‘Beyond the Signifying Face, the Signified Face Itself’

Comparing Barthes, who particularly stresses the writerly text and its nonlinearity, Jacques Derrida emphasizes ‘textual openness, intertextuality, and the irrelevance of distinctions between inside and outside a particular text’ (Landow, 1997: 33). For Derrida, a text is an open, networked, and decentralised system of signs. The structure of a text becomes open at both ends. The text has no stable identity, no stable origin, and no stable end. These interpretations of text illuminate a hypertext system, in which the individual reader can navigate each text in his or her own unique way. The reader can choose any centre of investigation and experience at random, but does not have to be confined by any organization or hierarchy.

Derrida’s interpretations of text may imply what can be identified as hyperwriting. Hypertext can be described a text which provides a network of links to other texts that are outside, above and beyond itself (Lister, 2003: 23). Hypertext may imply the texts that are more than just text. It can be argued that if writing can refer to multiple approaches more than to write through language, the concept of hyperwriting may become a reasonable concept. As it has been argued by Derrida in his Of Grammatoloty, writing designates ‘not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible’. Writing can refer to anything ‘beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself’ and ‘all that gives rise to an inscription in general’. There are multiple forms of writing, such as ‘cinematography, choreography’, and ‘pictorial, musical, sculptural’ writing (1976: 8). Besides these, the concept of writing has been extended as biological encoding and decoding, as it has been outlined that

The contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell… whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. (Derrida, 1976: 9)

Ref.:

Landow, G. (1997) Hypertext 2.0: the Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, 1-95, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lister, M., Dovey, J. Giddings, S., Grant, I., and Kelly, K., (2003) New Media: A Critical Introduction, 1-96, Routledge.