Of Grammatology (idea)

Of Grammatology does not seem to be a particularly 'massive tome' to me. The English translation by Gayatri Spivak, minus her introduction, runs at about 350 or so pages. That seems about average length for a book (I mean, its no Summa Theologica or anything...). Perhaps what makes it seem so 'massive' is the very (necessarily) dense nature of Derrida's writing.

The 'necessarily' I wrote above is not superfluous. Explicating why Derrida is hard to read is pretty much an explication of what I think Of Grammatology is all about. The book seems to me to be a statement of Derrida's early approach to philosophy, literature and phonocentrism through intensive re-readings of a number of philosophical works, most thoroughly some of Jean Jacques Rousseau's. I say early, because his approach changes/evolves in his later (around and after Limited Inc) work.

I see the "message" of Of Grammatology as this: the entire Western Tradition (in philosophy, and literature) is based around the model of phonocentrism. Which is to say, it is centred around the structure of a sort of self-present speech. What Derrida wants to argue is that this sort of model is misleading, and that now (in the aftermath of structuralism, and the age of the New Novel) this sort of self-presence is no longer unproblematic.

The problem with approaching the idea of phonocentrism is a difficult one is that to do so one must either invent an alternative model, or risk falling into the same trap that everyone from Plato to Heidegger has fallen into, according to Derrida. This new model seems to be emerging at the time that Derrida writes, it is one based on writing rather than speech (Derrida calls it graphocentrism).

So...to get to the meat of the importance of the book... what exactly does graphocentrism entail, and how does it differ from phonocentrism?

A quote:

By a slow movement whose necessity is hardly perceptible, everything that for at least some twenty centuries tended toward and finally succeeded in being gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself be transferred to, or at least summarized under, the name of writing. By a hardly perceptible necessity, it seems as though the concept of writing-- no longer indicating a particular, derivative, auxiliary form of language in general (whether understood as communication, relation, expression, signification, constitution of meaning or thought, etc.), no longer designating the exterior surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the signifier of the signifier-- is beginning to go beyond the extension of language. In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language (Of Grammatology 6-7).

Thus, graphocentrism can 'comprehend' (that is: encompass or, more fully understand) language than can writing. Why? Because, unlike the phonocentrism, a writing based model does not assume some magical sort of self presence of meaning, as does the misleading speech model. When we are speaking, we assume that the meaning of our words is completely enclosed within the instance that those words are uttered in. Derrida contends that this sort of self-presence is a myth, and that our words always already mean something other than what we intend by them when we speak them. (This is a little rudimentary, but see my writeup on Limited Inc for some of the detail on why Derrida thinks this is so for all language). Writing, however, has been treated throughout the Western tradition as a system of re-representation, that is: of signifiers representing other signifiers. Thus, within the system of writing, there has not been this insistence on the self-presence of meaning. In fact, people like Plato (through Socrates) insist that writing is in fact misrepresenting. That people like the Sophists can pervert writing so that words can seem to mean their opposite. This is what graphocentrism is about. Derrida contends that things like tape recording and hypertext (much later, obviously) show us that meaning can never be simply exhausted (because of the always present possibility of grafting a particular word, or group of words into a new and radically different context). He further contends that this does not only apply to tape-recorded speech, and strange new novels and hypertexts, but that it applies to all meaning, and all uses of language. This is for a number of reasons (which are, really, the subject of the entire book, and impossible to exhaust here without rewriting the book). One of the most important reasons (I think at least) is that words and meaning do not rely entirely on human thought for their meaning.

Derrida contends (not altogether unconvincingly...) that words relate to each other in ways that create meanings that aren't strictly determined by human thought. That is to say: intentionality is not the limit of meaning, though it plays a part. For instance, the cosmetic appearance of words (ostensibly an arbitrary phenomenon) has for Derrida a semantic importance. His work (and many others before, and after him)is riddled with puns and odd textual arrangements that play on this very notion: that the way words LOOK can have an impact on what they MEAN. Personally, I don't find Of Grammatology to be THAT verbose (especially compared to some of Derrida's other texts) but that verbosity is, as I explained above, a part of his argument. If you are interested in this sort of argument, I'd suggest reading his later stuff, because as he writes more and more, Derrida becomes more comfortable with pun, jokes, etc. etc. as both cosmetic features and vehicles of meaning (check out The Post Card, for example, or Cinders).

Disclaimer:This writeup is a pretty rudimentary recapitulation of what I think Derrida says in Of Grammatology. When I read it again (I got it from the library today) I'll come back and edit what seems wrong to me...but, I think that most of what I said here can be traced back to the book, and isn't just a product of my imagination!

Around the same time Derrida started publishing, Foucault had a pretty interesting essay about Rene Magritte that put across a bunch of the same sort of ideas that Derrida would go on to develop in much greater detail later, here's the reference:

Michel Foucault, "This Is Not A Pipe" pp. 187-204 in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, vol. 2, translated by James Harkness(The New Press, New York 1998). (Originally published in Les Cahiers Du Chemin 2 (15 January 1968) in an issue dedicated to Magritte after his death)

Of Grammatology Reference:

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Spivak (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1974).