Iterability+(Hubbell)


 * Iterability**

Iterability is the concept and principle of writing in which the synchronic and diachronic associations of the written sign are both present and divorced from each other so that the written sign can possibly carry an idea while not carrying an idea. In the Derridean conceptualization of language, iterability is both why language functions and why its function is absent meaning. Through iterability, the written sign has an infinity of contexts, but it can neither exist without a context, nor have definitive tie to a context.
 * Overview**

Derrida establishes a sense of communication that opposes previous definitions of communication. Communication, for Derrida, is built around an absence of the physical aspects of communication from each other, e.g., the author, reader, and text, and an absence of meaning. This is in opposition to sender-message-receiver models of communication from the middle of the 20th century. However, he sets the principle of iterability at the foundation of a communication based on absence (instead of presence): “In order for my ‘written communication’ to retain its function as writing, i.e., its readability, it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver, determined in general. My communication must be repeatable—iterable—in the absolute absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers. Such iterability-(//iter//, again, probably comes from //itara//, //other// in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved (whether pictographical, hieroglyphic, ideographic, phonetic, alphabetic, to cite the old categories). A writing that is not structurally readable—iterable—beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing.” (p. 7)
 * Explication**

Following from here, a mark is non-iterable writing. An iterable mark then makes writing. Assuming that any iterable mark makes writing, “code” becomes a superfluous distinction for an iterable mark. This allows for a definition of language that can be idiomatic enough to describe language failures, i.e., languages that are dead, and it presents a definition of language that in every iterable mark contains the possibility that it may be the last written sign of the language: “The possibility of repeating and thus of identifying the marks is implicit in every code, making it into a network [//une grille//] that is communicable, transmittable, decipherable, iterable for a third, and hence for every possible user in general. To be what it is, all writing must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence, it is a rupture in presence, the ‘death’ or the possibility of the ‘death’ of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the mark.” (p.8).

Iterability goes beyond writing. It also exists in oral communication, which frustrates the traditional distinction between written and oral communication: “A written sign, in the current meaning of this word, is a mark that subsists, one which does not exhaust itself in the moment of its inscription and which can give rise to an iteration in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it. This is what has enabled us, at least traditionally, to distinguish a ‘written’ from an ‘oral’ communication.” (p. 9)

The traditional difference between written and oral communication is one of reference, according to Derrida. Thus, in oral communication the speaker, through tone, gesture, etc., can identify a specific referent for a sign, but Derrida responds to this traditional difference: “Why is this identity paradoxically the division or dissociation of itself, which will make of this phonic sign a grapheme? Because this unity of the signifying form only constitutes itself by virtue of its iterability, by the possibility of its being repeated in the absence not only of its ‘referent,’ which is self-evident, but in the absence of a determinate signified or of the intention of actual signification, as well as of all intention of present communication. 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 in general; which is to say, as we have seen, the nonpresent //remainder// [//restance//] of a differential mark cut off from its putative ‘production’ or origin.” (p. 10)

Iterability also means that each sign has no specific context and creates an infinity of new contexts. “Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be //cited//; put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring [//ancrage//]. This citationality, this duplication or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is neither an accident nor an anomaly, it is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could not even have a function called ‘normal.’” (p. 12)

Iterability is both synchronic and diachronic, but these words take on an infinity of contexts unlike their original linguistic use by Saussure. Iterability means that a written sign accesses all of its synchronic and diachronic contexts immediately. Since the written sign accesses all of these contexts but cannot be connected definitively to any single one of them, the written sign’s quality as iterable is also its quality as different from all other iterations of itself. As an iterable written sign, “iterability” suffers from the same confluence and convocation of meaning that iterability creates. Iterability is the principle through which language is, according to Derrida, misconstrued as transmitting ideas—language’s “ideality” as it is referred to below: “Iteration in its ‘purest’ form—and it is always impure—contains //in itself// the discrepancy of a difference that constitutes it as iteration. The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account the fact that this identity can only //determine// or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and that it hence bears the mark of this difference.” (p. 53) “The concept of iterability itself, like all the concepts that form or deform themselves in its wake, is an ideal concept, to be sure, but also the concept that marks the essential and ideal limit of all pure idealization, the ideal concept of the limit of all idealization, and not the concept of non ideality (since it is also the concept of the possibility of ideality). Let us not forget that ‘iterability’ does not signify simply, as Searle seems to think, repeatability of the same, but rather alterability of this same idealized in the singularity of the event, for instance, in this or that speech act. It entails the necessity of thinking //at once// both the rule and the event, concept and singularity. There is thus a reapplication (without transparent self-reflection and without pure self-identity) of the //principle// of iterability to a //concept// of iterability that is never pure. There is no idealization without (identificatory) iterability; but for the same reason, for reasons of (altering) iterability, there is no idealization that keeps itself pure, safe from all contamination. The concept of iterability is this singular concept that renders possible the silhouette of ideality, and hence of the concept, and hence of all distinction, of all conceptual opposition. But it is also the concept that, //at the same time//, with the same stroke marks the limit of idealization and of conceptualization: "concept" or quasiconcept of concept in its conceptualizable relation to the nonconcept.” (p. 119)

One of the main section breaks in Signature Event Context is called “Writing and Telecommunication;” however, this break sets writing up as a “means” of communication not a “technology” or “medium” of communication. This makes a straw man of written versus oral communication because it disregards the reversibility of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” Derrida addresses McLuhan’s media-centric view of language only with only a cursory shot at his predictive approach (p. 20). But, approaching written communication as a means also side steps the contemporaneous discussions of written communication as technology or media which alienates the “message” or meaning from the reproduction and/or representation of the text. Alteration is no longer accidental, c.f. Lessig. “If we take the notion of writing in its currently accepted sense—one which should not—and that is essential—be considered innocent, primitive, or natural, it can only be seen as a //means of communication//. Indeed, one is compelled to regard it as an especially potent means of communication, //extending// enormously, if not infinitely, the domain of oral or gestural communication. This seems obvious, a matter of general agreement. I shall not describe all the //modes// of this extension in time and in space. I shall, however, pause for a moment to consider the import [//valeur//] of //extension// to which I have just referred. To say that writing //extends// the field and the powers of locutory or gestural communication presupposes, does it not, a sort of //homogeneous// space of communication? Of course the compass of voice or of gesture would encounter therein a factual limit, an empirical boundary of space and of time; while writing, in the same time and in the same space, would be capable of relaxing those limits and of opening the //same field// to a very much larger scope. The meaning or contents of the semantic message would thus be transmitted, //communicated//, by different //means//, by more powerful technical mediations, over a far greater distance, but still within a medium that remains fundamentally continous and self-identical, a homogeneous element through which the unity and wholeness of meaning would not be affected in its essence. Any alteration would therefore be accidental.” (p. 3).
 * Discussion**

Additionally, iterability approaches Ryan’s discussion of the “myth of the aleph” (Ryan, 2001, p. 2). Ryan’s myth of the aleph refers specifically to scholarship on hypertext narratives in which narrative theory scholars (narrative theory being a competing and cotemporaneous theory of language to Derrida’s) believe the bounded, finite realm of the narrative can be infinitely expanded by hypertext. Ryan’s response to the myth of the aleph argues that these infinitely expansive environments are ultimately limited by the logical structure that composes them.

Derrida, J. (1988). //Limited Inc//. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP. McLuhan, M. (1994). //Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man//. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ryan, M. L. (2001). Beyond myth and metaphor: The case of narrative in digital media. //Game Studies// //1//(1).
 * References**

Ong, W. J. (2002). //Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word//. New York, NY: Routledge. [Uses the heuristics of periodization to discuss orality and literacy as technological developments. A significantly different approach to written communication as technology than the brief and un-problematized discussion in //Limited Inc//] Wright, E. A. & Halloran, S. M. (2001). From rhetoric to composition: the teaching of writing in America to 1900. In //A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Modern America//, ed. J. J. Murphy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 213 – 246. [Places the written versus oral discussion in the realm of American pedagogy where technology refers to the tools of writing not the process of writing]
 * Further Reading**

Signature Event Context
 * See Also:**
 * Communication**
 * Deconstruction**