When Words Mean Nothing and Everything: The Double Valuation of Signs
- Foucault, The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language
“There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body”.
- Derrida, Of grammatology
1. Nothing or Truth
At the beginning of The Order of Discourse, Michel Foucault describes a curious fate that befell the words of the madman in Europe. For centuries, he writes, they were “either totally ignored or else were taken as words of truth.” They could fall into a void the moment they were spoken, or be treated as revealing something that ordinary reason could not perceive.
The contrast is striking. How can words become either nothing or truth?
The words themselves have not necessarily changed. What changes is what they are allowed to count as. An utterance may be heard as speech without being admitted as meaningful speech; under different conditions, it may acquire an extraordinary authority.
This is easy to miss because we tend to move directly from words to meaning. Someone says something, and we ask what it means. Foucault's example invites a prior question: what makes an utterance count as meaningful in the first place?
A sentence can be grammatically intelligible and still be dismissed as noise. Conversely, words that would ordinarily carry little authority can be received as prophecy, revelation, or evidence of a hidden truth. Meaning, then, is not the only issue. There is also the status assigned to what is said.
The puzzle lies one step before interpretation. We need to ask not simply what words mean, but under what conditions they are recognized as saying something at all.
2. The Word Before Its Meaning
Consider how easily an utterance can occupy different positions. Take the sentence “The king is dead.” It might be testimony when spoken by a witness, a joke when delivered by a comedian, a diagnosis when pronounced by a physician, a prophecy when attributed to a visionary, or nonsense when dismissed as the speech of someone who cannot be taken seriously. The sequence of words does not by itself determine which of these things is happening.
What changes is the framework in which the utterance is received.
Foucault's madman makes this especially visible. His words could be rejected as empty noise, but they could also be deciphered as containing a reason deeper than that of the rational person. The point is not simply that people misunderstood him. His speech occupied a peculiar position: it could be excluded from ordinary discourse while being granted an exceptional access to truth.
Hearing words and recognizing something as speech that counts are therefore not quite the same act. A sound can be audible without becoming an accepted statement; an intelligible sentence can be present without acquiring the status of testimony, knowledge, warning, or truth.
This distinction changes the question we ask of language. Instead of beginning with the content of an utterance, we can examine the conditions under which it is recognized as a statement of a particular kind.
When we turn from speech to writing in Of Grammatology, we encounter a related problem at a deeper level. Derrida examines a tradition that does not simply distinguish speech from writing, but assigns them different values: speech is associated with presence, immediacy, and proximity to thought, while writing is treated as secondary, external, and derivative. Yet when this tradition tries to describe what is most original or truthful, writing unexpectedly returns in a privileged form.
This is the movement we need to examine.
3. Good Writing, Bad Writing
The traditional hierarchy seems straightforward enough. Presence gives us the speaker; the speaker's voice is close to thought; writing comes afterward as a representation of what was already spoken. In its familiar form, the sequence is: presence → voice → writing
Writing is therefore associated with what is secondary, external, and artificial. The voice seems closer to the origin because it appears to accompany the speaker's presence.
Yet a peculiar problem arises when this tradition tries to describe the most original form of truth.
The truth may be said to be written in the soul. God's law may be engraved in the heart. Nature may be conceived as a book. Divine knowledge may be imagined as an inscription that precedes every human act of writing.
This is the point Derrida draws out in Of Grammatology. After tracing the opposition between a supposedly good, natural writing and a fallen, artificial one, he writes:
“There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body.”
The formulation is revealing. Writing, supposedly the secondary term, now acquires a privileged form. Ordinary writing remains derivative: it belongs to technique, exteriority, and artifice. But another kind of writing is invoked to describe something original, natural, living, and true.
The distinction can be put simply:
ordinary writing
→ secondary
→ artificial
→ external
divine or natural
writing
→ original
→ living
→ internal
→ truthful
The interesting feature is not merely that Derrida challenges the status of writing. It is that the metaphor of writing reappears when discourse tries to represent what is most primordial. The term associated with exteriority and derivation becomes a way of imagining an inscription that precedes human technique.
Why does a discourse that privileges voice need the image of writing when it speaks of ultimate truth?
4. When the Excluded Becomes the Origin
The two passages describe very different historical situations, but they reveal a comparable operation. In Foucault, the madman's speech can be dismissed as noise or received as revelation. In Derrida, ordinary writing can be condemned as a secondary and artificial copy, while another kind of writing—the inscription of truth in the soul, the heart, or nature—is granted a privileged status.
This is what we might call a double valuation.
The term needs to be understood carefully. Double valuation does not mean that a sign has two meanings. It means that a signifying form can receive two different statuses within different regimes of recognition. The same form of speech can be devalued as noise and elevated as revelation; writing can be treated as a derivative technique and invoked as the inscription of an original truth.
The pattern is striking:
noise → revelation
secondary → original
artifice → nature
exterior → interior
dead letter → living truth
Yet this is not simply a reversal of the hierarchy. Foucault is not saying that madness is true and reason false. Derrida is not saying that writing is simply superior to speech. The distinction between the ordinary and the exceptional remains intact. What changes is the status assigned to the exceptional form.
The excluded does not simply disappear; it can return in a privileged form.
This is particularly clear in the case of writing. Human writing remains the fallen, external, technical form, while “natural” writing becomes the image of an origin that precedes technique itself. The subordinated term is not liberated from the hierarchy. Instead, an exceptional version of it is elevated within the hierarchy.
The same structure appears in Foucault's description of madness. The madman's speech can be excluded from ordinary discourse precisely while being granted an unusual relation to truth. His words do not become ordinary statements; they acquire another status.
The two cases should not be collapsed into one historical story. Their objects and purposes are different. What they allow us to see, however, is a recurring instability in the valuation of signs: a form can be denied ordinary authority while being granted an exceptional one.
The question is no longer simply what a sign means, it is what produces these different valuations.
5. Who Decides What Counts?
A sign does not arrive alone. It enters a setting that already contains expectations about who may speak, what kind of statement is being made, how it should be interpreted, and what authority it can possess.
A sentence spoken by a witness, printed in a medical report, recited in a poem, uttered by a child, or produced by a machine may contain the same sequence of words while functioning very differently. The difference does not reside exclusively in the sounds or marks themselves. It also depends on the position from which the utterance is received.
There are systems between the speaker and what is heard.
These systems may consist of institutions, conventions, genres, classifications, authorities, or shared expectations. They do not simply add a context to an otherwise complete statement. They help determine what sort of thing the statement can be.
This is where the examples of madness and writing point beyond themselves. The issue is not merely that people sometimes make mistakes about what a statement means. Recognition itself is organized. Some utterances enter a field in which they can be examined, challenged, recorded, or used as evidence. Others are excluded before those operations can begin.
The important shift is therefore from the individual act to the system in which that act becomes legible.
We can ask not only what a speaker says, but what arrangement allows the statement to function as testimony, diagnosis, prophecy, literature, evidence, nonsense, or truth.
The status of a sign is not simply attached to it. It is produced through the relations surrounding it.
6. The Same Words, Another World
We still live with this problem, although the mechanisms have changed.
A statement can be classified as information or misinformation, relevant or irrelevant, human-generated or machine-generated. Its wording may remain unchanged while its position within a system changes.
This is particularly visible in algorithmic environments. Search engines rank some material above other material. Recommendation systems decide what deserves attention. Moderation systems classify expressions as permitted, restricted, or prohibited. Such systems do not merely process language; they classify what language is allowed to count as.
The classificatory operation is unusually visible here. A piece of language must be recognized as something—a useful answer, a reliable source, spam, a threat, or irrelevant content—before it can have the corresponding effect.
The contemporary problem is therefore not simply whether a system understands a sentence. It is how the system positions that sentence within its own field of recognition.
The madman's words could disappear into silence or become words of truth. Writing could be condemned as a lifeless copy or invoked as the inscription of the origin. These are very different historical cases, but both reveal that signs do not arrive with their status already attached to them.
Before asking what something means, we should sometimes ask what makes it count as meaningful at all.
Bibliography
Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967).
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original works published 1969–1970).
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