Now question arises, is writing Both Useless and dangerous…? This does not square easily with the social history of the rise of writing in the west. Sometimes, speech is offered a curious privilege, for example, law courts rely on writing, but they privilege vocal testimony, when the person is asked to say “I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” An academic thesis forbidden to cite oral statements as evidence is brought to its final court, the viva voce the court of the living voice, as “the argument of my theses is…….” Also the minutes of the committee meeting are written, but are ratified at the next meeting in speech; the Boss says “I call the secretary to read the minutest of the last meeting.”
But that is not quiet Derrida’s argument. First, paradoxically, phonocentricism is ‘a history of silence’, a repression of writing which can scarcely be acknowledged. Secondly, the suppression of writing is necessary to western philosophy, and all thinking influenced by it. It is crucial to philosophy’s metaphysical presuppositions.
Metaphysics inquires into aspects of reality which seem to lie beyond the empirically knowable world, out of reach of scientific methods. Its questions look like the philosophical questions: essential truth, being and knowing, mind, presence, time and space, causation, free will, belief in god, human immortality, etc. Are these questions? Empiricists like David Hume, and many positivists, scientific naturalists, skeptics and others have said NO. But the question persists. To set them up and answer them, Western metaphysics has looked for foundations:- fundamentals, principles, or a notion of the centre. These are the groundings for all of its inquiries and statements. This is the drive to ground truth in a single ultimate point—an ultimate point. Derrida calls this impulse logocentricism. The logos is taken as the undivided point, the origin. Metaphysics ascribes truth to the logos, along with the origin of truth in general. Metaphysics in its search for foundations is logocentric.[14]
How are the Foundations laid:
Use Binary oppositions: cast the key terms against their opposites. If the question is being, established “being” against “non-being”. And so on……presence/absence, mind/body, cause/effect, god/man, etc.
Privilege the first term: it’s is the “groundly” term, the positive term, give it priority. It is the term which articulates the fundamentals, principles or the center. It’s on the side of logos.
Subordinate the second term: It has to be negative, or the first term can’t be positive. It has to be deficient, lacking, corrupt, or just derivative. It opposes the logos, it is its enemy; or it dilutes that truth of truth, attenutates it, bleaches it out.
Set up a procedure: Always move from the first term towards the second.[15]
All metaphysicians proceed from an origin, seen as simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical—to treat then of accidents, derivations, complication, deterioration. Hence God before evil, positive before negative, pure before complex, etc. This is not just one metaphysical gesture among others; it is the metaphysical exigency, the most constant, profound and potent procedure.[16]
Derrida’s task is to undermine metaphysical thinking—to disrupt its foundations, dislodged its certitudes, turn aside its quests for an undivided point of origin, the logos. Its major task, Derrida argues that metaphysics pervades Western thought. Now, if Metaphysics is so pervasive, isn’t Derrida’s own thinking going to be inhabited by it? Yes – inescapably. So the task is impossible..? Derrida has never claimed that what he does is possible. He knows that no critique can ever totally escape from what it is criticizing. Meanwhile, movements can be made…. It is possible to overturn a metaphysical binaries, to reverse its hierarchy by privileging its second term—for instance, to privilege body not mind, Man not God, the complex before the simple, absence rather than presence. Derrida does this.[17]
But undecidability disrupts the binary structures of metaphysical thinking. It displaces the “either/or” structure of oppositions. The undecidable plays all ways, takes no sides. It won’t be fixed down. It leaves no certainty of privileged foundational term against subordinated second term. The unfixing of this certainty is the unfixing of Metaphysics. Derrida’s Philosophy has been called anti-foudationalism. That’s partly useful. But Derrida is not simply “against” foundations, he knows they are inescapable. However, metaphysical foundations can still be shaken. That’s what he does. He makes a movement of solicitation (French word, from old Latin solliciatare, to shake as a whole), a shaking at the core, a tremor through the entire structure.
Metaphysical oppositions rely on assumptions of presence. The first or privileged binary term “full” presence. Its subordinate is the term of absence, or of mediated, attenuated presence. This concept Derrida takes from Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the German Phenomenologist. Adopting Heidegger’s formulation, Derrida argues that in western thinking the meaning of being in general has been determind by presence, in all the senses of this word. Presence can be spatial: for example, proximity, nearness or adjacency, and also immediacy, having actual or direct contact, lacking mediation, having no intervening material, object or agency. And it can be temporal, it evokes the present as the single present moment, the now; and occurrence without delay, lapse or deferral. Presence organizes metaphysical concepts of being. And all the “groundly” terms of metaphysics designate a presence. Derrida gives these examples: [18]
Presence of the object to sight
Presence as substance essence or existence
Temporal presence as the point of the ‘now’, or of the instant
Self presence of thought or consciousness
Present being of the subject
Co-presence of the self and the other
Presence is the foundation for many claims, philosophical or not:-
That a truth can lie behind (therefore in proximity to) an appearance
That there is an immediate bond between the “the word of God” and truth
That a “spirit of the age” can inform an historical era, and therefore be present within it.
That a photograph can capture the “significant moment”, the now
That an artist’s expressed emotion can be present in their work
Why, then, is the speech/writing opposition so important….? Why is the privileging of speech a gesture which inaugurates Western philosophy? And if Philosophy as we know it is writing, why treat writing as a corruption, an obstacle or an irrelevance? To all this question Derrida give one single answer to all these questions “because it is a necessity of the metaphysics of presence.”[19] From that perspective speech seems to carry full presence. Metaphysical concepts of being, in time and space, demand presence. Writing depends on absence. Its characteristics oppose presence, metaphysical thinking has to eject it or subordinate it. In Speech, the speaker and the listner have to be present in at least two senses:
Present to the word in a spatial sense
Present at a particular moment in time in which the words are uttered.
Therefore, it seems that the speakers’ thoughts are as close as possible to their words. The thoughts are present to the words. So speech offers the most direct access to consciousness. The voice can seem to be consciousness itself. Derrida says “When I speak, I am conscious of being present for what I think, but also of keeping as close as possible to my thought a signifying substance, a soud carried by my breath. I hear this as soon as I emit it. It seems to depend only on my pure and free spontaneity, requiring the use of no instrument, no accessory, no force taken from the world. Tis signifying substance, this sound, seems to unite with my thought…..so that the sound seems to erase itself, become transparent…..allowing the concept to present itself as what it is, referring to nothing other than its present.”[20]
Speech is transparent, a diaphanous veil through which we view consciousness. Speech and thought, nothing comes between them. No lapse of time, no surface, no gap. So presence beguilingly seems to attend spoken words…..but not writing. Writing operates on absences; it does not need the presence of writer, or of the writer’s consciousness. The written marks are abandoned, cut off from the write, yet they continue to produce effects beyond his presence and beyond the present actuality of his meaning, that is, beyond his life itself.” [21]
And the same for the reader, all writing, in order to be what it is , must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general. This is not a modification of presence, but a break in it, a ‘death’ or the possibility of a ‘death’ of the addressee.” Writing cannot be writing unless it can function in these two absences. Presence is unsustainable.
Derrida and Rousseau
Having displayed how Saussure’s argument about the centrality of speech deconstructs itself, Derrida proceeds to make the same sorts of moves on the 18th century French Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, the father of French romanticism. In Discourse on Sciences and Arts, Discourse on the Origin and Bases of Inequality and Confessions, Rousseau reacted against the view of his contemporaries that progress in the arts and sciences will make human beings happy. Instead, he argued that civilization and learning corrupt human nature. He celebrated the “original”, “natural”, “uncivilized” man, the “noble savage” who was innocent of writing, private property and the powerful property and the powerful Institutions of the political state. Rousseau yearned to return to a “natural” state of idyllic simplicity, innocence and grace, living most of his life with an illiterate servant girl.
Rousseau’s writings depend upon a binary opposition between nature and culture. Nature is good, original, virtuous, noble and present. Culture is corrupt, degenerates, a “supplement” to nature’s fullness of presence. Rousseau also feels that writing is perverse—a product of civilization, a dangerous supplement to natural speech. He argues that in small scale, organic, living communities the face-to-face presence of speech had eventually given way to civilization, to inequalities of power and economics, and to the loss of the ability to speak one-to-one.
For Rousseau it is writing that has intruded upon the idyllic communal peace and grace of the one-to-one intimacy of natural speaking societies. But Derrida says that “Is it Rousseau’s dream of idyllic, intimate, primitive, speaking community simple the social and political equivalent of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence? Isn’t he just yearning for the full presence of speech and distrusting writing? ” Yes, he is. And it is Derrida’s task, then, to demonstrate how Rousseau’s writings deconstruct themselves. Now Derrida says, that all these Rousseau’s writings are writings, i.e. Rousseau is not present to us, he is absent, he is not speaking, we know him only through his writing, which he must depend on to communicate his thoughts to us. Rousseau, writing in a candid, confessional mode, realizes that even though writing is artificial and decadent, he is a writer. He realizes that he must rely upon writing to make his own most intimate thoughts and feelings known, even to himself. He also confesses that it is when writing down the history of his life and emotions, that he feels tempted to embellish, to fictionalize, to dress up the original, natural truth. Thus, he concludes that writing is a dangerous supplement to speech.[1]
However, Derrida seizes upon the fact that supplement, (suppléer, in French), can mean not only 1) to supplement, to add on to—but also, 2) to take the place of, to substitute for. So supplement is paradoxical, it can mean adding something on to something already complete in itself, or adding on something to complete a thing.
So it is like an ambigram.[2] And for Rousseau, writing is both something that is added on to speech, which is supposedly already complete and full of presence—and it is something which makes speech complete. But speech is obviously not complete if it needs writing to supplement it. It is not full of presence. It must contain absence.
And then Derrida shows that for Rousseau all his human activities involve this play of presence/absence. For instance, Rousseau writes that melody—the pure, spontaneous impulse to sing—is central, because it is so present to the natural voice. Harmony, on the other hand—the arrangement of multiple voices in concert—is unnatural. After all it depends upon notation, which is a form of writing. Rousseau argues that as civilizations become more complex, more abstract, written harmonies replace the innocent grace of natural speech-song—melody.[3]
But Derrida shows how Rousseau’s argument deconstructs itself. Rousseau writes that melody “has its principle in harmony, since it is an harmonic analysis that gives degree of the scale, and the chords of the mode, and the laws of modulation, the only elements of singing.[4]” We always sing a melody in a certain key, in a certain scale—and that is harmony. So the pure, pristine melody is always a form of its dangerous supplement—for it substitutes or adds a perverse, solitary and weakening pleasure to the normal, natural presence of erotic experience with a lover. The masturbator has fantasies about absent beauties with his imagination, supplementing them for the real thing.
And both sex and masturbation realizes Rousseau, may be just a substitute for his foster-mother his original object of desire. Thus the masturbator, the fantasist, is engaged in an endless quest. For his fantasies—and even his lovers—can never replace the full presence he enjoyed with his foster-mother. Again, but, is not it that just another form of the yearning for full presence all over again…? Just another example of what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence…?
Yes, And what Derrida reveals is that throughout the Confessions, Rousseau relies upon the dangerous supplement, fantasy—because he admits that at the very core of “natural” sexual desire—there is lack, absence. Rousseau admits that his “natural” erotic experiences with women have never been passionate, as exciting and fulfilling, as his erotic dreams and daytime fantasies. Sex can not live up to fantasy. Neither can it live up to the fullness of presence he once felt with his foster-mother. So like speech and melody, the presence of sex is always already inhabited by a certain lack, by an absence, which then must be filled in with dangerous supplement—fantasy.
Picking up on Rousseau’s comparison in the Confessions of “silent and ill chosen reading” to his first discoveries of auto-eroticism (masturbation), [5] Derrida comments on the difficulty of separating writing from masturbation. What links these two activities is the experience of “touching touched,”[6] or the double sensation of two exposed surfaces of the body at once. Not only, he argues, are all living things capable of auto-affection, but also “auto affection is the condition of an experience in general”[7] because sensory exteriority “submits itself to my power of repetition.”[8]
Derrida also wants to employ the metaphorical sense of masturbation as the expanding or the ejaculation seed in the world. Speech does not fall into the exteriority of space. While suppressing difference, speech nevertheless requires the listener as present other. It is what is added to “living self present speech” as supplement, much as masturbation presupposes (or supplements) the concept of sexual activity with a partner.[9]