The Post-Age *

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GREGORYL. ULMER ~.-i~- -:~~ &NOV29 P-i-iii:< ~:i::-Pi:i--::-?a;:-.19 7 Jacques Derrida. La Carte Postale: de Socrate a Freud et au-deli. Paris: Flammarion, 1980.

For two days in June, 1979, a meeting of "The Estates General of took at the Sorbonne for the of atten- Philosophy" place purpose calling N47:-i:::i:.:-:. tion to, and finding remedies for, the diminishing role of philosophy in French education. Derrida, one of the five-member preparation com- :~::::~ -i ..C.. mittee for the meeting, delivered the principal address, one of the essential points of which was an appeal for the humanities disciplines to enter into the media revolution. His comments were not designed to lessen the anxiety of the professional philosophers in attendance, for he reminds them that many of the changes taking place that seem so 00-:?' threatening to philosophy, that may indeed be causes of the "atrophy- ing" of philosophy which motivated the appeal for a meeting, may not simply be condemned and rejected. "We would be making a grave error V to ignore that if we are often shocked or made indignant by certain of these effects, it is because, even in our bodies, we live our relation to N philosophy behind protective selecting filters, in laboratories whose so- N~ci cial, political and philosophical conditioning especially merits interroga- 3F4] tion" ["Philosophie des Etats G6ndraux," in Etats Generaux de la Philosophie (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), p. 39-unless otherwise indi- frktiiz cated, all translations are my own]. He calls upon the group to concern itself with what passes for philosophy not only in other disciplines, but especially outside the scholarly and university circle. Derrida's purpose is to focus the attention of the educators on a new object (and mode) of study and communication-the very object that is responsible, according to the complaints which, in part, motivated the session, for changing the cultural situation in a way that seems detri- mental to the interests of humanities education: "I am thinking here in particular," Derrida states, "of what conveniently may be gathered under the generic name 'media' and the 'power of the media"' [Etats, p. 32]. Given a cultural situation in which the media have replaced the educa- tional institutions as the purveyor of whatever philosophy or humanities the public has, and given the complete absence of any critical element in this new education ("There is there a complementarity often scarcely readable, but solid, between the most immobilized, contracted academi- cism and all that, outside the school and the university, in the mode of representation and spectacle, taps almost immediately into the channels or chains of the greatest receivability" [Etats, p. 43]), the primary task for the Estates General is to concern itself with "the functioning of the market-place, the techno-politics of the 'media' and with what the

DIACRITICSVol. 11 Pp. 39-56 0300-7162/81/0113-0074$01.00 ? 1981 by The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions government administers under the name of 'Culture' and 'Communication.' It is desirable that this work on the techno-politics of the media become from now on a regular part, let me repeat, of the 'philosophical education' to come" [Etats,p. 40]. Now, with the publication of La Carte Postale (The Post Card), we have an idea of how Derrida himself intends to enter into the question of the media. The facilitator of Derrida'sentry is not McLuhan(whose status as a grammatologistDerrida seems reluctant to acknowledge), but Heidegger. Derrida, that is, is not a "media advo- cate," but rather he takes the position that "a certain sort of question about the meaning and origins of writing precedes, or at least merges with, a certain type of question about the meaning and origin of technics. That is why the notion of technique can never simply clarify the notion of writing" [Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. GayatriSpivak (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins, 1976), p. 8]. But to the extent that the question of the postal era concerns technology, it may be understood in relation to Heidegger's discussion of the techns. Working philologically, Heidegger located the essence of modern technology in the familyof terms related to Gestell (Enfram- ing), including thus all the stellen words, translated as "to order, to represent, to secure, to entrap, to disguise, to produce, to present, and so forth" (including, in one usage, "to supply," echoed in Derrida's"supplement" [Heidegger, The Ques- tion Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 15]. Derridahas long been interested in "Enframing,"of course, as demon- strated by his exploration of all "marginal"and "parergonal"phenomena. Enfram- ing, the essence of technology, is not itself technological, but is that which "sets upon man and challenges him forth." As such, according to Heidegger, it is related to poiesis, a type of unconcealment of the real (etymologicallylinked with setting up or erecting statues in a temple) in which all is ordered to be "ready for use" in a "standing reserve." The danger of technology is that its rigidcause-and-effect Enframingorder might blind humanityto alternativeorders. Thus it is not technology itself, but this blind- ness to its Enframing,that must be confronted: "Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive con- frontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology, and, on the other, fundamentallydifferent from it. Such a realm is art" [Technology, p. 35]. Derrida seems to agree with Heidegger's view, even if he plays with the notion, cited from Holderlin, that "where danger is, grows/the saving power also." One usage for the "post" in post card, that is, is as "guard post." At the same time, as Derrida states in the "manifesto" portion of Of Grammatology, "the future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normalityand can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity" [Grammatology,p. 5]. The "preface" to The Post Card, entitled "Envois"(and taking up nearly half the book) carries us further into Derrida'srisky writing than any other of his texts, with the exception of Glas ("I conceive for the subject [the preface] a rather perverse project, which is really not at all but which I fear you will judge monstrous" [Carte, p. 189]. One of the notions interrogated is the "epochal" itself-the neat sequence of periods and paradigms-for while it may be that a new era or age-post-postal and post-psychoanalytic-is dawning, it is first necessary for the postal and the psychoanalytic to "arriveat their ends." To gain access to this complex question, Derrida employs a theoretical model: the post card. Letters The Post Card is a collection in four parts-three essays on psychoanalysis "differing among themselves with regard to length, circumstance, style, and date"- "Sp6culer-sur 'Freud,"' "Le Facteur de la V6rit6," and "Du Tout,"' along with

SSome of this material has appeared in translation: "The Purveyor of Truth," YFS52 (1975), pp. 31-113; "Coming into One's Own," in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed. Geof- frey Hartman (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1978); "Speculations---on Freud," OLR 3 (7978), pp. 78-97. 40

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions "Envois,"described as "the preface to a book which I never wrote," a non-, or anti-, book then, whose "Memory" persists in the three essays: "It would have treated what has to do with the post office, with posts in all genres, in the manner of psychoanalysis, less in order to attempt a psychoanalysis of the postal effect than to refer to a singularevent, Freudianpsychoanalysis, to a history and to a technology of the courier, to some general theory of the dispatch ["envoi"] and to everything that by some telecommunication pretends to be destined" [Carte, p. 7]. LikeGlas, "Envois"has two "tracks"or "columns" or "bands." One consists of the reproduction of an engraving depicting Socrates and Plato, taken from the fron- tispiece of Prognostica Socratis basilci, a thirteenth-century English fortune telling book by Matthew Paris.The reproduction (also printed on the cover-"do not forget that everything began with the desire to make of this image the cover of a book" ["Envois,"p. 268]) folds out, so that it may be kept in view on the right hand side of the pages (Genet's position in Glas, the figural or image intuition column, the zone of the + R effect, which refers to the right side of the brain in the bicameral brain theory), while reading the more than 212 separately dated "letters" said to be tran- scribed from a correspondence carriedout on the backs of post cards imprintedwith this reproduction. The text is further divided, in that what we are given is one side of a correspondence (the part signed "Derrida"), but no replies. Nor is the correspondence complete (although it is concluded, covering a two-year span, dated June 3, 1977 through August 30, 1979, or, through November 17, 1979, if you include the blurb on the back cover, signed J.D., and speaking to the potential reader with the familiar you--"tu"-used to address the "beloved"). Some of the letters (cards) were burned, we are told, deleted according to a secret calculation, their place in the sequence marked by a gap of fifty-two spaces. All these divisions function at one level to violate the unity, closure, or completeness that characterize the traditional conception of the Book. At another level, keeping in mind that "Envois"is proferred as "a retrograde love letter, the last one of history," the cuts transfer the castration theme of Rousseau's New HSloi'se from the signified background (Abelard)to the foreground of the signifier. Derrida's experimentation with the letter puts into practice an interest he has had for some time in the letter as a philosophical genre-the letter is of interest in this regard because of its marginal status in the discourse of knowledge, and the undecidabilityof its statements due to the informalityand autobiographicalcompo- nent of the form. The letter, moreover, is central to the analyticalpieces in The Post Card, so a preface couched in letters is appropriate. "Le facteur de la v&rit4,"of course, is Derrida'sresponse to Lacan'sseminar on Poe's The PurloinedLetter. But in "Envois" he raises the question whether Poe's Letter, especially with regard to the relations among the police, the psychoanalytic institution, and letters, could be adapted to the new media. "Sp6culer-sur 'Freud'" is a close reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle from the perspective of Freud's letters, on the order of the connections drawn in Glas between Hegel's letters concerning his family life and his philosophical theories. The feature that makes the letter exemplary of the logocentric era (a synonym for "postal era") is that it is addressed and signed, directed or destined ("de- stinataire" = addressee). We take for granted the postal institution, thinking of it simply as a service, a technology extending from the runners of ancient times to the present day state monopoly using airplanes the telex, and so forth: "and with its tekhnr it implies a great number of things, for example, identity, the possible identification of senders and receivers" [Carte, p. 72]. The entire history of the postal tekhne rivets "destination" (and destiny, Geschick) to identity. "To arrive ["arriver"-to succeed, to happen] is for a subject to attain ["arriver"]my self" [Carte, p. 207]. Identity, in all its aspects (tfuth and being) is the ideology of the postal principle. Is it possible that, in the much discussed paradigm shift, communication itself will "end" (cease to be relevant) along with truth and identity?The epochal shift entails diacritics/September 1981 41

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions at least one event with major consequences for the humanities disciplines: "The end of a postal epoch is without doubt the end of literature" [Carte, p. 114]. "A whole epoch of the said literature, if not all, cannot survive a certain technological regime of telecommunications (the political regime is secondary in this respect). Nor philosophy, nor psychoanalysis. Nor love letters" [Carte, p. 212]. To the extent that the detective and epistolary genres constitute the essence of literature, literature is arriving at its end (allegorized as a post card sent from Socrates to Freud). But there is always a remainder, something extra left poste restante (the archive or encyclopedia of culture), for those who realize that the postal is not finally a transcendental principle equatable with the era of being. From the deconstructive point of view, the essence of the postal is not that letters arrive (the functionalist view) but that they (sometimes) fail to arrive. In terms of distance, spacing, rather than destiny, "the post is nothing but a "little fold, a relay to mark that there is never anything but relays" [Carte, p. 206]. In other words, the tekhne concerns Enframing, the production of images by whatever means, which is to say that the tekhn6 itself cannot "end," or "arrive" at its completion, since it is what allows anything at all to become present. TekhnL (is) differance [Carte, p. 206-207]. The grammatologist, then, if not the academic humanist, studies Enframing, not "literature." "Envois" is exemplary as an attempt to isolate the effect of the postal principle-identity, direction-as a step toward a metamorphosis of the academic Book.

Signature

"Envois" interrogates the effect of the letter-the interaction of identity and knowledge-in terms of Derrida's own proper name. It could be subtitled "Speculate--on 'Derrida.' " The pretense of coding, the secret names and mysteri- ous clusters of alphabetical letters ("EGEKHUM XSR STR"), allude finally to the secret of Derrida's signature disseminated in the text. The post card and the signature (the proper name) share the character of being both readable and unreadable-the post card circulates, its message exposed to anyone who looks, but, whether because of the excess or poverty of the message, it is meaningless (without interest) to all, even to the signer and recipient, who understand it to say no more than "I am here." "What I love about the post card is that, even in an envelope, it is made to circulate like an open but unreadable letter" [Carte, p. 16]. The laconic (Lacanic?) quality of the message, combined with the historical circumstance as- sociating the official adoption of the cards with the war of 1870 (the army needed a way for soldiers to communicate with their families without divulging information useful to the enemy), makes the post card an emblem of the nature of writing: "Writing is unthinkable without repression. The condition for writing is that there be neither a permanent contact nor an absolute break between strata: the vigilance and failure of censorship. It is no accident that the metaphor of censorship should come from the area of politics concerned with the deletions, blanks, and disguises of writing" ["Freud and the Scene of Writing," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), p. 226]. What has been said of the post card applies also to the signature, for, as Derrida adds in his discussion of the scene of writing, there is also a censorship which binds the writer to writing: "We are written only as we write, by the agency within us which always already keeps watch over perception, be it internal or external. [. . .] In order to describe the structure, it is not enough to recall that one always writes for someone; and the oppositions sender-receiver, code-message, etc. remain extremely coarse instruments" [Writing, pp. 226-227]. Derrida returns to this problem in "En- vois," to investigate the operation this time with his own signature. The framing which Lacan ignored in his seminar on the Purloined Letter, the question of the narrator so developed in literary criticism, is now foregrounded not only in terms of Freud's relation to the argument in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but Derrida's as well: "I am in this book Plato, Ernst, Heinele, etc." [Carte, p. 59].

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The problematic that Derrida introduces here in terms of the post card (its message so banal, so trivial, as to seem unanalysable; its existence so ubiquitous in popular culture as to render it conceptually invisible), he discussed earlier in terms of an umbrella-the umbrella as proper name (in the engraving the proper names "Plato" and "Socrates" are placed above the heads of the respective figures "like an umbrella" [Carte, p. 18]).

My discourse, though, has been every bit as clear as that "/ have forgotten my umbrella." You might even agree that it contained a certain ballast of rhetorical, pedagogical, and persuasive qualities. But suppose anyway that it is cryptic. What if those texts of Nietzsche (such as "I have forgotten my umbrella") and those concepts and words (like "spur") were selected for reasons whose history and code I alone know? What if even I fail to see the transparent reason of such a history code? At most you could reply that one person does not make a code. To which I could just as easily retort that the key to this text is between me and myself, according to a contract where I am more than just one. But because me and myself are going to die [ . .] our relation is that of a structurally posthumous necessity [Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979), p. 137].

In Derrida's theory, writing is by definition "posthumous," producing "untimely meditations" for an uncomprehending public. Such is the lesson of one sense of "post." Another "post" directs the strategy of the letter as a disguised "self- address." Derrida writes the post cards to himself (the code is between me and myself) by means of "apostrophe"-"Thus I apostrophize [...] (the man of discourse or of writing interrupts the continuous linkage of the sequence, suddenly turns toward someone, indeed some thing, he addresses himself to you)" [Carte. p. 8]. And in Derrida's homonymous style, the apostrophe is also the mark used with the reflexive verb in French, and the mark of possession in English. That is, the distance that both requires and makes possible self-reflection is part of the postal network. The strategy of the experiment conducted in "Envois" may now be recognized. Derrida, tracking down the effects of identity ("Even if I feign to write [on the post card or on the marvellous telemachine] and no matter what I say about them, I seek above all to produce effects" [Carte, p. 124]), places himself in the position of censor in the psychic economy, thus performing in a kind of psychoepistle the metaphorical description of the Unconscious-Conscious communication network. The metaphorics of this network include not only the kernel-shell model with the messenger running between, but also the notion of trace itself, which evokes as its analogy the entire history of roads (a path-ology). Hence many of the letters carefully record Derrida's travels, coming and going (da: fort) on his lecture tours ("I resemble a messenger of antiquity [. . .] and I run to bring them news which ought to remain secret" [Carte, p. 12], playing also on the theme of the "legs" (legacy) of Freud. The censor's function, of course, is not to prohibit communication, but only to disguise it-the secret is public. The public aspect of the secret picks up a topic developed previously in "Signa- ture, Event, Context" which poses as a limit-case, testing the theory of iterability, a circumstance that would prove that writing is productive even when cut off from all its origins or ends:

Imagine a writing whose code would be so idiomatic as to be established and known, as secret cipher, by only two "subjects." Could we maintain that, following the death of the receiver or even of both partners, the mark left by one of them is still writing? Yes, to the extent that, organized by a code, even an unknown and non-linguistic one, it is constituted in its identity as mark by its iterability, in the absence of such and such a person, and hence ultimately of every empirically determined "subject." This implies diacritics/September 1981 43

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions that there is no such thing as a code--organon of iterability, which could be structurally secret [Glyph 1 (1977), p. 180].

The possibility, repeatedly mentioned in "Envois," that one or both of the corre- spondents may die, either by suicide or in an accident, alludes to this limit-case. By positioning himself in the place of the censor, Derrida hopes to be able to work both scenes of the double science at once. A major shortcoming of philosophy (and of the discourse of knowledge in general), according to Derrida, is its failure to realize that the text must be signed twice. Putting their confidence in the copyright and the proper name, "each philosopher denies the idiom of his name, of his language, of his circumstance, speaks by means of concepts and generalities necessarily improper" [Sign6ponge," in Francis Ponge: Colloque de Cerisy (Paris: Union G6ndrale, 1977), p. 123]. To sign (Derrida derives the methodology for his counter- semiology from a pun on "sign") requires more than simply affixing the name to a text. Rather, one must literally inscribe the signature in the text. "It will be necessary for me to sign, that I sign and for that that I do like another, like him [Ponge, in this case] that is, that I give to my text an absolutely proper, singular, idiomatic form, therefore dated, framed, bordered, truncated, cut off, interrupted" [Sign6ponge," p. 119]. The problem is that this second order of the signature renders the relationship of the subject to knowledge more rather than less enigmatic. Thus we find Derrida's proper name at the head of his text, at the break between the foreword and the "preface" (like a protective umbrella):

Worn out as you are with the movement of the posts and the psychoanalytic movement, with all that they authorize in matters of sham, fictions, pseudonyms, homonyms, or anonyms, you will not be reassured and nothing will be in the least attenuated, alleviated, familiarized by the fact that I assume without detour the responsibility for these envois, for those which remain or no longer remain, and in order to give you peace I sign them here with my proper name, Jacques Derrida [Carte, pp. 9-10].

The undecidability of such statements, thoroughly established in Limited Inc, extends to remarks in interviews as well, such as the one in which Derrida declares that "what I write, one quickly sees, is terribly autobiographical. Incorrigibly" [Derrida, in Ecarts; Quartre Essais a propos de Jacques Derrida, ed. Lucette Finas (Paris: Fayard, 1973, p. 309].

Autography

The Post Card is an especially valuable addition to Derrida's theory, since it clarifies the deconstruction which "autobiography" is being submitted to in the signature operation. The Post Card, in other words, continues the post-structuralist concern for the place of the subject of knowledge. As we already know from Glas, as well as from several essays on Ponge and Blanchot, Derrida's signing involves a turn, like the apostrophe, which transforms the proper name into a thing, like a rebus. The figure used in Glas is antonomasia, a shift from proper to common noun. But if this turn or descent carried Ponge into the realm of the sponge, and Genet into the field of flowers, Derrida, being "Derrida," is nothing substantial.

I have in other texts, devised countless games, playing with "my name," with the letters and syllables Ja, Der, Da. Is my name still "proper," or my signature, when, in proximity to "There. J. D." (pronounced, in French, approximately Der. i. D.), in proximity to "Wo? Da." in German, to "Her. ]. D." in Danish, they begin to function as integral or fragmented entities, or as whole segments of common nouns or even of things? ["Limited Inc," Glyph 2 (1977), p. 167].

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Derrida mentions several times that his decision to write "on" figures such as Freud and Heidegger includes unconscious as well as theoretical motivation. That is, the da in Freud's fort: da and Heidegger's Dasein contain Derrida's signature, giving those respective theories a certain connection, aleatory yet necessary by force of the "after effect," with Derrida's autobiography ("here Freud and Heidegger, I conjoin them in myself as the two great phantoms of the 'grand epoch' " [Carte, 206]). Since a signature can be used as a cache to hide another signature (Derrida in Freud), it is never finally possible to decide what or who signs. This characteristic of the theory is itself part of Derrida's signature, which, besides the Der and Da of designation, also includes another location---"Derriere: every time that word comes first, if it is written therefore after a period with a capital, something in me brings me to recognize therein my father's name, in golden letters on his tomb, even before he was in it" [Glas (Paris: Galilee, 1974), p. 80]. But this "behind" is also "posterior," indicating that Derrida's name is implicated in one of the most famous scenes of psychoanalysis-the Wolf Man's obsession with the housemaid, viewed from behind, on her knees scrubbing (the act of cleaning is associated in signature theory with makingproper), a fetish derived from the primal scene of the parents having sex "a tergo." "Everything is always attacked from the back [de dos], written, described from behind [derriere]. A tergo" [Glas, p. 97]. Reversing his initials, as pronounced in French, reveals another basic term of Derrida's theory within his signature--"d-6j" (the always already). The already and the behind reinforce one another: "I am already (dead) signifies that I am behind. absolutely behind [derriere], the Behind which has never been seen full face, the Already [DbjA] which nothing has preceded, which therefore conceived and gave birth to itself, but as cadavre or glorified body. To be behind, is to be above all- separated from symmetry. I retrench-behind-I bleed at the bottom of my text" [Glas, p. 97]. The master trope in "Envois," Derrida states, has to do with "turning the back" ("tourner le dos"-also turning tail, taking flight, turning over, as well as to give the cold shoulder):

To turn my back on them while pretending to speak to them and take them as witness. This conforms to my taste and to what I can bear from them. To turn over the post card (what is Socrates's back when he turns his back on Plato--a very amorous position, don't forget-? That is also the back of the post card [...]). The word "back" and all the families which stir behind it, beginning from behind. There (da) is behind, behind the curtain or the skirts of the cradle, or behind oneself [Carte, p. 192].

Writing in the position of censor, at the frontier separating Unconscious from Conscious, Derrida plays with the forces of disguise and iterability, transforming his text into a rosetta stone-hieroglyph and vulgate at once. "Envois" dramatises this tension, and at the same time introduces a new attitude toward knowledge into academic writing: against the traditional model of research (the drive to find out and declare a truth-a model put into question by Nietzsche and Freud), Derrida proposes instead an elaboration of enigmas rendering all conclusions problematic: truth gives way to secrets, closure to undecidability. In short, he proposes a writing oriented towards thought rather than information, a pedagogical writing rather than a scientific discourse (every teacher will recognize which of the two modes is favored by learning theory). "As for 'learned' letters, you know, you alone, that I have always known how at least to make use of knowledge to distance the curious [. ..] I do not use ordinary language, the language of knowledge, to adorn myself or to establish my empire, but only to efface all the traits, neutralize all the codes" [Carte, pp. 88-89]. "Derrida" is the post card. The lesson for the academic writer is not only that the discourse of knowledge is motivated by desire (a common point from Plato to Freud), but that we write for ourselves, to ourselves, in a secret code laced with information. Like a post card, the diacritics/September 1981 45

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discourse of knowledge has two sides, without saying which is recto and which verso. This double writing has always been operative. Psychoanalysis taught us how to read the subscript; now grammatology teaches us how to write on both sides at once, effacing the public/private opposition. While others may still read our essays for "information" or "knowledge," we read them ourselves as "autobiography," the idea being that once the interpenetration of these discourses is recognized, a certain metamorphosis of academic writing may occur. "The Derri6re and the Deja protect me, render me unreadable, shelter me in the verso of the text. I am not accessible, readable, visible, except in a rear-view mirror. All the rhetorical flowers in which I disperse my signature, in which I apostrophize and apotrope myself, read them as forms of repression" [Glas, p. 97]. To write from the position of censor is to attempt to think directly from the superego and the conscience [Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 66], ("I am your terrorising 'superego' " [Carte, p. 18]). And what this agency cannot accept is divulgence: "What there is of divulgence in the slightest publication, the most reserved, the most neutral, I still find inadmissible, unjustifiable-and especially r-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s, a priori comical" [Carte, p. 89]. The new autobiography has little to do with confession or expression, then, as if, in any case, it was possible to so easily brush aside the guard at his post: "You are the name, or the title of all that I do not understand. That which I can never know [connaltre], my other side, eternally inaccessible, not unthinkable at all, but unknowable, unknown-and so lovable. On your subject, my love, I can only postulate" [Carte, p. 160]. This name, or title, is "Derrida." Reversing the usual situation in which the author unwittingly reveals himself while attending to the presentation of information, Derrida, as censor, organizes the information according to the dictates of the name. In this process, with all its safeguards, a quantity of material typical of conventional autobiography is pub- lished, but with an entirely different effect. We are presented with a memory: "I was just over four years old, easy to calculate, my parents were at the far end of the garden, myself alone with her on what we called the veranda. She slept in her cradle, I recall only the celluloid baby which burned in two seconds, nothing else (neither of having lit it myself nor of the least emotion today, only my parents who came running" (Carte. 1. 270]. Such fragments no longer function normally, since they belong to "Derrida," not Derrida: "I can always say 'that is not me' " [Carte, p. 255]. 46

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The "auto," that is, does not function at the level of such content. Yet such material is included as part of the experiment, since the effects of the censor are more clearly discernible when it is partially relaxed, as it is when dreaming [Laplanche, p. 66]. By noting what it allows to pass, what is excluded becomes more apparent in negative space. The superego, according to Freud, is constructed " 'on the model not of its parents but of its parents' superego; the contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgements of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation' " [Laplanche, p. 437]. The theme of The Post Card is precisely "tradition," into whose continuity Derrida insinuates himself. Keeping in mind that censorship (repression) is directed not against the instinct as such but against its signs or representations, Derrida, playing the role of censor, comes upon an image of his signature whose effect is the organizing experience of "Envois," for the image is "countertradition." When Derrida sees the post card in a display case in Oxford's Bodleian library, it affects him very much the way Grusha on her knees affected the Wolf Man. There is an "apocalyptic revelation" or recognition scene:

Socrates writing, writing before Plato, I always knew it, it remained as a photographic negative to be developed after twenty-five centuries---in me of course [. . .] Socrates, the one writing-seated, bent over, scribe or docile copyist, Plato's secretary. He is in front of Plato, no, Plato is behind [der- ri6re] him, smaller (why smaller?) but standing up. With extended finger he has the air of indicating, designating, showing the way or of giving an order-or of dictating, authoritative, magisterial, imperious [Carte, p. 14].

The importance of the scene is that it reveals, in one blow, the truth of tradition: "Everything in our bildopedic culture, in our encyclopedic politics, in our telecommunications of all kinds, in our telematicometaphysic archive, in our library, for example the marvelous Bodleian, everything is constructed on the protocolary charter of an axiom, which one could demonstrate, display on a card, a post card of course, it is so simple, elementary, brief, sterotyped" [Carte, p. 25]. The axiom is that Socrates comes before Plato-the order between them is the irreversible sequence of heritage. But what Derrida recognizes in Matthew Paris's image reversing the traditional relationship-the derriLre and designation (da) of his signature-, which makes the scene "terrorising" as well as apocalyptic-catastrophic, in short-is that his signature is implicated in the postal principle itself. That is, even while the postal era believes the proposition of an irreversible heritage, its practice is just the reverse, exactly as the post card shows. The post card-as a means of communication, and also in the engraving by Paris-is an image of teleology. This realization is all the confession we get in "Envois," along with the insight that teleology enframes television.

Return Inquiry

The image encountered in the Bodleian emblematizes teleological "return inquiry." Indeed, part of the interest of "Envois" is that it is an experimental version of an analysis presented in Derrida's first book-the introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry. One of the principal points made in this early book concerns Husserl's notion of Ruckfrage, translated as "question en retour" or return inquiry, which Derrida discusses in terms of the same postal metaphor used in "Envois":

Like its German synonym, return inquiry (and question en retour as well) is marked by the postal and epistolary reference or resonance of a communication from a distance. From a received and already readable document, the possibility is offered me of asking again, and in return, about the primordial and final intention of what has been given me by tradition. The latter, which

diacritics/September 1981 47

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions is only mediacy itself and openness to a telecommunication in general, is then, as Husserl says, "open ... to continued inquiry" [Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry": An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicolas Hays, 1978), p. 50].

The tele or postal analogy-the metaphorical focus of Derrida's analysis-involves a relational zigzag motion of circulation, the same movement that Derrida remarks in Freud's fort: da and Heidegger's Dasein (Derrida's signature theories). Tradition and translation, Derrida notes, are two aspects of the same possibility (an important point, considering the attention Derrida gives to translation in his essays) [Geometry, p. 72]. According to the postal principle, tradition and translation consist of an idealized communication. For example, "The Pythagorean theorem," Husserl states, "indeed all of geometry, exists only once, no matter how often or even in what language it may be expressed. It is identically the same in the 'original language' of Euclid and in all 'translations' " [Geometry, p. 72]. The model of language for Husserl is the objective language of science. "A poetic language, whose signifi- cations.would not be objects, will never have any transcendental value for him," Derrida notes [Geometry, p. 82]. Husserl conceives scientific language to be (ideally) univocal. "It thus keeps its ideal identity throughout all cultural development. It is the condition that allows communication among generations of investigators no matter how distant and assures the exactitude of translation and the purity of tradition" [Geometry, pp. 101-102]. For Husserl, then, "the primordial sense of every intentional act is only its final sense, i.e., the constitution of an object (in the broadest sense of these terms). That is why only a teleology can open up a passage, a way back toward the beginnings" [Geometry, p. 64]. His method, the return inquiry, always begins with "the sense as we now know it." Thus, despite sedimentation (and because of it, following a model of research as archeology) one can "restore history to its traditional diaphaneity." Tradition, in this teleological view, is the "aether" of historical perception [Geome- try, p. 49]. Husserl's science is one which counts on its ability to be able to say the same, to repeat itself in a continuity that anticipates every change in "science" no matter how radical or revolutionary. The history of such a science entails the notion of "horizon"-"the always-already-there of a future, a kind of 'primordial knowledge' concerning the totality of possible historical experiences"-a unity anticipated in every incompletion of experience, thus making the a priori and the teleological coincide [Geometry, p. 117]. In "The Age of Hegel" Derrida discusses the return inquiry in the context of the letter. The point of departure of this essay (also an interrogation of the "epochal") is a letter in which Hegel, in his later years, describes himself at the age of eleven learning philosophy at school. The anecdote of the philosopher describing himself, with hindsight, in a period before he was a philosopher (already Hegel, but not yet "Hegel") represents for Derrida the structure of teleology. "One will have understood nothing of the age (for example of Hegel) if one does not think first the conceptual, dialectical, speculative structure of this ddjJ-pas-encore [already- not-yet] ["L'age de Hegel," in Qui a peur de la philosophie? (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), p. 74]. One of the fundamental issues here concerns the status of such recollections: in the anecdote Hegel is using himself as an example in making an argument for teaching philosophy in the lycde-the already is the image of himself in the past (the past self becoming necessarily the present self); the not-yet is that what he is doing at age eleven is memorizing information, not yet speculating (doing philosophy like the author of the letter). This already-not-yet structure of the anecdote is the model of the world's oldest pedagogy: "revelation, unveiling, truth discovered of the already-there in the mode of the not-yet, socratic-platonic anamnesis sometimes revived by a philosophy of psychoanalysis" ["Hegel," p. 78]. Derrida goes on to show the homology between the pedagogy Hegel expounds in his letter and "the entire philosophic teleology of hegelianism." 48

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The larger issue concerns the teleological structure of thought and communication in the postal epoch in general, history in short; and in particular the status of memory in the discourse of knowledge. Psychoanalysis epitomises this question, being a mode of knowledge, a generalized truth and an institutionalized science constructed out of an idiomatic memory technique of an individual-it is the "science of Freud's name." In its simplified form, the question becomes: "how an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated auto-analysis, could give its birth to a world-wide institution?" [Carte, p. 325]. The entry point into this question, elaborated in "Sp6culer-sur 'Freud,' " is the famous anecdote in which Freud recalls observing his grandson playing a game with a bobbin on a string. Freud himself refuses to speculate on the significance of the observation because of its unscientific nature. But Derrida demonstrates that the progress of reasoning followed in the pages of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is homologous with the structure of this anecdote (which in turn is seen to possess the teleological properties of return inquiry). The methodology used for the analysis of the interaction between idiom and science, private and public, particular and general, is the juxtaposition of what Freud says in his theories and what he does in his writing (the basic procedure of deconstruction). The result is a reaffirmation, or a reminder, of the basic dilemma of the study of things human-the observer is part of the observation: "What happens when acts or performances (discourse or writing, analysis or description, etc.) make up part of the objects they designate? When they could give themselves as an example of that very thing about which they speak or write? One certainly does not gain thereby an autoreflexive transparence, on the contrary" [Carte, p. 417]. The effect of this interpenetration of subject and object in the writing performance, which blurs the inside/outside division, is to make it impossible to draw conclusions or offer solutions-an effect which Derrida feels should be cultivated, not avoided. The anecdote of the bobbin, then is both theoretical and autobiographical, autobiographical not only in the usual sense of its setting in Freud's personal experience, but in the sense that it images Freud's writing. Freud's case is especially interesting because the movement of the bobbin (the round trip, back and forth of the object on a string) is the image not only of the zigzag stitch sewing anecdote to theory, but the image of Freud's relation to the psychoanalytic movement as an institution (and here is the reversal of return inquiry). Freud plays with his theory of the pleasure principle the way the grandson plays with the bobbin. The grandson in effect dictates to Freud, a reversal or tautology that extends from Freud's biological family to his psychoanalytic (institutional) family-as information theory suggests, the forces at work in organisms and in organizations are the same. In both instances relationships (between or among people or ideas) are governed by the fort: da movement of repulsion: attraction that is a feature of survival. Thus Freud's speculations on the pleasure principle become intelligible in the context of his concern over the succession in the institution he hoped to build. Freud claimed that what mat- tered was not that his own name survive (as founder), but that his science live on: "it is as if he did not know, already, that in paying science with his own name, it is also the science of his own name that he pays, that he pays himself with a money order sent to himself. It suffices (!) to produce for the operation the necessary postal relay" [Carte, p. 353]. The relay is tradition. The "autothanatography" shown in this self- addressed operation reveals the real issue in return inquiry to be a question of life death.

Life Death

"Life death" is the title of the seminar in which Derrida elaborated the questions treated in "Speculer-sur 'Freud,' " involving, on the one hand, the problematic of biology, genetics, epistemology and the history of the life sciences (readings of Jacob and Canguilhem, among others), and on the other hand, a consideration of Nietzsche and Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche [Carte, p. 277]. The theme of

diacritics/September 1981 49

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ? i i i i i i • :•;-!i~ii";iiiiiiiii?ii:iii jiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiliiii'i"iiiii''';ii•"iii liii• iiil i! ...... ill~~:::i:i-,-:--':i:::'--~-iii:_:::::-?-:i-a !i iiii...... ?:iiiii-iiiii~-iii ?:l-(_:i:::.x:::?:-:::::: ::::::::::~ii~iiii i::::::: ..... speculation has to do, then, with reproduction in terms of a kind of socio-biology (and bio-economics)-the tendency of species and institutions to reproduce themselves as the same, and yet evolving and changing as they do so. Within this general theme, the immediate issue is the resemblance between tradition and the proper name. The death drive upon which Freud speculates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle relates to the postal principle in that, like the return inquiry of the postal relay, death is the tendency to return to an earlier state. The guardians of the letter, the police at their posts, work to assure that the death that arrives is one's own, proper death. The forces of conservation work through a network of relays, intermediary destinations, a labyrinth of detours: "the lengthening or the abridgment of the detour will be at the service of the properly economic or ecological law of oneself as proper, of the auto-affection auto-mobile of the fort: da [...] The measure of the lengthening or abridgment has no objective signification, they do not belong to objective time. They have no value except with regard to oneself who apostrophizes and calls himself as if to another in auto-affection" [Carte, p. 382]. But in trying to "teleguide" one's own destiny, in trying to be both sender and receiver of the news, the guardians want to sound their own funeral bell (glas)-they want the impossible [Carte, p. 379]. The implication, Derrida says, is that the drive of the proper is stronger than the life and death drives. And the impossibility of satisfy- ing this drive exposes a paradox within the proper which is the point of access for the deconstruction of autobiography. A shorthand term for the paradox is differance (Derrida never leaves the zone of this question) since the gap of separation (the postal relay) permits all "motion" as such. There are always two, to begin with, Socrates and Plato, or Secondary and Primary processes, given that the identification of the same required for truth or being (self) implies repetition. "Each time, with the drive, force, or movement, tendency or telos, it is necessary to maintain a gap [ecart, the anagram of carte, as Derrida remarks]" [Carte, p. 379]. Because of this gap, because the proper is not proper, there is such a thing as legacy, a scene of writing, delegation and envoi. To put it another way, the drive for self-recovery or appropria- tion is also a movement of expropriation in that the drive itself is proper to no one. "There is nothing less idiomatic than the desire for idiom" [Carte, p. 382]. Much of Derrida's work over the years has been an attempt to expose and overcome the drive of the proper. He argued against Husserl, for example, that in the transmission of a tradition (understood as a kind of communication), "non- communication and misunderstanding are the very horizon of culture and language" [Geometry, p. 82]. Against Husserl's endeavor to reduce or impoverish language in the interests of univocity, Derrida (setting his future course) poses the example of James Joyce who exploited equivocity: "To repeat and take responsibility for all equivocation itself, utilizing a language that could equalize the greatest possible synchrony with the greatest potential for buried, accumulated, and interwoven in- tentions within each linguistic atom, each vocable, each word, each simple proposition, in all wordly cultures and their most ingenious forms" [Geometry, p. 102]. Following Joyce's example, translation would not simply pass from one language into another on the basis of a common core of sense, but would pass through all lan- guages at once, cultivating their associative syntheses instead of avoiding them. Now, in The Post Card, Derrida emphasizes the equivocity in tradition, as manifested in the postal metaphor. He shifts his attention, in other words, to the possibility that a letter might not be delivered (the discontinuity disruptive of tradition). "It is necessary that I make (practically, effectively, performatively), but for you, my sweet love, a demonstration that a letter can always-and therefore ought-not ever 50

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions arrive at its destination" [Carte, p. 133]. The proof is simple at the level of the theoretical model-the postal system-requiring only the designation of the dead letter office. The division within the French psychoanalytic movement, split into factions quarreling about the "correct" interpretation of Freud-the subject of "Du Tout"-is proof at the institutional level. The possibility that a letter might go astray, ignored by Husserl and denied by teleology in general, is a phenomenon to be celebrated as an extension of that detour called life: "it is good that this is the case, it is not a misfortune, it is life" [Carte, p. 39]. Derrida renders himself unreadable (emblematized as the burning of the correspondence), precisely in order to live. What the postal institution labels the "dead letter office" Derrida calls the "division of living letters" [Carte, p. 136]. His point has to do with information theory, which describes information in terms of novelty-the more redundancy the less information. Novelty in this conception is negentropic, counters the tendency to run down, wear out. As might be expected, given the nature of deconstruction, Derrida does not attempt to go "outside" or "beyond" the postal principle in order to transform it. Instead, he shifts its poles (valorizing what teleology excluded) and then works this negative (now affirmative) pole of the concept for all it is worth, replacing destiny with chance-the luck, for example, that brought to his attention Matthew Paris's fortune telling book. Der- rida's strategy is sabotage--"leaning on a well-placed lever to force a disconnection, derailment, a ringing off, to play with the switching and to send elsewhere, to reroute" [Carte, p. 174]-keeping in mind always that "the post is not a simple metaphor, it is, as locus of all transfers and all correspondences, the 'proper' possibility of all possible rhetoric" [Carte, p. 73]. We can appreciate more fully now why Derrida's strategy includes writing from the position of censor, the superego, since in psychoanalytic theory it is the censor which forces the detour. Repression is precisely that which disturbs the logos of technology, the classic order of cause and effect, of original and copy in representation, the clearly defined order of sequence in the presentation of evidence or of inheritance. "Repression subverts the logic implicit in all philosophy: it makes it so that a pleasure can be-by the Ego- experienced as displeasure. This topical differentiation is inseparable from Repres- sion in its very possibility. It is an ineluctable consequence of differance, of the structure of 1, 2, 3 in a differing from self. It is not easily describable in the classic logos of philosophy and it invites a new speculation" [Carte, p. 309]. The immediate application of this new speculation is to overcome the desire of the professors to conclude, to render a question inert through resolution, to reduce the tension of a problem or an interpretation to the nirvana state of zero pressure by designing a decided meaning. It is important to clarify Derrida's relation to these professors. He states, for example, "I am not for the destruction of the universitas or the disappearance of the guardians, but it is necessary to wage a certain war on them when obscurantism and especially vulgarity install themselves there, as is inevitable" [Carte, p. 97]. We must remember, however, that this gadfly is talking to himself first of all. His proper name, for one thing, is inscribed in the two postmasters of the modern post age. The very drive of the proper whose effects Derrida interrogates in his theory of the signature is the movement of two postal concepts signed with the Da. "The movement of propriation recurrs in the Da of Sein and the Da of Dasein. And the existential analytic of Da-Sein is inseparable from an analysis of the distanc- ing and the proximity which is not so foreign to that of the fort: da" [Carte, p. 381]. As luck would have it, Derrida finds his name in the terminology of authenticity. His response is like that of Ponge who finds that his name is sponge-he laughs, for names may be remarked without being accepted. At the same time, given the in- volvement of his own name in the very syllable of identification, Derrida is in a privileged position for the exposure of signature effects. Even more to the point, Derrida is himself a professor, a theme central to the "plot" of "Envois." He has faced the dilemma of self-criticism before, as in Glas, for example, when he finds that he is judged in his role of professor writing on Genet: "if I write for the text, I write against him; if I write for him, I write against the text" diacritics/September 1981 51

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions [Glas, p. 224]. Derrida's response is not to resolve the dilemma but to embrace its dynamics, and to offer it as a model for working between, taking misunderstanding and understanding, confusion and decision, as equally real and interesting processes. Thus it is not possible, he notes, to decide whether he is for or against the postal principle. Part of what is implied in his "double science," then, is an academic writing that is at once rigorous and creative. He combines exacting scholarship with imaginative speculation, producing texts that are like casebooks on a given theoretical issue, forcing the reader to participate by drawing his own conclusions from the diversity of possibilities displayed. In this vein, his running commentary on the post card is a deliberately wild hermeneutic. Mocking the ethnocentric assumptions of the return inquiry which always begins in the known present and assumes continuity forward and backward, Derrida interprets the iconography of the post card according to modern gestural codes rather than according to the medieval code. Based on the gestures and posi- tions of the two figures, Derrida speculates that Plato may be riding a skate board, or may be a train conductor preparing to board, may be riding in a gondola, or pushing a baby carriage or a wheel chair, and so forth. In addition, the proper names of Plato and Socrates are put in play as a monogram. Thus the S and P are combined to signify the abbreviations of terms relevant to the theme-"post script," "subject and predi- cate," "primary and secondary processes." In the course of his "delirious" speculation Derrida inserts the "correct" interpretation of the original emblem provided by a specialist in the field. The expert responds to Derrida's inquiry in a letter, saying that the meaning is quite evident, simple: "It is necessary to read verbally the miniature. Socrates is in the process of writing. Plato is next to him, but is not dictating. He points with his index finger toward Socrates: there is the great man. With his left index finger he attracts the attention of the spectators, which one must imagine to the right of the philosopher who writes. He is thus subordinated, a smaller size and with a more modest hat" [Carte, p. 186]. No need to choose between the "delirious" and the "scientific" opinions, Derrida notes, since one is just a more elaborate version of the other. The effect of setting the starkly conservative explanation of the expert next to the cor- nucopia of "Derrida's" ravings ("the icon is there, vaster than science, the support of all our fantasms") is to demonstrate the drive of the proper within the academic discourse. The point is similar to the one Derrida made in "Restitutions" (in La V~rit6 en Peinture), in an analysis of the argument between two professors-Meyer Schapiro and Martin Heidegger-concerning to whom the shoes in Van Gogh's painting be- longed, whether the wearer could be identified as Van Gogh himself or as a peasant farmer. Derrida attempts to counter the absurdity of this debate (whose political motive, however, is serious enough, reflecting the conflict between urban Jew and rural romanticism that generated catastrophe in Germany) by arguing that the shoes are not even a pair. Derrida continues his exposure of the compulsion for identity manifest in academic scholarship by reviewing, in "Envois," the scholarly debate over the authenticity of Plato's letters. Ever since his first book, Derrida has been trying to alter the academic attitude toward fact, to begin to question the "exemplariness" of fact, to encounter fact rather in its wild singularity, which silently shows Being itself under the negativity of the apeiron [Geometry, pp. 151-152]. The apeiron is the unlimited, the indefinite, the undecidable, outside the furthest sphere of "ouranos" (the furthest limits of the universe), as in Anaximander's notion of "an infinite supply of basic substance 'so generation and destruction do not fail' " [F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms (New York: New York University, 1967), p. 19]. We can appreciate, then, why Derrida professes his admiration for Plato's Philebus in Post Card (it also provides the Platonic text for La Dissemination), for it was the prominence of the apeiron in Philebus that assured its continued use as a metaphysical principle in the subsequent Platonic tradition. The fact is that the importance of "Plato's" Seventh Letter as a

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions contribution to the history of autobiography is in no way diminished by the am- biguity of its authorship.

Popularization

The implications of Derrida's media theory can be stated in one word- popularization-even if, in the context of Derrida's texts, that seems to be merely a paradox. I will outline three points which should clarify Derrida's plan for the ex- pansion of academic research into the popularization of philosophy (the humanities) by means of video production. 1. Power. Like Kenneth Burke, who once noted that wherever there is hierar- chy there will also be rhetoric, Derrida states, playing on the homonym "la poste" (mail) and le poste (guard station), that "posts are always places of power. And power exercises itself according to the network of posts" [Carte, p. 431]. We know already from his address to the Estates General of Philosophy that he believes that the academic worker should not only study the effects of the media but should engage in media practice: "it is within the media that the battle ought to be established" [Estates, p. 169]. Derrida remarked in Of Grammatology that he was elaborating the second stage of a "science" which began in the eighteenth century with Warburton et al. leading up to the decipherment of the Rosetta stone. What may not be clear in "Envois" with regard to the motif of the secret (given Derrida's parodistic use of the censor's position, and his mimicry of the appeal for disguise found in Plato's letters written in a politically dangerous environment), is that Derrida's use of enigma is designed precisely for didactic communication. The condition of the academic book today resembles the status of Egyptian hieroglyphics in Warburton's day-originally in- tended (in their ancient context) for public communication, even for popular (politico-religious) messages, they became indecipherable, esoteric, unreceivable and hence occult as the ability to read them was lost. Warburton's insight-that the hieroglyphs were meant to be read by the public-reflects Derridas' view that any "code" is iterable. More important, in the present context, are the political implications of War- burton's study, translated to the current academic scene. "It is true," Derrida remarks, "that the political question of literati, of intellectuals in the ideological ap- paratus, of the places and stockages of writing, of caste-phenomena, or 'priests' and the hoarding of codes, of archival matters,-that all this should concern us" ["Scrib- ble (writing-power)," YFS 58 (1979), p. 118]. The same "catastrophe" that befell hieroglyphics (their encrypting, their dissappearance as "truth"), is now befalling the discourse of the modern humanities: "to summarize: it is as if a catastrophe had perverted this truth of nature: a writing made to manifest, serve, and preserve knowledge-for custody of meaning, the repository of learning, and the laying out of the archive-encrypts itself, becoming secret and reserved, diverted from common usage, esoteric. Naturally destined to serve the communication of laws and the order of the city transparently, a writing becomes the instrument of an abusive power, of a caste of 'intellectuals' that is thus ensuring hegemony, whether its own or that of special interests: the violence of a secretariat, a discriminating reserve, an effect of scribble and scrypt" ["Scribble," p. 124].'That the key to a given code was lost or hidden is not in itself the problem, since this possibility constitutes the structure of writing. The catastrophe is the second veiling which covered over the first, which made the secret secret, causing people to forget the original encrypting and accept the power of the priests as natural. In this context we may understand the strategy in "Envois" as a counter to the second secret, a simulacrum of secrecy, openly composing a cryptographic theoretical discourse, to expose the occult effect of specialized knowledge. Against the scribal-professorial-priest culture, Warburton and Derrida (first and second generation grammatologists), reassess the efficacy of the prophet who spoke directly to the people, supplementing and rendering communal his verbal discourse (every bit as diacritics/September 1981 53

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Qo~ ?i~~s~-nk ::.:. ?:I:" * I~-?1 r~

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: :;, ::.::::::i:-- -::: ~;'.:'::':::i:.?,i:b~"::-;-i:--:::::::-;: :.:. ::--:::.-::;::.:_---~-ii-i::: I,: ::::: ::-':?::"::: -::: enigmatic as its official counterpart) with an action language of gestures which could be preserved in pictographs. To reopen philosophic communication with the com- munity at large the technique of the prophets may be salvaged from the obloquy with which it is regarded by scientific culture and reexplored in an applied grammatology. 2. Model. "Envois" offers perhaps the clearest demonstration yet of how to introduce theoretical humanities to the popular medium of video. To appreciate this aspect of Derrida's work requires that we recall his involvment with "GREPH"-the group for research on philosophic teaching-one of whose principal goals is to extend the teaching of philosophy to earlier levels of schooling. The chief problem for such an undertaking is to find ways to teach philosophy "philosophically" to young people. More recently, the same problem was posed by the Estates General of Philosophy, but with regard to extending philosophy to the media, particularly television. The problem in this case is to communicate with the general public, rather than with school children. But the challenge of how to present the essentials of the humanities to a non-specialist and "untrained" public in a way that involves "real knowledge" rather than mere spectacle is the same. Derrida's strategy, with regard to the content of the presentation, is similar to a fundamental procedure of science education-the use of a theoretical model to work through complex, inaccessible phenomena by means of simple, concrete, accessible objects or images. The logocentric epoch is a post card. "Envois," then, includes large quantities of documentary information about the postal card, continually reworked in connection with the theoretical problem-the motivated or interested nature of scientific knowledge. But there is one major innovation which transforms this procedure from traditional pedagogy into applied grammatology: the metaphoric direction (following the insight of the Bodleian post card) is reversed. Derrida acknowledges that his strategy could be misunderstood when he remarks that Heidegger would no doubt accuse him of extending the metaphor of the post card beyond its reach, even of building a metaphysics of the post card. But to prohibit metaphoricity on these grounds, Derrida says, assumes that the card is being used simply as a figure, image, or trope of being, when just the opposite is the case:

But to accuse me, prohibit me, etc., one must be naively certain of knowing what a post card is or what the mail is. If on the contrary I think the postal and the post card from the side of being, of language, and not the inverse, etc., then the post is no longer a simple metaphor, it is, as locus of all transfers and of all correspondences, the 'proper' possibility of all possible rhetoric [Carte, pp. 72-73].

The comparison, then, is directed toward the post, the postal is dependent on being (understood linguistically, rather than ontologically-the "is" or "there is " [il y a] manifests differance, introduces telecommunication). In no longer treating the postal as a metaphor of the "envoi" or destiny of being, Derrida adds, one is able to take into account what happens in language, thought, and science "when the postal structure takes a leap, Satz, if you like, and poses itself or posts differently" (such as the shift from book to video).

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions With this reversal the vehicle (auto) of analogical thinking is itself explored and expanded-a kind of grammatological Maoism, in which the tenor ("superstruc- ture") of the metaphor (being) turns back on and produces the significance of the vehicle ("base"). The result is the realization that the use of communications technology is a concretization of certain metaphysical assumptions, consequently that it is by changing these assumptions (for example, our notion of identity) that we will transform our communicational productions. His exploration of the vehicle is deconstructive in that it shows how, out of the richness of detail available in the "familiar" model, an entire system of thought different from the accepted system may be devised on the basis of excluded or irrelevant features. "Envois," for example, suggests a view of the human condition based on the chance possibility that a letter may not arrive (a dysfunctionalism). "Envois" may be read as an attempt to define a paradigm of thinking based on analogy and metaphor, denoting the necessary metaphoricity of philosophy and science in the process of presenting the object of research. Reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle as an essay on the nature of speculation, Derrida notes that the first requirement of research is to translate an observation ("whether outside of, or already within, language") into a description in language. Then this translation must be translated into the language of theory, the schemas for which must be borrowed from an extant science in order to be receivable. The interest of this Enframing process for Derrida concerns the way each of the steps opens knowledge to speculation, effaces the distinction between sensible and intelligible, perception and language, thus permitting entry of the researcher's predilections into the process. Der- rida groups all the terms related to the speculative process-transition, transporta- tion, transgression, transference, and so forth-under the term "transfer" by which is meant all the networks having to do with "correspondences, connections, switchings, of a traffic and sorting of semantics, postal railway without which no transferential destination would be possible" [Carte, p. 409]. The "law" of this "quasi-concept" is termed "borrowing," thus taking note of the economic and fi- nancial language present in Freud's theory (speculation, interest, investment). "Surplus value" and catachresis are similar phenomena. Derrida's theory, then, more than simply offering one version of how to visualize a given philosopheme, amounts to a theory of presentation (popular and otherwise) as such. The "Maoist" productivity of the tenor of metaphor is not the only reversal Derrida exercises on McLuhan's technological determinism. McLuhan, and many other commentators, considered communications technology to be an extension of the relevant senses. But from the point of view of grammatology, concerned with the writing that directs the use of the technology, there is a more fundamental relationship between man and technology. The organs that direct the communications technology in writing are not the eyes, ears, mouth, but the sexual organs. Derrida learns from Freud that the apparatuses and machinery in dreams "stand for the genitals (and as a rule male ones)" [Writing and Difference, p. 229]. What the "scene of writing" performs is precisely this status of writing tools (pens, printing presses) as genitals-mail (male), as in "Le facteur de la vLritL," carries the scene of writing in the post age. But we know from Derrida's elaboration of the hymen as a "quasi- concept" that writing in the next epoch should be more vaginal than phallic. The metaphorics of this shift to video writing remain to be developed. 3. Script. The present circumstance of the academic book is that the verbal totally dominates the visual (the prestige of the book is manifested by the fact that this same situation describes the classroom as well). "Envois" appears to emblematize this imbalance by the extreme disparity between the amount of words used (needed) in contrast with the single image of the card. In fact, the text carries out an extraordinary passage from a verbal to a visually governed operation. Every- thing he writes, he explains, is "legend" in the sense that it is produced as a title or text for an image (alluding to the procedure in La V6rit6 en Peinture): "I never told you anything, only transfered what I saw or believed I saw" [Carte, p. 133], although he admits searching hours to find the right card (image) to send.

diacritics/September 1981 55

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Although it contains no actual image (picture), Glas outlined a theory for verbal-visual writing of the kind that is requried for a medium like television (or the classroom). The double column text that is conventional for video (film) scripts--one column for verbal discourse, one for the visual (figural) track-is simulated in Glas, miming a "machine" which "can not be managed like a pen"-"the machine adapts itself to all the progress of western technology (bellows, acoustics, electronics)" [Glas, 250]. (Glas is written for and with the "organ"-read genitals). In book form, the two tracks of Glas are spatially distributed, allowing only analytic access to the two scenes ("one must pass from one signature to the other, it is not possible to put a hand or tongue on both at once" [Glas, 285]). But this effect would be drastically different in an audio-visual medium one of whose chief features is the counterpoint of verbal and visual material. In short, the theory of writing posed in Glas exceeds the book, shows off the limitations of the book. A principal feature of "Envois," extending the "organography" of Glas, is the way it continually points beyond itself to an intermedial presentation. We are told, for example, that the image on the post card becomes a kind of mime by means of a collage technique-with a certain art of recomposition the scene on the card "is capable of saying everything": "it suffices to manipulate-as they do themselves anyway (tricks, slights of hand, intrigues)-to cut out, glue, and set going or parcel out, with hidden displacements and great tropic agility" [Carte,p. 121]. With the "d6coupage" technique the scene on the card is modified, giving it the status of a "modified readymade." The modifications include coloring the card, writing on it, adding or subtracting pieces or figures, and so forth. It soon becomes apparent that "Envois" is a book in the process of becoming a (film or video) script--"This will be our little private cinema" [Carte, p. 193]. The discourse refers also to a quantity of other "supports" used in the correspondence-films, cassettes, drawings, photographs. But finally the decision is made to burn all these materials, perserving only the words and the card. But the words continually remind the reader of their "legendary" function, of their dependency on a visual trace. As if reading a screenplay, we are given directions concerning the video portion of the broadcast. One important element in creating a filmed version of the drama would be animation sequences, using the card cutouts, such as the one suggested involving the names "Plato" and "Socrates" inscribed over the heads of the figures, designating "Socrates" as the one writing: "there is a gag in this image, silent cinema. They have exchanged their umbrellas, the secretary took the boss's, the largest one, you noticed the capital of one, the small letter of the other. Followed by a feature-length intrigue" [Carte, p. 18]. Another source of visual material pro- viding images for the video track could be the books of photographs documenting the lives of Heidegger and Freud which are mentioned in the text, including the description of scenes of Freud with his daughter, or Heidegger with his fiancee. "Envois" itself, it is true, is a "conceptual" script in that collages etc. are- Borges fashion-mentioned without being enacted. In this respect, Derrida allies himself with those avant-gardists who perform theory as a kind of visual art. These conceptualists (On Kawara, for example), from the Futurist movement to the present day, have utilized the post card as an art medium, part of a systems aesthetic in which mailing the card activates social sculpture. Conceptualism suffices for Derrida because he is working with the theoretical (second) stage of grammatology (the first stage being historical). Thus he attempts to teach the teachers by addressing them in (while deconstructing) their medium-the book. What he is telling the teachers, however, is that the third stage of grammatology-applied grammatology-must be performed in the double language of film and video. Derrida's texts may not be "popular," but grammatology is a science of popularization.

This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions