Sign-Function Linking

It is clear that if the phonic substance lost its privilege, it was not to the advantage of the graphic substance, which lends itself to the same substitutions. To the extent that it liberates and is irrefutable, glossematics still operates with a popular concept of writing. However original and irreducible it might be, the “form of expression” linked by correlation to the graphic “substance of expression” remains very determined. It is very dependent and very derivative with regard to the arche-writing of which I speak. This arche-writing would be at work not only in the form and substance of graphic expression but also in those of non-graphic expression. It would constitute not only the pattern uniting form to all substance, graphic or otherwise, but the movement of the sign-function linking a content to an expression, whether it be graphic or not.

It is because arche-writing, movement of difference, irreducible archesynthesis, opening in one and the same possibility, temporalisation as well as relationship with the other and language, cannot, as the condition of all linguistic systems, form a part of the linguistic system itself and be situated as an object in its field. (which does not mean it has a real field elsewhere, another assignable site.) Its concept could in no way enrich the scientific, positive, and “immanent” (in the Hjelmslevian sense) description of the system itself. Therefore, the founder of glossematics would no doubt have questioned its necessity, as be rejects, en bloc and legitimately, all the extra-linguistic theories which do not arise from the irreducible immanence of the linguistic system. He would have seen in that notion one of those appeals to experience which a theory should dispense with. He would not have understood why the name writing continued — to be used for that X which becomes so different from what has always been called “writing.”

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (2013-10-17)

• post modernism
• writing