which Derrida also calls a ‘mark’), the side in which the mark fails to
reproduce a signified content. The ability of a mark to reproduce a signi-
fied content can be reduced to polysemia, the production of a range of
possible meaning-effects which are the result of the contextual chains in
which the mark can be associated in a horizontal fashion.
For Derrida, polysemia is a rather modest aspect of signification, a
‘narrowly semiotic aspect’ of his concept of writing (1981: 29). Signs are
able to signify things, but what is neglected is that they do so in the face
of the alterity of the sign, the fact that it plays a role elsewhere, in other
contexts at other times.
The difference between polysemia and dissemination has nothing to
do with the sizeof contexts; rather, they are two opposing forces implicit
to all contexts, and scale is irrelevant. Nor does dissemination have any-
thing to do with the relation between unmediated and mediated commu-
nication. The nature of mediation is that it implicitly presupposes that
there is some substance that is being mediated. It cuts in always before
(always-already before) the effects of representation and a semantic field.
Its effects are precisely those of a structural indifference towards perfor-
mative communication and the impossibility of saturation. The more infor-
mation that one has about a context, the less successful will be the possibility
of totalizing the interpretation of utterances.
For this reason, there can be no neat narrative about what individu-
als think with regard to the failure or otherwise of the sign to signify.
Dissemination does not make its effects felt in the service of meaning;
rather, the phenomenal level of meaning is materially foreclosed by
the way that an audience, a viewer, a listener, a reader, is caught up in
dissemination.
The effects of dissemination ensure that ‘there can never be an expe-
rience of purepresence, but only chains of differential marks... because
the iterability which constitutes their identity never permits them to be a
unity of self-identity‘ (SEC: 318). The consequence of this is not to say that
‘the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are
only contexts without any centre of absolute anchoring’ (SEC: 320). When
the statement is made, ‘we need to put a matter “in context” or “in per-
spective”’, a logocentric promotion to the idea of a stable context is being
reinstated.
The difference between dissemination and polysemia, then, inheres
in the latter’s being determined by, and functioning within, the ‘imaginary’
experience of an homogeneous context, even if this context is as abstract
as that which receives its definition from an arche(a starting point) or
eschaton(an end point) – as in the philosophy of Hegel. Within this con-
text the task of interpretation is still to recapture the possible meanings
within the text – by means of a totalizing dialectics, for example. Derrida’s
critique of polysemic interpretation is precisely to deal with the desire for
totalization (the fallacy that contexts are finite and totally knowable) and
self-presence (the dream of a sign which would refer to nothing but itself).Interaction versus Integration 127Holmes-05.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 127