Derridada by Thomas Deane Tucker

Author:Thomas Deane Tucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2009-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

The Postal Principle

Duchamp had been essentially planning for the future arrival of the readymade since 1913 when he affixed a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool, fork facing down, for no other purpose than to amuse himself with the simple distraction of watching the upside-down wheel spin. The next year he purchased a common bottle rack from a Paris bazaar. Sailing for America, he left both objects behind in his Paris studio on Rue Saint-Hippolyte in the care of his sister. When he arrived in America, he wrote his sister a letter concerning these items and refers to them as readymades for the first time:

Now, if you have been up to my place, you will have seen in the studio, a bicycle wheel and a bottle rack. I bought this as a ready-made sculpture. And I have a plan concerning this so-called bottle rack. . . . This long preamble is just to say: take this bottle rack for yourself. I’m making it a ‘Ready-made’ remotely. You are to inscribe it at the bottom and on the inside of the bottom circle, in small letters painted with a brush in oil, silver white colour, with an inscription that I will give you herewith, and then sign it, in the same hand-writing, as follows [after] Marcel Duchamp.37

Here Duchamp makes an appointment for a readymade through the postal service. As a remote ‘unassisted’ readymade, Bottle Rack generates not only a temporal delay for a work of art but also a spatial delay or detour through distance and is thus the first work of art created by what Derrida calls the postal principle.38 Derrida coins this phrase in a text titled The Post Card. In this book, Derrida seems a bit apprehensive when it comes to grand claims about the uses of image technology. He views these new sending machines as yet another textual system, a matrix consisting of the operations of technology, the relaying of communications, various forms of textual analysis, and the process of conceptualization itself criss-crossing through all cultural, political, and social institutions. He tracks this matrix under the name ‘postal.’ The word postal is yet another coinage for the deconstruction of textual ontology, beginning with the logocentric opposition between physis and techne at the center of all technological performances.

The occasion for the word post arises from an infamously dense section titled “Envois” in The Post Card. “Envois” is written under the pretense of a series of letters between anonymous lovers supposedly written over a period of two years on the backs of postcards, all bearing the same image. The image on the postcard is startling to Derrida.39 It is a reproduction of a thirteenth-century drawing from a fortune-telling book depicting Socrates sitting at a desk writing with Plato dictating to him from behind. The image represents, in a very real sense, a delayed narrative in the story of Western philosophy. It reveals that Socrates, the philosopher who in Plato’s Dialogues endlessly disparages writing as poisonous to thinking, is the one who secretly writes.

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