Grammatology I
So, for a couple of weeks now I’ve been wanting to post about Grammatology and haven’t. No suspense, it’s just ‘cos I’ve been lazy. I am trying to commit myself to the following for July:
- One article per day
- 25-30 pages of a major text per day
- At least one, and hopefully two, substantive blog posts a week in response to my reading.
So, any "You can do it!"s from readers and friends would be encouraging.
So: Derrida. I’ve read through Spivak’s intro, the "Exergue," "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing," and about halfway through "Linguistics and Grammatology"–right now, I’m stuck in the middle of "The Outside Is the Inside."
My text is marked on every page, a crazy mish-mash of underlined passages and marginal notes, so rather than go through on a note-by-note basis, I’d like to just throw out some ideas that Derrida seems to be working through–playing through might be more appropriate of course.
It’s hard to know where to start, because as I try to describe one idea, I recall another, and that seems to be the proper starting point. Which, from what I can understand, is at least part of Derrida’s goal through deconstruction: to complicate our assumptions of genesis and of telos. This is fitting, giving Derrida’s aversion to binary epistemology: alongside in/out and presence/absence, we should include begin/end. (Here, as throughout this post, I seem to offer an ineloquent and reductive version of Derrida’s text. So it goes.)
Which is, at least in part it seems, crucial to the idea of the text (as opposed to that of the book). The book begins and ends, and in this sense offers an epistemology of limited scope: limited, isolated, solitary. What I’m not wholly sure I understand yet is the mechanism JD uses to move from book to text–I think I understand, or am beginning to understand, what each represents for JD, but the precise moment of transition seems vague. For me, the answer rests somewhat in the use that Derrida makes of his own sources: Hegel, Saussure, Rousseau, Nietzsche. Derrida doesn’t simply summarize and condense their respective arguments so that he can move into a stance of mere comparison and contrast; rather, he moves in and around and between and through these sources (playing with them, as it were–frolicking almost in the pleasure of the text) to demonstrate their own points of deconstruction and then–through that play–building his own claims about speech, text, and writing.
What Derrida offers, then–or at least the offer that I see on hand–is an idea(l) of an infinite text, an unbounded text that accumulates and accomodates contradiction and conflict through its complex structure. That is, for Derrida (and I admit I might have learned this through Spivak or another source, but it rings true after reading the text), conflict, ambiguity, and contradiction are. . .okay. His project doesn’t seem to be finding a way to eliminate contradiction nor to (as Adorno/Horkheimer suggest about the culture industry) demonstrate its cooption and commodification, but rather maybe to ask whether texts aren’t in fact built on contradiction–that contradiction is on some level a necessity in textual production?
Of course, it’s an easy gesture to point to the Web as a prototypical "infinite text." I think that makes sense, but it seems too easy as well–as though recognizing the scope and scale of the Web is the end of the task. The question I would ask, then, is whether the Web (if we want to think about it as The Infinite Text and hence reify it and leave it uninterrogated) functions in the way that Derrida demonstrates texts can and do. This is the germ of what could prove an interesting project, assuming of course noone has beat me to it.
Actually, a question about my own idea in the previous paragraph that makes me wonder whether I’ve understood the grammatology or not. Is JD’s idea that text in infinite or rather that the boundaries we impose upon it are arbitrary and socially constructed? By saying "the outside is the inside" or even "the outside is the inside" is Derrida necessarily offering a rejection of inside-ness or outside-ness or rather just demonstrating that the boundary is fluid and permeable? In either case, the question of how to treat the textuality of the Web remains, but obviously the answer(s) would differ greatly depending on which reading of Derrida is right.
[I think, too, that the idea/l of the infinite text is in some ways a Romantic one, in which the text replaces nature as the inspiration and measure for humanity. In turn, if this notion of the infinite text has any merit, it would bear an interesting comparison with the Kantian aesthetic and sublime.]
Another point of interest: deconstruction is, among other things, an invention strategy. On two levels, too. First, of course, deconstruction gives us something to do with texts: to deconstruct them as Derrida does to discover their contradiction and ambiguities. Of course, if we think of deconstruction simply as a hermeneutic in this fashion, we realize that all branches of theory are invention strategies. The problem, of course, is that working with them merely as hermeneutics is sort of a one-trick approach, right? I have my feminist/poststructural/modernist/postcolonial lens and that’s how I’ll view this text. So in that sense a hermeneutics seems contrary to Derrida’s project because a hermeneutics (apart from assuming a particular value for the logos) only understands a text through its own lens rather than opening it up to show how it creates meaning. This, however, points to deconstruction’s value as a heuristic: if we can understand how texts build meaning and construct meaning, then we can employ those strategies for our own ends: as Rice might say, we can re/appropriate them, rearrange them. remix them.
Finally–for this post at least–I’m interested in something Derrida suggests and alludes to but hasn’t (and perhaps might not) addressed directly: the connection between writing and epistemology. Derrida is critical, of course, of the logos, presence, and phonocentrism, which I guess do constitute certain assumptions about the organization, validity, and construction of knowledge. But given that Derrida establishes "writing" as an alternative to the tyranny of the logos, how does that effect rhetoricians and other scholars of writing? I don’t have an answer, but another idea that’s been brewing in me little head of late is precisely this point where rhetoric and epistemology overlap–for Aristotle, (as I’ve suggested before via Heidegger), rhetoric is the task of establishing persuasively valid knowledge–which plainly points to questions of epistemology anyway.
Oh yeah–metaphor is just all over the place. I’ll have to do a special "All Metaphor" post on JD’s comments on metaphor.
