However, it still cannot be denied that, in the history of the human race as in the development of every growing child, the use of speech becomes before the use of writing. Nor does Derrida deny it. Rather he denies the assumption that we ordinarily make without even thinking about it: the assumption that the original form of a thing is somehow also its “truest” form. Thus we tend to assume that we could finally explain language if only we could rediscover its most rudementary beginnings in primitive communication. Such an assumption comes very naturally to us, but we would be hard pressed to justify it on rational grounds. So Derrida proposes instead a radical separation of historical and conceptual priority. Derrida recognizes the fact that writing follows from the fact of speech, but he none the less asserts that the idea of speech depends on the idea of writing. Or to put it another way, writing is the logically fundamental condition to which language has always aspired.
No doubt this is a difficult position to grasp. But consider an analogy; the case of a growing tree. Ordinarily we tend to imagine — even when we know better — that a tree rises and flourishes by virtue of some deep and inwardly hidden source of life. We tend to imagine some single essential centre which there is the earliest stages of growth, and which has remained constant under all later increments. But in fact, of course, a tree lives on the outside , by the circulation which flows through its green bark and sapwood; and its centre is mere dead heartwood, endlessly supplanted and left behind.
—
Richard Harland (On Derrida and Language as Writing)
I agree with Derrida on many levels but this is just patently wrong.
(via hollovv)
1) This isn’t Derrida, this is a a gross oversimplification of Derrida out of context.
2) What do you disagree with?
3) The real point (and I hope I don’t grossly oversimplify myself here) is what he calls “arche-writing” as the hinge term for a general economy that produces the binary opposition but is not either of the terms (speech/writing, or presence/absence) and is both. Writing is the “phantom double” of speech, it returns to haunt speech as the condition of its possibility and impossibility. He calls writing “the natural violence” that comes from within natural speech but also conditions its possibility. The “history” of the binary is not what he’s interested in—he’s interested in the privileging of one over the other as typifying the metaphysics of presence/logocentrism present in Western thought.
(via rhizombie) I’m not protesting based on any assumed origin of the primordial reaction to language, etc., but rather that writing is not a condition for the possibility of speech nor does it condition it, but rather that speech conditions all forms of writing as the activity that makes sense and makes sense of and for someone that is writing. I am protesting on a few conditions - that texts are already polyphonous themselves and engaged in conflict and dialogue with themselves, that the person writing is engaged with this same dialogic activity with themselves and with their own writing, and that speech, gesture, and interaction must be the conditions of possibility for both the intelligibility and unintelligibility of any form of language. (via hollovv)
See, I really don’t get this, and I think it’s part of why I’ve never really been able to sink myself into Derrida.
I don’t understand the privileging of language (either speech/writing) over other objects of metaphysical inquiry (even though Derrida is against metaphysics, from what I understand, I always thought it was the sort of ‘negative metaphysics’ that Heidegger’s against as well - that is, to use his terms, the privileging of present-at-hand substances over any other type in the history of metaphysics). Why the focus on language over and above most other things?
You say that “speech, gesture, and interaction must be the conditions of possibility for both the intelligibility and unintelligibility of any form of language” (and you mean this in opposition to Derrida who would praise writing as more ‘originary’ or something over speech, if I’m right?), but I just don’t get how speech and/or writing serve as the ‘conditions of possibility’ for language as intelligible or whatever. Like, I’ve always been of the opinion that sense is prior to linguistic investigation: the limits of our world aren’t determined by the boundaries of language, or discourse, but by the boundaries of senses. I feel that senses come prior - both in an obviously historical sense, but in a metaphysical sense too - to any investigation of language.
I should qualify this a bit, so I don’t fall into some sort of naive empiricism. I’m not claiming that we can only know what our senses tell us, but instead that our linguistic descriptions of things that we can/can’t know are bounded by our senses. For example, I had a discussion with my roommate the other day about how some animals ‘see’ electromagnetism. I had to ask the naive question about how they see such a thing, what it could be like for them to see such a thing, etc. He corrected himself and said that it’s not that they ‘see’ electromagnetism, but that the sense it, and that sight is the closest sensory experience we have to what those animals are experiencing in relation to electromagnetism. Because we don’t have that sense though, we can only describe the experience derivatively, through metaphor. And that’s the limits on our knowledge there: the sensory experience of the world, and tools like metaphor are ways of trying to approximate experiences outside of this. As far as I can think of, I can’t think of any writing that gets out having sense as its grounding, even if only in a derivative sense - and not just the five traditional senses, but all the things that get considered as senses now (like, our sense of being a unified object in relation to a contexture of other objects or whatever).
So, all I guess I’m asking in this really long response (way too long, fuck) is: why the prioritizing of language? That’s something I never understood in the shift from phenomenological investigations to semiotic ones: what’s the justification for focusing on language so much?
Maybe it’s just because long investigations into language bore me, but…I just don’t get it? Whatever, I’ll probably have to end up reading Derrida anyway.
(Source: theframedmaelstrom, via autochthones)
![fuckyeahgillesdeleuze:
Writing has never been capitalism’s thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate. The death of writing is like the death of God or the death of the father: the thing was settled a long time ago, although the news of the event is slow to reach us, and there survives in us the memory of extinct signs with which we still write. The reason for this is simple: writing implies a use of language in general according to which graphism becomes aligned on the voice, but also overcodes it and induces a fictitious voice from on high that functions as a signifier. The arbitrary nature of the thing designated, the subordination of the signified, the transcendence of the despotic signifier, and finally, its consecutive decomposition into minimal elements within a field of immanence uncovered by the withdrawal of the despot—all this is evidence that writing belongs to imperial despotic representation. Once this is said, what exactly is meant when someone announces the collapse of the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’? Of course capitalism has made and continues to make use of writing: not only is writing adapted to money as the general equivalent, but the specific functions of money in capitalism went by way of writing and printing, and in some measure continue to do so. The fact nonetheless remains that writing typically plays the role of an archaism in capitalism, the Gutenberg press being the element that confers on the archaism a current function. But the capitalist use of language is different in nature; it is realized or becomes concerted within the field of immanence peculiar to capitalism itself, with the appearance of the technical means of expression that correspond to the generalized decoding of flows, instead of still referring, in a direct or indirect form, to despotic overcoding.
(Anti-Oedipus, p. 260—261)
[I deleted the French translation of this passage because, well, I can’t read it. So, yeah.]
This is probably the best response I’ve seen to NYPD destroying the OWS library. Basically anything relating Deleuze to current events gets my attention though.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luzg9w2PpM1qdgezco1_1280.jpg)
