(II) A Brief Intellectual History on Language & Meaning
(1) Saint Augustine
(2) Ludwig Wittgenstein
(3) Ferdinand de Saussure
(4) Jacques Derrida
(5) Jean-François Lyotard
I) The Linguistic Aspect:
Linguistics is the scientific study of language and its structure, which includes the study of morphology (of the forms of things), syntax (of the arrangement of words and phrases), phonetics (of the speech sounds), and semantics (of the meaning, including formal—its logical aspects, lexical—that of words and word relations, and conceptual—its cognitive structure). This discipline (while distinct today from the discipline of philosophy) is a focused investigation of a fundamental concern—language and its structure—of all philosophy, not just branches of it like philosophy of language and logic or the shared topic from which the contemporary analytic and Continental schools diverged from one another. While clearly crucial to studies of knowledge or ethics, language is more foundationally inextricable from questions of reason and meaning, without which philosophy would not be. Yet, due to their being different disciplines, no matter their shared concern for language, they have developed very different vocabularies and ways of thinking about language.
(1) Basic Questions of Language Let me begin by evading the task of concisely or specifically defining “language” in order to emphasize how we must conceive of it in the broadest possible way. “Language” comes from the Latin lingua, “tongue,” and while it is a genus—all those methods and systems of communication and expression—it is also what we call each of its species—from English to sign language to that of animals and bodies, not to mention that of flowers or stars or love; it is also importantly the structure of knowledge itself and that by which its content is formed and may be constitutive of that content. Even to limit this immense breadth to something concrete, let us just say the specific language of English, the fact that there are roughly 14 words added to it every day and that the Oxford English Dictionary has about 600,000 entries, is hardly a limitation that makes language something easy to grasp for our study. Thus, to simplify our most abiding concern with language down to a concern with the expression of meaning hardly yields us a simple task.
The expression of meaning, however, is so very simple; we do it all the time, endlessly, from infancy to dying words to pointing, in building a memorial to writing a term paper. It is so very simple until we try to express the meaning of expressing meaning. The following investigates one of the micro perspectives in the task, of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Differend, of the expression of meaning—the name—and quickly shows how the simple becomes hardly so:
The name is a word (spoken or written, both will be implied with the use of “word” here) or set of words by which something is known. But, of course, it is also a verb, the activity of naming something, whether to found it (“we will call it…”), embellish it (sir, doctor, father of the year), identify it (cup), specify it (“name your price,” 7:00, right here), mention it (“there’s the lamp”), cite it (Lyotard’s The Differend), etc.. It is also, of course, used idiomatically to designate fame or reputation, and likely many other things, but let us just consider the noun and verb nonspecifically: the name is an expression of what something is. To be lenient and take “is” to be “as,” or, that what something is, is how it is or what it is as, then to offer a name is to express what something means. This is, of course, a central problem, no matter that this is what we do all the time: what is that thing? It is a lamp. “Lamp” is, at once, the name and meaning of the “thing.”
So, perhaps we will gain more clarity if we ask not what a name is, but why do we name something? “Why” is diversely answered when we think again about defining the verb form of “name” (to identify something, etc.) and we can summarize these many answers into the general answer that we name something because we want to know it, since each diverse answer specifies some aspect of how we know it (in existence, time, place, type, etc.).
Thus, let us ask:
If we name something in order to know it, what is the nature of this relation between names and knowledge?
Does a name have an ontological relation to the thing named (it is, if it has a name)?
Does a name necessitate an ethical relation to the thing named (if the named is known, and knowledge of it makes a relation between knower and known, and ethics is about relations)?
These questions, namely the instant difficulty of answers, reinforces the importance and urgency of contemporary Continental philosophy's task to determine whether and how we can express the inexpressible, name that which prohibits a name. There are multiple levels here: the premise that one can name what one knows, or else one does not know it; that if one does not know it, one cannot prove it true or real; and that one’s name is what one is. If there is a survivor, there must be something that was survived, and the something must be known as something that can be survived, and if it is known, it can be named, and if it cannot be named, there is no survivor. If there is a witness, there must be something that was witnessed, and the something must be known as something that can be witnessed, and if it is known, it can be named, and if it cannot be named, there is no witness. And, most damningly, if a human being is a rational animal, and to be rational is to be capable of speech, and one not capable of speech, then … what is the ontological status of such a being? We want to, desperately, refuse this logic; we cannot just call it hateful or sophistry and walk away. So, we must walk back into the difficult and hopefully not impossible tangles of naming, of expressing meaning, of language.
2) Some Terminology:
Linguistics: the scientific study of language and its structure, which includes the study of:
Morphology: study of the forms or structures of units of meaning,
Syntax: study of the arrangement of words and phrases; can also directly refer to the rules that oversee the structure of language
Parataxis: the contrast to syntax (esp. discussed by Lyotard's The Differendthrough Notices on Gertrude Stein and Theodor Adorno), a side-by-side arrangement of words/phrases based upon coordination, rather than subordination; typically, this is done through the removal of logical conjunctions (e.g., “thus,” “therefore,” “so,” “then,” etc.) so that the flow of meaning is determined by something other than grammatical rules
Phonetics: study of the speech sounds, and
Semantics: study of the meaning, non-exhaustively including formal semantics (study of its logical aspects), lexical semantics (that of words and word relations), and conceptual semantics (its cognitive structure).
Sense and Reference: frequently left in the German Sinn and Bedeutung. Very important terms that shift their meaning slightly depending upon who is using them; in general, however, they are the two components that make up meaning wherein reference is the object a term or expression refers to and sense is the way in which the same term or expression refers to that object, that is, the mode of presentation of the object. The interplay between sense and reference takes different forms; for example:
there can be one referent to which two (or more) different senses apply
(referent: Johnny Cash; sense 1: singer, sense 2: father, or, interesting for our studies, referent: Kierkegaard; sense 1: Kierkegaard, sense 2: Johannes de Silentio—Kierkegaard is Kierkegaard, yet the latter is one of his pseudonyms, thus, also Kierkegaard),
just as there can be one sense to which two (or more) different referents apply
(sense: the divine being; referent 1: The Father, referent 2: The Son, referent 3: The Holy Ghost).
One of the great questions for Lyotard is the idea of sense without a reference, that is, a term or expression that is or would be considered meaningful, yet lacks a precise reference. The lack of a referent can be for multiple reasons, including:
there are none because there could be an infinite number of referents
(a common example is “the greatest integer”—since there is no greatest integer, while we “understand” the expression, it lacks a precise referent; the philosopher Frege used the example “the least rapidly convergent series”—again, we “understand” all of the components herein, yet there is no such precise thing)
or because the referent lacks a fixed proper name or ontological status because it evades/exceeds our conceptual comprehension or linguistic grasp
(for example, perhaps!, the living’s experience of one’s own death, God, the sublime, etc.).
Language: (etymologically ...)
The German, Sprache: (feminine, noun) speech, language, combines together the noun-senses of speech and language, whereas French divides these over at least three nouns:
Le langage: (masculine, noun) a system or style of language (le langage enfantin, children’s language); the ability to speak (idiomatically: elle m’a tenu un tout autre langage, she said something completely different to me (literally: she [to me] had/held/kept an entirely different language)).
Philosophically: inherent faculty and universal human construction of language for communication. For Lyotard: the system of language itself (“… le langage, qui serait la totalité des phrases possibles dans une langue” (§95), “… language, which would be the totality of phrases possible in a language” (§95))
La langue: (feminine, noun) a particular language (parler deux languages, to speak two languages; on ne parle pas la même langue, we are not speaking the same language).
Philosophically: system of language that precedes and makes possible speech. For Lyotard: not the system of language itself, but the specific system shared by individuals that makes their individual speech possible {however, “ordinary language,” the idea borrowed from Wittgenstein, that of the normal, everyday system of a people’s language is le langage ordinaire (§97), not la langue, the latter would be more particular—this breaks from Structuralism’s use of the term}.
La parole: (feminine, noun) speech as a faculty (être doué de parole, to have the power of speech); speech as possibility (avoir droit à la parole, to have the right to speak); word (il n’a pas dit une parole, he did not say a word); word as verbal assurance (tenir parole, to keep one’s word); words as linguistic (connaissez-vous cette parole de Pascal?, do you know this saying of Pascal’s?); words (film sans paroles, silent film (film without words)).
Philosophically: speech, actual utterances, the external manifestation of language, usage of the system of language, its concrete use.
For Ferdinand de Saussure (and most all Structuralism/Post-), le langage is hardly used; la langue functions as the totality, it is language as a system of signs that we share, it is social and outside of the individual, even as the individual can use it; la parole is speech, the individual, personal language used by linguistic subjects. –the problem: la langue becomes conceived as an already set system, something passive and done, whereas la parole becomes the active, present-tense use—this is a misunderstanding because la langue is necessarily as fluid as its components, the linguistic subjects taking up and using the language, and la parole is not created by each, but is necessarily the individual taking up of the social system of language. But, many structuralists fall prey to these mischaracterizations and it may be a contributing factor to their hopelessness towards changing the system.
La phrase: (feminine, noun) phrase, sentence (an assemblage of words)
In English, we use phrase equally as noun (expression, sentence) and as a transitive verb (to formulate something); the French verb-form includes exprimer (to express or to show, specifically in regards to formulating an idea or notion) and formuler (to express, put into words, or state, specifically in regards to formulating a question, sentence, or speech).
For Lyotard: expression in general, linguistic, bodily, otherwise; his use blurs the noun/verb distinction in its breadth (more than just an assemblage of words), but generally indicates the phrase object (the expression, whatever its form, not the activity of doing so).
More French/English Terms for Lyotard:
Le Différend: the differend; Un litige: a litigation; Un dommage: a damage; Un tort: a wrong; Le régime de phrases: a phrase regimen; genres de discours: genres of discourse; L’enchaînement: a linkage (a connection, sequence); Le mot: (masculine, noun) word (a unit of speech).
Une phrase “arrive” (“Question,” xii in English): “A phrase ‘happens’”—but, “arrive” and “happens” are verbs designating Ereignis, the German for: event, occurrence, presencing, enowning, appropriation, “propriating” (an allusion to “proprietary” and echoes the French proper, “own,” to incorporate the sense of ownness (born from the German root eigen) into the idea of an event). From Heidegger: both noun & verb, activity & site, a something & nothing at once that relates intimately to Being & to language--e.g., death (presence & deferral by which we define our Being), call of conscience (unspoken, from us, calls us back to reflect upon ourselves)--i.e., non-specific indications that solicit our response; is a coming to presence and that which presences, the revelation and withdrawal of Being.
On Names / Naming Conventions:
Onomatology (Onomastics): the study of proper names. It is the genus that includes toponymy and anthroponymy (see below).
Nomenclature: from the Greek nomen, name, plus clatura, calling; system of names.
Chronological system: a system of naming in accordance to a chronological order, that is, one of date and time sequences. Narratives in general have a tendency to be chronological but biographical sketches are typically such: begins with one’s birth, moving to childhood, adulthood, death. We can also speak of Babylonian and Assyrian chronologies having different kings and dynasty names, even while they temporally overlap. Then there are names themselves that are assigned because of the named thing’s chronology, for example, the Paleozoic Era names the geologic era from approximately 542 to 251 million years ago, it takes its name from the Greek for “old” and “life,” and is the oldest era in the Phanerozoic Eon, or how Brazil’s city Rio de Janeiro (“River of January”) takes its name from the Europeans’ first entry into its bay on January 1, 1502.
Topographical system: a description of structure, mapping surface features; examples would include a visual or written map of hydrographic, geographic, man-made features.
Toponymic system: topos, place, plus onuma, name: a system of place names, their origins, meanings, and use—it is a study of place names similar to how etymology studies the origins of words in language.
Anthroponymic system:anthropos, human, plus onuma, name: a system of naming relating to humans; information relating to human names (important especially as a means of preserving information or uses of language that have disappeared from common usage).
Deictics: (dik-tiks) from the Greek, deiktos, demonstrative; a word or expression whose meaning is dependent upon the context in which it is used, for examples: here!, now!, next Tuesday, you!, that, this, etc. Lyotard explains: “Deictics relate the instances of the universe presented by the phrase in which they are placed back to a ‘current’ spatio-temporal origin so named ‘I-here-now.’ These deictics are designators of reality” (Lyotard, The Differend, §50). The origin, however, of the deictics is not a static one, as “this” or “here” are most fluid, but they show origins that are presented or co-presented with the universe of the phrase in which they appear. Deictics appear and disappear with the phrase.
Lyotard’s Specific Terminology:
Phrase Regimen: the rules for constituting a phrase (phrase regimens include reasoning, knowing, describing, recounting, questioning, showing, ordering, etc., which all have their attendant rules).
Genres of Discourse: rules for linking phrases together (genres of discourse include to know, to teach, to be just, to seduce, to justify, to evaluate, to rouse emotion, to oversee, etc., which are all genres that dictate their own rules about linking phrases).
Linkages: every phrase calls for another, by necessity; these linkages are made in accordance with whichever genre of discourse within which parties are operating.
Phrase universe: a phrase presents (establishes) a universe, which includes:
Addressee: one to whom the phrase is addressed,
Addressor: one from whom the phrase comes,
Referent: that which the phrase is about, and
Sense: the meaning, or mode (way or manner) of presentation about the referent.
II) A Brief Intellectual History on Language and Meaning:
Augustine by Sandro Botticelli
1) Saint Augustine
Saint Augustine was born Aurelius Augustinus in 354 c.e., died in 430 c.e.. His Confessions is an autobiographical exploration of his anxiety-ridden religious conversion to Christianity. A preeminent literary and philosophical work, the Confessions are written in thirteen books, or meta-chapters, where the first nine span his memories of his past from infancy to about age 33, book ten is an examination of memory, and books eleven to thirteen discuss his philosophy of time, eternity, and an exegesis on the opening book of Genesis. In this work, he offers a radical conception of time much like Edmund Husserl’s groundbreaking 1900’s conception wherein the “now” is a fluid point of reference that, at once, reaches into the future and back into the past—time, then, is a distension of the mind—that is, there is no past, present, or future, in and of themselves, but, rather, a present memory of the past, a present intuition of the present, and a present expectation of the future. His guiding question in the book asks: “How can I seek you, God, if I do not remember you?” In his autobiographical search, he reveals the self to be, thus, essentially a relation to God: the more delve into the self, the closer we come to God. We can begin to understand why Jean-François Lyotard left us a most amazing posthumous work on Augustine’s Confessions.
Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Book I, Chapter 6:
“Then [as an infant] all knew was how to suck, to be content with bodily pleasure, and to be discontented with bodily pain; that was all. Afterward, I began to smile; first when I was asleep and later when awake. So, at least, I have been told and I can easily believe it, since we see the same thing in other babies. I cannot of course remember what happened in my own case. And now little by little I began to become conscious of where I was, and that I wanted to express me desires to those who could satisfy them; but this was impossible, since my desires were inside me and those to whom I wished to express them were outside and could not by any sense perception of their own enter into my spirit. And so I used to jerk my limbs about and make various noises by way of indicating what I wanted, using the limited forms of communication which were within my capacity and which, indeed, were not very like the real thing. And when people did not do what I wanted, either because I could not make myself understood or because what I wanted was bad for me, then I would become angry with my elders for not being subservient to me, and with responsible people for not acting as though they were my slaves; and I would avenge myself on them by bursting into tears. This, I have learned, is what babies are like, so far as I have been able to observe them; and they in their ignorance have shown me that I myself was like this better than my nurses who knew that I was” (Augustine, Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Signet Classic, Penguin, 1963), bk. I, ch. 6, p. 5-6).
This gives us something like Augustine’s genealogy of knowledge: First, we live like brute life, happy with pleasure, repelled from pain. Smiles reveal the birth of consciousness. Consciousness is (wholly or predominantly) consciousness of desire and is pre-linguistic. Satisfaction becomes an end to which we strive to find the means. This implies the birth of reason, to some degree. Expression was decided upon as the means for achieving the ends. Vengeance was acted out when communication failed.
This is an instrumentalist view of language, but also a model that presupposes a very complex pre-linguistic meaning. What is troubling about this model?: “It is clear, indeed, that infants are harmless because of physical weakness, not because of any innocence of mind” (Ibid., bk. I, ch. 7, p.8).
Augustine gives us the next steps:
“… since then I have observed how I learned to speak. It was not that my elders provided me with words by some set method of teaching, as they did later on when it came to learning my lessons. No, I learned to speak myself by the use of that mind which you, God, gave me. By making all sorts of cries and noises, all sorts of movements with my limbs, I desired to express my inner feelings, so that people would do what I wanted; but I was incapable of expressing everything I desired to express and I was incapable of making everyone understand. Then I turned things over in my memory. When other people gave a particular name to some object and, as they spoke, turned towards this object, I saw and grasped the fact that the sound they uttered was the name given by them to the object which they wished to indicate. That they meant this object and no other was clear from the movements of their bodies, a kind of universal language, expressed by the face, the direction of the eye, gestures of the limbs and tones of the voice, all indicating the state of feeling in the mind as it seeks, enjoys, rejects, or avoids various objects. So, by constantly hearing words placed in their proper order in various sentences, I gradually acquired the knowledge of what they meant. Then, having broken in my mouth to the pronunciation of these signs, I was at last able to use them to say what I wanted to say. So I was able to share with those about me in this language for the communication of our desires; and in this way I launched out further into the stormy intercourse of human life…” (Ibid., bk. I, ch. 8, pp.9-10.).
Here, his instrumentalism and highly developed, pre-linguistic, theory of mind is clear! With cool, reflective, objectivity, the infant sits back and observes the working of language employed by the adults around him. The infant learns not words, but the method of naming, then these names and then practices them and then engages in communication, whose sole purpose is the communication of our desires. This is the entry to human life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2) Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein (b. 1889 in Vienna; d. 1951 in Cambridge, England) is a monumental figure for both analytic and Continental philosophy, and interpreted dramatically differently (almost always) by the two sides.
Lyotard names Wittgenstein as one half of the “pre-text” for The Differend in the Reading Dossier; this is an important to the story behind Lyotard’s own concern with expressibility and the history of the problem of language and meaning. The two thinkers share much in common; both were polymaths in the range of topics their reflections broached or dwelt upon; both are contentiously challenging to brand or summarize; both employed diverse and unusual forms and styles in their writings—rampant pith and irony, rich images and oblique declarations.
Concerning Augustine, Lyotard’s posthumous book explicitly reveals his interest in him, yet The Differend is implicitly concerned throughout with the Saint’s ideas (especially what is detailed above). This interest is best revealed and understood through The Differend’s more explicit engagement with Wittgenstein and the latter’s engagement with Augustine.
Wittgenstein quotes Augustine (I, 8--quoted above) in the opening lines of his monumental book Philosophical Investigations (1929-49). Immediately after, he writes:
“These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names. –In this picture of language, we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pt. I, §1, p. 2e).
He goes on to give an instance of this view of language: a person is sent shopping with a list reading “five red apples.” He gives this to a shop keeper who, in turn, looks up each word; he finds the bins of apples, he takes out a paint chip with the color red, he matches them up and removes five of them.
Wittgenstein, as his own interlocutor, asks, “But how does he know where and how to look up the word ‘red’ and what is he to do with the word ‘five’?” and responds, to himself: no, he just acts this way, “Explanations come to an end somewhere” (Ibid., §1). We don’t need rules for the rules for the rules; we just use language!
His point—“That philosophical concept of meaning has its place in a primitive idea of the way language functions” (Ibid., §2).—leads him further—“But one can also say that it is the idea of a language more primitive than ours” (Ibid.).—for which he then offers an example of the ‘language of builders:’ Builder A is building a building. His assistant B has to pass A the necessary components of building when he needs them. A calls “block,” B passes the block; A calls “pillar,” B brings the pillar. This may be a system of communication, but it is not a language—at least, not everything that we call language.
So, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a game: one plays a game in accordance with rules; these rules differ depending upon the game in question (e.g., checkers versus rugby). To understand the game, we must understand its rules—that is, the contextual, conceptual form around the activity of certain particular associated actions and reactions, be they words, ideas, or physical responses (i.e., if we did not understand the role of small colored discs or netted sticks, we would not understand the playing of checkers or rugby, and, further, if burly players on a field were inching plastic discs around, we would not call it rugby, just as we would not call it checkers if some number of people we hitting each other with sticks, even if doing so upon or around a checker board).
So, if one person has something like a script wherein words stand for certain sounds (e.g., imagine a voice exercise for a singer) and another person reads the script not for the sounds but by the words themselves (e.g., as if it were a novel), they are not playing the same game (following the proper/intended set of rules), ignorant to the fact that the words had an entirely different function and meaning. Wittgenstein says that Augustine’s conception of language is much like this over-simplification of the script:
— Did that Assistant Builder B understand language when he brought a slab when the sound “slab” was belted out?
— Would an infant know that you were pointing to the redness of an apple when you said “red” and not the fruit itself, or indicating its shape, or number, or health benefits?
There is also a difference between the ostensive teaching of words and ostensive definition.
By asking these questions and giving and taking away these examples, Wittgenstein, over the course of his work, destroys the idea of any one-to-one correspondence between word and meaning (i.e., “red” = the color/the visible light with an approximate wavelength of 650 nm/etc.), thereby liberating language from the conceptual binds such correspondence consequentially imposed upon it. The binds he particularly attacks come from the theories of the competing schools of behaviorism and psychologism that gave opposite origins and means for the expression of knowledge.*
* Behaviorism, in this context, says that all meaning comes from (and can be only known) by behavior in the sense of how one physically behaves or acts/reacts, and not at all from internal processes. Psychologism, in this context, says that all meaning comes from (and can be only known) by psychology in the sense of one’s inner senses or workings of the mind and/or brain, and not at all on how one behaves. Wittgenstein’s refinement is that “An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outer criteria” (PI, §580), which, to put it simply, says neither stance alone is correct, but that meaning requires the play between them, and is most clearly shown in his requirement for a subject’s engagement with context for having and/or determining meaning. In regards to a brain-centered psychologism, Wittgenstein writes: “No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process n the brain correlated with associating or with thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought-processes from brain-processes. I mean this: if I talk or write there is, I assume, a system of impulses going out from my brain and correlated with my spoken or written thoughts. But why should the system continue further in the direction of the center? Why should this order not proceed, so to speak, out of chaos? It is thus perfectly possible that certain psychological phenomena cannot be investigated physiologically, because physiologically nothing corresponds to them” (Wittgenstein, Zettel, §§608-9). As an aside, but still importantly for our reading of Lyotard, Husserl also extensively attacks (and, with Frege, often considered responsible for the true death of) psychologism and promotes a view wherein logic is independent from psychology, although this is not to be confused with his promotion of meaning as cooperative creation between the subject and world wherein one gives oneself to the world and the world gives itself to the one in the creation of meaning.
Ferdinand de Saussure
3) Ferdinand de Saussure
De Saussure makes an almost identical move to destroy one-to-one correspondence in his seminal Course in General Linguistics (complied from notes from his 1906 and 1911 lectures at the University of Geneva and stands as the foundational text for the contemporary school of thought called Structuralism). He named his version of this radical proposition as the “arbitrariness of the sign,” and argued that there is a basic arbitrariness or difference between the word and the thing, that is, the signifier and the signified. As did Wittgenstein’s arguments, this undermines and dismisses a theory of language that says that there is a one to one correspondence, an unbreakable bond, between, for example, “desk” and a physical desk in the room. De Saussure liberates language from being chained to its static instantiation in a particular reality and instead reveals that there is no ultimate rule or set of structures for a relationship between a word and that which it represents (Cf., Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966).
While de Saussure’s argument is a component to a grander reconception of language and meaning, a very simplified example of this liberation can be evidenced in the expansion of meanings of terms, especially in conjunction to technology, e.g., “disc” conjures a cd more readily today than a record; a “dock,” something for resting or charging one’s iPod, not something wooden by the seaside; a “tweet,” a short electronic message, not a noise from a bird, etc.
Jacques Derrida
4) Jacques Derrida
Derrida (b. 1930 in French Algeria; d. 2004 in Paris), the controversial, contemporary French philosopher in the school(s) of thought we call Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism, and who has broached the status of cultural icon, helps us to better understand the far-reaching implications of this liberation from one-to-one correspondence, its radicalism, and its immense importance for understanding Lyotard. Derrida takes up the difference between the word and thing as a central point of richness and interest, expanding and expounding it as his idea of différance. This is not the same as the French word différence, which we would translate as “difference,” although they are pronounced the same. Instead, it is his term coined to hearken the two meanings of “differ” and “defer” in the French root verb, différer and to point to the fertile, ambiguous space in between a word and thing/meaning, that difference between them and deference between them. We can think of many differences between words and things/meanings, from the literal difference between letters or sounds and physical objects or definitions to the spectrum of intended meanings from a single word; Derrida stresses how these differences differentiate elements, thus, difference is a force, a “spacing” (espacement) necessary for the possibility of meaning itself. Less obvious, at first, is the deference between word and meaning. What he is pointing towards is that the conceptual space between them prohibits us from conceiving of them like two dots on a piece of paper between which we can draw a straight line, from one to the other. From the word, meaning is always, forever deferred (and vice versa). Take, for example, the word “dog.” Instantly, you “know” what this word means. But, this “knowing” is not simple, direct, rigid, fixed, absolute, or even actual: there is no one-to-one correspondence or identity between word and thing/idea/meaning. A word summons forth its meaning, but never fully; we must appeal to other words (e.g., animal, canine, poodle, Jacques, the one over there, now or in childhood, or the one belonging to some queen of France, the next category in a taxonomy, a new word in a child’s book, a less than nice word to describe a person, etc.) and all of these other words are different than the word “dog,” just as they are different from being one and the same as the meaning “dog.” *
* Note here the conceptual similarity here to Wittgenstein’s idea of language games—to move from word to meaning, we play out a series of moves according to rules, so if, for example, you read the word “rough,” there are many directions you could travel in the space between the word and its meaning depending on the context (the rules of the game): is this a word on a packet of sandpaper or a sign on a road or novel’s description of a character or someone’s response to a recount of a bad day, etc.?
Derrida’s conception of this deference of meaning is very similar to Lyotard’s explanation of the endless linkage of phrases, although we may argue the latter is more concretely applying the idea to actual lived experience, even while taking the idea conceptually further. Rephrasing Derrida’s explanation of différance (as/and the two elements of difference and deference, above) in something closer to his own language helps us see its connection to Lyotard:
-- différance is a “hinge” between writing and speech, permits the one and other, but is also a “space” between them to indicate the deferral of meaning that must take place between the signified and signifier;
-- différance is the movement of a passage through imprint that produces difference wherein the pure trace is différance, the non-sensible, non-intelligible possibility of the plenitude of sensible abundance, that which grants permission to the sensible and intelligible.*
* Cf., esp., Derrida, Of Grammatology, 62 ff. As an advanced note: his notion of an “instituted trace” re-hearkens a pre-linguistic meaning that permits the thinking of the other within itself so as to be able to allow for the entity, even as the trace must precede the entity… a starting point from which possible differentiations arise… a fluidity between sign and symbol. This fascinating for us reading Lyotard yet deeply problematic for Derrida hint of pre-linguistic meaning is also evidenced in his idea of “arche-writing,” which he describes essentially as a transcendental condition for the possibility of writing (a transcendental condition being that necessary condition that permits the possibility of something, for example, Kant’s transcendental condition for knowledge is the inner sense of time and space: we must have some inner sense of time and space in order to be able to take in sensory impulses as empirical data (color, light, shape, smell, etc.), which is the first step to be able to organize the data into knowledge). Arche-writing, for Derrida, is a writing that predates the vulgar writing and makes the latter possible through its dissimulation. He strongly argues that this concept and that of the “instituted trace” both irreducible to presence.
5) Jean-François Lyotard
Lyotard (b. 1924 Vincennes - d. 1998 Paris), educated at the Paris Lycées Buffon and Louis-le-Grand, and then the Sorbonne (where he studied philosophy and literature), served in WWII, married, had children, passed the agrégation to teach, in 1950, at a boy’s school in Constantine, in French East Algeria, then from 1952-59, teaching military children at La Flèche. In 1954, his environs and political activism led him to join Socialisme ou Barbarie, a socialist revolutionary organization (see info here and here). For about fifteen years, his life was one of devotion to far-left political thought and action. In 1964, a political splintering of the organization led Lyotard and his friend Pierre Souyris to join the break-away group Pouvoir Ouvrier (see info here and here). Just two years later came his resignation from official political membership, his break from faith in the efficacy of Marxist-led theory and practice, and his dedicated recommitment to the full breadth of philosophical study and writing. Into the mid 1960's he assisted teaching at the Sorbonne and then took a full position Université de Paris X, Nanterre--exercising his political activism in the “May 1968” political movement (see info here and here and here). Around this time, he engaged study of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and also earned his doctorat d’état for his manuscript Discours, figure. In the late 1960’s he engaged a research position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and then, in the early 1970’s, a position at Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes, which he held for almost 20 years, during which he became a celebrated teacher, wrote voraciously, established his name (publishing his most famous work, The Postmodern Condition in 1979 (see info here and a copy of the text here)), and lectured worldwide. In the early 1990’s, he remarried and had a son before dying of leukemia in 1998.
All of contemporary thought that names itself postmodernism is in the wake of Jean-François Lyotard. However, so little of what calls itself postmodernism respects the warnings and reminders of Lyotard’s work. Thus, it may be more accurate to say that all of the major currents of contemporary philosophy are in his wake as being those guilty of that which he diagnoses. Jacques Derrida, in his memorial essay “Lyotard and Us,” writes, “For I know that the debt that binds me to Jean-François Lyotard is in some sense incalculable; I am conscious of this and want it thus” (Jacques Derrida, “Lyotard and Us,” Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard, ed. Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Kent Still (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1-26, 9). This may be the most honest expression of Lyotard’s influence.
The importance of the sketchy narrative above on language and meaning from Augustine to Derrida illuminates many aspects of utmost importance for Lyotard, but especially the following:
— The impossibility of teaching language (in its full sense) by ostension; thus, illuminating Lyotard’s struggle with the problem of evidence via a phrase “showing” the gas chambers.
— The narrowness of an instrumentalist view of language (i.e., language is tool that we use to accomplish the task of communication). The greatest narrowness of such is revealed when it is assumed to be an origin for language and, consequentially, the presupposition that we exist outside of language and, thus, that we can draw firm lines between thought and language, desires and language, power and language, etc. Lyotard address this especially in his questioning of “owning” language or being “owned” by it.
— It also gives us the idea of language as a game, which Lyotard explicitly borrows from Wittgenstein (although we see similar ideas in de Saussure and Derrida, among others) for his conception of phrase universes and the linkage of phrases. Instead of speaking specifically of games, Lyotard offers the images of drifting between archipelagos and clouds drifting across the sky for conveying this linkage of phrases and for characterizing how thought works (or ought to work).
--The explanations of the destruction of a one to one correspondence between words and things, the arbitrariness of the sign, and différance all show why the witness cannot testify to the revisionist in an idiom that the latter would accept as legitimate. The revisionist presumes language operates like that of Wittgenstein’s builders (a firm one-to-one correspondence). But, just as Lyotard revealed the trickery in Protagoras’ paradox (how he was including the current case in consideration instead of keeping it as the universal rule), we need to find and expose the trickery of the revisionist, find where he uses the wrong set of rules, discover if there is a way to reconcile the differing sets of rules or translate them into a third, common set, and then see if there is still a differend …
To formalize what Lyotard foreshadows: yes, there still will be a differend, but it is not as the revisionist gives it!