Writing

The grammatologist least of all can avoid questioning himself about the essence of his object in the form of a question of origin: “What is writing?” means “where and when does writing begin?”

The responses generally come very quickly. They circulate within concepts that are seldom criticised and move within evidence which always seems self-evident. It is around these responses that a typology of and a perspective on the growth of writing are always organised.

All works dealing with the history of writing are composed along the same lines: a philosophical and teleological classification exhausts the critical problems in a few pages; one passes next to an exposition of facts.

We have a contrast between the theoretical fragility of the reconstructions and the historical, archaeological, ethnological, philosophical wealth of information.

Grammatisation by Bernard Stiegler

Now a few years into this 21st century, which will be the century of nanotechnologies and which will see unheard of relations between technics, science and desire, the crucial question of what links and distinguishes power, knowledge and the will, i.e., the question of what can, at times, set these infinitives into oppositions, composing them at the same time, by posing them together, this question which, more profoundly and par excellence is the problem of thought and its ass’s skin – as though it diagrammed the mechanism of that stupidity Deleuze called “transcendental” --, this question is a problem for us, so much so as to appear to have become unthinkable, the test and ordeal of powerlessness itself.

The great transformation of these terms, in as much as they are constituted only through the relation they form, begins with the advent of machines as a stage in the process of grammatisation. I call “grammatisation” the process whereby the flux and flow networking our existences become discreet elements: writing is thus, as the breaking into discreetelements of the flux of speech (let us invent the word “discretisation” for this possibility), a stage in grammatisation. Now, the process of grammatisation, with the dawn of the industrial revolution, suddenly surpasses the sphere of language – one wants to say that the same thinghappened to the sphere of logos – and invades the sphere of the body: first and foremost, the gestures of workers, which are discredited, devalued in view of their automatic reproduction –while at the same time the machines and apparat uses of reproducibilities of the visible and the audible appear on the scene.

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