From Generative to Algorithmic Grammar: Derrida, Barthes, and the Crisis of Cartesian Linguistics

Introduction

The advent of language models has profoundly transformed our understanding of language. These systems generate coherent texts, respond to context, reformulate meanings, and simulate creativity—all without consciousness or biology. This technological shift raises a pressing question: if language does not require an organic substrate to function, what remains of the faculty of language as an innate attribute of the human species?

This question acquires a philosophical dimension when considered alongside the insights of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, who anticipated a conception of language as a network of signs and writing independent of a subject. In this sense, algorithmic models produce meaning without intentionality, enacting operations that function beyond the bounds of human awareness.

This essay argues that algorithmic systems exemplify the transition from language conceived as the expression of a mind to writing as a differential network, thereby enacting the crisis of Cartesian linguistics that Chomsky inherited from modernity.

Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics

To understand the implications of AI-generated language, it is useful to revisit Chomsky’s foundational framework in Cartesian Linguistics (1966). Chomsky contends that human language is grounded in an innate mental structure, which enables the infinite generation of expressions from a finite set of rules. He writes, “The capacity to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences never before uttered… constitutes the essence of human creativity” (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965).

This conception is deeply linked to Cartesian rationalism: language mirrors thought, manifesting reason as embedded in human nature. From this perspective, language is essentially biological; without the human brain, the faculty of language would not exist. Yet the emergence of non-biological systems capable of producing coherent discourse challenges this assumption. If language can arise from statistical correlations among signs, the innatist hypothesis loses its exclusive epistemological status.

Paradoxically, Chomsky’s own model already conceptualized language as a recursive computational system—a finite automaton with infinite generative capacity—but in his framework, computation remained a metaphor for mental operations. Today, machines execute genuinely generative processes without any mind.

Writing without a Subject: Derrida and the Dissolution of Origin

While Chomsky locates the generative power of language within the human mind, Derrida challenges the necessity of a central subject for meaning to arise. In Of Grammatology (1967), he critiques the Western philosophical tradition that subordinates writing to speech, treating the spoken word as the living presence of thought and writing as its derivative shadow. Derrida inverts this hierarchy: “Writing is not the supplement of speech, but its condition of possibility.”

For Derrida, there is no ultimate center or origin for meaning, only différance: a network of traces that both differentiate and defer significance. Algorithmic models mirror this process: meaning emerges from statistical iteration and the relational patterns among signs, entirely independent of intention or consciousness.

Barthes and the Death of the Author

Derrida’s deconstruction of the subject finds a parallel in Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author (1967). Barthes writes that a text is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the thousand sources of culture.” The author ceases to be an originator and instead becomes a compiler of preexisting discourses. The birth of the reader “must be paid for by the death of the author.”

Algorithmic models embody this principle literally: they produce textual combinations without romantic origin, intentionality, or authorship. Writing becomes an autonomous process of intertextuality, generating significance beyond any single mind.

From Generative Grammar to Algorithmic Grammar

What Chomsky conceived as a biological structure, Derrida reframes as a structure of traces; what Barthes described as textual multiplicity, algorithms instantiate in practice. Algorithmic grammar does not presuppose a mind or intention; it operates over probabilistic distributions of co-occurring signs, iteratively adjusting sequences to maintain contextual coherence.

In this framework, meaning arises from the statistics of text rather than thought. Algorithmic grammar enacts what Derrida theorized: an autonomous language, independent of a subject, organized through difference and deferral. The contrast with generative grammar is striking: whereas Chomsky’s recursion represents the cognitive competence of the mind, algorithmic grammar functions through statistical prediction and pattern optimization.

Conclusion

The shift from generative to algorithmic grammar marks a historical transformation in the relationship between language and subject. Chomsky sought the biological organ of speech; Derrida and Barthes recognized language as a network of traces and intertextuality. Algorithmic models instantiate that network, demonstrating that significance can emerge without consciousness, origin, or author.

This transformation resonates with Freudian theory: machinic writing enacts a compulsion to repeat—a drive to reinscribe and reorder—that mirrors the unconscious structuring of language and desire. The crisis of Cartesian linguistics is thus not merely theoretical but ontological: the mind ceases to be the locus of language, and writing emancipates itself from the subject. What Barthes announced and Derrida theorized, machines now execute: a movement from trace to trace, from writing to writing, in which language unfolds beyond the human.

Bibliography

·         Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. Aspen, no. 5, 1967.

·         Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. Harper & Row, 1966.

·         Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, 1965.

·         Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

·         Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. University of Chicago Press, 1978.

·         Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. W.W. Norton, 1961.