The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing: The Program

pages 6-10 of the 1998 translation

I hope we are able to pick up a little speed as we progress, but for now these first few pages are incredibly dense and point to a rather complex historical context and set of problems; so we will take our time. We again begin with Derrida situating this work at a specific moment in history: everything is becoming language. He does not say it directly here but we could understand too that everything is becoming text. So, we should reiterate that Derrida is not saying he believes or wants everything to be text (though I would not deny that at points he may delight or even revel in this fact); rather his point is that it is happening—in large part because of the sciences, including the so called human sciences—so the question really is how are we to understand this thing that is happening.

What precisely is happening? In the human sciences (especially anthropology and linguistics), there is a growing appreciation (Lévi-Strauss, Saussure, Jakobsen, Lacan, etc. each in their own way) for the role of signification writ large and especially one based not on the lone pair signifier - signified (ie the word ‘tree’ and the concept tree) but rather baed on an ‘infinite chain of signification’ where each signifier gains its meaning not from an enduring concept but its relations of difference and similarity to other signifiers (both around it in a given sentence and elsewhere in the totality of language). Likewise, in the hard sciences, the postwar growth of cybernetics, information science, computing, DNA, etc. gave rise to a pervading interest in messages, data and information; the latter of which was often conceptualized in a similar way to signification as a “difference that makes a difference”—that is to say a magnetic switch being ‘on’ means something not intrinsically but rather in so much as it is not ‘off’. Interestingly, Céline Lafontaine has shown how much French theory and especially structuralism drew from cybernetics.

So, in this way everything is becoming language, and especially writing. This latter is for a very specific reason: the historical disparagement of writing that pervades metaphysics accuses writing of being a sign of a sign. Speech is supposed to be able to attest directly to ideas, events and people, whereas writing is claimed to be a mere recording of the living and present sign that is speech. But, what becomes clear in the mid twentieth century in a variety of fields is that all language is structured in this way: signs of signs everywhere one looks; every signified really just another signifier. Derrida will soon call this structure “writing in general.”

We thus find ourselves in a moment of two contradictory movements. On the one hand language/writing expands infinitely to describe everything but at the same time it gets caught in the finitude of writing (that is to say that all writing is capable of and ultimately bound to be destroyed—ashes to ashes, etc.).

language itself is menaced in its very life, helpless, adrift in the threat of limitlessness, brought back to its own finitude at the very moment when its limits seem to disappear, when it ceases to be self assured, contained, and guaranteed by the infinite signified which seemed to exceed it.

As we shall see, it is ultimately the finitude of writing that prevents it from being a perfect repetition of that which it represents, ultimately precluding the possibility of mastery over any language.

The very motion by which language and the sciences expand, hoping to extend sovereign mastery and knowledge over the world turn out to directly threaten that desire and with it metaphysics through the proliferation and recognition of the structure of writing (non-presence, non-fixity, finitude, etc.). We can see the processes at stake and possibilities in a sentence about cybernetics from this section:

If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts — including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory — which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, written mark, gramme or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also given up.

I like to translate this last word as “give up”, especially in the sense of turning oneself in to the authorities, rather than “expose” or “denounce” as Spivak has, for a number of reasons.

This giving itself up suggests that what is at stake is simultaneously admitting what has taken place, abandoning a former way of being, that is saying to oneself “I can’t go on this way anymore; life on the lam is no longer possible” and ultimately taking responsibility. But let us be clear this taking responsibility does not necessarily mean in a personal or moral sense but rather in the face of a situation, and here an interpretation gets especially perilous, but perhaps what cybernetics gives itself up to is even a certain authority, which here may be metaphysics qua science itself; we imagine then in a way the police, who have always in a way been synonymous with metaphysics, turning themselves in to themselves. When one gives one self up in this way at minimum they only admit that they can no longer avoid the consequences of what has happened or at least what they have been accused of regardless of whether or not one feels the law has actually been broken or that the law is just. We of course here risk the use of a metaphysical accounting for this abandonment, but that is precisely what is at stake in this sentence is metaphysics qua cybernetics giving itself up, exposing and denouncing, abandoning its life on the lam. Metaphysics against itself.

Moreover, what strikes me about this sentence is that Derrida says that cybernetics would have to preserve writing, trace, etc. up until that moment it gives itself up. Remembering that this is all under a conditional “if”, were cybernetics capable of fulfilling this conditional in the affirmative, on the other side of giving itself up, it could even perhaps go further than Derrida and do away with these quasi-metaphysical concepts that teeter on the edge between metaphysics and some elsewhere, but still trapped in its enclosure. What it seems to me Derrida is suggesting here is the possibility that cybernetics could possibly escape metaphysics, that it bears within it the possibility of a non-metaphysical science. We may even suggest the hypothesis that what ultimately lead to such rapid abandonment and collapse of cybernetics at the forefront of science was that it drew in its later iterations too close to this precipice, but such hypotheses are likely beyond the scope of this commentary.

Hopefully, this makes it easier to see the historical movement and moment that Derrida is situating this text in. While there is significantly more one could comment on in this passage (e.g the archon/arche, why is this section called “the program”, what is this logic of the supplement [a point that will be developed at length a bit later one], etc.), one final and critical theme should be noted before proceeding. Derrida uses the language of necessity to describe this movement:

These disguises are not historical contingencies that one might admire or regret. Their movement was absolutely necessary, with a necessity which cannot be judged by any other tribunal. The privilege of the phonè does not depend upon a choice that could have been avoided. It responds to a moment of economy (let us say of the "life" of "history" or of "being as self-relationship").

We will need to track throughout the grammatology the meaning of the necessity that governs this historical process. And, we should note the appropriateness of this term govern, as Derrida takes recourse to the language of judgement and a tribunal. What is the sole tribunal that could judge this movement? Is this tribunal metaphysics; the internal movement and development of metaphysics? Perhaps we are to conclude that internal to the laws of metaphysics no other outcome was possible (and hence it is the only tribunal that could judge its progress). What we will need to return to again and again as we consider where it is we are headed is the question of how we got here; at what point was the game set and the outcome determined. Can we identify an invention, an idea, a decision (perhaps one that has come to define “the West”) that makes of this entire movement a necessity; or is it larger then that something in the rules of the universe or life is responsible for this situation? Or perhaps the entire idea of necessity (and its opposition to contingency) will be a distinction that only exists internal to laws of metaphysics and its conceptions of “life”, “history” or “being as self-relationship” (the latter concept being one Derrida develops at length in Speech and Phenomena as he shows how even the relationship of oneself to oneself—that which should be the most intimate and personal—is in the final analysis ultimately alien and uncanny).

Perhaps this necessity is not what we normally think of by the term but rather the structure the very structure of our being misled; metaphysics then “wilfully misleading us, only in the course of an adventure: as that adventure itself. All in all a short enough adventure.” We will have to see if it is possible to imagine an end to this adventure or if it is necessarily interminable, inescapable even.