Word identity and meaning are effects of paradoxical sameness within repetition.

Evidence

Meaning arises, then, because the word is always a repetition, in a double sense. It is a repetition in the sense of something non-original, something that occurs by modifying or differing from an other; and a repetition in the sense of the-same-again. Meaning is an effect of this paradoxical quality of sameness and difference, whereby a word always happens to be just the same only different. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 459 (#expands, via linked claim)

If meaning is not simply that abstract realm we gain access to in dictionaries, how is it that words nevertheless do mean? It can be argued, Derrida shows, that what is most essential about words, for them to work as words, is that they are repeatable. A sign that was unique even in this sense, that happened only once, would not be a sign. So even when we insist on something’s identity as ‘the same word’, it is in fact something reiterated on different occasions, in different contexts. The simplest identity of a word, its self-sameness in this sense, is formed out of differences, the difference of reiteration. This reiteration has something paradoxical about it. On the one hand, each occurrence of a word is different. The word may differ in time or place, and may be modified in a diversity of empirical characteristics – being written, for example, instead of spoken. Language depends on the possibility of such diverse and different repetitions of the word, just as it depends upon the differences between words; it occurs only as such differing repetition. On the other hand, what is reiterated must remain the same word. In the midst of different repetitions, through every modification, there must remain a trace of something recognisably the same. It is this trace of sameness that we experience as the word’s ‘meaning’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 458 (#expands, via linked claim)

What exactly is this strange two-sided sheet, the sign? Suppose, as Derrida suggests, we refuse to take for granted the opposition of ideal versus material (and hence of text versus world) of which it is said to consist, and their hierarchical relationship. What kind of a thing then is the sign, what sort of event? Derrida’s answer would be that the sign is never exactly a thing or an event, in the sense of a unique and isolated empirical particular. Words do not work in that manner. In the first place, as Saussure himself elsewhere explains, a particular word always exists in relation to other similar sounding words. Its particularity is simply an effect of the way it differs from like-sounding words, as we saw just now with certain Arabic words. The English word ‘bit’, for instance, acquires its uniqueness only by differentiating itself from words like ‘bet’ and ‘big’. ‘Big’ in turn establishes itself as different from ‘dig’ and from ‘pig’, and so on. The same is true of what we call the word’s meaning. The meanings of ‘pig’, for example, are determined by other words, such as the existence in English of the word ‘pork’ to refer to pigs when served as food. The very bond between a word and its meaning, which was said to be the essence of the sign, can be shown to be just an instance of this process of difference. To find the meaning of a word (to borrow an example from Terry Eagleton) we look up its definition in a dictionary. The definition we are given is made up of other words. These words in turn are defined by more words, and so on. Words acquire their meaning from other words, not from the accuracy with which they ‘represent’. A word and its meaning turn out to be not a unique, two-sided object, but the product of interwoven relations of differences, one ‘element’ of which exists only in terms of others, in a weave that has no edge or exterior. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 457 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A sound conception causes quotations and objects to summon one another — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 101; A single phrase can hold contradictory temporal meanings simultaneously — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 54; New phenomena require new vocabulary, but familiar terms get repurposed — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 203 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Meaning emerges from the paradoxical combination of sameness and difference in repetition. #expands (0.95) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 459
• A word’s identity requires repeatable difference with a trace of sameness #expands (0.92) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 458
• Word meaning arises from differences among words, not representation #complicates (0.78) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 457
• Identity alignment requires perceived sufficiency of similarity rather than actual sameness #complicates (0.72) — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction, 75