Why Deconstruction? Science, Technology, and the Concept Under Pressure

“And thus we say ‘writing’ for 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, and with even greater certainty of military or political writing in view of the techniques that govern those domains today. All this to describe not only the system of notation secondarily connected with these activities but the essence and the content of these activities themselves. It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing”.

— Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology

Introduction — Why Does Derrida Deconstruct Writing?

It is tempting to read Of Grammatology as a reversal of the traditional hierarchy between speech and writing: if speech has been privileged over writing, Derrida simply gives the neglected term its due. Yet this interpretation leaves unanswered a prior question: what happened to make writing a problem in the first place?

This question matters because deconstruction can begin from very different points. A difficulty may emerge within a field of knowledge, place an established concept under pressure, and lead to further inquiry:

problem → pressure → inquiry → deconstruction

But deconstruction can also be treated as a procedure that precedes the question, identifying a target, exposing an opposition, unsettling its hierarchy, and reopening the concept regardless of what has made such an intervention necessary. Once the procedure is detached from the circumstances that gave rise to it, the question of why it is needed begins to disappear.

This article argues that Derrida's treatment of writing belongs to the first pattern. Of Grammatology takes shape within a historical moment in which developments in anthropology, biology, cybernetics, and the emerging sciences of information were already transforming the field in which writing could be understood. To follow Derrida's intervention, then, is to ask not simply what he does to the concept, but what had happened to make that intervention necessary.

1. The Inherited Architecture of Writing

One of the canonical formulations of the relation between speech and writing appears in Aristotle's De Interpretatione. At 16a3–8, spoken sounds are described as symbols of “affections of the soul,” while written marks are symbols of spoken sounds. Whatever the complexities of Aristotle's own account, the passage places written marks in a relation of dependence upon spoken sounds, while spoken sounds themselves are related to affections of the soul.

This arrangement does not make writing insignificant. It assigns it a particular position in the production and transmission of meaning. If speech is closer to what is present to the speaker, written marks can appear as a secondary representation of a signifying process that has already taken place. The written form preserves, communicates, or reproduces something constituted elsewhere.

That architecture became part of a much longer philosophical tradition, even as its precise formulation changed from one thinker to another. Derrida's target in Of Grammatology is consequently not Aristotle alone, nor a single proposition about language, but an inherited organization in which writing can appear exterior and derivative because meaning is presumed to have its proper origin in presence, thought, or speech.

Such an arrangement is easier to maintain when writing is understood primarily as the inscription of spoken language. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the term writing was entering intellectual and technical domains in which that description no longer seemed sufficient.

2. Before Derrida: Writing Expands

Something had already begun to happen to the object called writing before Derrida formulated his own account of it. At the beginning of Of Grammatology, he identifies three publications that had occasioned the essay from which the book developed: Madeleine V.-David's Le débat sur les écritures et l'hiéroglyphe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1965), André Leroi-Gourhan's Le geste et la parole (1965), and L'écriture et la psychologie des peuples (1963), a collection of essays that grew out of a scholarly colloquium held that year.

The three works approach writing from different directions. V.-David reconstructs the history of attempts to understand systems of writing; Leroi-Gourhan places inscription within a broader history of gesture, technique, human development, and symbolic activity; and L'écriture et la psychologie des peuples brings together historical, anthropological, and linguistic approaches that complicate any simple equation between writing and the graphic transcription of speech. Derrida's engagement with these works therefore belongs to the formation of the question itself rather than to a later search for material with which to illustrate an already completed theory.

One contribution to the collection is particularly revealing. In the concluding discussion, M. Février argues that mathematical notation can express forms of modern thought that ordinary language cannot adequately capture, and remarks that writing, “after having been its servant,” comes to take the place of language.

Derrida cites the passage later in Of Grammatology. Its significance lies less in any anticipation of deconstruction than in the fact that the relation between language and writing had itself become an object of inquiry. The older division of labor between the two was beginning to look historically contingent.

Derrida therefore entered a debate in which the meaning and scope of the concept of writing were already being reconsidered. Writing was being studied as a historical, anthropological, and technical phenomenon rather than confined to the narrow role of recording speech. The shift becomes especially consequential when related developments appear within the sciences themselves.

3. When Science Starts Speaking of Writing

Biology offers one of the clearest examples. In 1961, François Jacob and Jacques Monod described genetic regulation in terms of a “co-ordinated program of protein synthesis” and discussed the role of a short-lived “messenger” in the process. Their formulations contributed to a new vocabulary for biological organization in which heredity could be discussed through information, sequence, regulation, and programmed activity.

François Jacob's inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1965 brought the analogy closer to writing itself. He described genetic specificity as something “written,” compared the molecular sequence to an alphabet, and explained its organization through signs, words, and phrases. Heredity could thus be presented as a message chemically inscribed along the chromosomes. By the time Derrida wrote Of Grammatology, the language he identifies was already active within contemporary molecular biology: alphabet, signs, message, inscription, writing, and program had become available for describing processes within the living cell.

Derrida was therefore entering a scientific discourse in which writing had already begun to acquire a broader meaning. In molecular biology, terms such as alphabet, message, signs, and inscription were being used to describe the organization of heredity itself. His remark that “the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram” registers this transformation rather than introducing the vocabulary into an otherwise unchanged scientific discourse.

Cybernetics generated a related shift. Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics, published in 1948, brought communication, control, and feedback into a common framework for thinking about animals and machines, while the wider cybernetic field made information, transmission, storage, and programming central to the description of systems. Derrida does not claim that cybernetics simply renamed these processes “writing.” His concern is that such operations can occur without the immediate presence of a speaker whose meaning is subsequently fixed in written form. Information can be stored, transmitted, repeated, and processed within systems whose functioning cannot be adequately described by the old sequence of thought, speech, and graphic inscription.

This helps explain Derrida's striking claim that, “whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing.” The claim is broad, but its significance is historical before it is terminological: several fields were developing ways of describing inscription, coding, programming, and transmission that no longer fitted comfortably within the older conception of writing.

4. What the Pressure Changes

The question, then, is what this change does to the inherited concept of writing. The issue is not simply that more practices can now be called writing. What has changed is the kind of operation the term can designate. Inscription, repetition, storage, transmission, coding, programming, and retrieval can occur within biological and technical systems without belonging to a secondary stage in which a meaning first constituted in speech is merely recorded.

The traditional hierarchy depended on an order of priority. Meaning appeared first, speech expressed it, and writing preserved the result. That sequence gave written signs a derivative status because their function was defined in relation to an origin located elsewhere. Once inscription can describe operations within the living cell or within systems of information, the difficulty reaches deeper than vocabulary. The inherited architecture no longer provides an obvious way of assigning these operations their place.

Biology and cybernetics do not thereby become philosophy. They develop concepts appropriate to their own fields. The philosophical question arises when such developments put pressure on concepts inherited from a different organization of knowledge. Science investigates within particular frameworks; philosophy can ask what happens when developments within those fields put pressure on the frameworks themselves. Derrida's intervention belongs to this second movement.

This is why his response cannot be reduced to a simple reversal of the hierarchy. The question is not whether writing should replace speech at the top of the structure, but what allowed that structure to assign writing a secondary position in the first place and what has now made that arrangement difficult to sustain. Arche-writing becomes intelligible at this point: it names the structure of trace, repeatability, and difference that cannot be confined to writing understood merely as the secondary transcription of speech.

Derrida's intervention is therefore neither an arbitrary enlargement of a familiar term nor a straightforward replacement of one definition with another. He follows a disturbance that has already appeared across several fields and asks what the disturbance reveals about the conceptual architecture through which writing had previously been understood.

5. When the Gesture Becomes the Method

The history of writing raises a further question about deconstruction itself. Once Derrida's recognizable gestures have become familiar—identifying an opposition, examining its hierarchy, reopening a concept—they can be detached from the particular difficulties that originally gave them their point. A procedure can then be transferred from one concept to another without first asking whether anything has happened that makes such an intervention necessary.

The distinction is therefore between

problem → pressure → inquiry → deconstruction

and

deconstruction → target → application

In the first sequence, thought responds to a disturbance within a field; in the second, a familiar operation precedes the question it is supposed to answer. The latter risks turning deconstruction into a method precisely by making the gesture independent of its motive.

Derrida himself resists this reduction. In “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” he insists that deconstruction “is not a method and cannot be transformed into one,” rejecting the idea that it can be reduced to a set of rules or procedures that are simply transferred from one object to another. He writes instead that “deconstruction takes place,” describing something that occurs within structures rather than a technique deliberately applied by a subject (Derrida, 1988, pp. 3–4).

The implication is not that established concepts should be left untouched. They remain open to revision when developments within their fields make their inherited organization difficult to sustain. A concept may contain tensions, exclusions, oppositions, or historical assumptions without these features, by themselves, constituting a reason for deconstruction. The relevant question is whether something in the field has made those features consequential and has thereby created a difficulty that the existing conceptual arrangement can no longer adequately absorb.

Without such a question, deconstruction risks becoming an inherited gesture searching for an object.

Conclusion — The Cat Is Not the Point

There is a familiar teaching story about a spiritual leader whose cat disturbed his sessions. Before each lecture, he tied the cat to the leg of a table. Years later, after the teacher had died, his successor continued the practice, buying a cat and tying it to the table before every lecture, without knowing why.

The story is funny because the gesture has survived, but the reason for it has been forgotten.

The problem illustrated by the cat is the survival of a procedure after the problem that gave it its purpose has disappeared. What begins as an intelligible response can become a ritual once its reason is forgotten.

The same danger can affect deconstruction. A gesture developed in response to a real historical and conceptual disturbance can survive as a recognizable procedure long after the circumstances that gave it meaning have faded from view. Derrida's treatment of writing suggests a different model: inquiry begins when a change in the field makes an established conceptual arrangement difficult to sustain, and deconstruction follows the questions opened by that change.

The question, therefore, is not simply what can be deconstructed, but what has happened to make deconstruction necessary. The reopening of a concept should remain responsive to the problems that give it a reason to be reopened.

References

Aristotle. (1963). Aristotle's Categories and De interpretatione (J. L. Ackrill, Trans.). Clarendon Press. (Original works published ca. 4th century BCE)

David, M. V. (1965). Le débat sur les écritures et l'hiéroglyphe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles et l'application de la notion de déchiffrement aux écritures mortes. S.E.V.P.E.N.

Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967)

Derrida, J. (1988). Letter to a Japanese friend (D. Wood & A. Benjamin, Trans.). In D. Wood & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), Derrida and différance (pp. 1–5). Northwestern University Press.

Jacob, F. (1965). Génétique cellulaire: Leçon inaugurale faite le vendredi 7 mai 1965. Collège de France.

Jacob, F., & Monod, J. (1961). Genetic regulatory mechanisms in the synthesis of proteins. Journal of Molecular Biology, 3(3), 318–356.

Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1964–1965). Le geste et la parole (Vols. 1–2). Albin Michel.

Semaine internationale de synthèse. (1963). L'écriture et la psychologie des peuples. Armand Colin.

Vitale, F. (2014). The text and the living: Jacques Derrida between biology and deconstruction. Oxford Literary Review, 36(1), 95–114.

Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics: Or control and communication in the animal and the machine. Technology Press, John Wiley & Sons.