Derrida: "Signature Event Context" (1972)

In this essay, Derrida makes a number of strongly Wittgensteinian points about meaning and the use of language.

He notes that a sign always relies on a history of use in so far as it has a meaning, but that this history does not in and of itself constitute an unambiguous precedence. Theories with a strong or even mentalistic concept of “literal meaning” — Derrida duscusses Husserl and Austin — thus always have to jump through a lot of hoops in order to make it seem as if it were obvious how this word ought to be used in all future cases.

The Winding Road to Theory

He arrives at this conclusion by a somewhat strange route over a discussion of the concept of “writing.” According to Derrida, there is a classical philosophical theory which singles out writing as being different from speech in that it essentially involves a lot of peculiar absences — the physical absence of the writer, the somewhat vaguely defined role for the reader, and even the possible absence of a communicative intent in the writing itself.

However, he goes on, these features are in fact present in all communication, so we should really count speaking as a kind of “writing” as well if we take this definition literally.

We don't, of course, but the point is well taken: When a sign means something, it is because it echoes something else in the past.

There is therefore an essential tension between the observation that signs have meaning because they conform to a tradition of use, and the assumption that signs express inner, conscious, authentic intentions. Declaring a meeting open or declaring somebody husband and wife always is kind of theatrical, and the attempt in Husserl and Austin to ban all theatrical or “non-serious” uses of language from playing a role in the theory is therefore doomed from the outset.

Why This Post is So (Damn) Long

Book cover; from Wikipedia.

Derrida is such a bad writer that it can be really, really difficult to even parse his sentences, let alone to find out what his point is. Because it is so much work to plow through his layers of nested interjections and weird reverse sentence structures, tt always annoys me when people summarize him in broad strokes without commenting on specifics.

So I'll try something different here: I'll go through the text, literally page by page, trying to paraphrase everything he says in readable, English prose. If anybody finds this blasphemous, then I refer to that French philosopher who says that nobody owns the meaning of a text.

I'm following the page numbers as they appear in Limited Inc. Scans of the text is available from several university websites (e.g., here, here, and here).

I've not followed Derrida's headings, but rather divided up the text into some smaller chunks. This is partly to give the argument some structure and partly to give you some breathing space.

The Problem with Communication, Context, and Writing

The Problem of Communication, pp. 1–2

Derrida warms up with some reflections that are quite weakly related to the rest of the essay: We might, he says, be tempted to say that the invention of writing extended spoken communication into a new medium. But this presupposes a concept of "communication," and we cannot necessarily take this for granted.

The word "communication" can refer to the effects of physical forces as well as the effects of meaning. This might suggest that we can think of the concept of linguistic communication as a metaphorical extension of a literal concept of physical communication.

However, Derrida disapproves of this suggestion on the grounds that

1. he finds the whole idea of "literal meaning" suspect;
2. he considers it circular to base a theory of meaning on a theory of meaning.

The Problem of Context, pp. 2–3

Derrida thinks that there are indeed some problems with the seemingly unproblematic notion of "communication," and he locates these problems more precisely in the concept of "context."

Politeness is notorious for depending on context in subtle ways. Here, etiquette icon Emily Post
sidesteps the issue by giving a cut-and-dry prescription without any qualification. (From Etiquette, Ch. 28)

He asks:

But are the conditions of a context ever absolutely determinable? … Is there a rigorous and scientific concept of context? (pp. 2–3)

Lest you should think that the answer is yes, he asks an even more leading rhetorical question:

Or does the notion of context not conceal, behind a certain confusion, philosophical presuppositions of a very determinate nature? … I shall try to demonstrate why a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather, why its determination can never be entirely certain or saturated. (p. 3)

According to Derrida, this demonstration will

1. raise suspicions about the concept of context;
2. change the way we understand the concept of “writing”; specifically, he will question the idea that writing is a kind of transmission of information.

If Speech is Like Writing, We have a Problem, pp. 3–4

As stated above, Derrida notes that a lumping together speech and writing presupposes a unifying concept of communication:

To say that writing extends the field and powers of lucutory or gestural communication presupposes, does it not, a sort of homogenous space of communication? (p. 3)

If indeed there is such a homogenous space, then speech and writing should share most features. However, he will first argue that the "classical" theory of writing will claim that they are substantially different, and then that they in fact are quite similar after all.

The "Classical" Theory of Writing

Condillac on Writing, pp. 4–5

In order to sketch what the tradition has to say about writing, Derrida provides a couple of quotes by the French Enlightenment philosopher Étienne Condillac (1714–1780), specifically from his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746).

Condillac; from zeno.org.

He then quotes Condillac as saying that

Men in a state of communicating their thoughts by means of sounds, felt the necessity of imagining new signs capable of perpetuating those thoughts and of making them known to persons who are absent. (p. 4)

This passage comes from Part II, Section I, Chapter 13, §127 of Condillac's Essay. In the 2001 translation that I have linked to above, the word "absent" does not occur, but it does in fact in the French original.

Derrida thinks of this hypothetical origin of language as an explanation in terms of "economy," that is, practical concerns.

As one might suspect, Condillac thinks that writing is more civilized when it looks like Eurpoean writing: Thus Greek and Latin letters are the best, Egyptian hieroglyphs intermediate, and pictures are at the bottom.

Comments on Condillac, p. 5–7

Derrida again emphasizes the role of "absence" in Condillac's discussion. He stresses that

1. it is characteristic of writing that it continues to cause effects even after the departure of the writer;
2. to Condillac, absence is a gradual thinning out of presence (as in picture > symbol > letter).

Derrida also emphasizes the central role of analogy in Condillac's theory (words are analogous to thoughts, etc.)

He also repeats that Condillac is just one example of this theory, and that others could be given.

The Grand Claim, Part 1

Speech Might Be A Kind of Writing, p. 7

Derrida then proposes two "hypotheses":

1. All communication presupposes a kind of absence; so if writing is special, it must be because it presupposes an absence of a special kind.
2. Suppose we find out what this special kind of absence is, and suppose that it turns out to be shared by all other kinds of communication too; then there must be something wrong in our definitions of communication, or writing, or both.

This is a somewhat curious rhetorical somersault: First, Derrida has to sell us the rather unconventional idea that there is a classical theory of writing which defines writing in terms of a special kind of "absence." Then he has to shoot down that theory again.

Writing is Iterable, pp. 7–8

A swastika mosaic excavated from
a late ancient church in contemporary Israel.
If there ever was an "overdetermined" sign,
this symbol must surely be an example.
(Image from Wikipadia.)

So what kind of "absence" is characteristic of writing? Derrida proposes that the key is that writing is intelligible in the absence of an author. This means that it can be cited or read indefinitely, or in his phrase, "iterated."

The possibility of repeating and thus of identifying the marks is implicit in every code, making it into a [grid] that is communicable, transmittable, decipherable, iterable for a third, and hence for every possible user in general. (p. 8)

Here is another way of saying it: If a sign really means something, then other people can use it for their own purposes in other contexts. If they can't, it doesn't really have a meaning:

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 … (p. 8)

Alleged Consequences of the Iterability Claim, pp. 8–9:

This iterability theory of writing has, according to Derrida, four consequences:

1. It detaches writing from mentalistic notions like consciousness, intended meaning, etc. The theory is inconcsistent with the notion of "communication as communication of consciousnesses" or as a "semantic transport of the desire to mean" (p. 8).
2. It provokes "the disengagement of all writing from the semantic or hermeneutic horizons which … are riven by writing" (p. 9). What he means is perhaps that iterability is different from "meaning" in some limited, conventional sense.
3. It detached writing from "polysemics" (p. 9). Like the previous point, this could mean that the open-endedness of future use and citations is different from ambiguity of the more familiar kind, but I really don't know.
4. The concept of context becomes very problematic.

He says he will come back to all of these points later, but I don't know what he's referring to.

The Grand Claim, Part 2

The Characteristics of “Writing,” p. 9

At this point, Derrida wants to "demonstrate" that the iterability property is found in other kinds of communication in addition to writing, and, more generally, across "what philosophy would call experience" (p. 9).

Continuing his explanation of what he thinks Condillac is saying, he singles out three properties that writing is supposed to have according to the "classical" theory:

1. Writing subsists beyond the moment of production and "can give rise to an iteration in the absence … of the empirically determined subject who … emitted or produced it." (p. 9)
2. Writing "breaks with its context," where context means the moment of production, including the intention of the writer:

   But the sign possesses the characteristic of being readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moement he wrote it, i.e. abondened it to its essential drift. (p. 9)

   So once you write a sentence down, you lose control.
3. These breaks are related to the fact that writing is placed at some distance from the "other elements of the internal contextual chain" (p. 9). Presumably this chain is supposed to consist of things like the writer, the time of writing, the intention, etc. Derrida calls this the "spacing" of writing.

As is probably apparent, this list is really just a repetition of things that he has already said earlier.

The Lincoln memorial, finished 1922, mimics Roman architecture
mimicking Greek architecture; picture from Wikipedia.

All Communication is Writing, p. 10

After having made these remarks about the alleged classical theory, Derrida goes on to ask whether the classical characteristics of writing really are characteristics of all communication:

Are [these characteristics] not to be found in all language, in spoken language for instance, and ultimately in the totality of "experience" … ? (p. 10).

As an example of iterability in spoken language, he notes that we need to be able to recognize a word across "variations of tone, voice, etc.". This means that every new application of the word has to be recognized as an echo or citation of some earlier event. Thus, meaning must involve citation, since

… this unity of the signifying form only constitutes itself by virtue of its iterability, by the possibility of its being repeated in … the absence of a determinate signified or of the intention of actual signification, as well as of all intention of present communication. (p. 10).

These iterability conditions are, says Derrida, really characteristic of writing according to the classical theory. Hence, spoken language is a kind of "writing":

This structural possibility of being weaned from the referent or from the signified (hence from communication and from its context) seems to me to make every mark, including those which are oral, a grapheme … (p. 10).

Again, he generalizes this to experience without going to much into the topic:

And I shall even extend this law to all "experience" is general if it is conceded that there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks. (p. 10)

The idea is, presumably, that in so far as experience is mediated or interpreted, it is a kind of writing.

Critiquing the Tradition, Part 1

Husserl on Nonsense, pp. 10–11

Husserl; from the Lancet.

Husserl has a theory of how the sign can be detached from its referent. He proposes, according to Derrida, the following taxonomy:

1. Signs that have a clear meaning, but no current referent (I say "The sky is blue" while you can't see the sky);
2. Signs that fail to have a meaning because they are
   
   1. superficial syntactic symbol manipulation, as in formalistic mathematics;
   2. oxymorons, like "a round square";
   3. word salad, like "a round or," "the green is either," or "abracadabra."

This discussion refers to Volume II of Husserl's Logical Investigations. Specifically, the relevant parts of the text are Investigation I, §15 and Investigation IV, §12.

Derrida on Husserl, p. 12

Derrida notes:

But as "the green is either" or "abracadabra" do not constitute their context by themselves, nothing prevents them from functioning in another context as signifying marks. (p. 12)

As an example, he mentions that the word string "the green is either" is used by Husserl as an explicit example of agrammaticality — so it did after all have a use in language. (Consider also how the sentences "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" or "All your base are belong to us" have taken on a life of their own and can now be echoed or referenced.)

This illustrates, he says,

the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written … (p. 12).

Even more explicitly:

Every sign … can be cited, put between quotation marks; in doing so it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. (p. 12)

He goes on to say that a sign which did not have this property of citationality or iterability would not be a sign.

Critiquing the Tradition, Part 2

Things Derrida Likes About Performatives, p. 13

After having discussed Husserl, Derrida moves on to Austin. He wants in particular to talk about the notion of performative speech acts.
This concept, he says, should interest us for the following reasons:

1. Every proper utterance is in a sense performative.
2. The concept of performatives is a "relatively new."
3. Performatives do have referents in the usual sense.
4. The discussion of performatives made Austin reanalyze meaning as a concept of force (and this brings him, says Derrida, closer to Nietzsche).

These four features of performatives undermine the traditional communicative concept of meaning, according to Derrida.

Austin's Blind Angle p. 14

In spite of this subversive potential of performatives, Austin fails to realize that spoken language has the same "citationality" as writing, and this causes problems for his analysis again and again.

Specifically, he holds on to his mentalistic understanding of meaning. The "total context" that Austin has to keep referring in his discussion always contains

consciousness, the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject in the totality of his speech act. As a result, performative communication becomes once more the communication of an intentional meaning … (p. 14)

Infelicity is Structurally Necessary, p. 15

Austin; from University of Washington.

So Derrida claims that citationality is a precondition of meaning. Hence, a theory which tries to exclude the ritualistic or theatrical aspect of word use will either have to push aside a lot of counterexamples or run into problems.

On one hand, Austin can thus recognize that 

… the possibility of the negative (in this case, infelicities) is in fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk of the operations under consideration; (p. 15)

but on the other hand, he

… excludes that risk as accidental, exterior, one which teaches us nothing about the linguistic phenomenon being considered. (p. 15)

Repeating that point once more, Derrida states that:

1. Austin recognizes that there are ritualistic aspects to the context of a conventional performative speech act, but not that there are ritualistic aspects to meaning itself. "Ritual," Derrida asserts, is "a structural characteristic of every mark." (p. 15)
2. Austin does not take the possibility of infelicity seriously enough, and he consequently fails to recognize that it is "in some sense a necessary possibility." (p. 15).

Critiquing the Tradition, Part 3

Serious and Non-Serious Language, pp. 16–17

To illustrate these points further, Derrida quotes a passage from Austin's work in which he says that theatrical or joky language is “parasitic” on the more serious uses of language.

But such theatrical language use is not peripheral, Derrida claims:

For, ultimately, isn't it true that what Austin excludes as anomaly, exception, "non-serious," citation, (on stage, in a poem, or a soliloquy) is the determined modification of a general citationality—or rather, a general iterability—without which there would not even be a "successful" performative? (p. 17)

Do you want me to answer? Or is this a questions-only conversation?

A Private Language Argument, p. 17

At this point one might interject, Derrida says, that “literal” performatives are successfully executed all the time (opening a meeting etc.), so shouldn't he take care of those cases before he starts talking about theatrical deviations?

Not necessarily, Derrida says: Even a private language will have to conform to some internal standard, and even an event that happens only once might implicitly be a version of something else.

The Necessity of Infelicity Again, p. 18–19

In effect, Austin thus depicts "ordinary language" as surrounded by a ditch which it can fall into if thing go awry. But according to Derrida, this is a somewhat misleading picture in that the "ditch" is a necessary shadow of meaning.

A possibly infelicitous speech act; by Don Hertzfeldt.

He asks:

Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a "coded" or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a "citation"? (p. 18)

(Correct answer: No, it couldn't.)

As a consequence:

The "non-serious," the oratio obliqua will no longer be able to be excluded, as Austin wished, from "ordinary" language. And if one maintains that ordinary language, or the ordinary circumstances of language, excludes a general citationality or iterability, does that not mean that the "ordinariness" in question … shelter[s] … the teleological lure of consciousness … ? (p. 18)

(Correct answer: Yes, it does.)

Thus, the concept of "context" itself gets into some problems too, since it is not clear what counts as a theatrical context, and what doesn't:

The concept of … the context thus seems to suffer at this point from the same theoretical and "interested" uncertainty as the concept of the "ordinary," from the same metaphysical origins: the ethical and teleological discourse of consciousness. (p. 18)

To round off, he ensures us that his point isn't that consciousness, context, etc. makes no difference to meaning, but only that their negative counterparts cannot be excluded from the picture.

Who Really Talks When You Are Talking? pp. 19–20

Derrida's signature, jokingly inserted at the end of the paper.

In the last section, Derrida asks who the "source" is of a highly ritualistic sentence like "I hereby declare the meeting open." Austin himself compares such sentences with signatures, so Derrida picks up that thread.

Signatures are funny, he says, because a signature is expected at once to be authentic, and unique to the specific situation, but at the same time, also have a "repeatable, iterable, imitable form."

Being thus authentic if and only if they are good copies, signatures thus illustrate the contradiction that is built into the mentalistic notion of writing.

A Last Salute

Perspectives and Additional Claims, p. 20–21

On the last page of the essay, Derrida very rapidly throws a couple of rather large claims at the reader, mixed loosely with a summary of his main points:

1. The concept of writing is gaining ground, so that philosophy increasingly relies on authenticity concepts like "speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc."
2. Writing is difficult to understand from the perspective of the traditional theory.
3. His project of insisting on the work done by negative concepts (absence, failure, etc.) can be carried further in a larger project of metaphysical criticism.

So that's a dubious claim, a triviality, and a literature reference.

Foucault: Fearless Speech (2001)

Cover image (from amazon.com).

The title of this book is a bit misleading; it suggests a sexy collection of provocatively political manifestos but is in fact a piece of good, old-fashioned classicist scholarship, like much of the work Foucault did in his last years.

This particular study is concerned with the notion of parrhesia or "frank speech," which played an interesting role in both Athenian democracy and later Stoic self-improvement. Foucault combs meticulously through the works of Seneca, Epictetus, Plato, and others, in order to map out how the concept came to be first articulated and then problematized in the ancient and late-ancient literature.

The text is based on six tape-recorded lectures that he gave at UC Berkeley in 1983.

Although the first couple of chapters of the book treat the role of parrhesia in the context of political life, it really starts to pick up momentum as Foucault gets into the discussion of his latter-day pet topic, the care of the self.

The King Gets a Beating

As part of this discussion, he considers a dialogue by the Cynic philosopher Dio Chrysostom. This text dramatizes the alleged meeting between Diogenes (the philosopher said to live in a barrel) and Alexander the Great (pp. 124–133).

During the dialogue, Diogenes provokes Alexander by all sorts of means, including questioning his courage and his claims to the throne. This kind of deliberate provocation has some interesting parallels with the Socratic dialogue, but also some interesting differences from it:

… whereas Socrates plays with his interlocutor's ignorance, Diogenes want to hurt Alexander's pride. For example, at the beginning of the exchange, Diogenes calls Alexander a bastard and tells him that someone who claims to be a king is not so very different from a child who, after winning a game, puts a crown on his head and declares that he is king. Of course, all that is not very pleasant for Alexander to hear; But that's Diogenes' game: hitting his interlocutor's pride, forcing him to recognize that he is not what he claims to be—which is something quite different from the Socratic attempt to show someone that he is ignorant of what he claims to know. (p. 126; emphasis in original)

As the dialogue progresses, Alexander's patience and tolerance are put to increasingly harsh tests. In effect, Diogenes thus turns the conversation into a game with extreme stakes: Will Diogenes shut up out of fear for death, or will Alexander lose his temper and slaughter him because, after all, he did not have the self-confidence and fearlessness that marks a true king?

Everybody Wins?

The martial element of the dialogue is thus, in one sense, even stronger than in Plato:

Whereas the Socratic dialogue traces an intricate and winding path from an ignorant understanding to an awareness of ignorance, the Cynic dialogue is much more like a fight, a battle, or a war, with peaks of great aggressivity and moments of peaceful calm—peaceful exchanges which, of course, are additional traps for the interlocutor. (p. 130)

19th century depiction of the meeting (from Wikimedia).

The game finally ends when Alexander gets around to asking what the true mark of a king might be (now that Diogenes has disqualified practically everything that makes Alexander a king). Diogenes explains that a true king behaves like one, and is, in what I assume is Foucault's paraphrase, "noble by nature" (p. 132).

Thus:

Here the game reaches a point where Alexander does not become conscious of his lack of knowledge, as in a Socratic dialogue. He discovers, instead, that he is not in any way what he thought he was—viz., a king by royal birth, with marks of his divine status, or king because of his superior power, and so on. He is brought to a point where Diogenes tells him that the only way to be a real king is to adopt the same type of ethos as the Cynic philosopher. And at this point in the exchange there is nothing more for Alexander to say. (p. 132)

Just as in the Stoic ethos, the goal of the whole exercise thus seems to be a kind of independence from visible fame, power, and wealth. It's not that the real gratification lies in some afterlife as in the Christian tradition, but there is still a sense that one should avoid attachment to the wrong things, and to the wrong symbols.

Perceptual Hygiene

The last example in the book comes from a text by Epictetus, and describes a method for training oneself to meet impressions with the right state of mind. Inspired by sophistical question-and-answer games, Epictetus suggests that we should constantly keep an inner dialogue going regarding everything we see:

As we exercise ourselves to meet the sophistical interrogations, so we ought also to exercise ourselves daily to meet the impression of our senses, because these too put interrogations to us. So-and-so's son is dead. Answer, "That lies outside the sphere of the moral purpose, it is not an evil." […] He was grieved at all this. "That lies withing the sphere of the moral purpose, it is an evil." He has borne up under it manfully. "That lies within the sphere of the moral purpose, it is a good." Now if we acquire this habit, we shall make progress, for we shall never give our assent to anything but that of which we get a convincing sense-impression. (p. 163, cited from Epictetus: The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, III, 8)

Epictetus goes on to recommend doing this exercise constantly "from dawn till dark," interrogating your senses about everything you see. He compares this examination of one's impressions to the caution of a nightwatch — "Wait, allow me to see who you are and whence you come" (p. 161).

This is interesting for two reasons: First, it resonates a lot with contemporary notions of mindfulness as employed in New Age religions and self-help therapy. And second, it has an interesting and not completely obvious relationship with epistemological skepticism; many philosophical discussions of how one should distrust one's senses acquire a quite different ring when we put them in the context of such a clearly normative and ethical theory of perceptual hygiene.

The Dangers of Florid Prose

Just one last example: In his book On the Tranquility of Mind, Seneca reproduces a (possibly fictional) letter by a family member named Serenus. In the letter, Serenus complains that while he har largely overcome his desire for material wealth, public recognition, and an immortal legacy, he still occasionally falls back into old habits, feeling envy at "the sight of slaves bedecked with gold" and the like (p. 155, cited from Seneca: On the Tranquility of Mind, I, 4–17).

What I want to point out, however, is the way that Serenus explicitly links his desire for an eternal memory with a specific mode of writing:

And in my literary studies I think that it is surely better to fix my eyes on the theme itself, and, keeping this uppermost when I speak, to trust meanwhile to the theme to supply the words so that unstudied language may follow it wherever it leads. I say: "What need is there to compose something that will last for centuries? Will you not give up striving to keep posterity silent about you? You were born for death; a silent funeral is less troublesome! And so to pass the time, write something in simple style, for your own use, not for publication; they that study for the day have less need to labor." Then again, when my mind has been uplifted by the greatness of its thoughts, it becomes ambitious of words, and with higher aspirations it desires higher expression, and language issues forth to match the dignity of the theme; forgetful then of my rule and of my more restrained judgment, I am swept to loftier heights by an utterance that is no longer my own. (pp. 156–57)

In this way, Serenus (or Seneca) constructs a direct parallel between vain desires and ambitions to "high" writing. Apparently the assumption is that there is a kind of humbleness or honesty built into the "simple style" which at once is guaranteed to be "your own" and to keep you vigilant with respect to abiding by your (Stoic) principles of a philosophical life.

Final Remarks on Method

There is a place in the third volume of the History of Sexuality in which Foucault implicitly criticizes the Marxist conception of the dynamics of history for being to rigid, but it is quite obscure what exactly he imagines to put in its place.

This gets a little clearer in the brief remarks he makes on his project in these lectures. It's an important point, so I'll quote is quite extensively here.

During the first lecture, Foucault states:

I would like to distinguish between the "history of ideas" and the "history of thought." […] The history of ideas involves the analysis of a notion from its birth, through its development, and in the setting of other ideas which constitute its context. The history of thought is the analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience, or a set of practices, which were accepted without question, which were familiar and "silent," out of discussion, becomes a problem, raises discussion and debate, incites new reactions, and induces a crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices, and institutions. The history of thought, understood this way, is the history of the way people begin to take care of something, of the way they become anxious about this or that—for example, about madness, about crime, about sex, and themselves, or about truth. (p. 74)

In his concluding remarks at the end of the course, he elaborates:

Some people have interpreted this type of analysis as a form of "historical idealism," but I think that such an analysis is completely different. For when I say that I am studying the "problematization" of madness, crime, or sexuality, it is not a way of denying the reality of such phenomena. One the contrary, I have tried to show that is was precisely some real existent in the world which was the target of social regulation at a given moment. The question I raise is this one: How and why were very different things in the world gathered together, characterized, analyzed, and treated as, for example, "mental illness"? What are the elements which are relevant for a given "problematization"? And even if I won't say that what is characterized as "schizophrenia" corresponds to something real in the world, this has nothing to do with idealism. For I think there is a relation between the thing which is problematized and the process of problematization. The problematization is an "answer" to a concrete situation which is real. (pp. 171–72)

Homing in even more specifically on what must have been a Marxist critique, he continues:

But we have to understand very clearly, I think, that a given problematization is not an effect or consequence of a historical context or situation, but is an answer given by definite individuals (although you may find this same answer given in a series of texts, and at a certain point the answer may become so general that it also becomes anonymous). (p. 172)

These answers do not come "from any sort of collective unconscious" (p. 172):

And the fact that an answer is neither a representation nor an effect of a situation does not mean that it answers to nothing, that it is a pure dream, or an "anti-creation." A problematization is always a kind of creation; but a creation in the sense that, given a certain situation, you cannot infer that this kind of problematization will follow. Given a certain problematization, you can only understand why this kind of answer appears as a reply to some concrete and specific aspect of the world. There is the relation of thought and reality in the process of problematization. (p. 172)

I suspect this is about as clear as Foucault ever got on this issue, and about as clear as he could get.

Innis: Empire and Communications (1950)

I've always thought it sounded quite odd when Derrida said that Western philosophy has a preoccupation with the spoken word. How could a genre almost be more rigidly text-oriented than European philosophy?

Now that I've been reading some of Harold Innis' Empire and Communications, I'm beginning to see the contours of a different historical hypothesis that I hadn't originally read into Derrida's arguments. This concerns the extremely high value that European 19th-century philology put on phonetic alphabets as opposed to syllabic or idiographic scripts.

I think Innis sort of reiterates the valorization. Take a look at the kind of words that he uses to describe the "progress" of the Babylonian writing system:

Conventionalization of pictographs began with signs most frequently used and advanced rapidly with the replacement of strokes by wedges. Pictographic expression became inadequate for the writing of connected religious or historical texts and many signs were taken to represent syllables. By 2900 BC the form of the script and the use of signs had been fully developed, and by 2825 BC the direction of writing and the arrangement of words according to their logical position in the sentence had been established. (p. 27)

It's not that it must necessarily be a progress history—he might just mean "fully developed" in the sense of "to its known final form," or perhaps in some pragmatic sense (as the word "inadequate" suggests). But surely, there is quite a lot of directionality built into the metaphors he is using.

He continues as follows:

By 2900 BC the introduction of syllabic signs in a vocabulary which was largely monosyllabic had reduced the number of signs to about 600. Of these signs about 100 represented vowels, but no system was devised for representing single consonantal sounds or creating an alphabet. Cuneiform writing was partly syllabic and partly ideographic or representative of single words. Many of the signs were polyphonic or had more than one meaning. Sumerian had no distinctions of gender, and often omitted those of number, persons, and tenses. An idea had not fully been developed to the symbol of word or syllable. Pictographs and ideograms took on abstract phonetic values, and the study of script became linked to the study of language. (p. 28)

Weird, isn't it? It's almost as if he takes gender/number/person/tense marking as the mark of a civilized and modern language.

Here's what he writes on alphabets in the beginning of the chapter on ancient Greece:

The alphabet escaped from the implications of sacred writing. It lent itself to an efficient representation of sounds and enabled the Greeks to preserve intact a rich oral tradition. The ancient world troubled about sounds. (p. 53)

Maybe there's something to this. It is strange that Plato, the number one critic of the poetic tradition, should also be the main proponent for the use of structured conversation as a learning tool. Don't we have any ancients that thought that books could do something that the spoken word couldn't?

Foucault: "Writing the Self" (1984?)

This brief and very well-written text, reprinted in Foucault and His Interlocutors, is a case-study in the culture of writing and reading which, according to Foucault, emerged in the Roman Empire in the first centuries A.D.

It focuses mainly on a number of texts by the two philosopher-politicians Marcus Aurelius and Foucault's favourite, Seneca. Both of these writes also play a central role in Care of the Self, the third volume of his History of Sexuality.

The hypothesis that Foucault proposes in the text is that writing and reading in this period began to be considered as a kind of spiritual or ethical exercise that could help a (male, Roman) person constitute himself as a good, ethical subject. This meant using writing and reading as tool for reflecting on one's own life and training oneself in the discipline of independence from wealth and health. The main inspiration for this approach was Pierre Hadot.

Exercise or Confession?

Apparently, a part of the function of all this ceaseless writing was a kind of benevolent self-surveillance. Foucault quotes Seneca as saying

we must regulate our lives as though the whole world were looking at them (p. 243; originally in Letter 40)

However, Foucault insists that this practice should not (yet) be taken as a kind of confession;

it is not a matter of pursuing the unsayable, nor of revealing the hidden, nor of saying the unsaid, but on the contrary of capturing the already-said, of reassembling what one could hear or read, and this for an end that is nothing less than the constitution of the self. (p. 237)

It is not completely clear that this claim is true, though. The introductory quote from the Christian writer Athanasius clearly shows that a couple of hundred years down the line, the purpose of writing had certainly become "to ensure that one does not sin" (p. 234).

The rest of Foucault's text can perhaps be read as a prolonged attempt to justify that this is not the philosophy that we find in Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.

Why We Write

One strand of evidence in support of Foucault's claim comes from the ancient sources themselves. At least sometimes, they seem to consider the practice of writing diaries or letters explicitly as a kind of mental exercise:

Seneca recalls that when one writes, one reads what one writes just as in saying something one hears what one says (p. 241; reference to Seneca's Letter 84)

Consequently,

Whoever teaches, educates himself. (p. 237; quoted from Letter 7)

The point of writing a letter is thus not to air your flaws, but to give a friend advice about how to live a good, philosophical life, and thus indirectly benefit yourself.

Reflections On the Day Gone By

Another argument comes from the fact that some of the exercises simply seem to be ill-suited as acts of confession. For instance, the practice of silently and privately meditating on the day gone by can hardly be construed as a kind of confession (pp. 245-47).

This is further supported by the fact that when such reflections are actually written down, they often look more like attentive descriptions of daily details than like catalogues of sins and errors. Thus, Seneca describes a day in which "nothing happened" (Foucault's words) by meticulously recording its events in a letter. Foucault lists the contents:

A bit of physical training, racing with a young slave, a bath in barely tepid water, a simple meal of bread, a very brief nap. But the essential part of the letter---and it is that which occupies the longest part of the letter---had been devoted to meditation on a theme suggested by a sophisticated syllogism of Zeno apropos drunkenness. (p. 245; he is talking about Letter 83)

Marcus Aurelius tells a similar story, equally filled with tiny details, and with reasons for happiness rather than shame. Quoting him:

Then we went to eat. On what do you think I dined? On a bit of bread, while I watched many others devouring oysters, onions, and very fat sardines. Afterwards, we set ourselves harvesting the grapes; we sweated a lot, shouted a lot. [...] Having returned home, before turning on my side to sleep, I go through my task; I make an account of my day to my sweetest of masters, whom, were I to be consumed by it [i.e., were I to die on this day?], I would love still more. (p. 247; quoted after Marcus Aurelius' Letter 6 to Fronto)

Indeed, this looks more like an account of small successes and failures than an account of good and bad deeds. If recounting such events is beneficial for the soul, it cannot be as a disinfectant.

Reading As an Spiritual Exercise

Of course, the least confession-like of all literary practices is that of reading. However, this is also considered a valuable tool for moulding and training the self (pp. 238-40). Seneca thus recommends daily reading as well as slow and careful digestion of what one reads:

From all that you have skimmed, extract one thought to digest well that day. This is also what I do. (p. 239; quoted after his Letter 2)

The fact that such study and meditation is a tool for improving the soul on a general level is suggested by a statement by Epictetus that Foucault quotes:

It is of little importance that one has or has not read all of Zeno or Chrysippus; it is of little importance that one has seized exactly what they meant, and that one is capable of reconstructing the unity of their reasoning. (p. 239; quoted from Epictetus: Entritiens (the Discourses?), 2:65)

What is of importance, presumably, is that one goes through the trouble of meditating one some edifying prose, perhaps like the many religious cultures have emphasized ritually reading and re-reading sacred texts, both in private and in public.