Sign, Design, Communication - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 32

After elimination of materiality, which is inherent to the outside object and the
body, there remains the 'form' of inner sphere. The concept of 'form' comes
originally from Plato's concept of 'idea'or'eidos' (essence), which guarantees
that identity is interpreted in modern philosophy as the identity of objects, con-
sciousness, or spirit. Nevertheless, we can read a sign without presupposing the
doubtful concept of the 'form' as idea or code, and as long as a sign is still readable,
the form must be taken as a repeatable and iterable one that has materiality.
The word 'writing (´criture)' used by Derrida does not always mean writing in
contrast to spoken language. The oppositions between speech and writing (intelli-
gible and sensible, soul and body) seem to have persisted throughout the history of
Western philosophy. The former, the superior term, belongs to presence and the
logos; the latter, the inferior term, serves to define its status and mark a fall. It is not
important to reverse this hierarchical opposition. It is not a simple valorization of
writing over speech. Indeed, “the usual notion of writing in the narrow sense does
contain the elements of the structure of writing in general: the absence of the
'author' and of the 'subject-matter,' interpretability, the deployment of a space
and a time that is not 'its own.' We 'recognize' all this in writing in the narrow
sense and 'repress' it” (Derrida 1967b , Gayatri Chakravorty Spivack, translator's
preface. p. lxx). Therefore, we ignore that everything else is also inhabited by the
structure of writing as ´criture.
Indeed, Derrida admits this repeatability and iterability in our experience. The
marks that constitute experience construct “the network of effacement and of
difference, of units of iterability, which are separable from their internal and
external context and also from themselves”. (Derrida 1988 , p. 10)
A work of fine art seems to have an original, specific identity. Our experience
also seems to confirm it. But how? Our artistic experience—could it be possible
only through the cognition of the identity and the aesthetic form of the work? This
puts the cart before the horse. The identity in our aesthetic experience does not
depend on the form presupposed by transcendental metaphysics. Without a repeat-
able and iterable aesthetic experience, we are capable of discerning the original
piece and a fake. Rather, such an experience will constitute the identity with
iterability: Something that carries within itself the trace of a perennial alterity:
the structure of the psyche, the structure of the sign. To this structure, Derrida gives
the name 'writing' (´criture).
The structure of the sign, of experience, and of text has logically, even if not in a
fact, alterity or iterability. We usually think that originality or specialty comes from
a specific talent or fortuity and consists of only one event. However, originality can
and does coexist with repeatability as iterability. To write or design is to produce a
mark that constitutes a sort of machine that repeats the same action, but then in turn
repeatedly produces something different, positive or negative.
Let us not forget that “iterability” does not signify simply, ... 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