The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 21
deconstructive work had been applied to deconstruction itself (the word
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and the thing) – Derrida began to accept it as one term among many in
an evolving ensemble of such terms. The point would be more in line with
the phenomenon of the evolving self-destructive ensemble, than with any
attempt to find the single meaning or word.
In the following discussion of method in relation to deconstruction I will
refer from time to time to this phenomenon (the evolving self-destructive
ensemble) as a way of thinking about how deconstruction works (what hap-
pens, who or what does what and to whom, what are the consequences, what
can we do?) while putting the word itself under some strain. Shortly after the 1966 conference in America, ‘schools’ of deconstruction appeared, with the
so-called Yale School becoming prominent. Significantly, the writers associated with the Yale School (they were after all at Yale) were literary critics.
It was not an isolated phenomenon. Literature departments have always,
rightly or wrongly, been the first among disciplines to foster the interest in deconstruction. In actuality, deconstruction (or ‘theory’ as academic departments tend to call it) implies a kind of activity somewhere between literature and philosophy, but reducible to neither, more scientific than science can be, and more philosophical than most critics and some commentators realise.
At the heart of deconstruction lies the question of reading, which hence-
forth will be difficult to distinguish absolutely from writing. When a person reads, a kind of writing takes place: repeating, revising, decontextualising, recontextualising and so on. In certain cases this ‘taking place’ attains the status of an ‘event’. The aim of deconstruction (if we for now restrict the term to the concerns of method) is to produce such an event. So deconstruction could not be simply a method of reading. Rather it names the
necessity that puts this reading-as-writing in a privileged place with respect to any method in any activity whatsoever (scientific, critical, philosophical, ethical and so on). The concern with reading, furthermore, if we pursue the notion of reading-as-writing a bit, could not be reduced to any of the ancient or modern notions of interpretation. The notion of reading-as-writing
implies an activity but it also demands passivity on the part of the reader, who repeats but by doing so helps bring about the surprise of some event.
Derrida will at length refer to this reading-as-writing as acti-passivity. So we now speak in terms of how we might produce a critical reading rather than about guidelines for or practices of reading. A critical reading has a peculiar status in relation to the texts in connection with which it is produced, and it implies an irreducible element of parasitism. Derrida’s texts are critical readings. Later in his career, even his own texts become the object of his
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of a text that he or she reads and yet shows an apparent disregard for what in normal circumstances, and by the logic of standard ways of reading, would
be respected as its intentional or deliberate content.
Principles of Deconstruction
It has been often said, correctly, that deconstruction, whatever it is, is not a method. And this despite numerous high-profile dictionary and encyclopaedia entries that claim it is. A more or less official and certainly pervasively received idea of deconstruction therefore lends credence to other more
trenchant positions that seek to criticise deconstruction, as if it involved the decisions, techniques, objects and aims that, normally speaking, characterise methods. What is more to the point, yet less often said, is that in producing the kinds of critical reading associated with deconstruction there inevitably develops a discourse on the concept of method. This is also correct but could lead the unwary into the trap of believing that deconstruction is simply a
kind of meta-philosophy (as is sometimes also said), a discourse on or about philosophy. And while to some extent it is, this too gets us off the point, because it leaves in question the basic assumption: if deconstruction is a
discourse on or about philosophy then what kind of discourse is it? What
language other than that of philosophy could possibly be adequate for a
discourse on philosophy? So not a method, exactly, nor a meta-philosophy,
quite, deconstruction nonetheless implies a discourse on method and a way
of questioning philosophy in philosophical language, or at least in a language not distinct from the language that philosophy too must employ. Within this generality (which applies to all Western philosophy since its pre-Socratic
dawn) it becomes necessary to identify some specifics, which mark this
discourse (deconstruction) out from the rest and provide some footholds
for those who would like to participate in some way. A complication arises in that these specifics begin surprisingly (for they nearly always come at first in the form of questions about marginal, even trivial, matters) to mark the most trenchant concerns of philosophy at its most general.
There’s no ideal order in which to lay down the ‘rules’ (for want of a better term) of deconstruction. But we could argue the following: we may begin in
a way that is oriented by what Derrida refers to as ‘the thought of the trace’
(Derrida [1967: 233] 1998: 162). The thought of the trace would not be an
argument (as in a point of view or a position that one takes) but rather it would serve the role of a principle, in the time-honoured sense of this word, meaning a proposition that expresses a basic truth to be followed in the service of a philosophy (and so an aesthetics, an ethics, a politics or a science).
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A principle more generally would be a kind of rule or imperative by which
one could live. That should already be a bit surprising. Not many people
today would say that deconstruction proceeds on the basis of a fundamental
truth. So what then is this thought of the trace? As a fundamental truth
it’s complicated because the thought, such as it is, actually robs us of the very thing it is supposed to provide: a secure and authoritative beginning.
And, as ever, it concerns what at first could easily be taken, and dismissed, as a relatively trivial truth in the sphere of philosophical activity. It can be located in writing, its most secure and visible medium, as a quality without which there would be no such phenomenon. There are three distinct ways
of presenting it.
1. Evidentially: It is merely a matter of evidential certainty, and thus indubitable, that the basic unit of writing is what it is because it can be repeated. Such a unit need not even amount to a letter, for diacritical
marks (accents and so on), as well as punctuation, all function in the
same way; and letters too, depending on the writing system, can be
made up of different and exchangeable parts. It simply is not pos-
sible to imagine such a mark independently of this possibility. When
someone inscribes one on a parchment, a blackboard, a piece of paper,
a computer screen, or wherever, what appears there is precisely a
repeatable, something whose essence is its repeatability, something that is perceived in the dimension of its repeatability rather than in
its appearance as such: I perceive the letter ‘a’ not as a unique once-
only form but as a repeatable, remarkable mark. I recognise it and can
immediately distribute it in various (and I intuit, infinite) contexts.
The mark that appears already takes us from the sphere of evidential
experience into a rather more difficult sphere to comprehend without
some logical unravelling: a mark, in order for it to be the mark it is,
must be able to be repeated.
2. Logically: The repeatability of the mark implies a kind of identity that is predicated fundamentally on difference. If a mark must be repeatable in order for it to be the mark it is then even in the pre-nascent
possibility of its repetition a difference is implied. No iteration of a
single mark can be regarded as having the identical form of any other
one. Each repetition of the same mark is logically distinct. This ‘a’
differs from this ‘a’. Quite a strange logical form of the otherwise
commonplace notion of ‘difference’ is now implied. The difference in
question does not distinguish between two different things (say an ‘a’
and a ‘b’). It distinguishes one instance of the same thing from another
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instance of it. But the distinguishing difference must be regarded as
having its effect a priori. The written mark is only what it is by virtue
of the fact that it may be repeated. Logically, then, this structure of
repeatability shares some characteristics with the Platonic tradition’s
theory of types, according to which every empirical form instantiates
imperfectly the single purely intelligible type to which it belongs, its
eidos. I mention this now to illustrate why the apparently trivial domain of written marks might end up having more general implications. The
logic of the mark’s repeatable structure permits neither any purely
intelligible form nor any brute empirical or material existence for writ-
ing, yet in every other respect the Platonic condition is fulfilled. And,
in the meantime, the difference from itself of the mark has already
hinted at some qualities that indicate what kind of ‘being’ such a mark
might have.
3. Ontologically: … or almost … The difference from itself of the mark as a consequence of its repeatability gives to this insignificant little phenomenon a form of existence that at least in traditional terms would
not amount to much, not even to being as such. A written mark does
not exist (as such) independently of its repeatable structure, which
thus allows it to appear only as the trace of something else (in the logi-
cal instance itself). It never has its own proper independent ontological
character but appears always and everywhere in the form of a trace of
a trace, and so part of a universe (the writing system) of nothing but
traces of traces.
These three modes of the thought of the trace (the evident structure of
the trace in the written mark, the logical necessity of its repeatability, and the a priori force of its difference from self) will come to organise and underwrite everything that happens in the field of deconstruction. In Derrida’s
Of Grammatology he works out the modes of the trace in terms like textuality, supplement, differance and arche-writing. Already we can identify some provisional implications by which to proceed.
First, so long as we remain within the domain of writing, conventionally
speaking, these propositions will be evidently true and, within the entire
history of Western philosophy, not at all controversial. The question then
would be to what extent is it possible to cordon off such a domain so that
any implications derived from it could be controlled and maintained within
it? The impact of deconstruction has to do with the rigorous form of this
question, the productive failure of every attempt to control and contain the domain of writing, and consequently the consistency of its application to
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virtually any (perhaps every) field of philosophical questioning. This cannot, for reasons that will be developed in what follows, be simply asserted without demonstration. We can acknowledge however that Derrida’s readings of the
1960s and ’70s tend to focus on the complex structures by which texts in
the Western philosophical tradition reveal paradoxical attempts to exclude
from the sphere of philosophical activity all the effects I have just enumerated associated with writing. Not only does the attempt each time evidently fail, but also, and more to the point, a project of a philosophy – especially one that regards itself as scientific in some way – seems to depend for any possible measure of its success on exactly those effects that it attempts to exclude. Quietly there’s much at stake. A philosophical project (whether in the name of knowledge, reason, justice or art) seems to require a priority for the presence of the thought, or the context, or the being of what exists, or at least of the signs by which the world is produced and maintained. But the
thought of the trace does not permit a priority for presence (writing never amounts to more than a trace of a trace). In a provisional way one can assume that if the structure of the trace applies in any field of philosophical activity (or for that matter any other) then nothing in this field would be free from the implications to be drawn from it.
Second, if we cannot contain the thought of the trace in the domain of
writing, conventionally speaking, then we must operate as if there were
no other domain (nothing ‘outside’ the domain governed by the effects of
textuality). Oddly enough and conversely this constraint implies a possibly uncomfortable kind of freedom and so a kind of responsible irresponsibil-ity. Deconstruction proceeds by implication in various (perhaps illimitable) forms of inventive repetition. The logic of the structure of the trace must be instantiated in such a way that this logic is rendered apparent in the
form of an event of repetition. We can assume, again without controversy,
that most kinds of repetition do not amount to events in the sense meant
here (something that comes without warning, unexpectedly). A project of
deconstruction, however, while acknowledging the productive limitations of
repeatability, would put it to work in a way that allows for the reproduction of a prior structure in a novel form. So nothing in deconstruction occurs
in anything other than a form (a formal repetition) of something that has
already occurred. There are risks involved and one must, as Derrida puts
it, ‘take chances’.
Third, the forms by which something can occur are many. Following again
a rule that alters a Platonic principle, adjusting it in conformity with the thought of the trace, something that occurs in one form may be repeated
in an entirely different one. There’s room there for immense reserves of
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alteration, whereby the same thing can reappear in radically different forms, in different and unexpected contexts and with entirely altered senses and
shades of significance. These not entirely welcome consequences (but where
would we be without them?) can be tempered by a deconstructive sense of
responsibility, which implies a responsibility to the signature of the other in a repetition that in some way puts that signature to work in the form of a counter-signature. It helps to know a little about rhetoric and the styles not only (even if most obviously) of poetry but also of the formal properties of the logical proposition. Two senses of form apply (two forms of form):
the formal quality of a written work – its style – and the logical form of the proposition – which can remain relatively unchanged in the formal transfer.
The very possibility of a meta-language arises here: a language that takes
an alternative form to its so-called object language thus putting language in relation to itself, in the structural relation between a writing and a writing on writing. The viable and appropriate form of such a project would be
through what we still call today critical reading, that is, a way of reading that puts into question every existing protocol (every method) of reading while
producing a new text in a new form that in some way observes fidelity to the text being read.
To summarise, I have introduced in a preliminary way some principles of
deconstruction: the thought of the trace; the necessary repeatability of the mark; the difference of the mark from itself in its repetition; the failure of philosophy to exclude from its sphere the effects of the trace; and the idea of a project of deconstruction, which mobilises the thought of the trace as a form of signature.
Beginning: The Thought of the Trace and Intuition
All of that could not not proceed from the strange reference to an ‘else-
where’ from which the place and the language were unknown and pro-
hibited even to myself … ( Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida 1998: 70) So the kinds of critical reading that have come to be known by the name
deconstruction may be produced as repetitions mutatis mutandis. This Latin phrase (roughly ‘necessary changes having been made’) indicates situations
where an argument or account of something (in say philosophy, law, engi-
neering or science) may be transferred or applied to specific situations, in often quite altered arenas, if changes to details in these different contexts are granted (Aristotle’s identification of bird wings with the forelegs or arms of mammals, to use a very simple example). Derrida uses the phrase often. We
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might go so far as to say that each reading ought to be able to generate its own specific term that, without any synonymous correspondence, could nonetheless operate as an element in a chain of possible substitutions. In the works of the 1960s Derrida generates several such terms: supplement, differance,
