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124 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
by an over-powering desire for self-presence, the here and the now. This
usually involves a quest for lost origins – a master word or signified thought,
a logos which would transcend the uncertainties which may unsettle ordi-
nary language. Logocentrism involves an ‘exigent, powerful, systematic
and irrepressible desire for a transcendental signified’ (Derrida, 1976: 49).
A transcendental signified functions like a primordial self-presence, which
is somehow independent of the play of signs, and which would bring an
end to that infinite regress for a final meaning in the certitude of a ground.
It lies at a point where representation withdraws into a transparent unity
with what it represents, where subject and object are joined at last in pres-
ence in a privileged connection to truth and meaning.
For Derrida, logocentrism is inscribed in a range of features of
Western thought and culture, including an imperative to decide quickly,
to define who is foe and who is friend, anxiety over having to have certainty
and truth, the desire for instantaneous and perpetual contact – a super-
normative impulse for self-presence and certitude. For the purposes of
this book I am primarily going to detail the implications of logocentrism
for communication.
In an early collection of his most accessible interviews, Positions,
Derrida (1981) outlines the main features of logocentric communication as
the communication of consciousnesses. The logocentric concept of com-
munication involves ‘a transmission charged with making pass, from one sub-
ject to another, the identity of a signified object’ (23).
This conception also borrows from the value of presence involved in
auto-affection or ‘phonocentrism’, where the temporal and spatial are
united in a way which provides an increased measure of guarantee that a
message will reach its destination: a situation in which the speaker hears
him- or herself speak at the same moment as the hearer does. In this
model of communication, subjects are posited as the self-present sym-
metrical poles of an intersubjective process. The other value which is
central to logocentrism, as we have seen, is the view that there exists an
inventory of fixed signifieds which precede and are anterior to the speak-
ing subject and which are merely drawn upon in order to communicate
meaning and make present a common reality. Against the logocentric con-
cept of communication, Derrida argues, as we shall see, that language is
constituted in the very difference and distance that communication in its semio-
linguistic sense is supposed to overcome.

The metaphysics of the sign

Derrida’s critique of the logocentric concept of communication is at its
2
clearest in his account of Saussure. Saussure was one of the first thinkers
to explore the stability of the relationship between signifiers (marks on a
page, sounds in the air) and signifieds (thought concepts). When these
two elements are associated, they become a sign. Saussure showed that it