On Writing and Speaking

“Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow...”

- Lawrence Clark Powell

It always thrills me when what I’m studying in one class merges over to another class.

With that in mind, in her essay “Writing”, Barbara Johnson makes the case that what Derrida saw wrong with the logocentristic nature of Western philosophy – the privileging of speech over writing resulting from the hierarchical notion of binary relationships – was that “even when a text tries to privilege speech as immediacy, it cannot completely eliminate the fact that speech, like writing, is based on a differance… between signifier and signified inherent in the sign. Speakers do not beam meanings directly from one mind to another. Immediacy is an illusion” (343). I think it’s interesting that Johnson uses the word immediacy, because the first thing I thought to connect it to was Bolter and Grusin’s notion of remediation, in which immediacy and hypermediacy play against each other as old media is adapted, updated and used to create new media. If Johnson is saying that speech operates under the notion of immediacy – that it is, it is “presence, life, and identity” – then the act of writing, of creating a text, takes on ideas of hypermediacy, of “deferment, absence, death, and difference” (343). Meaning that when we read words on the page, at some conscious level we are constantly acknowledging that we are using a tangible object in order to gain insight, knowledge, entertainment, etc., but that this relationship is effectively hypermediated in that we can never see past the words on the page to see something inherently sustainable underneath. All we see are signifiers, never the truth.

Furthermore, I thought briefly to connect this to Habermas’s idea of the public sphere, in which the act of physically meeting in a place – a coffeehouse, a salon, etc. – changed how information was circulated. Habermas suggests that because of the rise in publication materials such as newspapers, magazines and journals, more of the population – that is, white, land-owning males – became involved in political and social discussions. In this way, they were influenced primarily by texts, by the written word, by physical objects. But Habermas saw the actual meeting, the physical act of coming together, as the most important facet of how the public sphere was shaped. Due to this interpretation, it seems that Habermas was, to some extent, favoring speech over writing.

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Johnson, Barbara. “Writing.” Literary Theory: an Anthology 2^nd Edition. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 340-347. Print.