From Tweet to Meme: Derrida’s Grammatology in the Post-Discursive Age
AI image Introduction: The New Hieroglyphs of Politics 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 ...