The Meaning of Meaning

The postmodern world exists on a moving bubble of water. The myth of the world being set on the back of a turtle, which is set on the back of a turtle, etc., is represented by arguments of such thinkers as Derrida, Heidegger, and Nietzsche.

Human thoughts, ideas and meanings have no direct causal link to the physical world they reference; they are constructs. From the modern age came structuralism: language as a construct, a contract or agreement of the culture from whence it came. The agreement, as any contract, has major dependency issues.

Take for example, The Red Wheelbarrow by Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

One can easily state the significance of the miracle in this instant. Indeed, "so much depends on" the agreement of society to realize what a red wheelbarrow is, in fact, seen as glazed with rain, standing beside white chickens. The rain creates glaze, chickens nearby are not to be confused with zebras, and they are white, as opposed to black, brown or purple.

Saussure founded the idea that language is composed of signs that are only known by difference. The sound that each individual word makes upon its utterance, is recognized by its relation to the sound a different word makes. The written word is known only by its difference in construct from another written word. The signifier is linked to the signified only by difference of relation; we know a chair is a chair because it is not a table. Saussure argued that the relationship between one sign and its connected object is only known by the difference that it has from other signs.

Jacques Derrida uses Ferdinand de Saussure's theory and couples it with the concept of differences in Neitzshe and Heidegger. The concept of Différance is born. Derrida argues that the meaning of language is unstable.

For Saussure's theory to work, one must notice the blank spaces: the white between the letters. The silence between the sounds becomes important. The blank spaces become as important as the actual sign itself. Saussure theorized on the differences between signs as the recognizable characteristic of meaning. Structuralism held to the idea that if one could find paradox in a text, therein would lie the meaning. New Critics found that by close reading one could make the connection between the signifier and the signified to find meaning. This held true with individual terms and also meaning of the whole text; connect the dots, read the room, a moral of the story if you will. The text, and language per se, becomes a closed unit without any meaning outside of itself.

Terry Eagleton comments on how Poststructuralists connected the dots. He illustrates where Structuralism breaks down and folds in upon itself. Saussure's view of the sign as a neat symmetrical unity between a particular and specific signified is challenged precisely because it is also a product of the difference between a lot of other signifiers. If a chair is a chair because it is not a table, then the endpoint becomes infinite. A chair could potentially also not be a spoon, or an elephant, or a substantial amount of "also nots." Rather than a concept of a signfied firmly tied to the tail of a particular signifier, meaning becomes the spinoff of a potentially endless play of signifiers.

Structuralism held that the signifier from inside language firmly held on to the object it referred to on the outside. Derrida extended this idea and showed how the endless play of signifiers create a deep, dark chasm that separates thought and the reality upon which it rests. Différance divides the signifier from the signified, instead the link becomes a bricolage of interconnected, fragile, constantly changing patterns of thought and language.

Meaning, language and thought become anything and everything but the object to which they refer. the signifier is known only by the endless chain of differences that continually flick by as it is pointing towards its object.This sparks a creative enterprise, like bricolage, onto meaning of being. As in chess, where every move is determined by, influences another; the creative process is the driving force. Chess, however, does not take place on its own; it is determined by the players, whereas language and meaning, Derrida notes, is not.

Language is mimicked, it is not taught. Language is subconsciously derived. A toddler is not in school the moment they utter their first word. The moment we cease to believe in an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the history of historical discourses, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage, and that the engineers and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs, the chess game ends. The very idea of bricolage is challenged and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

This process of language controls and influences identity and meaning of existence. Therefore thoughts become products of language, created and formed by random objects of differing origin. However, in search of a foundation, the meaning within meaning, if you will, nothing palpable, no graspable presence is to be found. Nietzsche found meaning and truth as a mobile army of metaphors. Truths are illusions, which one has forgotten are illusions.

Différance gathers these ideas in an attempt to explain the inner workings of language. The search for a single awesome truth reveals a construct of metaphors stacked, in no discernible or logical way, upon metaphors that attempt to replicate and impose meaning onto reality.

Derrida postulates how the continual differences in signs affect thoughts, meanings and presence of being. The difference in linguistic sign is similar to Heidegger's fraught identity between Being and Existence. Consider the ultimate question, Who Am I? The question immediately following: What Am I? and so on. The subjective meaning of Being as well as Existence each in their own way appear through difference, or who everyone, or everything else is. What is at stake is the object of thought. The thought of Being emerges from difference. Being and Existence is broken down to a thought and ends up as an argument of endless proportions. Here Différance gets caught in its own circular vortex of giving meaning to the breakdown of meaning.

Upon seeing the world, the subconscious becomes aware of a network of relationships, recognizable patterns between things. The differences between these things allows them to become separate and identifiable. The conscious experience creates a kind of ghost effect, a flickering of passing moments, that make sense only in their relationship with each other. Consider the effect of cards flicking; slightly different pictures of the same thing creates the illusion of seeing the actual thing in motion.

In this example, the immediate present is each individual card constantly flicking past. The present card is only known by the differences from the other cards flicking by. If one were to stop the endless flicking of cards, to investigate, Différance says the picture would fade to nothing because it has no reference. The present is never really here. The moment a moment is differentiated from any other infinite amount of moments, it has already become the past and is suggesting the current moment. Différance creates a world where one could honestly ask if we exist, and be entirely correct in an argument where any response is logical.

Derrida expands on Heiddegger's idea that forgetting of differences becomes an essential factor where the human mind makes sense of reality. If we admit that Différance is something other than presence and absence, then we must be dealing with the forgetting of differences.

We now must talk about the disappearance of trace's trace.

In philosophical terms, trace would be located in the interval between differences that separates the present, or the Being, from what is not. This idea applied to a text causes the deconstruction of the text as it identifies the exact moment of separation from meaning. In order for meaning to be, the moment meaning is acknowledged must be separated from what it is not. At the same time the present must be divided, thus dividing along with the present, everything that can be conceived on its basis. Trace can be conceived as a special tool, single use, a self destructing connector of infinite and invisible properties. The erasing of trace must always be, otherwise it would not be trace but an indestructible and monumental substance. For a corollary we can see Roland Barthes' third meaning, both Barthes and Nietzsche were influenced by Hegel, which posits that meaning occurs in the discrepancy between a sign and its binary opposite.

Trace becomes a lingering scent of familiarity: déjà-vu, jazz, the unexplained familiar; an experience of which no logical explanation can be given. Proto-trace becomes the chain to which Différance gets subjected. Trace is not a moment that can be explained in time or space; it is the simulacrum, or what was believed to have happened immediately prior, that gives meaning to anything perceived as real in the present.

Derrida explains Différance as a challenge to the traditional philosophical search for a single truth. Saussure, Heidegger and Nietzsche, in particular, contribute and support the argument that truth can only ever be a simulacrum. As such, language and thought is a bog of quicksand. True meaning and reality can never be perceived; fighting for understanding only serves to expand an already intertwined and interconnected vortex.

Here, Différance can be considered as a suicidal theory as it serves to deconstruct its own grand narrative; it becomes its own transcendental signifier. The idea of Différance would agree there is and is not a transcendental signfier, but in doing so, claims that it is itself one. The transcendental signifier, as such, would be composed of itself and all others, but not supported by any. If Différance is to exist, it cannot be imagined. It remains a metaphysical name, because there is no name for this, not even an essence of Being, not even the name Différance, which is not a name. It is not a nominal unity, and continually breaks up in a chain of different substitutions.