> On Oct 23, 2015, at 1:19 PM, Edwina Taborsky <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > Thomas - I think that Gary F's outline is, as I said, postmodernism - > grounded in Derrida's 'differance' and 'presence'...and 'rhetoric' [taking > names]. Nothing to do with Peirce and I don't see that Derrida was a scholar > of Peirce (he was more firmly Saussurian).
??? Derrida’s whole point was that Saussure was wrong and Pierce was right. The whole first half of On Grammatology, one of his most famous works, is just about this. Even if you dislike Derrida and that style of philosophy, I think the first half of On Grammatology is worth reading. http://www.mohamedrabeea.com/books/book1_3997.pdf <http://www.mohamedrabeea.com/books/book1_3997.pdf> (Sorry, this seems to be OCRed and is pages 49 - 50) In his project of semiotics, Peirce seems to have been more attentive than Saussure to the irreducibility of this becoming-unmotivated. In his terminology, one must speak of a becoming-unmotivated of the symbol, the notion of the symbol playing here a role analogous to that of the sign which Saussure opposes precisely to the symbol: Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbol. Peirce complies with two apparently incompatible exigencies. The mis-take here would be to sacrifice one for the other. It must be recognized that the symbolic (in Peirce’s sense: of “the arbitrariness of the sign”) is rooted in the nonsymbolic, in an anterior and related order of signification: “Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs.” But these roots must not compromise the structural originality of the field of symbols, the autonomy of a domain, a production, and a play: “So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbol.” But in both cases, the genetic root-system refers .from sign to sign. No ground of nonsignification—understood as insignificance or an intuition of a present truth—stretches out to give it foundation under the play and the coming into being of signs. Semiotics no longer depends on logic. Logic, according to Peirce, is only a semiotic: “Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I have shown, only another name for semiotics (semeiotike), the quasi- necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.” And logic in the classical sense, logic “properly speaking,” nonformal logic commanded by the value of truth, occupies in that semiotics only a determined and not a fundamental level. As in Husserl (but the analogy, although it is most thought-provoking, would stop there and one must apply it carefully), the lowest level, the foundation of the possibility of logic (or semiotics) corresponds to the project of the Grammatica speculativa of Thomas d’Erfurt, falsely attributed to Duns Scotus. Like Husserl, Peirce expressly refers to it. It is a matter of elaborating, in both cases, a formal doctrine of conditions which a discourse must satisfy in order to have a sense, in order to “mean,” even if it is false or contradictory. The general morphology of that meaning 10 (Bedeutung, vouloir-dire) is independent of all logic of truth. The science of semiotic has three branches. The first is called by Duns Scotus grammatica speculativa. We may term it pure grammar. It has for its task to ascertain what must be true of the representamen used by every scientific intelligence in order that they may embody any meaning. The second is logic proper. It is the science of what is quasi-necessarily true of the representamina of any scientific intelligence in order that they may hold good of any object, that is, may be true. Or say, logic proper is the formal science of the conditions of the truth of representations.. The third, in imitation of Kant’s fashion of preserving old associations of words in finding nomenclature for new conceptions, I call pure rhetoric. Its task is to ascertain the laws by which in every scientific intelligence one sign gives birth to another, and especially one thought brings forth another. Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such a signified. Now Peirce con-siders the indefiniteness of reference as the criterion that allows us to recognize that we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. What broaches the movement of signification is what makes its interruption impossible. The thing itself is a sign. An unacceptable proposition for Husserl, whose phenomenology remains therefore—in its “principle of principles”—the most radical and most critical restoration of the metaphysics of presence. The difference between Husserl’s and Peirce’s phenomenologies is fundamental since it concerns the concept of the sign and of the manifestation of presence, the relationships between the re-presentation and the originary presentation of the thing itself (truth). On this point Peirce is undoubtedly closer to the inventôr of the word phenomenology: Lambert proposed in fact to “reduce the theory of things to the theory of signs.” Ac-cording to the “phaneoroscopy” or “phenomenology” of Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that “the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign.” 12 There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called “thing itself” is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself. The property of the representamen is not to be proper [propre], that is to say absolutely proximate to itself (prope, proprius). The represented is always already a representamen. Definition of the sign: Anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, this interpretant be-coming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum. . . . If the series of successive interpretants comes to an end, the sign is thereby rendered imperfect, at least >From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think >only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion of the sign at the very >moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognized in the absoluteness >of its right. One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified >as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of onto- theology >and the metaphysics of presence. It is not surprising that the shock, shaping >and undermining metaphysics since its origin, lets itself be named as such in >the period when, refusing to bind linguistics to semantics (which all European >linguists, from Saussure to Hjemslev, still do), expelling the problem of >meaning outside of their researches, certain American linguists constantly >refer to the model of a game. Here one must think of writing as a game within >language. (The Phaedrus (277e) condemned writing precisely as play—paidia—and >opposed such childishness to the adult gravity [spoudè] of speech). This >play, thought as absence of the transcendental signified, is not a play in the >world, as it has always been defined, for the purposes of containing it, by >the philosophical tradition and as the theoreti- cians of play also consider >it (or those who, following and going beyond Bloomfield, refer semantics to >psychology or some other local discipline). To think play radically the >ontological and transcendental problematics must first be seriously exhausted; >the question of the meaning of being, the being of the entity and of the >transcendental origin of the world—of the world-ness of the world—must be >patiently and rigorously worked through, the critical movement of the >Husserlian and Heideggerian questions must be effectively followed to the very >end, and their effectiveness and legibility must be conserved. Even if it were >crossed out, without it the concepts of play and writing to which I shall have >recourse will remain caught within regional limits and an empiricist, >positivist, or metaphysical discourse. The counter- move that the holders of >such a discourse would oppose to the precritical tradition and to metaphysical >speculation would be nothing but the worldly representation of their own >operation. It is there-fore the game of the world that must be first thought; >before attempting to understand all the forms of play in the world.
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