Writing Technology with Derrida

For me, Derrida’s analysis in Paper Machine of computer mediated writing drifts along the border between refreshingly succinct and disappointingly narrow. Beginning with the former characterization, I found his final analysis of the (then) burgeoning shift from traditional, book oriented publishing to online publications to be quite equitable in its resistance to a totalizing evaluation of the publishing industry. Derrida deftly recognizes that although the move to online publishing breaks down some of the distribution barriers erected by traditional publishers, it simultaneously (and inevitably) opens the door to the much maligned glut of narrow minded, unoriginal opinion that has become synonymous with web based texts. As he puts it, “A new freeing up of the flow can both let through anything at all, and also give air to critical possibilities that used to be limited or inhibited by the old mechanisms of legitimation” (32).

Conversely, Derrida’s notion of the necessity of formalization (printing must eventually happen) is limited by it misconception of the radically processual nature that exists (at least potentially) within digital technologies. Although I agree with Derrida that a piece of writing must be formalized or “cutoff” at some point, I do not think that this “interruption” is contingent upon the manifestation of writing in a material form (a book or a CD-ROM). Rather, within the digital sphere, this formalization (although certainly necessary for meaning to happen) takes place in the act of reading. Digital texts have the potential to shift forms between many discrete reading acts, thus perpetuating a much more diachronic notion of writing than previous publication technologies.

Finally, Derrida seems to betray a certain deterministic relationship to emerging digital technology when he sets up the opposition between the ability to use a machine and knowing how it works. As a way of setting up this binary, Derrida uses the example of a pen versus computer/word processor. He says that most of us know how pens (or a typewriter) “respond” but that very few of us are aware of how “the internal demon” of the computer operates and “What rules it obeys. We know how to use them, and what they are for, without knowing what goes on with them, on their side” (23).

I do not follow Derrida’s historical nostalgia for the ease with which the ontology of past technologies could be “grasped.” As an alternative, I would propose a more functionalist analysis of mediating technologies. In our relation to any writing apparatus (pens, typewriters, keyboards, etc.) the particular material substrates that in-form the technology are only of significance insofar as they affect the function for which it is intended. The user’s awareness of the material substrates is irrelevant.

Derrida’s example of the pen as a “knowable” technology is tenuous because it assumes that knowledge of technological construction necessarily entails increased control over that technology’s function. Following this logic, wouldn’t it then be true that a person who makes computer hardware would be the best computer programmer? Not necessarily. In many ways, Derrida’s blind spot is one that he often reveals at work within language; essentially, what language is is not the same as what language does. In fact, taking this one step further, language is what it does.