Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation by Jeff Scheible

Author:Jeff Scheible [Scheible, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: SOC002010 Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural, ART023000 Art / Popular Culture, LAN006000 Language Arts & Disciplines / Grammar & Punctuation
ISBN: 9781452944371
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2015-03-14T22:00:00+00:00

It seems self-evident that the ambiguous field of the word “communication” can be massively reduced by the limits of what is called a context (and I give notice, again parenthetically, that this particular communication will be concerned with the problem of context and with the question of determining exactly how writing relates to context in general).4

The fact that Derrida is writing about writing — and in sections such as this, parenthesizing about parentheses — registers his deliberate grammatical style. In Derrida’s characteristically performative mode, the reflexive parenthetical of the above passage seems to help answer our question regarding the significance of Derrida’s reliance on the parenthetical.

If, as Derrida directs us in the parentheses, the ambiguity of “communication” is tied up in the matter of “determining exactly how writing relates to context,” then parenthetical form seems to be a textual metonym that foregrounds the difficulty in thinking through writing’s riddled relationship to context. By this I mean to say that the parenthetical is a form that, within written text itself, invites one to question how writing relates to context, since it sets apart, disrupts, or postpones the space of the “primary” writing. It seems safe to say that part of the reason parentheses are important for Derrida is that they displace. They displace the flow and authority of the nonparenthetical.

This sort of parenthetical displacement is critical to Derrida’s project of deconstruction, as he describes it in this essay. He writes,

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