Zenobia: Différance as a Perceptual Proposition

 

 

“Instead of thinking of Différance as the opposition to presence, what if we think of Différance as the as a series of signs interconnected in a temporal chain as opposed to a paradox where there is no ghost haunting presence, because there is no presence in a constant stream. Don’t you say as much? This presence, truth, was invented and it gives meaning, or signification, to presence. This original truth spoken from the first word, the first representation. The word represents the truth and the truth conceal the fact that it is a representation of the outside world in a system where the inside is privileged over the outside.”

          Said Zenobia as we were talking about my absence. It was after I didn’t talk to her week eventhough we were living together. She continued, “We are not imprisoned by an image. The image doesn’t even make sense as something present. If there is a sensible image then it only exists because a consciousness is defining it with previous signs. A consciousness is what connects all signs. The opposition between empiricism and deconstruction that stems how each field thinks of the concept of the sign. Both agree that signification is essentially an unending process without a beginning. Interpretation is always already involved in what is immediately given in perception, or intuition. Meaning is always open to and in need of further interpretation. The definition of the “sign” is rooted deep in the empiricist conception of natural signs at work in perception. I do have done away with the speculative need that generates and sustains metaphysics. While you undermine metaphysics without being able to escape it, I anticipate and avoid the error of seeking a foundation for certainty in some immediate mental grasp or intuition, or presence. Because you are never actually present anyway. For me metaphysics is a “"quest for certainty" which sacrifices real progressive stability for an illusory immutable one.” You seek the illusory. In fact, in two major respects, the empiricist critique of metaphysics applies to your arguments as well.

 

1. First, your critique of the metaphysics of presence remains tied, through Husserlian phenomenology, to the assumption - albeit recognized as self-defeating - that without presence there could be no certain basis for knowledge.

2. Second, from my perspective informed by the sign theory of perception and thought, it does not seem that you can escape from the intellectual impasse created by the Saussurean conception of the sign, which you have made a primary object of his criticism.

 

What’s more is that you finally accept Saussure's conception, freed of its phonocentric bias, and in effect you suppress mine. By going behind Saussure's thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign to its indispensable correlate and foundation, "the thesis of Différance as the source of linguistic value", you find the cue for you own concept - or, as you would have it, non-concept - of "Différance." This is the core of a new sort of transcendentalism, concerned with the conditions of possibility of signification in general. What makes this transcendentalism different is that it is lucid about the impossibility of our thinking our way back behind signs. This is conveyed by the deliberately paradoxical notion of a pure and originary trace, which you claim is the necessary precondition of linguistic meaning and of signs in any sense. Th originary trace is the alternative to presence. Natural signs are also an alternative to presence. The debate between Greek Sceptics and Stoics consists of two conflicting points:

 

1. the question of "the criterion" and

2. the possibility of an "indicative sign."

 

The Sceptics thought it was necessary to have a "criterion" in perception which provided certainty in a foundation of knowledge, while denying that such certainty could ever be attained. The Stoics believed knowledge in perception consisted of relations between experiences and not some criterion of certainty. The Sceptics held that there were two kinds of natural signs; commemorative signs consist of two phenomena, one occurring prior to another. They work so that one phenomena can function as a sign of the other in the other phenomena's absence. For example, smoke signifying an unseen fire or a scar signifying a prior injury. The indicative sign signifies something that is non-evident by nature, at least not temporarily. This would be something invisible…”

 

          I attempted to interject in this moment saying, in a somewhat frustrated fashion, “I know something invisible, but for Stoics…”

          Then she aggressively interrupted me, “This would be something invisible but for Stoics something intelligible, like pores signified by sweat, or and shame signified by blushing. The Stoics made the inferential structure of the indicative sign foundational to perception itself and logical consequence. An indicative sign is an antecedent judgment, in a sound hypothetical syllogism, which serves to unveil the consequent". Aristotelian logic emphasized the categorical focusing on terms (rather than propositions) as the variables in logical matrices, and among proposition types emphasized the categorical. Stoic Logic emphasized the hypothetical and gave it the crucial role in demonstrative reasoning

For the Stoics "knowledge is made of the necessary connectivity of events rather than of the necessary relation of genus and species". Stoic Logic is a conglomeration of changing marks and not as a bundle of eternal attributes or properties. There is no first cause, no resting place for any casual explanation, no eternal facts. The death of both Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics.

“Perception is itself propositional as a presentation of sensation it is said to reveal or indicate both itself and its cause. This is a natural sign. For the Sceptics the Stoics could only conceive of the sign as capable only of recalling what had been directly apprehended - "by reason of internal speech or reason" - Because sign itself is of the form: "if this, then that." Thus, the existence of sign follows from the nature and constitution of man. The sign is not a substitute for direct apprehension or sensory datum, but the irreducible and fundamental unit of knowledge.

“For the me all thinking is in signs. Perception is a process of inference by means of natural signs and intuition is not immediate non-inferential grasp, "presence." Anything which determines something else refer to an object to which itself refers.

“For both of us the uninterruptible juggernaut, the "movement of signification" is not to be grounded in or resolved into any intuition or unmediated grasp. The "thing itself"  - " is always already a signifier, a representative shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The thing-in-itself functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified hides itself constantly and is always on the move.

“For me a sign signifies by producing its interpretant, or the effect of a sign on someone who reads or comprehends it, in other words, a further thought which refers to the same object. This adds something to the meaning under which the reference is made. Then it becomes itself a sign in need of further determination in a succeeding interpretant that is projected into the future. The "self-identity" of the object "the signified" does not "hide itself constantly," it produces itself progressively but not definitively through the succession of thoughts or signs.”

When I was finally given a chance to speak I responded, arrogantly, “You concept of the sign is nice, I guess, but what of play? For me play is the notion of limitless signification in the absence of the transcendental signified because from the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs, therefore we think only in signs. This ruins notion of the sign. This leads to the deconstruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence.”

She immediately replied, and subsequently shut me down with, “Due to my empiricist future-orientation in the connective logic of the Stoics, I don't have a concept of play, because I don't care about an originary grounding in truth. The sign has a triadic structure, or relationship, consisting in;

 

1. "the being of positive qualitative possibility,

2. the being of actual fact, and

3. the being of law that will govern facts in the future," also referred to as firstness, secondness and thirdness.

 

The "thing in itself" is the object taken as a construct of law because meaning will always mold reactions to itself, in a way that its own being consists". This is the closest thing I have to a sense of play. You hold that the absence of the transcendental signified unveils the fact that the play of signification that constitutes the world. For you experience has always had a relationship with presence. Giving you the ammo to exclude empiricism from philosophy. But also using it as a grounding. It is true that the indicative function is "motivation", it moves a 'thinking being' to pass by thought from something else. Always on the side of psychic motivations. With its "origin" in the connecting empirical existents in the world. As Barnouw (1986) said,

 

"Expression is the fixation of ideal meaning within the self-evidence of inner existence and should be thought of as making possible, not communication to others of what we think or mean (this must be given up to indication), but rather repetition for ourselves of a meaning that remains identical to itself. Identity and repetition are what make possible meaning in Husserl's restricted sense, and this is essential to his interest in the objectivity or ideality that is achieved through signs."[1]

 

For the phenomenologist all signs are reduced to indication because of the externality associated with objectivity. "The certainty of inner existence doesn't need to be signified. "It is immediately present to itself." While I deny the presumption of a primordial presentation, you do not deny its presumption, and thus retains the sense of heterogeneity between ideal and empirical.

          “From here we can get into my definition of intuition. An intuition, is "a cognition not determined by a previous cognition of the same object, thus it is determined by something out of consciousness." An intuition is "nearly the same as 'premise not itself a conclusion'." "Perception is a continual interpretation of new "data" in the light of the old and as adding to and modifying it, but nowhere in the process is there a simple given. What is taken as immediate in intuition is necessarily mediate, determined by prior cognitions of the same object, that is, the result of inference and also giving rise to further inference." This pragmatists definition of the sign. We only hear sounds in relation to memories or previous sounds. "Every thought must be interpreted in another", every thought must be inferred from another, i.e. that no thought can have its origin or object in an unknowable thing-in-itself.  No thought, or sign, is at any instant present to the mind in its entirety, they exist in different times connected by a consciousness running through them. It is something which we live through or experience as we do the events of the day. "Différance in the sense of differentiation is essential to our grasp of any single content in its self-identity." There is no need for paradox. "We have no images even in actual perception." If we have a picture before us when we see, "it is one constructed by the mind at the suggestion of previous sensations." All association is by signs." Cognizability and being, based in knowledge as defined by a community, are metaphysically the same and synonymous terms. There is nothing, to prevent our knowing outward things as they really are, although we can never be absolutely certain. Each "thought suggests something to the thought which follows it, i.e. is the sign of something to this latter" and "is translated or interpreted" by the latter." For me there can be no crystallized or permanent law, because this would inhibit learning and habit formation. The capacity to learn is fundamental in out probable knowledge based objective reality of chance in the universe. My laxity of determination, or play, promotes the concrete development of rationality, in the mind and the world and through their interrelation.”

          She finished her lecture then left. I was left to think about the abolition of the transcendental signified or "thing in itself." Zenobia was right. With its abolition the mind is free of objective constraints exerted by reality, or should even want to be, is nonsense to me. The resistance afforded by realities came across in experience is crucial to cognizing the reality of the law, or rather the nature of a sign. Sign relations articulate the structure of reality but not apart from the human mind. 

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[1] Peirce and Derrida: "Natural Signs" Empiricism versus "Originary Trace" Deconstruction by Jeffrey Barnouw from Poetics Today

Vol. 7, No. 1 (1986), pp. 73-94 (22 pages) Published By: Duke University Press https://doi.org/10.2307/1772089