Notes on Derrida’s ‘Signature Event Context’

Derrida’s ‘Signature Event Context’

A Critical Summary

Introduction

The essay, “Signature Event Context”, by Jacques Derrida was originally written for a conference on the theme of “Communication” in Montreal, August, 1971, where he explicates on his theory of speech and writing.

This essay hence proves to be one of Derrida’s clearest explications on two key notions that pervade his entire work. The first is the notion of iterability, and the second is the notion of logocentrism – two key notions that are definitive and integral components of western thought!

To Derrida, speech is also a kind of writing. In this respect, his theory is in every way a sharp contrast to Marshall McLuhan’s concept of ‘writing’ and the media.

The Epigraph to the Essay

Derrida begins his essay with an epigraph by Austin, taken from his most influential work, titled, How to Do Things with Words.

It goes thus -

"Still confining ourselves for simplicity to spoken utterance”, which serves to foreground the logocentric assumptions of the statement, and thereby establish a hierarchy of meaning.

The dictionary, for example, practices this logocentric assumption, in which, the primary meaning of a word is mentioned first, followed by its secondary meanings.

However, to Derrida, words are necessarily polysemic!

So Derrida then dwells on the polysemic meaning of communication.

‘Communication’ as a Vehicle or as a Means of Transport

Derrida then asks if the word or signifier ‘communication’ corresponds to a concept that is ‘communicable’?

If so, then one must ask oneself, what does the word [or signifier] ‘communication’ communicate?

Does it communicate a

determinate content,

an identifiable meaning,

or

a describable value.

Derrida then predetermines the concept of communication as a vehicle, a means of transport or transitional medium of a meaning!

Communication & Context

The word ‘communication’ can be reduced by the limits of what is called a ‘context’.

The ‘context’ restricts the meaning of the word.

According to Derrida, a context is never absolutely determinable!

The notion of writing can only be seen as a means of communication, that  extends across time and space. In other words writing merely extends the domain of oral or gestural communication.

Limitations of Oral Communication

In fact, writing offers a sort of ‘homogeneous space’ of communication, because, in locutory communication, the voice or gesture would encounter therein a restriction or a factual limit, an empirical boundary of space and of time, while writing, in the same time and in the same space, would be capable of ‘relaxing’ those limits and hence the unity and wholeness of meaning would not be affected in its essence!

To Derrida, then, traditional Western metaphysical philosophy is therefore an ‘extension’ of speech.

Writing Does not Change the Content of the Oral Tradition

Writing to Derrida, (in contrast to McLuhan’s theory) does not alter or change the content of the oral tradition, since the same ideas in the oral tradition can be communicated in a ‘vehicular way’ through writing, in the written tradition as well, without in any way changing the content!

One of the main axioms of American Media Studies is that, writing has its own biases, when contrasted with the oral tradition. And this is exactly where Derrida differs from Marshall McLuhan.

Derrida’s Attack on Condillac’s Theory of Writing

Then he proceeds to attack Condillac’s theory of writing, by citing from Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, in which he portrays writing as a ‘natural development’ of the knowledge, and the ideas of the oral tradition, first by the drawing of pictures, then pictographic writing, and then gradually grows more abstract, and thereby becomes a seamless extension of the oral tradition.

In the Western metaphysical tradition, writing has always been addressed to an absent audience - the primary difference between writing and speech, in the Western tradition, something that Derrida contests, vehemently against.

According to Derrida, Condillac has not discussed the idea of absence in terms of the centre.

For example, when someone reads a particular author’s text, the author is ‘absent’ to the reader, and the author might have been dead as well. Therefore, there is a certain ‘non-presence’.

In the ‘logocentric tradition’, logocentrism is the metaphysics of presence, through which absence is seen a supplement to it. Derrida hence develops his own theory of media here, based on the ‘absence’, a kind of ontology of absence, that displaces the concept of writing, and reframes it with his theory of differance – as an endless chain of significations.

Sign, Imagination & Memory

The sign comes into being at the same time as imagination and memory, the moment it is necessitated by the absence of the object from present perception.

Memory consists in nothing but the power of recalling the signs of our ideas, or the circumstances that accompanied them; and this power only takes place by virtue of the analogy of the signs.

A written sign is hence proffered in the absence of the receiver.

Absence: Merely a Distance Presence

At the moment when an author is writing, the receiver may be absent from the author’s field of present perception. ‘But is not this absence merely a distant presence, one which is delayed or which, in one form or another, is idealized in its representation?’ asks Derrida.

My Communication Must be Repeatable-Iterable!

In order for my “written communication” to retain its function as writing, i.e., its readability, it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver, determined in general. My communication must be repeatable-iterable in the absolute absence of the receiver, he says!

A writing that is not structurally readable-iterable-beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing.

To Write is to Produce a ‘Mark’!

A mark is a sign that has been divested of the metaphysics of presence.

Therefore, ‘to write’ is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning, offering things and itself to be read and to be rewritten.

It is the structure of the ‘mark’ that makes it writing as such! 

And the mark of writing is its iterability! Its legibility.

Writing has to be legible. In the absence of a centre, I should still be able to read and understand what the centre intended or meant in sending this message.

Writing has to be iterable or legible in the sense that it should be able to be divorced from its originary source, from the source of the author, or the context that originated it.

Derrida then takes the concept of absence and iterability and extends it across all other media.

The Signifier is No Longer Grounded by the Signified

Speech therefore, according to Derrida is not at all different from writing, it is also separable from its original context. The signifiers in both speech and writing are separable from their original context, both in speech and writing. And they are capable of being inscribed and being grafted into other contexts. The signifier is no longer grounded by the signified, since all the signifieds now exist outside the context of the metaphysically encoding systems.

This is in sharp contrast to the MacLuhan idea of Media Studies, in which MacLuhan says that, every medium has its own bias. Thus Derrida rescues ‘writing’ from domination and tyranny by the metaphysics of presence in the logocentric tradition.

Then Derrida moves on to Austin’s theory of the distinction between ‘performative utterances’ and ‘constative utterances’.

Constative utterances are assertive statements, classical ‘assertions’, generally considered as true or false ‘descriptions’, of facts, whereas, performative utterances make something happen! (from the English ‘performative’, allowing to accomplish something through speech itself).

Performative Utterances make ‘Something Happen!’

Although Derrida is quite appreciative of Austin’s attempt to liberate performative statements from the true/false dichotomy, he critiques Austin for depending too much on the notions of intention, context, and convention.

To Derrida, an utterance can only “succeed” if its formulation is repeatable, or iterable, or if it can be identified as a “citation”, conforming to a predictable structure, at some point in the past!

Derrida extends this concept of iterability to written texts, and gives signatures as an example. He claims that in order for a signature to be valid, it must contain the qualities of being repeatable and imitable, conforming to a predictable structure, at some point in the past!

The signature anchors the performative utterance in the written version. The signature supplements or compensate the living presence of the author, and thereby authorises it!

At the same time, it also indicates a future presence, with the possibility of the reproducibility of the signature, as an authority of the document that’s being signed.

One reason why he ironically ends the paper by signing his own name, by saying,

The-written-text of this oral communication was to be delivered to the Association des societes de philosophie de langue francaise, ahead of the meeting. That dispatch should thus have been signed. Which I do, and counterfeit, here. Where? There. J.D.

Conclusion

Speech and writing are two forms of media that are doing the same thing! Both based on the same model of differance, the endless play of signifying chains based on the iterability and possibility of removing them from their original contexts, of deauthorising both the signifiers from their original signifieds, and generating entirely new contexts of meaning around them. As such, there is basically no difference between speech and writing, concludes Derrida.