I'd discussed a bit last week about Peirce and Derrida in the context of signs. As I mentioned, one big criticism of Derrida is that he purports to adopt the notion of sign from Peirce but actually maintains much more of a connection to Saussure. I've been reading one paper on this that some might find interesting. It's "Peirce and Derrida: 'Natural Signs' Empiricism versus 'Originary Trace' Deconstruction" (Poetics Today, 7:1; 1986) by Jeffrey Barnouw. Now Barnouw is familiar with Peirce so I think this challenge is something one has to address. Underneath Barnouw's challenge is the idea that Peirce is empirical in a fashion that Derrida attacks in empiricsts and even Husserl. The issue is natural signs. (And this was brought up in the Valve debate about Derrrida as well) Natural signs ends up being, I believe, about indexes in Peirce's jargon about signs.
Barnouw asserts that while Derrida adopts Peirce's notion of unlimited semiosis (signification as an unending process) He then says that the problem with this is that Peirce's definitions of the sign is
rooted in the empiricist conception of natural signs at work in perception, a conception which competes and conflicts with Derrida's thesis of an "originary trace" understood in difference.
Peirce traced this empiricism back to Berkeley, although the influence of Helmholtz seems to have been at least as important for his appropriation of it. In either case the analysis of sense perception as a process relying on natural signs was fundamental to the empiricist approach. ...The crucial point, established in detail in the conclusion, is that Peirce's conception that all thinking is in signs depends on his continuation of the classic doctrine of natural signs, and that it provides the core of an empiricism against which Derrida's strictures can be fairly assessed. (74)
Barnouw has a paper where he critiques Saussure's conception of the sign ("Signification and Meaning: A Critique of the Saussurean Conception of the Sign," Comparative Literature Studies 18:260). I confess I've not read that paper. Referring to this paper Barnouw says "[Saussure's] conception [of the sign] is determentally one-sided and fundamentally at odds with Peirce's conception of the sign." However he doesn't elaborate although I think most Peirceans quickly see what is problematic with Saussure. What is odd to me though is that he says,
Actually Derrida finally accepts Saussure's conception, freed of its phonocentric bias, and in effect suppresses Peirce's. The result of the deconstruction of Saussure's sign concept is only to exacerbate the incompatibility with empiricism grounded in natural signs.
By going behind Saussure's thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign to its indispensable correlate and foundation, the thesis of difference as the source of linguistic value" (pg. 52) Derrida finds the cue for his own concept - or, as he would have it, non-concept - of "differance." 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 hte deliberately paradoxical notion of a pure and originary trace, which Derrida claims in the necessary precondition of linguistic meaning and of signs in any sense. (75)
Now originary trace is Derrida's notion of a sign as "present." I've argued that Peirce's immediate and dynamic object fulfill the same role. That is Peirce's immediate object within the sign is Derrida's originary trace. However clearly this aspect of Peirce's signs can be tied to arbitrary signs (symbols as signs) or natural signs (indexes as signs). The question is, does Derrida reject such?
Where I think Barnouw goes astray is found in his analysis of Derrida's notion of play. I'll quote the same passage of On Grammatology that Barnouw does.
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 deconstruction of onto-theology and the metaphysics of presence. (50)
Now Barnouw, somewhat understandably, appears to be taking this critique as missing Peirce's notion of "in the long run" wherein the Kantian "thing-in-itself" is lost as the thing in Truth becomes what an ideal community would assert of it. That is the sum of representations. This would be an "end" and thus the very transcendental signified that Derrida rejects. The key to understanding Peirce here is to recognize that this is a possibly infinitely deferred future. If we talk of any finite community in a finite amount of time (what Derrida is concerned with) or even infinite in the sense of small senses of infinity (aleph0, aleph1) then Derrida and Peirce agree. Further when Peirce talks of this sense of truth as destined he doesn't mean it in the sense that Derrida critiques (destiny as entailed of logical necessity) This reading of Peirce would be very much at odds with both his conception of evolution as well as his cosmology. So there are some temporal aspects to Peirce's conception of signs that can't be neglected.
Play, for Derrida, is to be precisely about the fact that the dynamic object, or the thing itself, is always absent in any sign. We have but the immediate object that only gives a hint towards the dynamic object. That "gap" between thing and hint of thing opens up a phenomenology of guessing which is precisely the notion of Derridean play. While Derrida criticizes empiricism it does so on the basis of ignoring this gap. That is we can have a static representation given to us. But then, if we take Peirce seriously, he too rejects this remnant of Cartesianism implicit in empiricisms. I think one must keep in mind that when Derrida rejects empiricism it is not the empirical, broadly conceived, that he rejects. (The idea that something Other "gives to us" an experience) Rather he is critiquing a particular way of conceiving of the empirical as found in the empiricist tradition. But clearly Peirce too is doing this.
There are a few other points, which I'll get to an other day. The issue of indexes still needs to be addressed in more depth. However this post is long enough as is.
I was going to talk about the rest of the paper in a second post, but it ends up being more of the same.
I'd say that one reason one doesn't encounter icons or indexes in On Grammatology is due to the focus on language which is, for Peirce, conventional and thus a Symbol. I think the concern that Derrida doesn't engage in icons or indexes is a valid one, although it can be addressed. I'll hopefully do that later.
The other concern about eternally absent objects I think I addressed. One thing to keep in mind is that Peirce's approach to signs isn't to consider it primarily from the point of view of the interpretant (i.e. the interpreter and their interpretation). Rather it is to consider it from the object which via the sign determines the interpretant. Thus it reverses the normal order. However note that this makes doing a normal comparison between Derrida and Peirce more complex as Derrida is looking at it from the interpreter's point of view (phenomenology). However, as I said in the above, Peirce still has an absent object as an essential part of his logic.
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