The Johns Hopkins University Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/464513 . Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Diacritics. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Wed, 2 Jan 2013 06:56:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2i~. :::Y:::'- ;:i 4: THE POST-AGE * _:-:-::: 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 es- sential 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 tech- nique 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 "pref- ace" 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 psycho- analytic 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 "dif- fering 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.