Protecting Meaning?

It’s so hard for anyone of us to consider that the language we use is flawed.  If language is the tool we use to communicate the ideas that are in our heads I can tell you even without reading Locke or Derrida that I cant recall ever actually communicating my ideas fully with 100% clarity, that is, with every single subtle nuance and feeling involved.  I think we get so accustomed to failing communications 100% that we naturally find a way to get enough of our ideas communicated as to leave us satisfied with the goal of our communication. 

I see clearly why we read Locke and Derrida together, Derrida picks up with Locke didn’t have time to expand. I use the word time because I feel as though he would have if there were more hours in the day.  As Locke suggests, we are all taught simple meanings to simple words relatively unanimously with subtle variations. However, when they become complex, mixed modes, we lack the tangibility in the environment to maintain and universal meaning from person to person and place to place. (818, Locke) Derrida expands on this by holding that “language--especially written language--cannot escape the built-in biases of the cultural history that produced it”. (253, Herrick) When we try and explain one of these complex situations to a friend we can never truly relay what we felt with 100% accuracy, for Derrida we have to constantly use other words to reinforce the meaning.  Which then becomes a never-ending hand-off of meaning that postpones communication indefinitely.  The differance is, (please correct me at will, this is why I’m including this metaphor)as I understand it, to be the shoelace that makes your shoes different from your friends but defines them both as shoes in a general sense. It’s the difference in those laces that make one a shoe with red shoes and one a shoe with blue, but the presence of those laces in both that remain as they are both shoes.  This example may not cover it but it’s the best I could do!

The first big question I had (other than the second-or-two too long it took me to break down “irreducibly”) was about the difference between his term “differance” and the typical term “difference”.  It couldn’t be specifically to use spell check against me, moreover, what is Derrida saying about signification/meaning/rhetoric in general, or the actuality of differences with this subtle change in spelling that we cannot hear?  “The a of differance… is not heard; it remains silent, secret, and discreet, like a tomb” (280, Derrida).  He states himself in the next passage that this difference in terms must be explicitly stated every time it’s used verbally and how that wouldn’t make anything easier (281, Derrida).  Derrida talks about the idea that I understood to be keeping the basis of this meaning in text form. “This will refer irreducibly to a written text, a text governing my talk… “ (281, Derrida) When Locke starts to outline the ways in which meanings start to vary, he states this as one of those reasons, “where the ideas they stand for have no certain connection in nature; and so no settled standard anywhere in nature existing, to rectify and adjust them by” (818, Locke) Perhaps a piece of the purpose-puzzle of Derrida’s different term “differance” was to provide a standard in nature that exists for his idea and for people’s protean meanings of that idea to be rectified and adjusted by, perhaps to protect them from misinterpretation by forcing them to be based physically in text?

Works cited


• Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, Second Edition. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Wiley/Blackwell, 2004. 278-288.
• Herrick, James A. The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction, Third Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson, 2005. Excerpts on “Contemporary Rhetoric” (222-240), “Derrida” (253-256)
• Locke, John. "From An Essay Concerning Human Understanding." The Rhetorical Tradition: Reading  from Classical Times to the Present, Second Edition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 817-827.