; the philosophical study of the nature of being.
Quick recap: Plato (a pagan, please remember, in case you’re keeping score) philosophizes a vision of the universe that will sound utterly and mundanely familiar to anyone even vaguely aware of the basic tenets of Christianity. Plato proposes that a divine and benevolent Intellect—what he calls the Craftsman—has transformed a preexisting Chaos into a rational, mathematically ordered, beautiful Cosmos designed to produce all kinds of Good outcomes. What is more, this Craftsman has built His universe based on a fixed and eternal model (details about this model are scant, but we can assume it features a lot of divine and orderly Good Stuff). On top of that, all rational souls should seek to understand and to emulate this fixed and eternal model. Now, by “rational souls,” Plato means us. Because, you see, when our rational souls get packed into our silly, fleshy, irrational bodies, well, Bad Stuff happens. Our souls lose all of their original rational excellence. But, by recognizing and patterning ourselves on all the beautiful orderliness of the Craftsman’s universe, well, we’ll be restored to that previous rational excellence. And then: Oh Happy Day!
Sound vaguely familiar?
By crossing intellectual swords with Plato, Derrida can be seen as one of the instigators of Post-Structuralism and Post-Modernism (more usually written as postmodernism, postmodern, and even pomo). In theory-talk, “post” simply means “after” or “following,” as in “post-war era” or “post-game interview.” Thus, Derrida is not necessarily against Structuralism; in fact, as seen above, he bases his linguistic theories squarely on Saussure’s Sign. He just goes beyond the orderly investigations of most Structuralist thinkers. Derrida pushes the Sign to its breaking point to step into—as we’ll see next posting—chaotic and uncharted linguistic and cultural waters.
Derrida is, however, both pushing beyond and in conflict with Modernist thinking—thinking that very much is predicated on language being stable and Truth being permanent and Plato’s views on the universe being factual.
Readings of possible interest on rightwing attacks on cultural theory:
Bartlett, Tom. “Is New College of Florida Headed for a Hostile Takeover?” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 27, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-new-college-of-florida-headed-for-a-hostile-takeover?bc_nonce=w75ouibmlxc49cbetl7pld&cid=reg_wall_signup).
Gabriel, Trip. “He Fuels the Right’s Cultural Fires (and Spreads Them to Florida),” The New York Times (April 24, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/us/politics/christopher-rufo-crt-lgbtq-florida.html).
Readings of improbable interest on Jacques Derrida:
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Criticism: Major Statements, eds. C. Kaplan and W. Anderson (4th edition, St. Martin’s, 2000, pp. 493-510, first published 1967, see for example: http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f13/drrdassp.pdf).