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128 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
Transcendentally, totalization and self-presence are both impossible,
then, because all contexts are inhabited by radical alterity or dissemination.
Moreover, Derrida argues that today, in the era of telecommunication, we
have become more attuned to these realities of language-as-writing. The
ideology of telecommunication is that, in a non-semiolinguistic sense, it
aims to ‘bring subjects together’. But, argues Derrida, the purposive ratio-
nale of telecommunication conceived as the transport of semantic com-
munication is de jure undermined at its very origin. Yet, on the other hand,
the fact of telecommunication as a non-semiolinguistic phenomenon, as
that which enables the citational grafting and lifting of marks out of local
contexts, that is, as the material basis of that always open possibility,
establishes de facto a form of subjectivity which is constitutively more
abstract than social forms which relied on the illusion of closed contexts.
That is, the techno-utopia of global-village discourses proposes a return to
the immediacy of social relations whilst in fact it dissolves those relations
in its very production.

Writing and telecommunication

What writing and telecommunication do in relation to ‘the transparency
and immediacy of social relations’ is to introduce the always open poten-
tial for a meaning to be abstracted from its ‘original’ context, in the way
that it is experienced as original. In other words, this is to say that the dis-
tinction between the original and the repeated becomes entirely open and
indeterminable; this is how writing extends and abstracts individuals
from closed contexts (see SEC: 320). What Derrida celebrates in the modern
period is the more transparent move towards social relations assuming
a form in which discourses refer to nothing except themselves (as in a
simulacrum); to no grand narrative or originating discourse, even though
there may be a nostalgia for such things. As such a condition, which
reveals the disseminative side of writing, begins to prevail, the more ‘local
contexts come into contact owing to more powerful and universal means
of communication that can be found in the era of telecommunication
and the Internet. These developments in the means of communication
de-parochialize contexts by bringing them into contact with others. That is,
the possibility of reproducing a meaning (what Derrida calls the ‘internal
context’ in the semiolinguistic sense: SEC: 317) is undermined by the very
practice of its reproduction the more a mark is mass-reproduced (but not
in the sense of permanence). The efforts to intensify mass communications
can only create greater abstraction. So writing, which, de jure is normally
thought of as a technology for the reproduction of meaning, when consid-
ered logocentrically (the semiolinguistic sense) is also the medium which
de facto destroys this very ideal as lived wherever it operates.
In theorizing the rise of telecommunication, Derrida argues against
the idea of a ‘global village’, as popularly conceived as a universal