The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing
Derrida, Jacques, and Barry Stocker. Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings. London ; New York: Routledge, 2007.
In this chapter, “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing” from Of Grammatology, Derrida looks at what he considers to be the problem of language. This problem has to do with how we now (Note: this was published in 1967) use the term too loosely. “This crisis is also a symptom. It indicates, as if in spite of itself, that a historic-metaphysical epoch must finally determine as language the totality of its problematic horizon” (6).
As the chapter title suggests, Derrida is looking at the end of writing in reference to the book, since the book is a finite, limited, set collection of words and pages. Conversely, language has no boundaries, nor does the larger idea of writing. Writing itself can be altered, redirected, repurposed, resent, etc. To put it in context of the idea of the signified, spoken language (langue) signifies the thought and writing signifies the spoken language. Therefore, writing is the signifier of the signifier.
As has been more or less implicitly determined, the essence of the phoné would be immediately proximate to that which within “thought” as logos relates to “meaning,” produces it, receives it, speaks it, “composes” it. If, for Aristotle, for example, “spoken words (ta en tè phonè) are the symbols of mental experience (pathèmata tes psychès) and written wards are the symbols of spoken words” (De interpretatatione, 1, 16a 3) it is because the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind. (11)
In many ways, one can today see many examples of writing overtaking speech (parole). We use email, IM, and texting instead of the telephone. Face-to-face (FtF) meetings are being replaced by screen-sharing sessions, chat sessions, etc. Online education is replacing (in some cases) FtF classroom teaching, including classes that incorporate both synchronous and asynchronous written communication such as chat session, Multi-user areas, discussion boards, etc. While there are all examples existent in our current era (none of which existed at the time Derrida published this work), these instances exemplify-and even amplify- the ideas behind what concerned Derrida about the idea of writing and language and how those ideas are changing.
It is as if the Western concept of language … were revealed today as the guise or disguise of a primary writing: more fundamental than that which, before this conversation, passed for the simple “supplement to the spoken word” (Rousseau). Either writing was never a simple “supplement,” or it is urgently necessary to construct a new logic of the “supplement.” (7)
He writes that we have used the term language to refer to “action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity, etc.” (9). In this way, the term represents the language of these items, which can all be conceived of as interpretable by the spoken word. However, we now use the term writing to refer to all these previously-defined aspects of language, as well as “all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing’. One might also speak of athletic writing… of military or political writing” (9). So, in essence, all of this describes both the system of notation connected with the activities and the activities themselves.