I just completed a submission draft dealing with Derrida and materiality, one that I'm contributing as a chapter to a book being done on the "material turn" in rhetorical studies. As it touches on much of the interests I discuss on here, I thought I'd include a small portion of the paper:
Writing boasts its share of ghosts as well. The mystique attached to old texts, seen recently as the source of satanic power and mysticism in Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, can also be seen in the name given to those piles of mail deemed undeliverable: the so-called “dead letters,” named because of their removal from the more lively process of circulation and the possibly deceased status of their senders and addressees. Even the near-instantaneous exchange of e-mail is phantasmatic, with writing done here suddenly manifesting there, saved in the inbox until (or after) being read, waiting for one more click of the mouse before initiating a sort of electronic séance. Derrida, we should remember, routinely argues that writing is dedicated to the proposition that the author no longer needs to be for the message to be received, and that the possibility of communicating beyond one's death is necessarily inscribed in every act of writing. Writing, in other words, always entails the possibility of writing a dead letter.
And so it is no coincidence that Derrida's Specters of Marx, which revolves around a reading of the ghosts in and of Karl Marx (the great thinker of materiality), also contains a meditation on the spectrality of contemporary technics. In it, the specter proves so pivotal that Derrida contends that no assessment or appreciation of media can be made “without taking into account so many spectral effects, the new speed of apparition (we understand this word in its ghostly sense) of the simulacrum, the synthetic or prosthetic image, and the virtual event, cyberspace and surveillance, the control appropriations, and speculations that today deploy unheard-of powers.” In other words, the spectral component of media, their ability to make the dead live again, to proffer a virtual sense of presence, or to simulate or anticipate an event, are what give new media and their messages their distinctive character. The specter, we could say, is what produces media as material phenomena, that shapes the possibilities of response and interpretation in today's evolving media ecology.
Derrida's discussion of spectrality begins with the ghost of Hamlet's father, who appears in the opening act to set in motion the events that will follow. This is no idle choice. Hamlet was an influential text for Marx, to be sure, but there is more at work here. Hamlet is first and foremost a play, a text to be performed, and as such points to the quintessentially theatrical nature of spectral logics. Every act of channeling, be it one of recording or transmission, is a setting of the stage, a portrayal or presentation of an event, and will be structured by a set of rules that govern its recognition as such. Every instance of mediation offers a material and psychical inscription of its ghosts. As such, an appreciation of spectrality implies that mediation can never be reduced to or defined by a logic of representation, since media necessarily unravel the binary between presence and absence, a binary that simply cannot maintain itself within the structure of telecommunications.
Still, for those wary of Derrida and deconstruction, eyebrows will no doubt be placed on high alert. How, they might ask, does this idea of spectrality relate to the rest of Derrida's oeuvre? Is spectrality as relativist, as slippery, as his other vocabulary games? Predictably, this answer is not as clear as Derrida's skeptics might prefer, but I believe this lack of clarity will offer us a way to take Derrida further as a thinker of materiality and mediation. More on that in a moment. For now, let me offer Derrida's own description, in which spectrality is linked to those characteristics that Derrida has previously described as the play of différance or the movement of deconstruction:
What has ... constantly haunted me in this logic of the specter is that it regularly exceeds all the oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible. A specter is both visible and invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal: a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance. The spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is in the element of haunting that deconstruction finds the place most hospitable to it, at the heart of the living present, in the quickest heartbeat of the philosophical.
This passage, to which I will return later, is remarkable in its assessment. Haunting offers a “place most hospitable” to deconstruction, the specter is likened to the trace, and the specter is said to confront those binaries that have been (in part) the target of Derrida's writing for decades. And yet, there is a stunning ambiguity here, one that centers on the supposed reality or actuality to which the “de facto” testifies, for if spectrality is “in fact” deconstruction, where has the specter been hiding itself all this time?
Two questions announce themselves at this point. First, what is the relationship between spectrality and those earlier terms used to describe différance, like the “trace,” with which rhetoricians are already quite familiar? And second, given its obvious hospitality to deconstruction, given Derrida's long history of writing about différance and iterability, and given his allusions to ghosts and simulacra in other texts, including “Plato's Pharmacy,” why did spectrality take so long to arrive near the forefront of his thought?
Comments (5)
Ken: so hot! Awesome writing, of course . . . and excellent topic. We need someone to present Derrida's thinking in a non-spooky way for the commies!
Do you have the full citation for this essay yet? I've got a book review coming out in QJS on haunting as an idiom (was like written a year ago! man they are slow), and there's a section on Derrida that I would do well to cite your essay for this new project (as well as your other stuff). And speaking of the spectral, have you been shopping that diss yet?
Hope you're doing well over yonder.
Posted by Josh | June 25, 2005 12:04 PM
Posted on June 25, 2005 12:04
Ken: so hot! Awesome writing, of course . . . and excellent topic. We need someone to present Derrida's thinking in a non-spooky way for the commies!
Do you have the full citation for this essay yet? I've got a book review coming out in QJS on haunting as an idiom (was like written a year ago! man they are slow), and there's a section on Derrida that I would do well to cite your essay for this new project (as well as your other stuff). And speaking of the spectral, have you been shopping that diss yet?
Hope you're doing well over yonder.
Posted by Josh | June 25, 2005 12:04 PM
Posted on June 25, 2005 12:04
Thanks Josh, nice to see you come by the new place :) No cite yet. It's part of a book project Biesecker and Lucaites are doing on materiality and it's my hopeful contribution. I want to wait to hear from them, but after that, I'll certainly send you a copy if you like. In the meantime, I'm doing an NCA panel on the paper, so maybe we can chat there? Or on skype - you using it yet? It's incredible.
And believe me, I'll be looking forward to the book review. And no, no shopping yet. I decided to avoid it for a year and have only recently started to look at it again (this post is in part a product of that second glance), and although I think I know what I need to do before I want to shop it, I've got some other projects i want to finish up before that happens. Oh, and I don't know if you've heard, but C and I have a little girl on the way, circa late October, and much of my thinking is about that these days :)
More in a few - we just got back from a Wedding in Ohio.
Posted by Kenneth Rufo | June 26, 2005 11:45 PM
Posted on June 26, 2005 23:45
Zoinks!?!?!!! Baby? Hot damn! Congrats daddio! I can see how having a munchkin can pretty much take over your brain. Hurrah! for you.
I'll check out your panel at NCA; meanwhile, I'll keep reading your blogishness. I've been writing about ghosts lately--the voice as ghost, actually--so your work is really helpful.
Hope the summer finishes out well for you.
Posted by Josh | June 28, 2005 10:19 AM
Posted on June 28, 2005 10:19
mmm.. nice design, I must say..
Posted by ragazzi | February 21, 2007 5:30 AM
Posted on February 21, 2007 05:30