Page 146 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-05.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 129

Interaction versus Integration 129
community. The ‘network society’ is marked not by a change in
semiolinguistic extension (an ability to extend meaning) which works the
same for both speech and writing, but by the phenomenon of language-as-
writing as a technological power in itself changing and producing more
and more non-saturable and open contexts.
The notion that ‘writing’overcomes the problem of immediacy is as
ideological as the notion that this already occurs in relations of mutual
presence or of performative, event-like statements. And yet Derrida is
enthusiastic about telecommunication not because it creates a global
village but because it undermines the ideological notion of an homoge-
neous context by installing the material power of writing as a non-
saturable context. The kind of threat which only writing makes possible
to logocentrism is now made more universal than ever following the rise
of telecommunication.

As writing, communication, if one insists upon maintaining the word, is not
the means of transport of sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings,
the discourse and ‘communication of consciousnesses’. We are not wit-
nessing an end of writing which, to follow McLuhan’s ideological represen-
tation, would restore a transparency or immediacy of social relations; but
indeed a more and more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing
of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth,
etc., would only be an effect. (SEC: 329)

Derrida is here critical of how McLuhan singles out writing (in the
narrow sense as defined by Derrida) as the one technology of communi-
cation which threatens the, by his account, sensory richness of an oral cul-
ture by means of an over-dependence on vision. The emergence and
predominance of exclusively electric technologies are posited to facilitate
the restoration of sensory balance (especially the liberation of the said
improvisory, gestural and synaesthetic qualities of speech), counter-
balancing the linear and mechanical culture of what McLuhan (1967) calls
Gutenberg or typographic man.
For Derrida, the effect of privileging the narrow definition of writing
is that it reinstates a dichotomy between speech and writing which in turn
reinstates the phonocentric metaphysics of presence: ‘It is this questioned
effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism’ (SEC: 329). The ‘powerful
historical unfolding of a general writing’ arrives to release the radical
potential of the ‘essential predicates’ of the general, disseminative status of
writing which have always been repressed and denied by logocentrism:

… writing, as a classical concept, carries with it predicates … whose force
of generality, generalization, and generativity find themselves liberated, grafted
onto a ‘new’ concept of writing which also corresponds to whatever always
has resisted the former organization of forces, which has always constituted
the remainder irreducible to the dominant force which organized the – to
say it quickly – logocentric hierarchy. (SEC 329–30)