Derrida and Oralcy: Grammatology revisited Christopher Norris It’s still difficult to get used to the idea that Derrida’s no longer alive, no longer ‘there’ as a kind of tutelary (sometimes cautionary) presence. This is only the second time I’ve given a talk about him since he died. It’s difficult for all sorts of reasons, partly because he was so much a dominant influence on the intellectual scene, partly because he was so active, productive and intellectually creative right up until the last few months of his life. But also because he wrote so much over the years about questions of presence, the writer’s supposed presence in his or her work, and about questions of absence, including the kind of absence that overtakes a body of written work when the author dies and is no longer present to answer directly for his or her words. This raises the whole question of intentions, of authorial meaning (vouloir- dire), of how far we can or should respect those intentions, and so forth. And of course it also raises crucial issues about the scope and limits of interpretation, issues that we are very much concerned with here. In some of his earliest work, for instance in his 1971 essay on J.L. Austin and speech- act philosophy, Derrida was already saying that one of the peculiar traits of written language was the fact that in some sense it survives, it lives on, it continues to communicate or signify beyond the writer’s lifetime. In a sense this is obvious enough, yet Derrida thought of it as something really quite mysterious and hard to explain, this way that writing manages to convey at least the simulacrum of presence regardless of the author’s absence, whether through death or just not being there to respond to any queries. So there are all sorts of weird, rather spooky intimations in Derrida’s work about our situation now, that is to say, the situation of trying to make sense of Derrida’s work when he’s no longer around to talk at conferences like this one and explain what he originally meant. His almost obsessive interest with the whole question of oralcy vis-à-vis literate culture goes back to his earliest work, including his great work Of Grammatology, which is, among other things, centrally a book about speech and writing. 1 As a kind of structuralist – albeit one highly critical of the structuralist enterprise -- Derrida was much concerned with binary oppositions, with either/ors, with one thing as opposed to or defined by contrast with another. He put the case (and many scholars have questioned this, have found it an extravagant and quite preposterous claim) – he argued that the speech/writing opposition was central to all these binary distinctions, including those between nature and culture, philosophy and literature, reason and rhetoric, concept and metaphor, male and female . all the structuring oppositions of what he called Western logocentric (or ‘phallogocentric’) discourse. He wrote On Grammatology at a time when there was quite a burgeoning industry of speculative writing on the relations between oral and literate culture – the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ debate -- and Derrida took a line which, on the face of it, was pretty squarely opposed to the ideas being put forward by Marshall McCluhan and Walter Ong. (By the by: was Terry Hawkes the first to make that joke about ‘the Ong with the numinous prose’?) What Derrida appeared to be saying was that writing is in some sense prior to speech – of course not historically, chronologically, or developmentally prior but prior in the sense that spoken language presupposes the possibility of writing, that the potential for writing – along with many of its structural characteristics – is built into the very nature of language from the outset. That struck many readers (one is tempted to say: many not too patient or careful readers) of On Grammatology as being a downright absurd or nonsensical claim. In historical, developmental, diachronic, or cultural terms speech comes before writing; there is no recorded instance of a culture that developed writing before it was able to speak and communicate through spoken sounds. So clearly, Derrida is not saying that. What he is saying is that writing in a certain sense, the possibility of writing, is always there at the origin of speech. This question of the origin of language had long been a bone of contention, especially amongst French academicians. I gather the French Academy actually once placed a veto on any further essays on the origin of language, because it got people tied up into such conceptual knots. Derrida is not so much trying to unpick those knots and finally resolve the issue but is rather trying to 2 understand just why we get into such a muddle when we speculate on the origin of language or, for similar reasons, on the speech/writing relationship. To put it in structuralist terms, which are the terms in which Derrida first came at this problem: which comes first, langue or parole? On the one hand we are compelled to suppose that certain ‘primitive’ speech-acts, perhaps certain kinds of fragmentary, gestural as yet pre-articulate but somehow intelligible utterances must have been produced – and secured some sort of basic communicative uptake – before language could settle down and get codified into a systems of conventions, semantic, grammatical, and so forth. That would be a fairly commonsense, intuitive way of thinking about the origin of language. On the other hand, how could it count as a language in anything like the full sense of that term unless it already possessed certain structural characteristics, I mean, lexical distinctions and grammatical markers and at least the possibility of conveying articulate ideas and concepts through a stock of shared conventions? This is why so many people became confused: can you ever disentangle those conflicting priorities and make sense of questions concerning the origin of language? Derrida doesn’t provide an answer to that. What he does say is that we have to re- conceptualize the problem, which is of course a typical Derridean move; we have to see how closely it is tied up with the issue about speech and writing, with the former conceived as somehow more ‘original’, more natural, spontaneous, genuinely expressive, etc., and the latter (writing) conceived as just a bad supplement, a corrupting addition to the primacy and self-sufficiency of spoken language. And then – famously – he goes on to show how this ‘supplement’ is always there at the origin, how the various predicates (the negative values and pejorative associations) that have so often been attached to writing are in fact, all them of, equally applicable to spoken language. Thus Derrida says in Of Grammatology that in some sense -- and this is a provocative and contentious move -- we have to think of writing as being the condition of possibility for any kind of language. As I have said, this struck a lot of his commentators as being an absurd claim. However, what he means by it is that we can’t conceive language without structure, without system, conventions, parts of speech, grammar, tenses, and the rest. He has a marvelous, extended, immensely 3 detailed and (I think) very cogent reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology where he says that the entirety of Rousseau’s work, not just his essay on ‘The Origin of Language’ but all his thinking about language, music, culture, society, civil institutions, sexual relations -- all these topics are structured on the opposition between presence and absence, nature and culture, speech and writing. Rousseau associates speech with the natural, the primordial, the spontaneous, the sincere, the passionate or heartfelt. His basic idea is that in speaking to each other, preferably in a small, close knit, mutually dependent organic community, we don’t (or wouldn’t, or shouldn’t) need writing because we don’t need laws, we don’t need class differences, differences of rank or hierarchical distinctions of any kind. We should just have straightforward, face-to-face oral communication, and it’s only with the development of society, as social structures become more complex and hierarchical, that we need a more complex language, a highly articulate language that can communicate complex ideas. And of course it is at this stage that we also develop a need for writing as the means whereby to record laws, deliver judgments, draw up constitutional arrangements, assign various sorts of delegated authority, etc. So writing for Rousseau was an instrument of oppression because its various powers and capacities were exercised by the few at the expense of the many. Derrida’s point is that the kinds of suspicion or hostility so often directed against writing by philosophers, social thinkers, religious thinkers (especially in the Christian tradition), and even by linguists – Saussure among them – has always been aimed at something other and more than just ‘writing’ in the sense of a graphic or written as opposed to a spoken language. It has always attracted these negative or pejorative associations because writing is conceived as secondary, derivative, supplementary, parasitic, and all those other (supposedly) bad things. Just think of that biblical passage – ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ – to which Derrida adds numerous others from a great range of religious, philosophical, and other ‘logocentric’ traditions of thought. There is a fascinating demonstration of this – and of the kinds of textual complication to which it gives rise – in Derrida’s classic essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. Plato had a 4 deep mistrust of writing, influenced by his teacher Socrates, who made a virtue of writing nothing since the written word had a corrupting influence on spoken language and, through that, on the proper, truth-seeking exercise of human reason.