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Overview
Fleming shows that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida’s early work is that we do not know what writing is. Channeling Derrida’s thought into places it has not been seen before, she examines printed errors, spaces, and ornaments (topics that have hitherto been marginal to our accounts of print culture) and excavates the long-forgotten reading practice of cutting printed books. Proposing radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as “error,” “letter,” “surface,” and “cut,” Fleming opens up exciting new pathways into our understanding of writing all told.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226390567 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 09/12/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cultural Graphology
Writing after Derrida
By Juliet Fleming
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-39056-7
CHAPTER 1
The Psychopathology of Writing
Reviewing a book on children's toys, Walter Benjamin once observed that "a child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse; he wants to play with sand, and so he becomes a baker." To achieve the expanded sense of writing that cultural graphology requires, we might start with a similar thought: A woman may pen a novel, fill out a form, or sign her name, not for an instrumental reason but because she wants to write. Then, effecting an even more radical displacement behind the appearance of things, we can go further and say that writing is the object of a set of actions whose aims are elsewhere, and now our woman writes to fill a gap or dominate an environment, or because she has an impulse to measure, stretch, cover, cut, fit, join, contain, open, close, begin, end, or repeat; to clear space or put something away so as not to have to think about it any longer; to reserve or store or spend; to pause, touch, or stroke ... nothing can close this list. Perhaps she only wants to do or admire or join in; to follow or suffer or be herself. Perhaps she wants to love or — and this is a function of writing rarely adduced — perhaps her aim is to leave things alone. If each of these actions is an instance of expression, it is not the "self-expression" that is too easily attributed to writing but the articulation of life lived at the place where we happen to be.
To have come so far is by no means to have reached the end of what Derrida means by writing — you are only in its outskirts. But already it seems unlikely that all this could be fenced within the realm of psychology. Indeed, such constraint would be ungrammatological. Countering Saussure's argument that "it is for the psychologist to determine the exact place of semiology" Derrida urged that research on the sign not be confined to the psyche (Po 21). And those who read Grammatology with care can see that the study of writing envisaged there would finally extend to cover all information in the biosphere (where information is any reliable material covariance, and the biosphere understood not as an entity but as a process of the reception and exchange of this information).
But cultural graphology needs limits, and it is in Derrida's own blueprint that, if psychoanalysis must always fall short of being grammatology, it should nevertheless be granted a controlling interest over the local topics and issues that would make up the more worldly and feasible science that concerns us here. And it seems prudent enough to begin, as he suggested, with a psychopathology of writing in general that would not limit itself to slips of the pen but would still pay more rigorous attention to them than Freud did himself. This is a prudent enough strategy — as long as we are aware from the start that, in Derrida's reading, psychoanalysis will turn out to know a great deal more than it knows it knows about writing and a great deal about what Derrida once called the "techno-political history" of the book (PM 13).
If Derrida's relations with the thinkers he admired were often vexed, his early ambivalence towards Freud, and his need to put an effective distance between psychoanalysis and deconstruction, was especially marked. In 1988 he shocked an audience at the Sorbonne by declaring to René Major "I have never subscribed to any proposition of psychoanalysis." Geoffrey Bennington, who tells this story, notes that you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. "Does he not say," ponders Bennington, "for example in Of Grammatology, that the best chances of achieving a breakthrough with respect to metaphysics are to be found, alongside linguistics, in psychoanalysis?" Was it not Freud who first gave voice to Derrida's proposition "that the present in general, is not primal but, rather, reconstituted ... that there is no purity of the living present?" (WD 212). And doesn't Derrida "appeal all over the place" to Freudian conceptuality? Furthermore, if it is true, as Derrida says, that none of Freud's concepts escape metaphysics, it is also true that for him no concept does. What could be the reason, then, for this outspoken resistance to psychoanalysis? Bennington answers, for Derrida, that while psychoanalysis may come very close to deconstruction, and look like it too, what it has not yet done, and may never be able to do, is "elucidate the law of its own belonging to metaphysics." And he imagines Derrida ruling on the matter: "not really thinking through both the necessary belonging of its concepts to the history of metaphysics and its necessary strategic displacement of those concepts, psychoanalysis understands less than deconstruction."
If the judgment ventriloquized here does not do justice to psychoanalysis (Bennington himself describes Freud trying to reshape and displace the metaphysical concepts, inadequate to his purpose, with which he was working in Beyond the Pleasure Principle), it is also not completely fair to Derrida, whose midcareer reading of that late text matches Bennington's as he describes how Freud's thought "advanced, only to suspend without any possibility of stopping, all those theses in which his successors or heirs and readers in general would have had him stop" (R 41).
As he grew older Derrida felt an increasing admiration for and kinship with Freud, and, at this late moment, as he describes the founder of psychoanalysis eluding the constructions that his followers want to put on his thought, he could be talking of himself. But as a younger scholar Derrida found that the question of the stopping point, of the limit that allows every inquiry to proceed, was not so easily suspended. In Grammatology you can find him facing the formidable problem of delimitation in relation to his own method of reading Rousseau. And here his response is to deflect attention from his own difficulties to those, presumably worse, that a psychoanalytic reading would have in deciding between what truly belonged to Rousseau as his own "proper" thoughts and what we might once have called their "context":
Around the irreducible point of the originality of this writing an immense series of structures, of historical totalities of all orders, are organized, enveloped, and blended. Supposing psychoanalysis could, in principle, succeed in outlining and interpreting them, supposing that it could take into account the entire history of Western metaphysics as it offers habitation to, and enters into relations with, Rousseau's text, it would still have to describe the law of its own belonging to metaphysics and to western culture. Let us not pursue this any further. We have already measured the difficulty of the task and the element of frustration in our own interpretation of the supplement. We are sure that something irreducibly Rousseauist is captured there but we have carried off at the same time an unformed mass of roots, soil, and sediments of all sorts. (Grammatology 161, translation modified)
If psychoanalysis could describe absolutely everything that surrounds and determines an act of writing, and if it could, in addition, describe its own place within metaphysics, then it would no longer be psychoanalysis but an ideal form of deconstruction. But faced with the task of sketching out what psychoanalysis cannot and will not be able to explain, Derrida's energy fails him: "Let us not," he says, "pursue this any further." We can't blame him — but neither can we help noticing that the problem here has less to do with psychoanalysis than the fact that he has already "measured the difficulty" and described the "frustration" of trying to account for a thing in relation to its total context in his own interpretation of the supplement: "we are sure that something irreducibly Rousseauist is captured there but we have carried off at the same time an unformed mass of roots, soil, and sediments of all sorts."
The question of where to stop is rarely faced so squarely. Derrida never found an answer for it, but he continued to think about it. Where to stop contextualizing (this is the problem encapsulated by his infamous claim that "there is nothing outside the text"); where to stop analyzing (because the point comes where we have to get on with thinking, albeit with conceptual tools inadequate to the task); where to stop assigning responsibility (because, as every parent knows, we can attend responsibly to one thing only at the expense of others)? There is no proper accounting for anything if you cut it short, and there is no accounting for anything if you do not cut it short. And here you can see Derrida broaching the ethical issues that became the more articulate concern of his later years — for, to focus on context is to focus on responsibility, and to focus on responsibility is to focus on context.
Deconstruction and psychoanalysis thus have in common that both want to and neither can delimit their topics or think through the necessary belonging of their concepts to the history of metaphysics — with the result that they both quickly get to the point where their task is to indicate what we may never know: "There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is un-plumbable," said Freud, "a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown" (SE 4:111). And Freud produced another image to explain why the interpretation of a dream is always curtailed: "The dream thoughts ... cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this network is particularly dense that the dream wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium" (SE 5:525). That a thought or an entity is a mushroom growing from a mycelium of other thoughts or entities — this is what Derrida means by dissemination.
That every train of interpretative thought has therefore to be broken off, that even deconstruction must "outline" and thereby deracinate the things it would interpret is common sense. But in 1967 Derrida still felt there were places where Freud could be blamed for having cut his inquiries too short and for giving up the chase just when things were getting interesting. He says so twice in "Freud and the Scene of Writing," once when he suggests we should be "more attentive" to the slip of the pen "and to its originality" than Freud ever was, and again when he lands heavily on Freud's remark that while the mystic writing pad models the structure of the psychic apparatus, it cannot imitate its live functioning. "It would be a mystic pad indeed if, like our memory, it could accomplish that," smiled Freud (SE 19:230). "All that Freud had thought about the unity of life and death should have led him to ask other questions here," says Derrida, not smiling (WD 227–30).
What did he mean? If we rephrase "the unity of life and death" as the essential relation of the living to the non-living, we seem to be face-to-face with the familiar "question of technology." And it would be familiar were Derrida not calling for its reconception: "here the question of technology (a new name must perhaps be found in order to remove it from its traditional problematic) may not be derived from an assumed opposition between the psychical and the nonpsychical, life and death." Writing in its most general form, "arche-writing," is the name that Derrida gives to technology conceived in this way, as a system or program that subtends and only secondarily produces distinctions between the living and the nonliving, between the present and representation, or — as we could say, though Derrida does not — between meaning (which is constructed by something living) and information (which requires nothing more than reliable material covariance). The "question of technology" is thus "the question of writing" — and one that neither Derrida nor the rest of us will ever be done with. It follows that "that which, in Freud's discourse, opens itself to the theme of writing results in psychoanalysis not being simply psychology — nor simply psychoanalysis" (WD 228). And if psychoanalysis should have a "controlling interest" in the new discipline of cultural graphology, that is because psychoanalysis itself is finally "controlled" (at least, it is everywhere destabilized) by its own entanglements with the themes and techniques of writing in both its narrow and broader senses.
A psychopathology of writing such as Derrida called for in his blueprint for cultural graphology would thus comprise everything within the discourse of psychoanalysis that Freud had thought, as well as everything that he had failed to think, about writing and the ways in which psychical impulses are recorded and archived. It would lead over familiar ground onto some much less travelled and more challenging terrain, to the point where the energies and competencies of our individual disciplines would begin to fail.
Derrida cut a path in this direction in 1995 with Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression; two years later he was still mulling over the issues he encountered there in an interview he gave to the journal Les Cahiers de médiologie for a special issue on the powers of paper. In these two works his thoughts about writing are under immense and special pressure, for there is nothing without writing; no writing without the preservation offered, however briefly, by an archive; and no archive that is not the immediate destruction (either by oblivion, or by an opening to the future) of what is preserved. To have archive fever is thus to have no rest "from searching for the archive right where it slips away" (AF 91). Derrida testified that he had contracted this fever as an adolescent, and he was never able to shake its anguishing consequences: "If I love the word," he told a conference of translators in 1998, "it is only in the body of its idiomatic singularity, where a passion for translation comes to lick it as might a flame or an amorous tongue" (WRT 175).
I will return to these hectic texts in my final chapter, for in 1967 there was one topic that Derrida could immediately name as needing more attention, and that was the lapsus calami. Freud's claim was that writing errors result when unconscious impulses attach themselves to, and interfere with, conscious intentions. Compromise formations that can be read as the expression of unconscious wishes, they are a subset of the bungled actions, or parapraxes, that we now recognize as "Freudian slips." But you can see why Derrida found the remarks that concluded Freud's extensive analysis of slips of the voice to be provoking: "Slips of the pen, to which I now pass, are so closely akin to slips of the tongue that we have nothing new to expect from them" (SE15:69). Derrida's first thought would have been that writing errors can't be subsumed to those of the voice, for the pen can write things the tongue cannot say; his second that Freud himself likened the psyche to a script that has never been "subject to, never exterior and posterior to, the spoken word" (WD 209).
But is there more to the topic than an opportunity to correct this expression of Freud's phonocentrism? In the brief remarks we are considering Derrida observed only one more thing — namely, Freud's self-restriction in the matter of pen slips "did not prevent him from raising the fundamental juridical problem of responsibility, before the tribunal of psychoanalysis, for example in relation to the murderous lapsus calami." "Questions of Responsibility" was the overarching title under which Derrida conducted his teaching seminars after 1991. The topics he addressed under this rubric (which include testimony, hospitality, eating, animals, sovereignty, and the death penalty) allowed him to give pointed expression to the question of what it means to respond to, before, or on behalf of another; they also consolidated the position of those who want to see an "ethical turn" in his career. But an interest in responsibility is evident in Derrida's earliest writing: it can be found, as I have already indicated, in the question of context, and also in the form of the pressing disciplinary question of what becomes of philosophical responsibility once the most basic certainties of its discourse have been shown to have motives and attachments of which it remains unaware. Still, it might be just as true — and just as true to Derrida — to say that he never had any interest in responsibility, and that this lack of interest, which takes the form of a deep suspicion of anyone who claims to have arrived at a position of ethical or disciplinary responsibility without noticing that every such position involves irresponsibility towards other others, is already fully evident in Writing and Difference.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cultural Graphology by Juliet Fleming. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsAbbreviations
Introduction: From Grammatology to Cultural Graphology
1 The Psychopathology of Writing
2 Type Ornament
3 Sign Tailoring
4 Psychoanalytic Graphology
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
“Fleming extends and fulfills Derrida’s vision of a quasi-totalizing science of writing. Moving from grammatology to graphology, she shows how trace, mark, supplement, signature, and other terms figure in an open-ended project embracing poetry, cultural theory, book design, psychoanalysis, and media studies. On every page Cultural Graphology brings forward the ferocious wit and brilliance of Derrida’s ways of thinking through writing.”
“An impressively original and absorbing study. Fleming has a very good understanding of the way Derrida engages with issues such as writing, the trace, the mark, and the surface, and is never intimidated by his more extravagant gestures. Drawing on her deep knowledge of early modern materials, she brings into the realm of Derrida’s thinking a fresh set of examples, written with elegance and flair in a prose that moves with ease and skill among different kinds of discourse and between the abstract and concrete.”