Act so that there is no use in a centre. Gertrude Stein.
If you act so that there is no use in a center, your action would be dissolving all possible, all imaginable, uses in a center. If there’s a center, you can be equidistant from it with others; you can be closer to it or more distant from it than others. A center establishes a hierarchy—at the very least between center and margin. But every other hierarchy is modeled on the hierarchy between center and margin—hierarchies are only possible if there is a center. Presumably, that’s why Stein would enjoin us to act so that there is no use in a center, but following her imperative would place her injunction at the center as we take her as a model for detecting, identifying and then disabling this use of the center, that use, and then other uses. But in thus acting to dissolve the center, we would need to use the center, at least in order to determine which use of it requires the most urgent attention. So, as we subtract uses, we add uses to the center: acting so that there is no use in a center is, in fact, a discovery procedure for revealing and naming all the uses of a center.
In Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences,” we are given and warned about a great many uses of the center. The center allows for the “structurality of structure”; it provides a “fixed point of origin”; it allows for “free play within the system,” which depends upon the “coherence” provided by a center; it also limits the free play within the system (allowing and limiting free play may be two different, not incompatible, uses). But, according to “classical thought concerning structure:
``` the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure— although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé as philosophy or science—is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a fundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay. With this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the ``` ``` game. From the basis of what we therefore call the center (and which, because it can be either inside or outside, is as readily called the origin as the end, as readily arché as telos), the repetitions, the substitutions, the transformations, and the permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens]—that is, a history, period—whose origin may always be revealed or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one could perhaps say that the movement of any archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure from the basis of a full presence which is out of play. ``` Derrida’s language here seems strangely intentionalistic and even psychologistic at crucial points. The center holds the structure together, and is therefore inside the structure; but, the
center is not subject to the free play of elements within the structure, and is therefore outside of the structure. This paradox, or “coherence in contradiction,” “expresses the force of a desire.” This is a desire for certitude, a mastering of anxiety—it is a way of establishing a teleology, wherein the end is contained in the origin. The center is presumably fragile as well—otherwise, why the anxiety?—and, therefore, a challenge to one center is met through a series of substitutions and permutations, a constant decentering, with one center replacing another. Still the logic here seems to be progressive, insofar as each decentering implicates the new center further in the free play it sought to avoid, and we become increasingly aware of our implication in the game. (It’s not clear whether this makes us more or less anxious.) The watershed here seems to be when “language invaded the universal problematic,” implicating all centers in the play of differences.
What prevents us from moving from “metaphysics” to “discourse,” in that case? Why is it that “ _[t]here is no sense_ in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest”? It is interesting that the example Derrida provides demonstrating why “we have not language” is the concept of the “sign” itself, which we cannot do without but which Derrida contends is unthinkable without the metaphysical distinction between “sensible” and “intelligible.” We can take the concept of the sign, then, as a test for whether we can have any language, not necessarily “alien to this history” but inclusive of and non-reducible to it. We can agree with Derrida that the sign belongs at the center of the human sciences, precisely because the sign marks the threshold of the human. Whether we speak in terms of a Peircean “symbol,” or the distinction between signifier and signified, the sign is different from any form of non-human communication insofar as the operation of any sign is both conventional and historical while being outside of conventionality and history. Words only mean what they mean insofar as a community of language users “agrees” that that is what they mean; but the word “agree” is clearly inadequate because a community, as was perhaps first pointed out by Rousseau, would already have to have language to “agree” on the meaning of signs. But this means that the origin of language would also be the origin of community and, indeed, the origin of the human. Derrida’s intuition regarding the paradoxicality of any such origin, or any attempt to posit an origin, is formidable; and his failure or refusal to hypothesize regarding an origin more originary than any other is unsurprising.
Derrida’s intuition regarding the articulation of “center,” “origin,” “desire” and “anxiety” is also remarkable. Something like “desire” and something like “anxiety” would, indeed, have to lie at the origin of the sign, because the sign articulates attention, and desire and anxiety both sharpen and singularize attention. Where there is attention, there is a center of that attention. As Michael Tomasello has pointed out, the apparently very simple activity of pointing or, more specifically, “pointing something out,” is something only humans do. What Tomasello calls “joint attention” is constitutive of human sign use, and is intimately linked to the paradoxical “agreement” discussed in the previous paragraph. We are each directing the other’s attention to something, and also showing each other that we know the other is doing so. The paradoxicality and
recursivity definitive of human language is already present on this simple scene: nothing but our respective gestures toward some center sustains the gestures themselves, but for each of us the gesture is always already available—neither of us invented it or could imagine it to have been “invented” (or “discovered”). It only remains to produce a hypothesis regarding the possibility of this paradoxical construct.