System, Text, Difference

Abstract

Mind, language, machine: three systems without positive substance that, copulating interactively, create the universe as it is known and manipulated by man. Each seems to have a ‘physical’ reality, and yet each is also — and more importantly — an ethereal network of relations: a mind, elaborated through its eerie space like a language, is not simply a brain (a neural structure, ‘wetware’); a language is not simply air in motion or ink on paper; a machine is not simply silicon-based circuitry (hardware). Each, like the signs that comprise language, has a particle/wave nature, has something of Jacques Derrida’s trace (‘trace’) about it: each ‘can be focussed either materially or conceptually,… both is and is not matter, and carries within itself a kind of necessary exteriority’.¹ Each in its insubstantiality consists of software: differential relations, diacritical nodes. No stuff at all finally: just functionalist patterns of interrelation, maps without territory, wispy microtexts interwoven. Each is — or is coming to be understood as — the same kind of system. And yet there seems to be a divorce among them, an otherness of each to the others.