Structural Linguistics And Formal Semantics

Jaroslav Peregrin

Introduction

The beginning of this century hailed a new paradigm in linguistics, the

paradigm brought about by de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique
Genérále and subsequently elaborated by Jakobson, Hjelmslev and
other linguists. It seemed that the linguistics of this century was
destined to be structuralistic. However, half of the century later a
brand new paradigm was introduced by Chomsky's Syntactic
Structures followed by Montague's formalization of semantics. This
new turn has brought linguistics surprisingly close to mathematics
and logic, and has facilitated a direct practical exploitation of linguistic
theory by computer science.

One of the claims of this paper is that the post-Saussurian

structuralism, both in linguistics and in philosophy, is partly based on
ideas quite alien to de Saussure. The main aim then is to explain the
ideas driving the formalistic turn of linguistics and to investigate the
problem of the extent to which they can be accommodated within the
framework of the Saussurian paradigm. The main thesis advocated is
that the point of using formalisms in linguistics is more
methodological than substantial and that it can be well
accommodated within the conceptual framework posited by de
Saussure.
1 De Saussure vs. Structuralism

Before beginning to discuss structuralism, let us stress the distinction

between the genuine views of Ferdinand de Saussure and the
teachings of his various avowed followers, be they linguists or
philosophers. In fact, de Saussure's theory, as presented in his
Course, is an austere and utterly rational scientific theory articulated
with a rigour commonly associated with linguistic theories of the 'post-
Chomskian' period, though differing from them by the absence of
formalisms. Many of the de Saussure's followers tried to turn his
approach into something quite different: into a tool of questioning
scientific rationalism overemphasizing the "literary" aspect of
language.
This is true particularly of French philosophers who used the
structural insight to fight the analytic approach of their Anglo-
American colleagues. It is beyond doubt that French structuralism
constitutes one of the most significant philosophical movements of
this century; however, its affiliation to de Saussure is an intricate
matter. These philosophers have eagerly reassumed the view of
language as a self-contained phenomenon to be explained by an
appeal to its intrinsic properties; however, they have almost
completely ignored other aspects of de Saussure's approach to
language, notably his calm scientific rigour.1
Linguists such as Jakobson and Hjelmslev, of course, remained far
more faithful to the teaching of their predecessor, but they failed to
match his rigour. Thus Hjelmslev's theory, although guided by the
promising goal of finding "the system beyond the process" and "the
constancy beyond the variability",2 is overloaded with more or less
mysterious concepts which he is not willing to make sufficiently
precise; and Jakobson, although on the one hand ready for such
exquisitely "Saussurian" claims as "if topology is defined as the study
of those qualitative properties which are invariant under isomorphic
transformations, this is exactly what we did in structural linguistics"3,
on the other hand considers theory of language to be akin to literary
criticism and claims that "only as a poetry is language essential"4.

2 De Saussure de-mythicized

In what sense then was de Saussure himself a structuralist?

Structuralism, as developed by de Saussure, consists in viewing
abstract linguistic objects (especially meanings, but everything that
he calls linguistic reality) as values of elements of the system of the
expressions that make up language. Let us explain this in detail5.
First, let us notice that to speak about a structure is possible only
there where it is possible to speak about parts and wholes. Indeed:
structure is the way of organizing parts into a whole. So to base one's
theory of language on the concept of structure presupposes viewing
language as a part-whole system.
Let us stress that the notion of a part-whole structure of language
may be far from trivial. Expressions are indeed strings of words and
as such they consist of substrings (thus John loves Mary consists of
John loves and Mary, or of John and loves Mary, or of John and
loves and Mary), but this trivial part-whole structuring is not what
linguistics is about. Besides it there is another, nontrivial partwhole
structure which can be imposed on the class of expressions of
language and which stems from centuries of investigations by
grammarians. According to this notion John loves Mary consists of
John and to love Mary, or of John, to love and Mary, where loves is
considered to be only a kind of "form" (or a "manifestation") of to love.

Let us further notice that to speak about a structure is necessary only

there where two different wholes may consist of the same parts.
Indeed, structure then is what makes the difference. Otherwise there
is no reason for not considering all wholes as having the same
structure. We saw that the sentences John loves Mary and Mary
loves John can be considered as consisting of the same parts. But
these two sentences are different, and hence there must be
something which makes them so; and it is this something that is
addressed as their structure.
The part-whole view of language implies the perceiving of
expressions as building-blocks, as constituents of more complex
expressions, the ultimate wholes being sentences. (Sentences
themselves can thus be viewed both as complete wholes and as
blocks used to build more complex wholes.) Any block is suitable for
some ways of building some wholes, and not suitable for other ways
and other wholes; and the situation may arise in which the usability of
two blocks coincides. This is the case when using one of the blocks
instead of the other leads always to the result which we consider
equivalent to the original one. (If we build houses and equate all
houses of the same shape, i.e., differing only in colour, then we
thereby equate also all bricks differing only in colour.) This is to say
that considering some wholes equivalent engenders our also taking
some blocks to have equal values.
Hence every equivalence on the class of expressions of language
induces an assignment of values to expressions. The concept of
equivalence, or, in de Saussure's term, identity, is thus
interdependent with the concept of value. This is de Saussure's
(1931, p.110) claim that "the notion of identity blends with that of a
value and vice versa."
Now, roughly speaking, the main claim of de Saussure's is that all the
abstract entities associated with expressions can be considered as
values and hence as certain "spin-offs" (using the term as used by
Quine) of certain equivalences (or oppositions, which are
complements of equivalences).

3 Chomsky, Montague and Formal Semantics

Chomsky's path-breaking theory occasioned the reconstruction of

language as a formal algebraic structure. Chomsky proposed to
account for a language via a set of formal generative rules, the
recursive application of which to a given initial symbol generates all
and only syntactically well-formed sentences of the language.
The notion of natural language as a bundle of rules is clearly nothing
new. In fact, the very idea of grammar is based on this view: to write
a grammar of a given language means to articulate rules accounting
for well-formedness of that language. Chomsky's novum was that he
proposed organizing the rules into a hierarchical system allowing for
systematical generation, and basing all this upon setting up of the
grammar as a real mathematical structure6. Such a mathematization
entailed an exceptional increase of rigour and perspicuity and,
moreover, it led to the development of a metatheory, investigating
into the formal properties of grammars (e.g. their relative strengths).
Chomsky's approach proved to be extremely fruitful in the realm of
syntax, and linguists immediately tried to extend it to semantics. They
attempted to generate meanings in the same way as Chomsky's
theory generated surface structures. However, these attempts, be
they presented as semantic markers of Katz and Postal (1964), or as
generative semantics due to Lakoff (1971), in general failed to be
satisfactory. The reason for this failure was diagnosed by Lewis
(1972): it was the failure to account for truth conditions, which is a
conditio sine qua non of semantics7. Montague, Lewis and others
thefore offered a new way to account formally for semantics based on
the results of formal logic.
The basic idea was to treat meanings as set-theoretical objects on
which expressions are mapped. The first approximation, going back
to Gottlob Frege, was to reify the two truth values and to consider the
meaning of a sentence to be directly its truth value. However, this
approach had the unpleasant consequence that any and every pair of
sentences that are either both true, or both false, are synonymous;
which proves such an approach to be essentially untenable. The
lesson to be learned seemed to be that the meaning of the sentence
does not amount to its truth value, but rather to its truth conditions.
This obstacle was resolved by introducing the concept of possible
world into semantics and this is where Montague enters the scene.
(However, it is fair to stress that possible-world semantics was not
discovered by Montague; he was neither the first one to use possible
worlds as a tool of logical theory - the first to use them systematically
were Stig Kanger and Saul Kripke - nor the only one to employ
possible-worlds-based logic in an effort to formulate a systematic
semantics of natural language; concurrently other theoreticians
presented similar theories - at least Tichý's (1971) transparent
intensional logic is surely worth mentioning. But Montague is the one
who has become the legend.)8 Possible worlds were considered as
the entities to which truth is relative; hence to say that the meaning of
sentence was its truth conditions became to say that it was a certain
function assigning truth values to possible worlds. This turned truth
conditions into entities accommodable within the framework of set
theory.
The step from truth values to truth values relativized to possible
worlds (and in general from extensions to intensions) was a good
one, but not good enough. It soon became clear that even to consider
every pair of sentences being true in the same possible worlds as
synonymous is inadequate. Every truth of mathematics is true in
every possible world; but it is surely inadequate to consider all truths
of mathematics as synonymous. The solution accepted by the
majority of semanticians was to consider meaning of sentence as
something structured. According to an old proposal of Carnap (1957),
two expressions were taken as really synonymous if they not only
shared intensions, but were intensionally isomorphic, i.e. if they
consisted of the same number of constituents and if their respective
constituents shared intensions; and this idea, revived by Lewis, has
served to ground the "hyperintensional" semantics that became
prevalent in the eighties.
Lewis has proposed to consider meaning as a Chomskian tree whose
leaves are occupied by intensions. His proposal has been further
elaborated especially by Cresswell (1985). Other proposals to the
effect of considering meaning as a structure, were articulated within
the framework of situation semantics of Barwise and Perry (1983)
and within that of discourse representation theory due to Kamp
(1981)9. Tichý (1988) has reached the conclusion that the intension of
a complex expression is constructed from the intensions of its
components and has proposed to consider not the result of the
construction, but rather the construction itself as meaning.
The shift from functions to structures hailed a rapproachement
between the theories of logically-minded semanticists operating
within set theory and those of the more traditionally-minded ones
using formalisms more loosely. If we free ourselves from the
'ideologies' of individual schools, we can see that the gap between
Kamp's discourse representation structure or Tichý's construction, on
the one side, and Chomsky's deep structure or the tectogrammatical
representation of Sgall et al. (1986), on the other, need not be
crucial10.

4 Language as an Algebra

Now what we are claiming is that formal linguistics does not in

general bring insights essentially incompatible with the structuralist
paradigm; rather, it carries out the "mathematization" of language
thereby creating a framework in which the Saussurian point can
appear quite intelligible.
We have stated that de Saussure's approach presupposes the view
of language as a part-whole structure, i.e. as a class of items
(expressions) some of them consisting of others. Thus we are
viewing language as a class of expressions plus a collection of
operations which enable more complex expressions to be made out
of simpler ones. So, for example, the class of expressions contains
the expressions John, to love, Mary and John loves Mary; and among
the operations there is one that makes John loves Mary out of John,
to love, Mary.
Now in order to state this in mathematical terms, let us present a tiny
fragment of algebra. We shall restrict ourselves to three definitions,
and we are not going to press for exactness; the aim of the whole
enterprise is merely to illustrate the role which mathematics can play
within a theory of language.

Definition 1. An algebra is an ordered pair A=<C,F>, where C is a

set, called the carrier of A; and F=<Fj>jÎJ is a family of functions, called
the operations of A, each of which maps the Cartesian power of C on
C (i.e. each of which is an n-ary function on C).

Definition 2. Let A=<C,<Fj>jÎJ> and A'=<C',<Fj'>jÎJ> be algebras with

the same number of operations. Let G be a function from the carrier
of A to that of A'. We shall say that G is a homomorphism from A to A'
if G(Fj(x1,...,xn)) = Fj'(G(x1),...,G(xn)) for every x1,...,xn from the domain
of Fj and for every jÎJ.

Definition 3. Let A=<C,<Fj>jÎJ> be an algebra and E an equivalence

(i.e. a transitive, symmetric and reflexive binary relation) on the
carrier of C. Let us call a subclass of C an E-subclass if each its two
elements are equivalent according to E. Let us call an E-subclass of
C maximal if it is not included in another E-subclass of C. Let C' be
the class of all maximal E-subclasses of C; and for every jÎJ let F j' be
the function on C' such that Fj'(y1,...,yn)=y if and only if there exist
elements x1,...,xn,x of C such that x1Îy1, ... ,xnÎyn, xÎy and Fj(x1,...,xn)=x.
The algebra <C',<Fj'>jÎJ> is called the factor-algebra of A according to
E and it is denoted by A/E.

Using Definition 1 we can restate our previous consideration more

mathematically. The consideration effectively views language as an
algebra: the carrier of the algebra contains the expressions John, to
love, Mary and John loves Mary; and among the operations of the
algebra there is a ternary one, say Fk, such that Fk(John, to love,
Mary) = John loves Mary.
Chomsky's contribution was not to abolish this view, but rather to
explicate it and to articulate the rules of the algebra of syntax in the
rigorous mathematical way. The contribution of the semanticians can
then be seen in articulating the semantic aspect of language into
another, semantic algebra connected with the first one by the function
of meaning assignment.
The point is that if Chomsky's theory can be seen as the
reconstruction of language as the class of lexical items plus the class
of grammatical rules constructing more complex expressions out of
simpler ones, then Montague's contribution can be seen in mapping
lexical items on certain basic set-theoretical objects and in paralleling
the syntactic rules operating on expressions by rules operating on
their set-theoretical meanings. Every expression E is thus supposed
to be furnished with a set-theoretical meaning ||E||; the simple
expressions being assigned their meanings directly, the complex
ones via semantic rules. If we - for the sake of simplicity - temporally
shelve possible worlds, then we can say that ||John|| and ||Mary|| are
supposed to be elements of a basic set understood as the universe
of discourse, ||to love|| is considered as a function assigning truth
values to pairs of elements of the universe (the sentence holds true
for some pairs and is false for other ones), and ||John loves Mary|| as
a truth value (true or false)11. The meanings of simple expressions
such as John, to love, and Mary are supposed to be given in a direct
way, whereas those of complex ones like John loves Mary are
considered to be "computable" out of meanings of its parts. Thus, the
value ||John loves Mary|| is considered to be computable out of ||
John||, ||to love|| and ||Mary||; namely as ||to love||(||John||,||Mary||).
In general, the meaning of a complex expression is a function of
meanings of its parts. This approach thus sanctions the so called
principle of compositionality, which has been considered basic for the
theory of meaning since Frege.
The set-theoretical meanings of lexical items plus the rules to
compute the meanings of complex expressions out of their parts thus
yield an algebra with the same number of operations as the algebra
of expressions. Meaning assignment then comes out as a mapping M
of the algebra of expressions on the algebra of meanings such that to
every operation F of the algebra of expressions there corresponds an
operation F' of the algebra of meanings such that for every e 1,...,en
from the domain of F it holds that M(F(e1,...,en))=F'(M(e1),...,M(en))).
Hence, referring to the Definition 2, we can say that the meaning
assignment is a homomorphism from the algebra of expressions to
the algebra of meanings.

5 Saussure Mathematized

With the help of this framework, we find that many points previously
difficult to articulate, become surprisingly simple. An example is the
way we have just expressed the principle of compositionality: this
principle, which has been constantly subject to misunderstandings,
now becomes the simple and unequivocal claim of the homomorphic
character of meaning- assignment. Everybody who is familiar with the
basics of algebra easily understands; a misunderstanding is hardly
possible12.
We have stressed that de Saussure's claim is that the meaning of an
expression is its value resulting from oppositions present in the
system of language. We have stressed also that the value is a
reification of the way the expression functions as a building-block for
building wholes suitable for various purposes, notably true sentences.
Translated into our algebraic framework, the algebra of semantics
owes its being to certain oppositions present within the system of
language, notably to the opposition between truth and falsity, or,
which is the same, the equivalence of sameness of truth value.
Algebraic theory allows us to clarify how an algebra plus an
equivalence between elements of its carrier yields a new algebra: our
Definition 3 articulates this in explicating the term factor algebra; it
amounts to the "coalescing" of the equivalent elements of the original
algebra and to the corresponding adjustment of its operations. This
suggests the idea of considering the algebra of meanings as the
factor algebra of the algebra of expressions factored according to the
equivalence of sameness of truth value.
The obvious objection to embracing this conclusion is that it leads to
identifying meanings with classes of expressions, which seems to be
highly implausible. However, saying that the algebra of meanings can
be considered as an algebra of classes of expressions is not to say
that meaning be a class of expressions - the point of the structural
view is that meaning is not this or that kind of thing, that what there is
to meaning is rather only the structure of the algebra of meaning. This
is to say, in algebraic terms, that the algebra of meanings is definite
only up to isomorphism; the factor algebra of the algebra of
expressions must be seen as a mere representative of the whole
class of isomorphic algebras, each of which can be considered to
represent the algebra of meaning, and none of which can be directly
identified with it.
In fact, formal semantics can be seen as placing additional, pragmatic
requirements on the algebra which is to be considered as the algebra
of meanings; it endeavours to select that of the isomorphic algebras
which would be the easiest to work with. In particular, it is usual to
require that the operations of the algebra of semantics be as simple
as possible. Frege proposed that the meaning of a sentence should
be considered as the result of application of the meaning of its
predicate to those of its terms. This idea was subsequently
generalized to yield the general requirement that the operators of the
algebra of meaning should be operators taking as one of its
arguments a function and yielding what this function yields when it is
applied to the remaining arguments. This means that if F is an n-ary
operator of the algebra of expressions, then there exists an i such
that for every n-tuple e1,...,en of expressions from the domain of F it
holds that

||F(e1,...,en)|| = ||ei||(||e1||,...,||ei1||,||ei+1||,...,||en||).

The relation of an algebra supplemented by an equivalence to the

corresponding factor algebra is thus the prototype of the relationship
between the system of language expressions and a system of values
which the expressions acquire with respect to some opposition or
equivalence. Although the algebraic model, if taken literally, might
lead to an oversimplified view of language, it evidently dramatically
improves the intelligibility and comprehensibility of the Saussurian
point of the value-like character of meanings and other linguistic
abstracta. And, this is, in general, the true role of mathematics within
a theory of language: it is neither to improve language, nor to give its
precise and exhaustive description, but rather to facilitate
comprehensibility and intelligibility of language via confronting it with
models13.
6 Structuralism Rejoined?

De Saussure's structuralistic insights invited generalization: the idea

of structuralism is far more sweeping than to restrict itself to linguistic
reality. The French structuralists took one direction of generalization:
they snesed that natural sciences were threatening to swallow up
humanities and they have ended up with philosophy as a kind of
literary genre (viz Derrida). But there were other people more
fascinated by, than fearful of, the sciences and they instead merged
their own structuralist insight with the rigorous scientific thinking.
Analytic philosophers, from Russell, Carnap and Wittgenstein to
Quine and Davidson, were, of course, not influenced directly by de
Saussure, but their teachings seem to be in certain aspects more
congenial to the spirit of Cours de linguistique générale than the
teaching of those who are usually considered as de Saussure's direct
followers. And it was analytic philosophy whose advancement is
inseparably interlocked with the advancement of formal semantics.
I do not want to claim that analytic philosophy and formal semantics
are necessarily intrinsically structuralist. The views of many analytic
philosophers, and of even more formal semanticians, amount to a
kind of nomenclatural view of language, which is the direct opposite
of structuralism. Many analytic philosophers did not manage to resist
the temptation to embrace a form of naive scientism and ended up
with a kind of systematic metaphysics (now approached via language
and done with the help of mathematics and set theory) which the
structuralist insight vanquishes. But a significant number of these
thinkers, people such as Wittgenstein, Quine or Davidson, avoided
such traps and their approach can be truly called structuralistic.
Quine's (1992) recent conclusions about the concept of structure are
even more radical than those of his predecessors: instead of urging
the reduction of abstract objects to relations, he questions the very
idea of an object: "The very notion of object, or of one and many, is
indeed as parochially human as the parts of speech; to ask what
reality is really like, however, apart from human categories, is self-
stultifying. It is like asking how long the Nile really is, apart from
parochial matters of miles and meters." (p.9) Hence aphoristically:
"Save the structure and you save all." (p.8)
The views close to Quine's and especially relevant for what we have
been pursuing here are due to Donald Davidson - it is him who has
made it clear that formal semantics need not be understood as a
naively-metaphysical, nomenclatural matter and who has shown the
plausibility of the theory of meaning as derivative to the theory of
truth. And it is these views which we try to show to be congenial to
the basic insights of de Saussure14.
We have stated that the ways of analytic philosophy and structuralism
essentially parted. However, their recent offspring - post-analytic
philosophy and poststructuralism - are no longer antagonistic and
indeed are sometimes surprisingly close. I think that the inseparability
of the question about the nature of reality from the question about the
nature of the language we use to cope with the reality, as urged in the
above quotation by Quine, is in fact the same problem as that which
irritates people like Foucault and Derrida. And I think, on the other
hand, that the "careful mathematization of language" which is urged
by Derrida (1972) is nothing else than the non-nomenclatural, non-
metaphysically founded usage of formal logic as pursued by Quine
and Davidson15.

7 Conclusion

De Saussure's structuralistic view of language is quite compatible

with the formal trend of linguistics appearing during the recent
decades. In fact formalization and mathematization help to make the
structuralist point intelligible.
Many theoreticians believe that formal semantics and analytic
philosophy is connected with a nomenclatural view of language and
hence is incompatible with the structural insight. But this is wrong -
formal semantics is in itself neutral, and it is capable of being
explicated both in the naive nomenclatural way and in the way
congenial to de Saussure's structuralism; and among analytic
philosophers we can find outstanding representatives not only of the
former, but also of the latter view.

NOTES

1. There are philosophers who evaluate even more harshly the way in which French structuralists
handled the heritage of de Saussure. Thus Pavel (1989, p. vii) characterizes their efforts as
follows: "They mistook the results of a specialized science for a collection of speculative
generalities. They believed that breathtaking metaphysical pronouncements could be inferred
from simple-minded descriptive statements." (Back to text)
2. Hjelmslev (1943, p.11).(Back to text)

3. Jakobson (1971, pp. 2234).(Back to text)

4. See Holenstein (1987, p. 25).(Back to text)

5. For a more detailed expositions of the issues presented in this section see Peregrin (1994b).
(Back to text)

6. Chomsky himself, of course, would consider his approach not a mere improvement of
methodology, but as an empirical discovery concerning human's innate inner workings; we leave
this conviction of his aside, because it is peculiar to his own line of thought and it is not essential
to the formalistic turn as such.(Back to text)

7. Lewis claimed that linguistic theories of meaning are mere translations of natural language into
another, formal language, namely 'markerese'. However, I think that this caveat, as it stands, is
misguided: every explicit semantic theory is clearly a translation of natural language into another
language, be it 'markerese', the language of set theory, or whatever. The only way to do explicit
semantics is to make statements 's' means m, where m is an expression of a language.(Back to
text)

8. For general information about the concept of possible world see Partee (1989); for conceptual
analysis see Peregrin (1993a).(Back to text)

9. Kamp's framework aims, besides this, at capturing what can be called dynamics of language,
especially its anaphoric capacities; and it slowly becomes a paradigm of the semantic theory for
the nineties. (Back to text)

10. This point was made quite clear by Davidson (1984, p.30): "Philosophers of a logical bent
have tended to start where the theory was and work out towards the complications of natural
language. Contemporary linguists, with an aim that cannot easily be seen to be different, start
with the ordinary and work toward a general theory. If either party is successful, there must be a
meeting."(Back to text)

11. Taking the intensional aspect of language at face value, we have to relativize all of this to
possible worlds: the denotations of ||John|| and ||Mary|| (if we do not treat them as rigid, i.e.
possible-worlds-independent, designators) will be functions from possible worlds to the universe,
||to love|| a function from possible worlds to pairs of elements of the universe, and ||John loves
Mary|| will be a function from possible worlds to truth values: in some worlds (situations, time-
spans etc. the sentence holds true, in other worlds it does not.(Back to text)

12. The objection that such an explication is simple only due to the backlog of the complicated
theory of algebra, is not sound - algebra is nothing ad hoc, it is a well established theory whose
meaningfullness is independent of whether we do or do not use it within a theory of language.
(Back to text)

13. See Peregrin (1993b).(Back to text)

14. For Davidson's way of understanding semantic theory see Davidson (1984); see also
Peregrin (1994a).(Back to text)

15. The recent philosophical development of Richard Rorty documents that these two seemingly
disparate approaches to philosophy could lead to a unified stance.(Back to text)

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Derrida, Saussure and Meaning

Olwen McNamara
Question: What do you get when you cross Derrida with a member of the
Mafia?

Answer: Someone making you an offer you can't understand, or refuse!

(adopted and adapted from Pimm 1991)

There are times when I feel that deconstruction positions me in just such a
predicament. Like Heller's Captain Yossarian for whom the very act of
declaring himself insane infuriatingly but indisputably proved his sanity; my
attempts to challenge Derrida's notions can sometimes leave me feeling as if
I am tacitly confirming their veracity. When, for example, I challenge the
suggestion that interpretations are multiple, or meaning infinitely deferred, I
am left with the uncomfortable sensation that the interpretation may not have
been uniquely apprehendable. That I was, in fact, as Derrida would caution,
simply indoctrinated into believing this to be case by the subtle and
innocuously regulating effect of the structures in the text. Dare I be seen to
display such naivete and lack of insight in Chreods??

Probably not! Neither, I suspect, is it fashionable to subject Derrida's ideas

to rational critique. There is a sense in which it appears naff and prosaic to
do so; the impression created is that Derrida's 'project' is above and beyond
such pedestrian logical analysis. Derrida's most influential ideas on literary
criticism however do seem to me to be based upon fairly routine, albeit
extremely insightful, notions of language and meaning which, in turn, are
broadly located in, and developed from, Saussurian linguistics. Nevertheless
Derrida appears to display a somewhat ambivalent attitude to Saussure; on
the one hand he justifies many of his positions with reference to Saussure,
adopting and adapting numerous of his terms, whilst on the other hand, he
occasionally vilifies him. The Derrida/Saussure interface appears to me one
possible way to penetrate Derrida's undefinable, or ill-defined, notions. Thus
the act of inspecting Derrida's ideas of language and meaning in relation to
those of Saussure may perhaps enable me to clarify certain rather obscure
issues.

Derrida's deconstructionist project originated in France in the mid 1970's in

part as a consequence, perhaps, of an inevitable reaction to a repressive
academic and intellectual system which rigidly administered a unique and
definitive interpretation of literary texts (Ellis 1989 p. 84). For Derrida there
was of course "nothing outside of the text" (1976 p. 158) and focusing on
textual analysis, he derided what he perceived as the controlling effect of its
structure upon interpretation. Derrida wanted, not simply to reverse, but to
challenge from within, the centring of meaning offered by the binary
oppositions through which structuralist thinkers of the post-war period had
claimed to uncover hidden meaning in language. Levi-Strauss, for example,
attempted to analyse what he claimed were binary oppositions structuring
the narratives of ancient societies. The myth was developed in the mind of
the individual but it was, in essence, already in his mind as a concealed
signifying system through which he generated his world view.

Derrida reasserted and developed strands central to Saussurian linguistics

based on relations and differences. He advocated the analysis of linguistic
form as a system of pure values, where the value of each sign is entirely
dependent upon the system within which it is cited. Whereas Saussure would
maintain a distinction between objects of the world, which may have a
natural value (linked perhaps to the economy), and language, where words
have only a conventionally associated value (and that in the moment only);
Derrida does not, he accepts no arbiter or reference external to language.
This marks quite an important point of departure for the deconstructionist
discourse and as a consequence objects, words and their meaning and indeed
the world, are produced in the play of differences. Tompkins, a fervent
advocate of deconstruction, observes

There is then no difference between language and objects because objects

are at play in a system of differences too.... The sign, the thing that is
articulated by the system of differences, is all that there is, and, therefore,
language is not secondary, is not provisional, is not just marking time or
keeping place until the thing itself arrives because things themselves are
linguistically constituted. And the world itself is discourse. (Tompkins 1988
p. 144)

Words for Saussure are not, of course, labels which have come to be
attached to things already comprehended independently; they supply the
conceptual frameworks for man's analysis of reality and also the linguistic
framework for his description of it. Saussure's model of a linguistic sign is of
a "two?sided psychological entity" (Saussure 1983 p. 99), comprising the
meaning of the word, or associated concept, together with (and inseparable
from) its sound image. He uses the analogy of two sides of a piece of paper
to illustrate the bond.

A language might also be compared to a sheet of paper. Thought is one side

of the sheet and sound the reverse side. Just as it is impossible to take a pair
of scissors and cut one side of the paper without at the same time cutting the
other, so it is impossible in a language to isolate sound from thought, or
thought from sound.... Linguistics, then operates along this margin, where
sound and thought meet. The contact between them gives rise to a form, not
a substance.(Saussure 1983 p. 157, italics in original)

Saussure asserted the bipartite nature of the sign and avoided including the
referent, as in a typical tripartite relationship; this does not, I think, indicate
that he is equivocal about the existence of anything external to that
relationship. His belief was not that the referent was indistinguishable from
the linguistic state but that terms internal to the linguistic system defined
each other uniquely, by contrast and comparison, without regard to the
referent. If I am angry or hot there are a plethora of terms which I can use to
describe how I feel, each one limiting the range of applicability of the others.
This does not imply, however, that my temperament or temperature is a
quality of the linguistic state; it is not, there is a commonlyunderstood, real
perceptible and measurable difference between cold, warm and hot. The fact
that there are a range of words associated with the concept of temperature
does not, I believe, indicate that meaning can slip freely between them. In
fact I would argue that the presence of so many related terms actually limits,
rather than extends, the flexibility of the interpretation.

Derrida I think develops his pivotal system of differences from a

reinterpretation of Saussure's central tenet that "... in language there are only
differences, and no positive terms" (ibid p. 166). Saussure had proposed that
the value of a sign was produced, in part, by its syntagmatic relations with
other signs that surrounded it in acts of speech. In part also, by
psychological associations within mnemonic groups, terms that could be
used to replace, contrast with or combine with the sign. Whereas Saussure's
analysis built upon consideration of specific differences and identities
between a particular sign and other signs to which it was directly related;
Derrida's reinterpretation of Saussure's ideas allowed for any comparison to
be made. Association was endorsed between any signs in an endless chain of
signification, there was to be free play of differences!

The deconstructionist model, it seems to me, posits at least two axes of

slippage: one within the sign and one between signs. For Saussure the two?
sided entity appears firmly bonded; although he does speak of the
arbitrariness of the sign making it both more variable and more invariable
over time (diachronically). Indeed because the sign is arbitrary there is both
no reason to change it and no reason not to change it. Hence for Saussure the
sign is synchronically invariable, whereas for Derrida, owing to the
"indefinite referral of signifier to signified" (Derrida 1978 p. 25), the sign is
in a constant state of flux. Derrida then, with a magic pair of scissors, cuts
along the margin of thought and sound in a way which Saussure thought
impossible. Meaning is asserted to be no longer possible in the moment,
which Derrida regards to be as a result of the absence of the "transcendental
signified": since this original signified or 'true' meaning is not present the
chain of signification continues endlessly.

The absence of the transcendental signified is also a factor in Derrida's

rejection of logocentrism, a term which he uses to characterise what seems
to be a sort of linguistic metaphysical realism: a belief that spoken words
faithfully represent objects, concepts and meanings in the real world.
Derrida's inference seems to be that knowledge of the world is inevitably
mediated. This is an idea which has been expounded in various ways by
many philosophers and linguists over the last 300 years. Saussure considered
that "it is the viewpoint adopted that creates the object". The anthropological
linguists Sapir and Whorf, famous for their ideas on linguistic determinism,
believed that language determines not only the way we think about things
but also what we think about them. Derrida develops his position with
regard to the transcendental signified by claiming that

On the contrary, though, from the moment that one questions the possibility
of such a transcendental signified, and that one recognises that every
signified is also in the position of a signifier, the distinction between
signified and signifier becomes problematical at its root. (Derrida 1981 p.
43)

Derrida appropriates Saussure's terms signifier and signified but extends the
function of the signified to embrace the role of signifier in another act of
signification. Thus the signification process, if extended outward in this
manner, would presumably eventually encompass "the world itself [as]
discourse" (Tompkins 1988). Clearly the "distinction between signified and
signifier" will, as Derrida foresees, become "problematical".

The second axis of slippage I identify is in between signs and also through
time. The French verb 'differer' has two meanings which in English
correspond to two distinct terms, 'differ' and 'defer'. Derrida, I think, uses
this catalyst to extend Saussure's notion of 'difference', which in its
nominative form means only, 'to differ from'. He invents a new French word,
'differance', which is to encompass the meaning absent from 'difference', that
is 'to defer'. Derrida claims,
Now the word difference (with an e) can never refer either to differer as
temporisation or to differends as polemos. Thus the word differance (with an
a) is to compensate ? economically ? this loss of meaning, for differance can
refer simultaneously to the entire configuration of its meanings. (Derrida
1982 p. 8)

In this way Derrida extends the meaning of differences to indicate the

dependence on a chain of linguistic terms, or "a field of infinite
substitutions" (Derrida 1978 p. 25) that can always be extended, reviewed or
recontextualised. Meaning for Derrida is never in the present, it emerges
from the play of 'differances' between the various terms in the text: subject
to continuous reframing, within ongoing discursive activity.

The play on the word 'differences' is one of Derrida's most celebrated

messages, it also demonstrates to Derrida that "there is no phonetic writing":
the replacement of 'a' for 'e' cannot be heard in the pronunciation. He says

... this graphic difference (a instead of e), this marked difference between
two apparently vocal notations, between two vowels, remains purely
graphic: it is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard.

(Derrida 1982 p. 3)

It is significant to Derrida who believes that writing both, "precedes and

follows speech, it comprehends it" (1976 p. 238). This is a position which is
historically difficult to defend as not all languages have a written form. It is
important for Derrida, however, to support his critique of ethnocentrism
which he sees as epitomised in what he interprets as the predilection of the
Western world, and especially Saussure, to privilege speech over writing.
Saussure's interpretation of history was somewhat different; although he
clearly did privilege speech over writing he considered that historically the
Western world had privileged writing over speech, perhaps because of its
permanence and the status which literature held in developed civilisations. It
was this stance, the one which Derrida now adopts, which to Saussure's
mind was 'ethnocentric' since it necessarily focused attention on developed
cultures with an extensive tradition of writing, and ignored the rest.

Derrida enforces a way of looking at literature, and indeed life, that sees it as
a stream of self?referential structureless awarenesses. His redefinition of
terms extends the notion of text to include all that is humanly perceived and
he concludes that truth, meaning and understanding are impossible.
Tompkins (1988), is perhaps characteristic of many deconstructionist
accounts, she believes that

The significance of post?structuralist model is that it collapses... into a

single, continuous act of interpretation ... subject, method, object,
interpretation ? all are part of a single evolving field of discourse. (Tompkins
1988 p. 733)

Her thesis is that the reader cannot apply an analysis to a text because she or
he is inextricably bound into the interpretative system. Tompkins, however,
proceeds to give a highly explicit five page exposition of exactly what
Derrida mean by differance in literary analysis. Although not myself
particularly well versed in literary criticism, the analysis does appear very
conventional in that it appears to regard, and refer separately to, the author
and his intentions on infinitely many occasions in a very positive manner.
Further, Tompkins appears to regard the text, and its interpretation, as very
much belonging to the author, rather than being her personal construct. It
seems that Derrida is no more reflexive in his exchanges, Ellis notes that
during a dispute between Searle and Derrida, the latter remarked on a
number of occasions that

Searle had misunderstood him and misstated his views, even adding at one
point that what he, Derrida, had meant should have been clear enough and
obvious to Searle. (Ellis 1989 p. 13)

Derrida's response to Searle's critique appears a little hypocritical, to say the

least, when measured against the deconstructionist's views on text and the
author. In his structural analysis Derrida attempts to achieve a penetrating
interpretation of the text as a totally independent entity. Introducing the term
textuality, he challenges the opposition text/author by asserting the
independence of the text. Such a reading, in effect, bestows on the reader the
role of 'creator of meaning' which might formally have been thought of as
the function of the author. Meaning is considered to be detached from the
author and his intentions and instead dependent entirely upon the reader; it is
thus no longer unique but multiple or even infinite.

Most readers, I suspect, would hold the view that an interpretation of a text
is achieved by a peculiar synthesis of reader and author. Further, that the
differences which this synthesis illuminates are ones of emphasis rather than
radically different explication. What accounts for this apparent absence of
free play in the interpretations? It could indeed be, as I have no doubt that
Derrida would claim, that readers are all indoctrinated by the subtle and
innocuous regulating effect of the structures in the text upon its
interpretation. One plausible alternative explanation is that the analysis
which led Derrida to asserting free play of meaning was completed in a void,
it divorced language from its context. Ellis mounts a convincing critique of
post?structuralism generally on this issue, asserting that it separates
language, intentionality and communication:

Literary theorists have grappled with the issue of language and intention and
some have argued that intentionality can be separated from language and
later added to assist with interpretation (Juhl 1980), while others deny it is
even possible... (Searle,1969, Knapp & Michaels, 1985). The separability of
intentionality and language might be debatable but not so intentionality and
communication. (Ellis 1991 p. 221)

Many of Derrida's key ideas are based upon Saussurian notions which in
turn were grounded in the linguistics of speech. Saussure portrayed langue
(a system of words combined with a set of rules values and norms) as a
social institution but endowed each person with an internal representation of
it, thus permitting it access to la parole, its realisation in every day acts of
speech and writing. In this way then Saussure firmly lodged his rule system
in the 'speech circuit' with access to individual acts of speech.
Deconstruction, however, in removing text from its communicative context,
claims that meaning is postponed, or indeed infinitely deferred; that
interpretations need to be subjected to interpretation. I would argue that this
is simply not practically substantiated in everyday life any more than it is in
text. Most observations and questions encountered in everyday life require
no clarification whatsoever as can be confirmed by the relatively few
occasions on which misunderstandings do occur. We are often painfully
aware of the occasions when things do go badly wrong; aircraft crash,
patients die, Light Brigades are annihilated, but these are thankfully
relatively infrequent. Conversely, I am amazed at times, when transcribing a
tape recording of a lesson just how few words are used, or apparently
required, to transfer meaning. Social intercourse is not dependent upon
language alone, there are a myriad of other signifiers which indicate how a
particular statement is to be interpreted.

In direct comparison, it appears, that sometimes in Derrida's writing

infinitely many words may be used and still not transfer meaning with any
degree of clarity; thus challenging Wittgenstein's (1922 preface) observation
that "What can be said at all can be said clearly". Postmodernity celebrates
the breaking down of cultural barriers, but in effect high culture is replaced
by another equally esoteric and exclusive art form,deconstruction. Possibly
some of the literature produced is simply an exclusive self?referential
language game, a "textless text" in the words of Geoff Dyer of the Observer,
who, reflecting upon his experience of two of Umberto Eco's books remarks:

People may have bought Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco with no

intention of reading it but it was still a book in the sense that its nominal
purpose was to be read. Foucault/ Blanchot was something else; the truth is
that the last thing you would do with this book ... would be to read it. To
have read it would have violated its essence. It was, if you like, pure
signifier: an almost textless text whose meaning was inscribed in its virtual
textlessness.

(Quoted in Private Eye 14th Jan 1994 p9)

What more can I say?

References

Derrida, J. (1976)Of Grammatology (Spivak Trans.) John Hopkins Press,

London.

Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference (A. Bass Trans.) Routledge,

London.

Derrida, J. (1981)Positions (A. Bass Trans.) Althone Press, London.

Derrida, J. (1982) 'Differance' In J. Derrida, Margins of Philososphy. (A.

Bass Trans.), pp.1-28. Harvester Press, Brighton.

Ellis, J. (1989)Against deconstruction. Princeton University Press, New

Jersey.

Ellis, D. (1991) Post-Stucturalism and Language: Non-sense.

Communication monographs 58 pp. 213-23.
Pimm, D.(1991) Signs of the Times. Educational Studies in Mathematics 22,
pp. 391-405.

Saussure, F. (1983) Cours de Linguistique Generale, Duckworth, London.

Tompkins, J. (1988) A Short Course in Post-structuralism. College English

50 (7) pp.733-47.

The moment when semiotics is becoming well-established in

America - a subject of conferences, a topic of university courses, and
even a domain to which people in various traditional disciplines are
beginning to relate their own work - is also, as is perhaps only
appropriate, a moment when semiotics finds itself under attack,
criticized as a version of precisely the scientific positivism which is
itself very prone to reject semiotics. In many cases, of course, the
attack on semiotics comes from a traditional humanism, affronted that
a discipline with scientific preten- sions should claim to treat products
of the human spirit. These argu- ments can be countered in various
ways which I shan't be discussing here. I'm interested in a more
radical. critique which also focuses on the scientific pretension of
semiotics - a critique which compels our atten- tion precisely because
it isn't another version of traditional humanism. One could cite various
examples of this position. I offer as not untypical, but among the
better informed, J. Hillis Miller's argument that among literary critics
who have been influenced by European developments a clear
distinction can be drawn [ ... ] between what might be called to con-
flate two terminologies, Socratic, theoretical, or canny critics on the
one hand, and Apollonian/Dionysian, tragic, or uncanny critics on the
other. Socratic critics are those who are lulled by the promise of a
rational ordering of literary study on the basis of solid advances in
scientific knowledge about language. They are likely to speak of
themselves as "scientists" and to group their collective enterprise
under some term like "the human sciences." Such an enterprise is
represented by the discipline called semiotics For the most part these
critics share the Socratic penchant, what Nietzsche defined as "the
unshakeable faith that thought, using the thread of logic, can
penetrate the deepest abysses of being[ ... J." The inheritors of the
Socratic faith would believe in the possibility of a structuralist-inspired
criticism as a rational and rationalizable activity, with agreed upon
rules of procedures,
*This paper was delivered at the International Conference on the
Semiotics of Art, spon- sore d by the University of Michigan, Mav
1978, and will appear in the proceedings of that conference. For a
more extensive development of this discussion, see my "Structural-
ism and Grammatology," boundary 2 (forthcoming).
given facts, and measurable results. This would be a discipline
bringing lit- erature out into the sunlight in a "happy positivism" (1976:
335).
The "uncanny critics," on the other hand, have no such faith in the
pos- sibility of general and systematic theories, because they have
discovered that a careful working through of individuai texts, whether
literary or philosophical, leads to unmasterable paradoxes, aporias,
which seem constitutive of the domain of signification itself.
I cite this argument as an example of the attitude which has come to
be called "post-structuralist" or "deconstructionist," but I am less
interested in Miller's own account of the situation, which seems
primar- ily based on psychological categories - are the proponents of
semiotics "lulled by the promise of rational ordering"? do we have
"unshakeable faith" in thought? - than in the powerful interpretive
account of lin- guistics and semiotics on which statements such as
Miller's are ulti- mately dependent: Jacques Derrida's reading of
Saussure in De la gram- matologie. I want to focus on this reading
partly because I think Derrida is right and that his argument should be
better understood among semi- oticians but also because I am
interested in the implications for semio- tics of this deconstructive
reading.
But first a word about Derrida's general project. Derrida's writings, his
readings of theoretical texts, are explorations of what he calls the
"logocentrism" of Western culture - the "metaphysics of presence"
which these texts can be shown simultaneously to affirm and to
under- mine. The metaphysics of presence - our metaphysics -
determines being as presence, granting ontological primacy, for
example, to what is deemed to be present to consciousness. The
Cartesian cogito, in which the I is deemed to lie beyond doubt
because it is present to itself in the act of thinking, is one instance.
Another is our notion that there is a pres- ent instant which we can
truly grasp in that it is self-identical and pres- ent to us, and that the
reality of everything depends on its relation to this presence of the
present: the past a former present and the future an anticipated
present. Finally, there is the notion of meaning as something present
to the consciousness of the speaker at the moment of utterance: what
the speaker "has in mind" as he speaks.
Derrida is interested in the way in which this logocentrism is "decon-
structed" in texts that affirm it. To deconstruct logocentrism is to show
that what was taken to be the truth of the world or the ground of an
enquiry is in fact a construct that has been imposed and which is con-
tradicted by certain results of the enquiry it founds. This will become
clearer, as we follow Derrida's reading of Saussure. The Cours de
linguis- tique generale and semiotics generally provide a striking case
for Der- rida, for it can be shown to contain a radical critique of
logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence on the one hand, yet
an affirmation of logocentrism and an inextricable involvement with it
on the other. Let us take these movements in turn.
1. The critique of logocentrism. Since Saussure defines language as
a system of signs, the central question becomes that of the nature
and identity of signs and their constituents. Saussure is led by his
investiga- tion to argue that linguistic units do not have essences but
are defined solely by relations. His famous claim that "dans la langue
il n'y a que des diff‚rences, sans termes positifs," is a principle wholly
at odds with logocentrism. It maintains, on the one hand, that no
terms of the system are ever simply and wholly present, for there are
no positive terms and a difference can never be present as such. The
reality of linguistic units cannot depend, therefore, on their presence
as such. And, on the other haind, in defining identity in terms of
common absences rather than in terms of common presences, the
linguistic and semiotic principle puts in question the principle which is
the very cornerstone of the metaphysics of presence.
2. The affirmation of logocentrism. Though Saussure has specified
that sound itself does not belong to the linguistic system, and though
he has used the example of writing to illustrate the nature of linguistic
units, he adamantly denies that writing is an object of linguistic
enquiry ("spoken forms alone constitute its object") and treats writing
as a parasitic form, the representation of a representation. This may
seem like a relatively innocent move, but in fact a great deal depends
on it. And the energy and moral indignation which Saussure displays
in relating how linguists can "fall into the trap" of attending to written
forms and how writing can "usurp the role" of speech and even affect
pronunciation - this suggests that more is at stake than meets the
eye. Ever since Plato con- demned writing in the Phaedrus,
discussion of language has ascribed some characteristics of
language to writing and then relegated it to a position of dependence
so as to confront a purified speech. To put it very schematically, if
writing is set aside as dependent and derivative, accounts of
language can take as the norm the experience of hearing oneself
speak, where form and meaning seem given simultaneously and in
an event of incarnation, rather than, say, the act of deciphering an
anonymous inscription. The repression of writing minimizes the differ-
ential or diacritical nature of language in favor of supposed
presences.
The privileging of speech is not only a weighty matter, it is also very
nearly inescapable. Why is this so? Because linguistic analysis, and
by extension semiotic analysis, depends upon the possibility of
identifying signs. To identify signs one must be able to identify
signifieds, since a sequence is a signifier only if it is correlated with a
concept or signified. We know bet and pet are different signifiers
because each has associated with it a different signified. And if we
ask how we know this, at what moment or place this association is
given, the answer requires some form of presence and will ultimately
refer to the moment of speech: the moment of utterance when
signifier seems to deliver the signified which is present in it or which it
expresses at that moment. The moment of utterance seems to
present positive terms, given in and of themselves, and thus to
provide a point of departure for analysis of a system said to consist
only of differences.
Since the possibility of grasping or identifying signifieds is necessary
to the semiotic project, it is no accident that semiotic theory should
find itself implicated in phonocentrism and logocentrism. It is neither
an accident nor, I want to insist, an error. Let me quote a passage
from the Grammatology:
The privilege of the phon‚ does not depend on a choice that could
have been avoided. It responds to a moment of economy (let us say
of the "life" of "history" or of "being-as-self-relationship"). The system
of s'entendre parler through the phonic substance - which presents
itself as the non- exterior, non-mundane, and therefore non-empirical
or contingent signifier - has necessarily dominated the history of the
world during an entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the
world, the idea of world- origin, that arises from the difference
between the worldly and the non- worldly, the outside and the inside,
ideality and non-ideality, universal and non-universal, transcendental
and empirical, etc. (1976: 7-8).
These are large claims. They may become more comprehensible if
one notes that oppositions such as outside/inside,
transcendental/empirical, etc., depend on a point of differentiation, a
line of division which dis- tinguishes the two terms and commands the
opposition. The claim is that the moment of speech, where signifier
and signified seem given together, where inner and outer or physical
and mental are for an instant perfectly fused, serves as the point of
reference in relation to which all these distinctions are posited.
Since the privileging of speech is essential to our metaphysics,
Derrida does not argue that Saussure was mistaken in asserting the
primacy of voice and founding linguistic analysis on the necessarily
logocentric notion of the sign. On the contrary, Derrida's analyses of
the ubiquity of logocentrism - even Georges Bataille can be shown
ultimately to be a Kantian - show that analysis is necessarily
logocentric: even the most rigorous critiques of logocentrism cannot
escape it since the concepts they must use are part of the system
being deconstructed. There are, of course, various ways of playing
with or resisting the system that one cannot escape, but it would be
an error to suggest that Derrida and deconstruction have provided us
with an alternative to semiotics and logocentrism. Grammatology,
Derrida has said, is not a new discipline which could replace a
logocentric semiology; it is the name of a ques- tion (1972: 22).
Indeed, Derrida's own writing involves a series of strategic manoeuv
res and displacements in which he modifies his terms, producing a
chain of related but non-identical operators - diff‚rance, suppl‚ment,
trace, hymen, espacement, greffe, pharmakon, parergon - to prevent
any of his terms from becoming "concepts" of a new science.
Derrida's reading of Saussure is an exploration of the self-
deconstruction of semiotics. Indeed, in the interview in Positions enti-
tled "Semiologie et grammatologie" he identified his double science
or double reading not with a mode of discourse that would lie outside
or beyond semiotics but with a special practice within semiotics.
One can say a priori that in every semiotic proposition or system of
research metaphysical presuppositions will cohabit with critical motifs
by virtue of the fact that up to a certain point they inhabit the same
language, or rather the same system of language. Grammatology
would doubtless be less another science, a new discipline charged
with a new content or a new and well- delimited domain than the
vigilant practice or exercise of this textual divi- sion (la pratique
-vigilante de ce partage textuel) (1972: 49-50).
Three points by way of conclusion. Deconstruction isn't, at least in the
work of Derrida and its other most skillful practitioners, some kind of
"new irrationalism," as is occasionally suggested. Though it reveals
"irrationalities" in our systems and theories, it is the most rigorous
pur- suit of the logic of the text, be it a theoretical or a literary text.
The aporias deconstruction reveals are contradictions, paradoxes,
which semiotics cannot escape: in this case that the theory of the
sign leads to theoretical principles which must be repressed if
analysis is to take place. Semiotics cannot help supposing positive
terms which its theory must disallow. Further discussion would lead
us to the unmaster- able oppositions between langue and parole,
system and event, synch- ronic and diachronic, which can never be
held together in a single self-consistent system. Generally, semiotics
is not the self-consistent dis- course of a science but a text.
What deconstruction advises is not a change of direction - the correc-
tion of some error which would make it a "true science" - or a change
of purpose - a shift from semiotics to a new discipline of grammatol-
ogy. There is no escape from textuality; one can only engage it with
crit- ical vigilance: "la pratique vigilante de ce partage textuel."

REFERENCES

DERRIDA, JACQUES, 1976. Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak,

trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hop- kins), 1972 Positions (Paris: Minuit).
MILLER, J. HILLIS, 1976. "Steven-s's Rock and Criticism as Cure,"
The Georgia Review 30:2-,330-405

THE MICROSTRUCTURE OF LOGOCENTRISM:

SIGN MODELS IN DERRIDA AND SMOLENSKY

by
 KIP CANFIELD
Dept. of Information Systems, University of Maryland
canfield@icarus.ifsm.umbc.edu

_Postmodern Culture_ v.3 n.3 (May, 1993)

pmc@unity.ncsu.edu

Copyright (c) 1993 by Kip Canfield, all rights reserved.

This text may be used and shared in accordance

with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright
law, and it may be archived and redistributed in
electronic form, provided that the editors are
notified and no fee is charged for access.
Archiving, redistribution, or republication of
this text on other terms, in any medium, requires
the consent of the author and the notification of
the publisher, Oxford University Press.

I. ON (PURE) RHETORIC

[1] Peirce (Buchler 99) says that the task of pure rhetoric
is "to ascertain the laws by which, in every scientific
 intelligence, one sign gives birth to another, and
especially one thought brings forth another." Sign models
are metaphors that evolve to support any constellation of
ideas, and as de Man points out, "metaphors are much more
tenacious than facts" ("Semiology and Rhetoric" 123). Any
critique of current ideas dealing with human cognition and
symbolic behavior must therefore address the metaphoricity
of sign models.
[2] In what follows, we will explore a remarkable
parallelism in stories about the sign, between the discourse
of the humanities and of cognitive sciences. This
exploration will be conducted in the form of close readings
of two works, "Linguistics and Grammatology," Chapter 2 of
_Of Grammatology_ by Jacques Derrida, and "On the proper
treatment of connectionism" by Paul Smolensky. The
purpose
of these readings is not to apply results from one field to
another or to hypothesize direct influence, but rather to
investigate two rhetorical strategies that develop in the
face of the same metaphoric impasse. Both of the works in
question come out of a rejection of structuralism--in
philosophy and cognitive science, respectively--and
although
their arguments are basically the same, they take different
paths away from structuralism.
[3] Derrida stakes out a skeptic's position, one that shows
the aporias and contradictions inherent in the dyadic sign
model used by structuralists. He explicitly denies that
 there is any way around these contradictions. Smolensky,
by
contrast, has the scientist's typical aversion to
skepticism, and he tries to reconceive the sign model that
underlies his theory of connectionism in order to resolve
those same contradictions. The parallels between these two
works, I will argue, may be attributed to a similarity in
the historical moment of each author, even though the
works
themselves are twenty years apart and their authors are of
different nationalities.
[4] Derrida stakes out his territory in opposition to
Structuralism, with its linguistic model of rules and
grammars for atomic units of meaning. Oversimplification
of
Structuralism can be dangerous (see Culler 28), but in
essence, Structuralism was an empiricist reaction to the
interpretive projects of the New Criticism, and it explained
referent meaning as the center of a symbolic system or
structure. In "Linguistics and Grammatology," Derrida
demonstrates the problems that such an autistic view of
human signification entails, and suggests that the dyadic
sign model of Saussure is in fact responsible for generating
the aporias of Structuralism.
[5] Smolensky's work is an oppositional response to
traditional Cognitive Science, that uneasy mixture of
Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Cognitive
Psychology, in turn, began as a reaction to the empiricism
of Behaviorism and its inability to refer to Mind as a
 theoretical construct. The relatively humanistic models
employed by Cognitive Psychology came under attack after
the
field became heavily influenced by computer-based Artificial
Intelligence in the 1970s, and it became fashionable to
value cognitive models only if they had a computational
implementation. The state of this modeling led to very
simple and brittle models of human cognition and, in effect,
dragged Cognitive Psychology back towards Empiricism. For
example, a recent work by Alan Newell (_Unified Theories of
Cognition_) proposes a theory of cognition that is based
primarily on production rules (rules of the if/then type).
The complex problem of how the antecedents and
consequents
of these rules arise cannot be addressed in such a limited
architecture: in fact, Smolensky sees this sort of dyadic
sign model--the kind of model that is easily implemented on
a serial computer--as the basic problem for objectivist
Cognitive Science.
[6] Both Smolensky and Derrida, then, object to a tradition
that presents a simplistic, deterministic view of human
signification, and both elaborate a new vision of semantics
and dynamics for their sign models. Each author offers a
vision of human cognition that is more complex, more
mysterious, and less deterministic than the traditions they
oppose.

II. SIGN MODELS

[7] Though the discourse of any given historical moment is
governed by certain metaphors, it is often the case that
changes to those metaphors are generated by the very
discourse they govern. Structuralism and Cognitive Science
use a static, dyadic model of the sign, but the syntactic
orientation of dyadic sign models makes such explanations
of
meaning unsatisfying, both logically and contextually.
Authors such as Sheriff have tried to rescue meaning by
applying the triadic model of Peirce, with its interpretant,
but this solution is largely unsuccessful because it simply
inscribes pragmatics in the interpretant, leaving the
connection between pragmatics and meaning obscure. The
critiques of Structuralism and Cognitive Science described
below rely on more flexible, dynamic sign models:
Smolensky
tries to change the architecture of the dyadic sign model
fundamentally, while Derrida explores that model's inability
to account for the gap between the signifier and the
signified. Both authors employ an organic, dynamic,
systems
model which unifies the oppositions that arise in static
accounts of the sign.

SMOLENSKY'S MODEL

[8] Cognitive Science was carved out in academia during

 the mid-1970s to create an interdisciplinary home for
various scholars who took an information-processing
approach
to cognitive modeling. Two major critical responses to this
objectivist cognitive science are cognitive semantics
(Lakoff, "Cognitive Semantics") and connectionism
(McClelland _Parallel Distributed Processing_ vol. 1).
George Lakoff is one of the more polemical writers of this
critique. He has identified two definitional aspects of
what he calls objectivist (mainstream) cognitive science.
They are:
(1) The algorithmic theory of mental processes: All
mental processes are algorithmic in the mathematical
sense, that is, they are formal manipulations of
arbitrary symbols without regard to the internal
structure of symbols and their meaning.
(2) The symbolic theory of meaning: Arbitrary symbols
can be made meaningful in one and only one way: by
being associated with things in the world (where "the
world" is taken as having a structure independent of
the mental processes of any beings). ("Cognitive
Semantics" 119)
Lakoff goes on to propose a "cognitive semantics" (he also
calls it experientialist cognition). In so doing, he
challenges two major characteristics of the objectivist
account. First, he counters the arbitrariness of the sign
with a new theory of categorization related to the prototype
theory of Rosch; second, he lambastes the syntactic
orientation of algorithms in the information processing
 model:
The most essential feature of objectivist cognition is
the separation of symbols from what they mean. It is
this separation that permits one to view thought as the
algorithmic manipulation of arbitrary symbols. The
problem for such a view is how the symbols used in
thought are to be made meaningful. ("Cognitive
Semantics" 125)
Lakoff's language here revolts against the arbitrary nature
of the sign and the syntactic character of algorithms. Its
criticisms strike at the dualistic definition of the sign
and therefore at the foundations of structuralism.
[9] The connectionist approach to cognitive modeling
accepts Lakoff's critique, but connectionism is primarily
concerned with model architecture:
Connectionist models are large networks of simple
parallel computing elements, each of which carries a
numerical *activation value* which it computes from the
values of neighboring elements in the network, using
some simple numerical formula. The network elements,
or *units*, influence each other's values through
connections that carry a numerical strength, or
*weight*. (Smolensky 1)
The connectionist architecture supports distributed
processing, in which each parallel processor is doing only
part of a larger process that perhaps cannot be modeled as
a
series of steps in an algorithm (as with a Turing machine).
In the connectionist models, representation is achieved by
 looking at an entire network of individual unit values.
These models are often called parallel distributed
processing (PDP) models (Rumelhart and McClelland).
[10] The connectionist model is largely incompatible with
the traditional cognitive science framework, which is
symbolic and based on language. This rejection of the
traditional structure of the sign (signifier/signified)
makes allies of Lakoff and Smolensky. Smolensky's article
offers what he calls "the proper treatment of
connectionism"
(1). The article sets out to define the goals of
connectionism, and it explicitly advocates a specific set of
foundational principles. Smolensky's first task is to
establish the purview of his analysis, which he calls the
level of the subsymbolic paradigm. This level lies
somewhere between the symbolic level of traditional
structuralism or cognitive science and the neural level of
basic biological processes:
In calling the traditional approach to cognitive
modeling the "symbolic paradigm," I intend to emphasize
that in this approach, cognitive descriptions are built
of entities that are symbols both in the semantic sense
of referring to external objects and in the syntactic
sense of being operated upon by symbol
manipulation. . . . The mind has been taken to be a
machine for formal symbol manipulation, and the
symbols
manipulated have assumed essentially the same
semantics
 as words of English. . . . The name "subsymbolic
paradigm" is intended to suggest cognitive descriptions
built up of entities that correspond to *constituents*
of the symbols used in the symbolic paradigm; these
fine-grained constituents could be called *subsymbols*,
and they are the activities of individual processing
units in the connectionist networks." (3-4)
[11] Smolensky has dispensed with the signifier/signified
dyadic structure of the sign (where symbol=sign). He was
forced to do this by the intractable space (gap) between the
signifier and the signified. This space caused brittleness
in the artificial intelligence systems--inflexibility in the
face of a changing environment. By contrast, Smolensky's
architecture for the sign is very malleable. A sign
(concept) has no simple internal structure that contains the
big problematic gap: instead, a sign is conceived of as a
network of very simple elements that allows context to
intrude into (be contained in) the sign. Dreyfus and
Dreyfus put it thus:
What Smolensky means by a complete, formal, and
precise
description is not the logical manipulation of
context-free primitives--symbols that refer to features
of the domain regardless of the context in which those
features appear--but rather the mathematical
description of an evolving dynamic system. (31-32)
[12] Smolensky says: "the activities of the subconceptual
units that comprise the symbol--its *subsymbols*--change
across contexts" (15). He states the principle of context
 dependence as follows: "In the symbolic paradigm, the
context of a symbol is manifest around it and consists of
other symbols; in the subsymbolic paradigm, the context of
a
symbol is manifest inside it and consists of subsymbols"
(17). At this point Smolensky has described a network
structure that claims to have more powerful explanatory
capabilities than the traditional dyadic model of the sign
because context can intermingle with content.

DERRIDA'S MODEL

[13] Derrida has precisely these same objections to the

traditional structure of the sign. Whereas Smolensky
responds with the network metaphor, Derrida's critique is
governed by the metaphor of generalized (arche) writing.
Writing is the structure and process which makes possible
the dynamic character of language, according to Derrida,
but
it is (commonly) considered to be exterior to language. He
discusses this exteriority at length, arguing that
[t]he exteriority of the signifier is the exteriority
of writing in general, and I shall try to show later
that there is no linguistic sign before writing.
Without that exteriority, the very idea falls into
decay. (_Of Grammatology_ 14)
[14] The problem is that once you enforce the distinction
between the signifier and the signified, reference is
 confused, and you continually get the "eruption of the
outside within the inside" (_Of Grammatology_ 34). The
nature of the confusion surrounding reference in a static,
dyadic account of the sign is clear in the following:
The system of writing in general is not exterior to the
system of language in general, unless it is granted
that the division between the exterior and the interior
passes through the interior of the interior or the
exterior of the exterior, to the point where the
immanence of language is essentially exposed to the
intervention of forces that are apparently *alien to
its system*. (_Of Grammatology_ 43; my emphasis)
This notion of penetration is parallel to Smolensky's
observations about brittleness, since including context
inside the sign is an example of the exterior intruding on
the interior. Under a dyadic sign-model, such an
interpenetration of context and the sign is not allowed, and
this prohibition, in turn, is one factor that generates
critique.

III. MOVEMENT AND MEANING

[15] Both Derrida and Smolensky object to dyadic sign

models
because of their naive simplicity and semantic problems.
This naivete is a consequence of Structuralism's and
Cognitive Science's view of the sign as static. Both
Derrida and Smolensky elaborate a dynamics in their
 critiques. Derrida's mechanisms for including movement in
the sign-model are differance, trace and presence, which are
discussed below. Smolensky uses the mathematical theory
of
dynamic systems to put movement into his network
structure.
The semantic problems are, at root, the same as the hoary
old mind/body problem of philosophy. Smolensky thinks
that
his sign model, in the framework of connectionism, goes
some
distance in solving that problem. Derrida despairs of a
solution and, in fact, states that a solution is impossible.
Let us look first at the semantic aspects of each critique
and then at the dynamics.

SEMANTICS

[16] Structuralism and most flavors of cognitive science are

forms of rationalism or introspectionism (see Chomsky,
_Knowledge of Language_). Both Derrida and Smolensky
oppose
such rationalism. Smolensky proposes an intuitive
processor
(which is not accessible to symbolic intuition), and a
conscious rule interpreter:
What kinds of programs are responsible for behavior
that is not conscious rule application? I will refer
 to the virtual machine that runs these programs as the
*intuitive processor*. It is presumably responsible
for all of animal behavior and a huge proportion of
human behavior: Perception, practiced motor behavior,
fluent linguistic behavior, intuition in problem
solving and game-playing--in short, practically all
skilled performance. (5)
The programs running on the intuitive processor, then, are
not composed of symbols which have a syntax and
semantics
similar to language. This idea is not mainstream in
cognitive science, which takes an artificial-intelligence or
information-processing view of cognition and posits exactly
the intuitive/linguistic correspondence Smolensky rejects.
[17] Smolensky translates subconceptual processes into
mathematics, which are not accessible to intuition. Derrida
describes the traditional rationalism as logocentrism, a
fundamental effect of the atomic structure of the signified.
In the course of his polemic on speech, Derrida says:
The affirmation of the essential and "natural" bond
between the phone and the sense, the privilege accorded
to an order of signifier (which then becomes the major
signified of all other signifiers) depend expressly,
and in contradiction to the other levels of Saussurian
discourse, upon a psychology of consciousness and of
intuitive consciousness. What Saussure does not
question here is the essential possibility of
nonintuition. Like Husserl, Saussure determines this
nonintuition teleologically as *crisis*. (_Of
 Grammatology_ 40)
The appeal to nonintuition by both authors is a necessary
break with traditional representation, and it recalls
Lacan's barrier between the signifier and the signified
(Noth 303), where there is no "access from one to the
other." One can no longer retain traditional models built
with now-discarded tools: the new models require a new
metaphysics.
[18] It is intriguing that both authors appeal to *levels*
to justify the apparent difference between usual
interpretations of the sign and the novel view taken in
these texts. Smolensky's appeal is to physics:
The relationship between subsymbolic and symbolic
models is more like that between quantum and classical
mechanics. Subsymbolic models accurately describe the
microstructure of cognition, whereas symbolic models
provide an *approximate* description of the
macrostructure. (12, my emphasis)
This comparison jumps right out of his three-level
architecture. The lowest level, the neural level, is
closely modeled with the subsymbolic (=subconceptual)
level.
The highest level, the traditional symbolic (=conceptual)
level, is only an approximation of the lower levels. It is
an approximate language that developed to allow us (the
subject) a way to talk about cognitive matters. He says:
The relation between the conceptual level and the lower
levels is fundamentally different in the subsymbolic
and symbolic paradigms. This leads to important
 differences in the kind of explanations that the
paradigms offer of conceptual level behavior, and the
kind of reduction used in these explanations. A
symbolic model is a system of interacting processes,
all with the same conceptual-level semantics as the
task behavior being explained. . . . [whereas, u]nlike
symbolic explanations, subsymbolic explanations rely
crucially on a *semantic ("dimensional") shift* that
accompanies the shift from the conceptual to the
subconceptual levels. (11; my emphasis)
[19] Derrida has to resort to a similar tactic in the face
of our inability to escape metaphysical talk:
What Saussure saw without seeing, knew without being
able to take into account, following in that the entire
metaphysical tradition, is that a certain model of
writing was necessarily but provisionally imposed . . .
as instrument and technique of representation of a
system of language. And that this movement, unique in
style, was so profound that it permitted the thinking,
*within language*, of concepts like those of the sign,
technique, representation, language. (_Of
Grammatology_ 43)
The dyadic structure of traditional structuralist sign
models has proven unacceptable for both authors.
Smolensky
responds by conceiving of a new structure (a network) and
Derrida by exploring the problems in the old structure (the
gap between signifier and signified).
 SMOLENSKY'S INTUITIVE PROCESSOR

[20] A recurring theme in these stories about levels is the

inaccessibility of the lower levels to symbolic intuition.
Traditional theories of the sign assume that intuition can
penetrate anything cognitive. By contrast, semantics in
Smolensky's model involves the mysterious "shift" from
numeric to symbolic representation, a shift described in his
"subsymbolic hypothesis":
The intuitive processor is a subconceptual
connectionist dynamic system that does not admit a
complete, formal, and precise conceptual level
description. . . . Subsymbols are not operated upon by
symbol manipulation: They participate in *numerical--
not symbolic--computation*. (7, 3; my emphasis)
[21] Furthermore, the unit processors in the model do not
correspond to conceptual-level semantics at all. They do
not model words, concepts, or even distinctive features as
described in linguistics. Smolensky proposes the following
subconceptual-unit hypothesis:
The entities in the intuitive processor with semantics
of conscious concepts of the task domain are complex
patterns of activity over many units. Each unit
participates in many such patterns. . . . At present,
each individual subsymbolic model adopts particular
procedures for relating patterns of activity--activity
vectors--to the conceptual-level descriptions of inputs
and outputs that define the model's task. (6-7)
 A complete description of cognition is numerical and
therefore not available in our native symbolic language.
Subsymbolic computation in a dynamic system is cognition,
and the asymptotic behavior of trajectories in the system is
*somehow* approximately mapped to symbolic language.
This
explains the nonintuitive character of the intuitive
processor and presumably explains why symbolic theories
like
those in linguistics always seem to *almost* formalize
language, but ultimately fail on the fringes.

DERRIDA'S ORIGINS

[22] We have noted above that Smolensky links the

subsymbolic and symbolic levels with a "semantic shift."
The Derridean concepts of trace and differance parallel
these levels. These concepts operate within the metaphor
of
writing in a way that allows Derrida's system of signs to
move and be dynamic. For our purposes, the problem of the
origin and the dynamics of differance are the salient topics
in Derrida's theory.
[23] Because the signified is "always already in the
position of the signifier" (_Of Grammatology_ 73), origins
become problematic. As Derrida puts it,
Representation mingles with what it represents, to the
point where one speaks as one writes, one thinks as if
 the represented were nothing more than the shadow or
reflection of the representer. A dangerous promiscuity
and a nefarious complicity between the reflection and
reflected which lets itself be seduced
narcissistically. In this play of representation, the
point of origin becomes ungraspable. (_Of
Grammatology_ 36)
[24] This attention to the problem of origin indicates an
uneasiness with semantics. Derrida uses the image of track
or trace to express this uneasiness. What he says (in
Smolensky's terms) is that there is no origin because we
attach a semantic purpose to origins and at the point of
origins, there is no semantics. The (pure) trace is not
semantic:
The trace is not only the disappearance of origin--
within the discourse that we sustain and according to
the path that we follow it means that the origin did
not even disappear, that it was never constituted
except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which
becomes the origin of the origin. . . . *The (pure)
trace is differance*. It does not depend on any
sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or
graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such
a plenitude. Although it *does not exist*, although it
is never a *being-present* outside of all plenitude,
its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one
calls the sign. . . . *The trace is in fact the
absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to
saying once again that there is no absolute origin of
 sense in general*. (_Of Grammatology_ 61-62, 65)
[25] This recalls Smolensky's "semantic shift" problem, in
which he sets up a system where all computation is purely
numerical and has no symbolic-level semantics. He must
then
finesse a "shift" to our human realm of signs, something
Derrida says is impossible:
This arche-writing, although its concept is *invoked*
by the themes of "the arbitrariness of the sign" and of
difference, cannot and can never be recognized as the
*object of a science*. It is that very thing which
cannot let itself be reduced to the form of
*presence*. . . . There cannot be a science of
differance itself in its operation, as it is impossible
to have a science of the origin of presence itself,
that is to say of a certain nonorigin. (_Of
Grammatology_ 57,63)
[26] Derrida, like Smolensky, emphasizes the nonintuitive
or
unconscious character of cognitive acts like language.
Derrida calls this the "fundamental unconsciousness of
language" (_Of Grammatology_ 68) and says that "Spacing
as
writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-
unconscious
of the subject" (_Of Grammatology_ 69). But while Derrida
says of the trace that "no concept of metaphysics can
describe it" (_Of Grammatology_ 65), Smolensky has
presented
 a mathematical metaphysics. Smolensky's attempt has yet
to
tackle the precise point that Derrida has tried to show
cannot be described: the point at which the non-semantic
origins of signification become semantic.

DYNAMICS

[27] In the terminology of engineering mechanics, statics is

the study of forces on structures, and dynamics is the study
of forces on structures in motion. All critiques of
structuralism reflect a passing from statics to dynamics;
the dynamic view of structuralism has always existed in
structuralism but was not mainstream (see Piaget). Post-
structural discourse emphasizes movement and temporality.
Smolensky uses models taken from dynamic systems theory
to
achieve this, while Derrida defines a cluster of terms
(differance, trace and presence) for the same purpose.
Both authors use this dynamism to argue for an organic sign
model that integrates form and function.
[28] Smolensky explicitly uses the models and mathematics
of
dynamic systems, as studied in physics. He views the
architecture of his model in this way:
The numerical activity values of all the processors in
the network form a large *state vector*. The
interactions of the processors, the equations governing
 how the activity vector changes over time as the
processors respond to one another's values, is an
*activation evolution equation*. This evolution
equation governing the mutual interactions of the
processors involves the connection weights: numerical
parameters which determine the direction and magnitude
of the influence of one activation value on another.
The activation equation is a differential
equation. . . . In learning systems, the connection
weights change during training according to the
learning rule, which is another differential equation:
the *connection evolution equation*. (6)
He elaborates a "connectionist dynamical system
hypothesis"
in which the connection strengths (weights) of the network
embody the data, and differential equations describe the
dynamic process within which these data become
knowledge.
The state of this intuitive processor (the network) is
defined by a vector which contains the numerical state of
each unit processor in the network. For our discussion, the
important aspects of this description are the global control
over the process of signification given by the systems idea,
and the semantic anomalies presented by the numerical
character of the model.

SMOLENSKY'S GLOBAL CONTROL

[29] The systems idea is very important in Smolensky's
discourse. It becomes possible to describe the
connectionist version of cognition by using a mathematical
dynamic system as a model (my discussion is informed by
Rosen). A dynamic system in mathematics depends on two
kinds of representation: one must represent every possible
state of the system (statics), and also the behavior of the
system (dynamics). The static description uses the concept
of a *state space*, which contains an instantaneous
description of every possible state of the system. These
states can be described as measurements on a system. For
example, in Newtonian mechanics, all particles can be
described in a system with six dimensions: three for
position in 3-dimensional space and three for a momentum
measurement in each of those three dimensions. It is
important that the number of dimensions chosen give a
complete description of the state of the system. In such a
model, all states that have the same values in all
dimensions are identical to each other. Each dimension is a
state variable and the n-tuple (or vector) of all the state
variables is a representation of the (instantaneous) state
of the system. The mathematical set of all possible unique
vectors is the state space of the system. Therefore, most
systems will be multidimensional and cannot be visualized
in
Euclidean space.
[30] In order to provide a dynamic description of a system,
one must know how the state variables change with time.
Mathematically, this means that each state variable
 (dimension) is a function of time. If each of these
functions is known, the dynamic behavior of the system is a
trajectory in the state space through time. It is usually
impossible to know these functions exactly, but since the
rate of change of a single state variable depends only on
that state in the state space, we can give conditions that
these functions must follow. These conditions constrain the
trajectory of a behavior but do not uniquely determine it.
The constraint is modeled as the derivative of a function
which gives the rate of change at a point (state). The
derivative of a function (with respect to time) is analogous
to the slope of a tangent line to a curve; the slope
reflects how fast the points on the curve are changing in
the neighborhood of the state. A dynamic system, then, is
described by a set of simultaneous differential equations
where differential equations are functions of the state
variables and their derivatives. Systems described with
differential equations represent infinitely many
possibilities that are constrained by the (dynamically
changing) structure of the system.
[31] Dynamic systems impose a global effect on the state
space. For example, in the plane of this paper, all points
(positions) can be described with two numbers--the
coordinates in the xy plane (a vector with two elements).
The intuitive processor's state space, however, is
multidimensional: its state space is the set of all possible
vectors that describe all activation values of all unit
processors in the system. The global effect occurs (most
simply) because a differential equation sets up conditions
 on every point in the state space. For example, a
differential equation with a function in two dimensions
involves derivatives which set up a direction field that
constrains the trajectory of any curve that goes through a
point in it. The direction field is a condition that
attaches itself globally to every possible point, and it is
what makes possible a global, system-level description of a
multitude of separate interacting agents.
[32] The modern scientific concept of fields--such as
electric fields, magnetic fields, or even magic force-fields
in science fiction--are examples of this kind of global
effect. They are something usually unseen but considered
to
be real (i.e., they effect material reality) and they
operate globally, albeit mysteriously, in an area of space.
Smolensky sees reference as the asymptotic behavior of a
trajectory in a dynamic system, and his scientistic
assertion of the possibility of global control contrasts
with Derrida's exasperated skepticism, seen below.

DERRIDA'S DIFFERANCE

[33] The early Derrida is conducting a guerrilla war against

structuralism from within the metaphysical terrain of
structuralism. He only has whatever is at hand there for
the fight. While Smolensky is free to use exotic weapons
from his experience (he was trained as a physicist), Derrida
must work within the tradition of the dyadic sign. He
 considers the dyadic sign constitutive of human thought,
even as he shows its inadequacy for explaining meaning.
Notwithstanding these differences in tradition and precept,
there are many points of contact between Smolensky's
dynamic
systems and Derrida's trace and differance.
[34] Derrida conceives of the operation of the trace as a
*field* in the sense described above, but has no language to
justify such a global and actively structuring concept. In
exasperation, he calls it "theological":
The trace, where the relationship with the other is
marked, articulates its possibility in the entire field
of the entity [etant], which metaphysics has defined as
the being-present starting from the occulted movement
of the trace. The trace must be thought before the
entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily
occulted, it produces itself as self-occultation. When
the other announces itself as such, it presents itself
in the dissimulation of itself. This formulation is
not theological, as one might believe somewhat hastily.
*The "theological" is a determined moment in the total
movement of the trace. The field of the entity, before
being determined as the field of presence, is
structured according to the diverse possibilities--
generic and structural--of the trace*. (_Of
Grammatology_ 47, my emphasis)
[35] The reader should compare this description with the
global *structuring* impact of dynamic systems on state-
space, described above. At all times, Derrida presents the
 trace as dynamic. It is the "movement of temporalization"
(_Of Grammatology_ 47), and "[t]he immotivation of the
trace
ought to be understood as an operation and not as a state,
an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given
structure" (_Of Grammatology_ 51). The shift from statics
to dynamics is, of course, a key feature of contemporary
discourse on the sign.
[36] Derrida responds to accusations that differance is
negative theology with an essay in "How to Avoid Speaking:
Denials." Frank Kermode summarizes the argument well:
The purpose of Derrida's pronouncement is to claim that
differance is not negative in the same measure as the
God of negative theology; for it is so in much greater
measure--indeed it cannot properly be thought of as
negative at all; *it is outside negativity as it is
outside everything*. Only by an intellectual error--
induced by a sort of metaphysical paranoia, a fear for
the security of that "realm"--could anybody suppose
that differance has a design on us, or a desire to make
itself into some sort of presence. (Kermode 75; my
emphasis)
Informed by a reading of Smolensky, one might conclude
that
differance *is* desire, and that "metaphysical paranoia" is
completely justified. Where structuralists and objectivist
cognitive scientists assume "meaning" as a concept around
which structure is built, Derrida and Smolensky use ideas of
process and structure to produce "meaning." The main
 rhetorical strategy both authors use to do this is to deny a
hard distinction between form and function. This conflation
gives reality to a field of signification. This is explicit
in Smolensky's mathematical metaphysics; in Derrida, it is
implicit in the movement of the trace.
[37] Derrida's treatment of presence is interesting in
relation to these metaphysical ideas. Culler, in _On
Deconstruction_, invokes Zeno's paradox to explain
Derrida's
insistence on the impossibility of presence. The present
moment is never really present, but always marked with the
past and the future. The present is then not real, as
difference is not real. Trace "does not exist" and
differance is "nothing." Time and absence conspire to
destroy any phenomenology.
Arche-writing as spacing cannot occur *as such* within
the phenomenological experience of a presence. It
marks the dead time within the presence of the living
present, within the general form of all presence. The
*dead time* is at work. That is why, once again, in
spite of all the discursive resources that the former
may borrow from the latter, the concept of the trace
will never be merged with a phenomenology of writing.
As the phenomenology of the sign in general, a
phenomenology of writing is impossible. No intuition
can be realized in the place where "the *whites* indeed
take on an importance." (_Of Grammatology_ 68)
One might be tempted to regain presence by an appeal to
the
 idea of a field of signification, proposed above, but
presence fails for both authors at the point where its
phenomenology must be intuitively accessible to the
subject.
Both authors set up a metaphysics which describes a
mechanism for presence, but both place that mechanism in
the
inhuman realm of numbers or (pure) traces.
[38] Derrida's insistence, then, on presence and difference
as "nothing" might be understood as referring only to the
realm of human consciousness, the only realm describable
in
structuralist terms. Derrida's nullification of presence
and differance recall a funny story, an old chestnut, that I
have most recently seen reincarnated in a book by Arbib
(_In
Search of the Person_): it seems that there was this
mathematician who wished to prove something for Riemann
geometry. He disappeared into a room and filled a
blackboard with Dirichlet integrals and other mathematical
arcana. After a time, a cry was heard from the room, "Wait!
Wait! I've proved too much! I've proved there are no prime
numbers!" The nullification of differance is a funny idea
when one considers such that this nullification might *be*
the global control that *produces* cognition. Smolensky
might accuse Derrida of having been inattentive in his
calculus classes. On the other hand, Derrida would probably
apply a quotation from Barthes (Noth 313) to Smolensky: "I
passed through a (euphoric) dream of scientificity."
 IV. CONCLUSION

[39] I would like to reiterate that this has been an

exploration of rhetorical strategies that arose in two
similar historical moments. My discussion ignores any
justification or evaluation (scientific or otherwise) with
regard to the works by Smolensky and Derrida, and it
proposes no direct influence of one on the other. Most
importantly, this is not a "methodological" paper that
proposes something ridiculous like a "dynamic systems
approach to everything."
[40] Both Derrida and Smolensky want to give a fuller, more
complex vision of the signifying human. Structuralism and
objectivist Cognitive Science present a syntactic picture of
human meaning that is unsatisfying. Each author tries to
breath life into the dyadic sign model by regaining
presence. Smolensky explicitly appeals to presence as a
field in dynamic systems theory. Derrida precisely defines
such a field with the terms trace and differance while
denying their reality because he rejects the concept of
global control. The genesis of these critiques is the
static character of structuralist or objectivist accounts of
signification, theories which relegate all process to the
gap between a signified and a signifier, a gap which is
"nothing": Derrida and Smolensky rush in to fill this void.
Both authors note a semantic problem for sign models that
requires a mysterious "semantic shift" from the unconscious
 to the conscious. This semantic anomaly does not allow
intuitive access to the basis of the sign model. Derrida
sees this as an insurmountable mystery, while Smolensky
thinks it can be accounted for.
[41] Spivak uses Levi-Strauss' term bricolage to contrast
modern discourse with engineering: "All Knowledge,
whether
one knows it or not, is a species of bricolage, with its eye
on the myth of *engineering*" (_Of Grammatology_ xx).
Smolensky and Derrida are doing similar odd jobs, but with
different tool boxes. Smolensky, with his "eye on the myth
of engineering," is a bricoleur with a full quiver of
metaphor: he can play Ahab ("That inscrutable thing is
chiefly what I hate"). Derrida doesn't have much faith in
his weapons: he can love the whale.

------------------------------------------------------------

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