On the phonograph record Minutes it is possible to hear -- along with W.S. Burroughs, Jean Cocteau and other luminaries -- the voice of Jacques Derrida discoursing on death and deconstruction. Derrida's voice appears as an excerpt from a discussion that, we learn from the liner notes, took place after the Linguistics of Writing conference in Glasgow, 1986. On death, Derrida suggests that the desire for presence is not necessarily a bad desire, just unfulfillable, because its fulfilment would mean death. On deconstruction, Colin MacCabe responds by pointing out its failure to account for the way that new communications technologies have questioned the whole relation between speech and writing enshrined within the dominant literary tradition. Deconstruction, he argues, has been used not to open up the literary curriculum but as a last way of going back and saving that curriculum.2
Regardless of the perspicuity of MacCabe's point, what is interesting is the fact that it is not heard on the excerpt chosen for the Minutes record -- which, by the way, is copyrighted by Derrida. We learn of MacCabe's contribution only from a brief passage in the book that was produced from the proceedings of the conference, which presumably originated -- via transcripts -- from audio recordings of the conference. In this confusing mediamatic configuration, the presence of MacCabe's point regarding the relationship between speech and writing which new technologies have torn asunder, moves in and out of both visibility and audibility, between one medium and the next.
Derrida would probably be delighted at this sort of confluence, but not delighted about MacCabe, whose criticism is quite misplaced, particularly as Derrida's recent writing embraces technologies of communication such as the tape recorder, the phonograph and the telephone, and particularly as Derrida is more concerned with saving himself than saving the literary curriculum. In fact, salvation comes for Derrida via the recording, through which he is saved from having to hear this criticism along with his own voice which, furthermore, is also saved for posterity. But more than this, the phonographed voice defers the possibility of full presence -- which for Derrida would mean death -- by instituting the disembodied voice of technology. Through the prosthetic subjectivity that the disembodied voice grants, Derridean deconstruction is saved from being mute in the face of Western metaphysics -- which Derrida refers to as a metaphysics of presence, constructed from the so-called presence of an inner and silent voice.
Against the silence and absoluteness of the inner, metaphysical voice, Derrida poses the concept of the trace. The trace is a mark of a presence which is never fully present, and an absence which is never entirely absent, and is associated with a Derridean tropology of inscription. The trace is revealed not through speech, but through writing (écriture), which allows the difference, the absence, the other inherent in discourse, to appear. As a 'writing-before-speech', écriture has no associations with either the inner voice of metaphysics, or the romanticised voice of primary orality. However it does share with western metaphysics the element of silence: the trace reveals, and is revealed by, the space, or spacing, of writing -- be it the gap between letters on the page or the silence which differentiates phonemes in speech.3 An associated concept, differance, operates through the silence of the phoneme 'a' which can be seen written on the page, but cannot be heard in speech. According to Derrida, this oscillation between hearing and seeing, between speech and writing, which is revealed through a silence, absence or gap, provides a way of articulating the mechanisms or logics which constitute metaphysical presence and at the same time interrupt those mechanisms.4 Derrida's appeal to silence as an instrument of rupture is, however, always veering towards the inner and silent voice of western metaphysics. Perhaps this is why he turns to the metaphor of gramophony to sonorise his inscriptive schematic -- his 'science of writing'.
For Derrida, the gramophone interprets (reads) the phonographic voice as form of writing,
a writing-before-speech, and by doing so deconstructs the myth of presence and origin upon which metaphysics relies. At the same time, the possibilities for a non-philosophy, or philosophy of difference, are made audible through what he calls the 'phonographic act'. In the 'Prologue' to Cinders (1987)5 Derrida writes that for some ten years he had been thinking about the sentence 'cinders there are (il y a là cendre)'. Like the a of differance, the accent on the là of il y a là cendre is silent, marking a tension between writing and speech which is reflected in the text itself. In the same text, Derrida re-names the trace as the 'cinder', and describes Cinders, the book, as a 'writing apparatus' which 'calls' to the unheard voice/s rumbling through the authorial text of metaphysics. The key question Derrida asks in the 'Prologue' is ' ... how can this fatally silent call that speaks before its own voice be made audible?' (C, 22). That is, how can the call which precedes the voice, which is only emitted through writing, be made audible? How can the silence of which the accent on the là speaks be made to sound?6 Derrida acknowledges that since the polylogue is written and therefore 'destined for the eye' it 'corresponds only to an interior voice, an absolutely low voice'
(C, 22). So how can it be amplified? Derrida finds the answer in sound technology: 'Then one day came the possibility, I should say the chance of making a tape-recording of this'
(C, 22 - 23).
In Cinders the tape recorder appears at the moment when this 'almost' silence is given a voice -- the moment when Word becomes flesh, when the thundering heavens are given to utterance:
For that it is necessary that you take the word into your mouth, when you breathe, whence the cinder comes to the vocable, which disappears from sight, like burning semen...Cinder is only a word. But what a word for consuming itself all the way to its support (the tape-recorded voice or strip of paper, self-destruction of the impossible emission once the order is given)...And you can also receive semen through the ear (C, 71 - 73).
It is interesting that Derrida inserts a tape recorder at the the site of the Immaculate Conception, especially given that in quattrocento paintings the Madonna's impregnation
by the Word is often depicted by a tube stretching from the mouth of God to the ear of the Madonna. Being the 'support' of the word, the tape recorder produces the voice as an analogue to the originary inscription/emission of the Judaic Torah, which is a set of ciphers both forming the name of God, and providing the circuit from which, and within which, writing and discourse can proceed. The Torah is a writing-before-speech, because the voice of an incorporeal God could not be terrestrial, that is, sonorous. However, while the Judaic Word might seem to be a static object, it is animated by the vitalism of the cinder. Inscribed but also broadcast, the word is a seed, a palimpsest, which contains and generates all possible writing (note that 'broadcast' is originally an agrarian term, referring to the spreading of the seed in planting). Gershom Scholem writes that, to Jewish mystics
the Torah is ... a living organism animated by a secret life which streams and pulsates below the crust of its literal meaning...[It] does not consist merely of chapters, phrases and words; rather it is to be regarded as the living incarnation of the divine wisdom which eternally sends out new rays of light.7
Routed through Derrida's notion of the cinder and écriture, the Judaic 'Word' is never originary, since every word signifies another in an endless chain which neither ends nor begins with a first cause, or unitary God. Yet while escaping the myth of origin, the word is still caught in a potential silence. According to Moshe Idel, with the emergence of Jewish philosophy the Biblical verse 'Moses spoke and God answered him with a voice' was re-interpreted, the speech and the hearing now belonging only to Moses, while God's message was delivered through 'the instrument of spiritual speech addressed to the soul, whereafter the soul itself transforms this...into speech which another human being is able to hear'.8
The instrument of the soul is, in Derrida's phonographically inspired science of writing, an analogue of the tape recorder or amplification device; it transmits and makes audible a message from elsewhere.
If the cinder is always already inscribed, it cannot be originary. But still, how does it avoid the silence of 'spiritual speech', or the anechoic space of traditional metaphysics? In the recording, the word 'self-destructs' in the temporality of sound, consuming itself as a cinder, while the voice, which for Derrida also represents 'sound in general' becomes literally a trace -- the phonograph's grooves, the tape's magnetic configurations, the cipher of the 'impossible emission'. So the aurality of the recording, by creating an 'aural-trace', a vocal-writing, represents the always-already-inscribed, but also the always-potentially-audible nature of the cinder. The gramophonic recording is therefore a trace of a trace, a trace which makes pure difference -- Being itself -- finally audible and which, through the operations of technology, can be made to sound.9
What then, does the cinder make audible through the recording? Derrida writes:
...the spoken 'recorded' voice makes a reservoir of writing readable, its tonal and phonic drives, the waves (neither cry nor speech) which are knotted or unknotted in the unique vociferation, the singular range of another voice (C, 25).
Technology amplifies writing at the same time that it sonorises the 'interior voice', the 'absolutely low voice' which, as Derrida says, is 'destined for the eye' (C, 22). But how does the interior voice reach its ocular destination? While the cinder might be amplified by the tape recorder, it is also transmitted. Radiating outwards, the cinder passes from one metaphysical and symbolic space to another; like the 'speaking tube' present at both the immaculate conception and the invention of phonography, it becomes a vehicle for carrying and transmitting the silent seed, the Word, in much the same way as a telephone. Appropriating this transmissional technology, Derrida now supplements gramophony with the spatiality and movement of telephony. Gramophony becomes 'telegramophony', a concept which also hinges on a barely audible, barley legible silence. In Ulysses Gramophone Derrida introduces the telephonic metaphor anecdotally, as an occasion which prompted a chance decision concerning the title of the talk he would give on James Joyce. Glancing at a page of notes Derrida reads 'hear say yes in Joyce' as a kind of 'telegraphic' order, 'irresistible' in its brevity:
So, you are receiving me, Joyce's saying yes but also the saying or the yes that is heard, the saying yes that travels round like a quotation or a rumour circulating, circumnavigating via the ear's labyrinth, that which we know only by hearsay (oui-dire).
Because 'hear say yes' and 'hearsay' are homonymous in French (l'oui dire), differing only by an umlaut on the 'i' of hearsay, Derrida concludes:
...Yes in Ulysses can only be a mark at once written and spoken, vocalized as a grapheme and written as a phoneme, yes, in a word, gramophoned.10
In sympathy with the meaning of 'tele' as transmission over a distance, a telephonic 'hearsay' travels, as does rumour, through spatial and social networks, often spreading from ear to ear like wildfire, carried by the multiple voices of a Heraclitean style hearing/saying. But if the 'yes' in Ulysses travels via the rumourology of the telephone, then being described as 'gramophoned' it connotes the old style telephone system, which sent electronic signals via the mechanical actions of the predominantly women operators. The mechanical connotation of the metaphor refers us to the telephone's introduction, that era when electricity was still a new and barely understood phenomenon, compared to the commonsensical operations of machines like the gramophone. It also refers us to an older mode sociality, where the telephone was the province of extended rumour-ing amongst women, and short, to the point, almost telegraphic brevity in message sending and receiving amongst men.
Derrida continues this masculine mode of communication, by translating entendre, meaning to hear/understand, as 'receiving', thus situating hearsay and 'yes' within the metaphoric circuits of telephony. The first phone call in Ulysses, which Derrida reads as a call to Israel from God, takes place 'in the offices of The Telegraph newspaper (and not The Tetragram)' (UG, 269 - 70). The tetragram comprises the four letters spelling God's name in the Kabbalistic tradition, a tradition which, according to Scholem, is 'both historically and metaphysically...a masculine doctrine, made for men and by men'.11 The phone call, containing the 'yes' of differance and the cinder, put through by women operators in the feminine sphere of rumour and 'hear/say', nonetheless 'takes place' in the vicinity of the silent cipher of the tetragram, site of an originary 'emission'. In other words, rumour occurs within the sphere of a silent deciphering -- metaphysics itself; differance is already contained by technology, be it writing, phonography or telephony.
For Derrida, writing is now 'a telegramophonic obsession', concerned with receiving a certain call; the call 'between God...and Israel', which occurs in the mode of a recording.12 The prayer is now a telephone call -- or the call is a prayer -- caught in the grooves of a phonograph. But the obsession is also with receiving (entendre) the untranslatable. Through telegramophony this dialogue with the other is amplified and transmitted. It moves from the 'almost silence' of the 'writing-before-speech', to the uncanny circulations, rumourological networks and crossed wires of the telephone call.13 And through this movement the tension between writing and speech, and on a deeper level, between presence and absence, begins to resonate and resolve into audibility. A kind of sonorous presence takes the place of the 'almost silence' of the trace, renamed as cinder:
...the cinder is ... the name of the being that...remains beyond everything that is...remains unpronounceable in order to make saying possible although it is nothing (C, 73).
The cinder radiates from a centre, and in that radiation expresses the becoming of aurality and fire alike. Like the 'sound object' of recording and some sound art discourses, the cinder waits to be amplified, broadcast, transmitted by the prosthesis of the stylus, be it the phonograph needle, the recording head of the tape recorder, or the nib of the pen. Amplification is culturally connected to notions of synaesthesia, of technologically transforming the sensorium such that hearing becomes feeling and feeling is experienced as the cosmic vibration of life emitted from all things both animate and inanimate. Amplification both detects and transmits this vibration, supplying the listener with a prosthetically induced access to the plenitude of an otherwise inaudible phenomenal life and metaphysical Being. In Derridean terms, amplification or the 'phonographic act' makes the call, the prayer, the cinder, the 'yes', finally audible.
Through the 'phonographic act' the recorded voice seems at first to dislodge metaphysics because it is inscribed, written rather than spoken, and therefore does not ensure the present presence of the speaker. However, the present presence of the speaker is replaced by the disembodied voice of technology, which substitutes for the silent voice of the mind. Rather than making audible the differance which aurality -- like fire -- represents, the phonograph restores and at the same time evacuates the inner voice and origin of Western metaphysics. What is lost in this process is the sonority of sound and hearing, the corporeality of noise and rumour, corporeality itself. In Derridean deconstruction, rumour is untranslatable, it cannot be heard but only read 'with the eyes'. And while the feminised ear hears hearsay amidst a labyrinth, the eye, through the glance or the rapid scan, reads the 'irresistibly brief', 'telegraphic order': hear say 'yes'. Following this order, Derrida deems the là of the cinder silent and says 'yes' to a philosophical era which has represented sound as other, and otherness as a reservoir which will always provide a hidden, silent ground. What is heard
in gramophonic écriture is this scratching of the unpresentable, the hidden, the trace, represented through the metaphoric circuitry of a masculinised technology. It is not surprising that for Derrida hearsay is 'gramophoned', and by the end of Ulysses Gramophone, the telephone is situated 'in the head', providing as he says, a 'telephonic interiority', a 'mental telephony' which 'inscribes remoteness, distance, differance' (UG, 272).
In Speech and Phenomena Derrida first likens the a of differance to the silence and secrecy of a tomb, and it is from this silence that all others in his non-philosophy follow. The tomb is the home of the cadaver, the place where the noise of the body has ceased, where silence can finally 'be'. In order to hear that absolute silence one must be already dead. But to hear an 'almost silence' it is only necessary to be prostheticised -- to have an electronically or mechanically aided hearing. Disembodiment belongs to the telephonic ear or phonographic voice, for which there is no split between seeing and hearing, nor speech and writing. And through this refigured subjectivity, death is displaced.
Which returns us to the recorded salvation which began this paper. Contra Colin MacCabe, it is Derridean deconstruction itself, and not the literary curriculum, which is saved by gramophony. But it is saved only by recourse to fairly old, mechanical, primarily inscriptive technologies and metaphors which in the contemporary cene are far from revolutionary. And far from revolutionary is the slight shift from the absolute to the 'almost' silence of the voice, from the absolute to the almost inaudibility of the rumours of the other.
1 This paper was first presented at the Lab Gallery, San Francisco, in 1992.
2 Jacques Derrida, 'Some questions and responses', from The Linguistics of Writing conference, Strathclyde University, 4 - 6 July, 1986, published as The Linguistics of Writing, eds. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, Colin MacCabe, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987, pp. 260 - 61.
3 'The difference that brings out phonemes and lets them be heard and understood (entendre) itself remains inaudible.' Jacques Derrida, 'Differance', in Speech and Phenomena, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 133.
4 ibid., p. 130. 'This differance belongs neither to the voice nor to writing in the ordinary sense, and it takes place...between speech and writing.' ibid., p. 134.
5 Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Hereafter cited as C.
6 'But how can this fatally silent call that speaks before its own voice be made audible? How could it be kept waiting any longer?' (C, 22) 'How can the accent on the là of il y a là cendre be pronounced "on two incompatible registers" -- speech and writing?' (C, 24).
7 Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Schocken Books, 1941.
8 Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, p. 84.
9 In Early Greek Thinking Heidegger refers to language as 'the house of Being'. In Cinders Derrida states: 'There are cinders only insofar as there is the hearth, the fireplace, some fire or place. Cinder as the house of being' op. cit.,
p. 41.
10 Jacques Derrida, 'Ulysses Gramophone', in Acts of Literature, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 267. Hereafter cited as UG.
11 Scholem, op. cit. p. 37.
12 '...he had somewhat mechanically repeated this prayer, the most serious of all prayers for a Jew, the one that should never be allowed to become mechanical, to be gramophoned.' (UG, 269).
13 The telephone appears in relation to chance, specifically the chance meeting between Derrida and Jean-Michel Rabate: 'we later said...that this coincidence must have been "telephoned" ... ' (UG, 267). The uncanniness of this crossing makes the telephone, as Freud had mused, 'telepathic', that is, psychoanalytic. Chance, the uncanny coincidence, perhaps the uncanny per se, is made audible through the telephone, which in this case is Derrida himself. Thinking back to Heidegger, the 'call' is always to Dasein, and heard through uncanniness, when one is in the mode of 'hearkening attunement'. Re-routed through Derrida, does the call become audible only when one is in the state of being-a-telephone?
Référence: http://autonomous.org/soundsite/main.html