From Tweet to Meme: Derrida’s Grammatology in the Post-Discursive Age
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The digital landscape has shifted. A decade ago, the brief, aphoristic tweet reigned as the dominant form of online discourse — a remnant of the phonetic, linear tradition of writing. Today, however, the meme has overtaken it, establishing an aesthetic regime where images, captions, and icons define the rhythms of collective meaning. In the United States, political culture itself has become deeply visual: politicians appear in memes wearing Mexican hats, wielding maracas, or reimagined in pop-cultural tableaux. What once belonged to the margins — the comic, the pictorial, the non-discursive — now sets the tone of public debate. This inversion, seemingly trivial, recalls a deeper philosophical tension that Jacques Derrida traced in Of Grammatology (1967): the hierarchical opposition between phonetic and nonphonetic writing, between the linear voice and the graphic trace.
The meme’s ascendancy thus signals not merely a shift in media consumption, but a grammatological transformation — a return of those nonphonetic forms once excluded by the Western metaphysics of the word.
Phonetic Writing and the Era of the Tweet
In Derrida’s view, Western thought privileged speech as the locus of truth and immediacy, relegating writing to a secondary, derivative role. Phonetic writing — alphabetic, sequential, reducible to sound — became the technological support of that illusion. It preserved, he wrote, “the idea of a logos or the full presence of the voice to itself” (Of Grammatology, p. 11).
The tweet, with its minimal syntax and insistence on “voice” (“What’s happening?” asks the interface), extends this lineage. It is a medium built for enunciation, for producing the effect of presence. Each post aspires to authenticity — a direct utterance of opinion, outrage, or wit. The short text, linear and alphabetic, carries the metaphysical promise of communicative transparency: a thought made legible, a voice transmitted without distortion. Even when detached from speech, the tweet maintains what Derrida would call a phonocentric structure — the fantasy that language can be mastered through immediate expression.
Yet, Derrida also reminds us that writing is never pure transmission but iteration — a mark that “can break with every given context, engendering infinitely new contexts” (p. 315). Every tweet, no matter how personal or spontaneous, becomes a trace: repeatable, quotable, decontextualized. Twitter’s textual brevity disguises the fact that it is already a space of différance — of slippage, parody, and endless reinterpretation. But within the cultural imagination, it still belongs to the discursive order: rational, declarative, phonetic.
The Meme as Nonphonetic Writing
If the tweet echoes the alphabetic line, the meme recalls the hieroglyph. It is graphic rather than phonetic, spatial rather than sequential. Its meaning arises not through syntactic order but through juxtaposition — of image, text, tone, and cultural reference. The meme is not read in time but apprehended in space. Its logic is that of the constellation, not the sentence.
Derrida describes nonphonetic systems — such as hieroglyphic, Chinese, or mathematical writing — as forms that “escape the horizon of the voice” (p. 84). Western philosophy, he argues, subordinated these systems because they did not mirror speech. Yet, paradoxically, they reveal the true nature of writing: as spacing, iteration, and difference. In the meme, this latent grammatological structure resurfaces. The meme’s composite syntax — image layered with caption, gesture with irony — performs the very différance Derrida theorized: meaning deferred and proliferated through play.
A meme depicting a senator under a Mexican sombrero, for instance, operates through displacement rather than statement. The humor lies not in propositional content but in semiotic friction: an image of authority recoded through a visual cliché. Its signification cannot be paraphrased; it emerges from relation — a field of traces rather than a fixed message. In this way, the meme reclaims the pictorial dimension that phonetic writing had repressed, transforming it into the dominant mode of digital expression.
The Deconstruction of Linearity
For Derrida, the alphabet’s linearity sustained an entire epistemology: to read was to move forward, to progress along a single temporal axis. The digital meme dismantles that axis. It does not unfold but unfolds itself all at once. The viewer does not follow a line of reasoning but confronts a spatial montage. This spatial simultaneity—an image, a font, an affect—embodies a new semiotic economy that Derrida anticipated when he observed that nonphonetic writing “no longer forms a chain but a network” (p. 88).
In this sense, the meme is not a successor to the tweet but its deconstruction. It exposes the limits of phonetic discourse by foregrounding what was always outside it: the graphic, the gestural, the iterable. The tweet’s linear temporality collapses into the meme’s visual instantaneity. Presence gives way to circulation; authorship dissolves into collective re-inscription. Each meme is an anonymous rewriting, a trace without origin. “The trace,” Derrida writes, “is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself” (p. 156). That definition could describe the meme perfectly.
From Margins to Center: The Return of the Repressed
The meme’s rise marks not only a technological shift but also a cultural inversion. Historically, the West regarded nonphonetic scripts as primitive or ornamental — peripheral to the serious work of thought. The meme, once dismissed as juvenile internet folklore, now commands the center of political and cultural discourse. Campaigns, movements, and ideologies circulate through humor, remix, and visual allegory.
What Derrida called the “ethnocentrism of the alphabet” (p. 85) — the belief that phonetic writing is the universal form of reason — is now undermined by the very technologies it once spawned. Digital media have democratized the graphic sign, bringing back the expressive economy of the ideogram and the collage. In memes, the visual and the textual cohabit without hierarchy, signaling a post-discursive era where image supplants argument as the privileged vehicle of persuasion.
This is not, however, the end of writing, but its metamorphosis. Derrida envisioned that the expansion of cybernetics and informatics would “extend the domain of writing to all that gives rise to inscription in general” (p. 9). The meme is one such extension: a writing that is not written, a text without text. It enacts what Derrida called arche-writing — the originary structure of traces from which all signification proceeds.
Conclusion: Toward a Grammatology of Memes
The transformation from tweet to meme encapsulates a deeper historical oscillation: from the phonetic to the nonphonetic, from the voice to the trace. Derrida’s grammatology allows us to see this not as a decline in rational discourse but as the return of the repressed graphic dimension that underlies all writing. The meme, in this light, is the contemporary hieroglyph — a fragmentary sign that resists linearity and refuses to be subsumed under the logic of the voice.
When politicians appear as memes — adorned with sombreros or staged in ironic tableaux — it is not merely satire; it is the symptom of a cultural reconfiguration. Meaning no longer speaks; it circulates. The meme does not replace the word; it exposes what the word had always concealed: that writing, in all its forms, is an act of difference, not presence.
References
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (G.
C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Milner, R. M. (2016). The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and
Participatory Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dean, J. (2019). Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. London: Verso.
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