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The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity

Catherine Malabou ab a Dpt. de Philosophie, Universit Paris X Nanterre, Nanterre Cedex b Dept. of Comparative Literature and Humanities 331UCB, University of Colorado at Boulder, Annjeanette Online Publication Date: 01 July 2007

To cite this Article Malabou, Catherine(2007)'The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity',The European Legacy,12:4,431 441 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10848770701396254 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770701396254

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The European Legacy, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 431441, 2007

The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity

CATHERINE MALABOU
Translated by Annjeanette Wiese

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ABSTRACT The word grammatology literally signifies the science of writing. One must acknowledge, however, that this science has never existed. Derridas book Of Grammatology proposes to elaborate and to implement just such a project. Why has this grammatological project never been accomplished? For Derrida, writing can no longer simply designate a technique for the notation of speech. A distinction should be made, then, between narrow and enlarged meanings of writing. Indeed, is the extension of the concept of writing the work of writing itself or must one suppose that the modifiability of the concept is not of the order of writing? This essay will propose that an original modifiability, not reducible to the single operation of writing, is initiated from the beginning as well. I call this modifiability plasticity. Plasticity of writing would then be the paradox inherent in the redefinition of writing itself that may explain the failure of any grammatology.

The word grammatology, Jacques Derrida recalls in his work of the same name, literally signifies the science of writing.1 One must acknowledge, however, as Derrida himself affirms, that this science has never existed. In fact, under the name of the science of writing, one only finds histories of writing, concerning its appearance, its genesis, its transformations, never its essence nor its status as an object.2 There has also never yet been a Course in General Grammatology and grammatology has never been designated the project of a modern science. (323). Of Grammatology (De la Grammatologie) proposes to elaborate and to implement just such a project. Derrida would thus lay the foundations for a veritable science: the concept of writing should define the field of a science, a full-fledged positive science (27). The title of the third chapter of the book is explicit in this respect: Of Grammatology as a Positive Science. Derrida asserts that the constitution of a science or a philosophy of writing is a . . . difficult but necessary task (93).

pt. de Philosophie, Universite Paris X Nanterre, 200 Avenue de la Re publique 92001, Nanterre Cedex. De Email: cmalabou@club-internet.fr Dept. of Comparative Literature and Humanities 331UCB, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309, Annjeanette. Wiese@colorado.edu
ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/07/04043112 2007 International Society for the Study of European Ideas DOI: 10.1080/10848770701396254

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The question that I want to pose here is the following: why has this grammatological project never been accomplished? Why has a scientific grammatology never seen the light of day? Why has the science of writing, in the new sense that it has to have, never been constituted? Why does the title Of Grammatology only designate one book by Derrida and not a treatise of universal reach, susceptible of generatinglike linguistics, for examplea scientific posterity? There are two types of reasons for this failure. First are those Jacques Derrida advances himself. Returning to the work of 1967 in a talk entitled For the Love of Lacan given in 1992, Derrida declared: Of Grammatology was first the title of an article . . . andthis is one of the numerous mistakes or misrecognitions made by Lacan and so many othersit never proposed a grammatology, some positive science or discipline bearing that name; on the contrary, both the article and later the book of the same title went to great lengths to demonstrate the impossibility, the conditions of impossibility, the absurdity, in principle, of any science or any philosophy bearing the name grammatology. The book that treated of grammatology was anything but a grammatology.3 These statements clearly show that the failure of grammatology was programmed . . . by grammatology itself. The Derridean redefinition of writing constitutes the foundations of grammatology while contradicting the very concept of science. One needs to recognize, then, that the conditions of the possibility of grammatology are precisely the reasons for its impossibility. But there is, in my opinion, a second type of cause for this failure, which has perhaps less to do with the aporetic character of the deconstruction of writing (which disallows all theory or positive philosophy of writing) than it has with a logical weakness or a paradox inherent in the redefinition of writing itself and the deconstruction of its concept. It is to this paradox that I wish to devote myself: let us call it the plasticity of writing, the sense of which will clarify itself in the course of the present analysis. First let us return to Of Grammatology. Precisely how does Derrida characterize the science of writing? In the second chapter of the book, Linguistics and Grammatology, Derrida argues that we must substitute a grammatology for the general semiology outlined by Saussure. The latter is governed by the theoretical privilege of the sign and only on this basis can it exceed the limits of a linguistics that it proposes, however, to transgress. Indeed, semiology presents itself, according to Saussure, as a general theory of signsand not only linguistic signs. If grammatology has become necessary, it is insofar as the thought and knowledge of language demand precisely to be freed from linguistics, a freedom that semiology is not able to accomplish. Only grammatology, explains Derrida, can make out of linguistics-phonology what would be only a dependent and circumscribed area (30). Why? Because grammatology is in some ways a semiology without signs. As long as one situates oneself within the strict limits of a logic of signs, one remains prisoner of a phonetic and phonologic determination of language in the midst of which writing is always secondary.4 As long as one continues to speak of signs, including the written sign, one remains tributary to an understanding of the signifying referral attached to the model of the natural link between the voice and the spirit and meaning. Such a connection presupposes a natural bond of the signified (concept or sense) to `, the glossa, and the logos (29). But the phonic signifier, a natural link between the phone

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this natural bond does not exist. The signification in the beginning is immotivated and grammatology indeed presents itself as a science of immotivation: Science of the arbitrariness of the sign, science of the immotivation of the trace, science of writing before speech and in speech, grammatology would thus cover a vast field within which linguistics would . . . delineate its own area . . . . By a substitution which would be anything but verbal, one may replace semiology by grammatology in the program of the Course in General Linguistics (51). But, as stated at the beginning, one must acknowledge that such a grammatology has never entered upon the assured path of a science. It has in fact never been constituted as a discipline. Neither in a general wayit has never become a region of full-fledged knowledgenor in some particular manner in Derridas oeuvre. In his lifework, in fact, the grammatological project is not found outside of Of Grammatology. Of grammatology as a positive science is nowhere else a question in the writing of Derrida, neither, strangely, in the texts contemporary with it, such as Writing and Difference rence), nor after. (LEcriture et la diffe There is not, there never has been and there certainly will never be a general semiology, but there is not, there never has been, and there also certainly will never be a general grammatology. The word itself is no longer used by the later Derrida except to recall the work of 1967. Why, then, does grammatology disappear from the moment of its appearance? Several responses, as Ive said, are proposed by Derrida himself. He declares, from the first pages of the book, that such a science of writing runs the risk of never being established as such and with that name. Of never being able to define the unity of its project or its object. Of not being able either to write its discourse on method or to describe the limits of its field (4). In fact, as one knows, Of Grammatology establishes me ` and at the same time the closure of knowledge. In this the limits of the classical episte sense, there cannot truly be a science of writing. Graphematics or grammatography ought no longer to be presented as sciences; their goal should be exorbitant when compared to grammatological knowledge (74). As such, grammatology likewise cannot be considered a human science: What seems to announce itself now is, on the one hand, that grammatology must not be one of the sciences of man and, on the other hand, that it must not be just one regional science among others (83). Grammatology cannot be a science like other sciences. All of Derridas oeuvre constitutes in a certain sense the deployment of this scientific impossibility. But this response, too general, leaves in the shadows intentions that all the same are displayed very clearly in the work: despite everything, grammatology is indeed presented as a science, as a program, as the successor to linguistics and general semiology. What then can one think of the strange destiny of the science of writing? In order to advance the analysis of these problems, let us ask ourselves, for a second time: in what does the essence of the disruption to which Derrida subjects the traditional concept of writing reside? As we have seen, for Derrida, the meaning of the word grammatology has to change, it has to stop designating the history of writing to become what it is, the title of a veritable science of writing. This change in meaning clearly applies to a profound change in the meaning of writing itself. Writing can no longer simply designate the technique of the notation of speech. It can no longer be understood only in its common or

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vulgar sense of simple transcription. A distinction needs to be made, then, between narrow and enlarged meanings of writing. The first, the narrow meaning, up to the present has concealed what Derrida proposes to name arche-writing, which corresponds to the enlarged meaning. We continue to call arche-writing writing, Derrida states,
only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing. The latter could not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation of the arche-writing, by the desire for a speech displacing its other and its double and working to reduce its difference. If I persist in calling that difference writing, it is because, within the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation, destined to signify the most formidable difference. It threatened the desire for living speech from the closest proximity, it breached living speech from within and from the very beginning (56).

Arche-writingoriginal trace, variously of presence and living speechis thus to be thought of as a generalized writing that covers the entire field of linguistic signs, which is also to say, the entire field of human practice (44). In fact, to the extent that all societiesincluding societies said to be without writing defer the selfsame [le propre], if every culture has as its origin the erasure of presence, then grammatology also covers the field of anthropology, ethnology or sociology.5 The point we must attend to concerns the passage from the vulgar meaning to the original meaning of writing. What authorizes such a passage and how does it take place? This passage is presented as a modification. Derrida speaks in effect of a modification of the concept of writing (55). This modification is in turn thought of as an extension. It is, in fact, according to its enlarged meaning that writing must be understood as arche-writing, a meaning that goes so far as to comprise speech. The entire question is to know what renders possible the modification and extension of a word, the transformation of a concept at a given moment in the history of thought. What allows a philosopher to increase, to modify, to expand or to deform the signification of a concept? These questions allow us to see the paradox that is, in my opinion, inherent in the Derridean understanding of writing. Indeed, is the extension of the concept of writing the work of writing itself or must one suppose that the modifiability of the concept is not of the order of writing? In other words, must one suppose that the modification of a concept is always and necessarily of the order of a rewriting? Is the modification of the concept of writing a rewriting of writing or must one suppose that the transformation of a concept responds to another dynamic or another logic than that of writing? If it is true that writing comprises language in its totality, can one argue, given the extension of the meaning of writing, that the passage from the common signification to its original signification may also be ascribed to the work of writing? Or to the contrary, is it necessary to think that an original modifiability, not reducible to the single operation of writing, is initiated from the beginning as well? It is this modifiability that I call plasticity. Plasticity designates the double aptitude of being able both to receive a form (clay is plastic) and to give form (as in the plastic arts or plastic surgery). Must it not be supposed, at the origin of all concepts, that there is a possibility of plasticity that allows for a change of meaning in history?

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That allows it to receive and to give itself new forms throughout time? The deformability of a concept would thus be older than the concept itself, and nothing says that this logic of form and deformation need be identical to the work of the trace and is mixed up with the work of rewriting. Plasticity, in this sense, is the threat to which the form subjects the trace. If this is true, then modification, the operation of enlarging the concept of writing, would escape the grammatological field: it would be impossible to produce, in the framework of the science of writing, the conditions of the possibility of the plastic re-elaboration of the concept of writing. The expansion of the concept of writing is not necessarily, or not uniquely, a graphic gesture. One can respond that these arguments are without importance and that the passage from the common meaning to the expanded meaning of the concept of writing may indeed be ascribed to the same work of writing. Isnt arche-writing precisely understood by Derrida as a transformation or a plastic surgery of the common meaning of writing? Then there would be no explanatory principle of modification to look for outside of writing or outside of grammatology. If the meaning of writing expands, it is perhaps simply because deconstruction loosens it, frees it from its traditional meaning. What is in question, Derrida states, is to give to the theory of writing the scope needed to counter logocentric repression (my emphasis). The expansion would be quite simply an amplification by liberation, an automatic movement of decompression. Elsewhere, for Derrida, writing perhaps designates only the movement of the expansion of its meaning, a movement that as such authorizes it to circulate, to display its plurivocity, its nonlinearity, its dissimilarity, its difference of amplitude: its meaning sometimes restrained, sometimes enlarged, sometimes vulgar, sometimes original. Writing mixes itself with the circulation of meaning, including and foremost the meaning of the concept of writing. At the beginning of the third chapter, Of Grammatology as a Positive Science, Derrida insists on the plurivocity of the concept of writing: Where does writing begin? When does writing begin? Where and when does the trace, writing in general, common root of speech and writing, narrow itself down into writing in the colloquial sense? Where and when does one pass from one writing to another, from writing in general to writing in the narrow sense, from the trace to the graphie [and vice versa]? (74, my emphasis). Grammatology would then be the study of the expansion, the formations and deformations of meaning. The vocabulary of metamorphosis or of morphogenesis would not be a stranger to the grammatological lexicon. Whats more, metamorphosis or morphogenesis would be themselves, in a certain sense, forms of writing. It remains to be asked, however, why writing enlarges itself at a certain time. It remains to be asked to what historic necessity this change of meaning corresponds. Derrida clearly provides a reason for this necessity. We live, he explains in 1967, in the epoch of writing, which already implies a change of meaning of the term itself. It is as yet hardly perceptible, but nonetheless certain: By a slow movement whose necessity is hardly perceptible, everything that for at least some twenty centuries tended toward and finally succeeded in being gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself be transferred to, or at least summarized under, the name of writing. By a hardly perceptible necessity, it seems as though the concept of writingno longer indicating a

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particular, derivative, auxiliary form of language . . . is beginning to go beyond the extension of language (67). We begin, following Derrida, to read otherwise, to write otherwise; we speak only of writing. Writing is in the air; it is, so to speak, lair du temps:
Now we tend to say writing for all that and more: to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible; and also, beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself. And thus we say writing for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural writing. One might also speak of athletic writing, and with even greater certainty of military or political writing in view of the techniques that govern those domains today. All this to describe not only the system of notation secondarily connected with these activities but the essence and the content of these activities themselves. It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing (9).

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Derrida thus affirms here that the semantic expansion of the concept of writing has resulted not from some arbitrary decision but appeared first in the real, out of a fertile semantic field pregnant with motifs of the program, of information, of the code, of the genetic or cybernetic code. In France, the impact of a book like The Logic of Life (La Logique du vivant), by Franc ois Jacob, written a few years after Of Grammatology, confirms this emergence of writing in all fields of activity and thought, this grammatological structure of the being of an epoch.6 The common meaning was already, in the real of the sixties and seventies, extending itself. Jacobs book already bears witness to the graphic power that is in the midst of imposing itself, in biology in particular, under the title of this privileged hermeneutic instrument: DNA, the genetic translation of an ontology of the graph that determines from now on the comprehension and the study of the living being. Nevertheless, the fact that writing is in the air does not suffice to make it a grammatological epoch. It is still necessary to construct or elaborate grammatology itself; it is still necessary to construct or elaborate the meaning of writing as arche-writing; to help along the automatism, so to speak. This elaboration self-evidently requires the work and the intervention of the philosopher or, as Derrida stated at the time, of the grammatologue. This task and this work themselves consist in constituting writing as a `me moteur). Without this constitution, writing, even though present motor scheme (sche everywhere, can neither designate a specific operation or a specific structure nor, owing to this fact, can it be seized upon by historical consciousness. It is thus that, for Derrida, bringing arche-writing to light is not only, contrary to the hypothesis mentioned above, the result of a liberation from the stranglehold of metaphysics, the natural end in some sense to a repression. It is also an invention, resulting from a productive philosophical imagination. All thought has need of a scheme, that is to say, a motif, product of a rational imagination that allows it not only to harvest the philosophical fruits of an epoch but also to force the entrance of this very epoch, to open

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the hermeneutic perspectives that drive it to reveal what it is. To think is always to schematize, to pass from concept to existence while bringing to existence a transformed concept. By motor scheme, I mean an encounter of a pure image, that is, of a concept here arche-writing, or differancewith an existent real, given to intuitionhere the fecundity of the graphic sign in the form of a code, program or inscription. Constituted in this way, the motor scheme is a kind of tool capable of appropriating the largest quantity of energy and information from the text of an epoch. It assembles and elaborates the significations that impregnate the culture at a given moment by way of floating images or tendencies, which constitute, at once both vaguely and surely, a sort of air of things or of material Stimmung. It imprints on them at the same time the mark of the concept. The constitution of writing as a motor scheme is thus the result of a progressive movement that begins with structuralism, is continued by the discoveries of linguistics, cybernetics and genetics, and finds itself conceptually elaborated at the same time as it is disrupted by the grammatology of Derrida. Grammatology hurries into a scheme the slow movement of historical maturation. To summarize, the enlarged meaning of writing is at once intuitively given and conceptually constructed. This double status, rendered possible by the schematization, allows one to grasp the articulation of the larger meaning of writing and the articulation of its narrow, derived or vulgar meaning. There are thus three fundamental grammatological axes: writing as arche-writing, writing as common meaning, writing as motor scheme. Isnt it to this scheme that Derrida gives the name supplement in the second part of his work? The supplement, in fact, is a signifying structure that the philosopher must produce, between what he commands and what he does not command of the concepts of his epoch and the structures of his language (158). But doesnt this logic of creation and collection of form, of activity and of passivity, obey the dynamic of another operative register than that of writing? Doesnt it appeal to the efficacy of plasticity, that is, of a game of donation and reception of form that is more original than arche-writing, that permits the construction of the concept of arche-writing itself? If this is true, then the extension of the meaning of writing would be the nonwritten part of writing, its plastic part, which interrupts the trace of the trace to substitute for it for an instant the formation of the form. The definition of writing as supplement would imply then a supplement of the meaning of writing. This supplement would be granted to writing by the plasticity of its concept. The philosophical imagination at work in the constitution of motor schemes would thus also be exorbitant with respect to the grammatological field. What does this say? What do we mean by this unwritten plastic part of the concept of writing? Do we want to return to a presence of form supposed to preside over the destiny of the trace? Isnt plasticity always metaphysically delayed in relation to the game of writing or of dissemination? It is easy to remark, even if Derrida defines differance as the being-imprinted of the imprint and the formation of form, that the latter signification remains, from one end of the work to the other, subordinated to the first.

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In Form and Meaning (La Forme et le vouloir dire), Derrida affirms that all thought of form, even that which critiques the traditional concepts of eidos or of morphe , remains irreducibly a prisoner of metaphysics:
How could it be otherwise? As soon as we utilize the concept of formeven if to criticize an other concept of formwe inevitably have recourse to the self-evidence of a kernel of meaning. And the medium of this self-evidence can be nothing other than the language of metaphysics. In this language we know what form means, how the possibility of its variations is regulated, what its limit is, and in what field all imaginable objections to it are to be maintained. The system of oppositions in which something like form, the formality of form, can be thought, is a finite system. Moreover, it does not suffice to say that form has a meaning for us, a center of self-evidence, or that its essence as such is given for us: in truth, this concept cannot be, and never could be, dissociated from the concept of appearing, of meaning, of self-evidence, of essence. Only a form is self-evident, only a form has or is an essence, only a form presents itself as such. This is an assured point, a point that no interpretation of Platonic or Aristotelian conceptuality can displace. All the concepts by means of which eidos or morphe have been translated or determined refer to the theme of presence in general. Form is presence itself. Formality is whatever aspect of the thing in general presents itself, lets itself be seen, gives itself to be thought.7

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To affirm then that there is something nongraphic, that is plastic, in the schematic construction of writing, isnt that to stay attached to retrograde values, isnt that to deploy again an attack against writing in the name of presence of the self ? To this I respond with another question: isnt there a nonmetaphysical working of form, operative in metaphysics, that also waits for its decompression or its liberation? And is it not this working that renders possible the decompression or liberation of writing? If such a question can be posed today, it is perhaps because we are no longer of the epoch of writing, that writing is no longer lair du temps. Indeed, in the domain of genetics, for example, the motif of the code is less and less pregnant. In the domain of neurobiology, the models of frayage or facilitation, of the trace, of the imprint, take a back seat to those of form: neuronal configurations, network formations, emergences of images. In cybernetics, the program is no longer even the master word. We are witnessing a decline or a disinvestment of the graphic sign and graphism in general. Plastic images tend to substitute themselves for graphic images. Thus appears the necessity of constructing a new motor scheme, precisely that of plasticity. Yet did Derrida ever consider the possible caducity of the graphic model in general? Certainly he states that a supplement exists only inside a chain of substitutions, thus seeming to admit that the supplement writing could abandon its place to another. However, this structure of substitution remains above all and according to him integrable in the working of writing, and the historical emergence of another supplementarityfor instance plasticin no way invalidates the fact that history is a form of writing in its very principle: that historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the possibility of writing in general, beyond those particular forms of writing in the name of which we have long spoken of peoples without writing and without history. Before being the object of a historyof an historical sciencewriting opens the field of historyof historical becoming . . . . The history of writing should turn back toward the origin of historicity.8

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This means that writing has the capacity to incorporate the historically nongrammatological character of its supplements. In my view, however, writing does not have this capacity. In fact, if grammatology could honor the changing of supplementarity, it would no longer be a grammatology but a plastology, a genesis of the plastic formation of schemes. In my view, this impossibility of thinking of the end of writing threatens the grammatological project from the inside and from the very start of the game. I have always been surprised to notice that, in his article Differance, Derrida doesnt sufficiently honor an essential yet banal signification of the world differance: change, variation or variant. To be different, according to the dictionary, is, among other possibilities, to be changed, unrecognizable, modified, transformed. A differentiation can thus also designate a transformation. But this sense does not rer . . . has two appear clearly in Derridas text. He writes: We know that the verb diffe meanings which seem quite distinct . . . the action of putting off until later, of taking into account, of taking account of time and of the forces of an operation that implies an economical calculation, a detour, a delay, a relay, a reserve, a representationconcepts that I would summarize here in a word I have never used but that could be inscribed in this chain: temporization. Second: to be not identical, to be other, discernible, etc.9 The signification of transformation, of becoming other, by metamorphosis for example, stays in the shadows. Differance is never characterized as a change in form. It isnt presented as being able to transform itself nor as being able to change supplementarity. If the trace had an image, in Derridas work, it would always be that of the gap or of erasure, never of rhythm, of the figure, or of the form. Hence, does not the course of writing finish by being indefatigable, everlasting, always identical to itself ? And does this not limit the grammatological project in principle? Does this not vitiate it with the same impossibility as that of the semiological project of Saussure, governed by linguistics? Isnt the problem of grammatology that it is limited by a sort of blindness to the nongraphic origin of the new concept of writing? There is in fact a power of fabrication of meaning that exceeds the graphic sign. The constitution of writing as a motor scheme is the result of a power of transformation of which grammatology is perhaps only an occurrence. There is always something other than writing in writing. This other thing is not inevitably an utterance or a presence. This nongraphic supplement does not introduce a logocentric residue, but it marks the difference of the grammatological instance from itself, which is also its end. Today, the concept of plasticity tends to become at once the dominant motif of interpretation and the most productive exegetic and heuristic tool of our time. This is the case, first of all, because plasticity is the systematic law of the deconstructed real, an organizing mode of the real that comes after metaphysics and today allows itself be discovered in every domain of human activity. Today, new metamorphic occurrences appear that impose themselves at the level of social and economic organization, at the level of genre or of the sexual identity of individuals, that show that the privileged regime of change is the continued implosion of form, by which form revises and reforms itself continually. Secondly, this is so because we can only have access to these new organizations or configurations thanks to a tool that is itself in keeping with these forms, in accord with or adequate to them, which is not the case with writing. Today, one must acknowledge that the power of the linguistic-graphic scheme is weakening and that this scheme has entered

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into a penumbral half light. Indeed, it seems that from now on plasticity imposes itself, gradually but surely, as the paradigmatic figure of the organization of the real in general. In his work Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind (LHomme neuronal), Jean-Pierre Changeux reproaches philosophers for not being sufficiently interested in recent discoveries concerning neuronal functioning. According to Changeux, this lack of `-vis the extraordinary interest attests to an ignorance or an unacceptable disregard vis-a revolution that research on the brain has accomplished over the course of the twentieth century: In the last twenty years, our knowledge in this field [in the sciences of the nervous system] has undergone an expansion matched only by the growth of physics at the beginning of the century and molecular biology in the 1950s. The impact of the discovery of the synapse and its functions is comparable to that of the atom or DNA.10 Plasticity of the brain refers to the capacity of the synapses to modify their efficacy of transmission. Synapses, in fact, are not fixed; in this respect, they are not simple transmitters of nerve information, but have in a certain sense, the power to form or reform this information. This plasticity prompts the hypothesis that neuronal circuits are able to organize themselves, that is, to modify their connections in the course of perception and learning. It is certainly the exceptional . . . plasticity of human cerebral organization that, according to Changeux, most deserves to be the object of philosophical reflection.11 In fact, thanks to the fundamental discoveries of neurobiology, [from now on] we have at our disposal physical traces of how meaning is accessed.12 This declaration is of fundamental importance. The traces of which Changeux speaks here are, in fact, first and foremost images and forms. In truth, new technologies of medical imaging allow for the observation of the human brain in action. Used in conjunction with electric recordings of the brain, these techniques represent a fundamental contribution to the study of cerebral sites underlying specific components of mental activity. We are from now on capable of photographing the double mode of encoding of these behaviors (perceptive or other): the topology of nerve connections on the one hand, and the path of the impulses that correspond to them on the other. The result of this double encoding is called the graph.13 But, paradoxically, this graph is not writing; this trace proceeds by neither imprint nor frayage. Hence, the fact that the metaphor employed to describe it is not, paradoxically, a graphic metaphor. The metaphoric register used is geographical or political: of assemblies, of formations or of neuronal populations. Changeux writes that the concept of assemblies or cooperative groups of neurons leads directly from one level of organization to another, from the individual neuron to a population of neurons. These assemblies thus depend on the appearance of graphs. The model of reformation, of recomposition, substitutes itself for the model of frayage: it becomes plausible that such assemblies, made up of oscillatory neurons with high spontaneous activity, could recombine among themselves.14 Linkages, relationships, spider webs, such are the configurations that the networks of nerve information take. It appears then that the synaptic openings are definitely gaps, but gaps that are susceptible to taking on form. The example of neurobiology is only one example of the fecundity of plasticity in the real. We could surely call together other examples that today show that traces take on form.

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The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity

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To conclude, I should insist on the fact that plasticity itself is only a scheme. That is, it will itself be replaced by another scheme. The manner in which I have here presented the extension of the meaning of writing as a plastic operation is certainly itself tributary to a historical understanding and thus destined to be transformed, modified and changed. In this sense, the present explanation on the basis of plasticity is not definitive. Plasticity, like writing, is only a supplement. The question is to know whether a science of the supplement can exist: semiology, grammatology or plastology, or whether supplements always turn away from the paths of their origins, in a more cryptic way even than that which Derrida so well described.

NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed. (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 4. Derrida recalls the definition dictionary: A treatise upon Letters, upon of the word grammatology given in the Littre the alphabet, syllabation, reading, and writing (323 n. 4); subsequent references are cited in the text. 2. There is one close exception, recognized by Derrida in his reference to I. J. Gelb, A Study of Writing: The Foundations of Grammatology (Chicago, 1952). 3. Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 52. 4. Cf.: Even though semiology was in fact more general and more comprehensive than linguistics, it continued to be regulated as if it were one of the areas of linguistics. The linguistic sign remained exemplary for semiology, it dominated it as the master-sign and as the generative model: the pattern [patron] (Of Grammatology, 51). vi-Strausss treatment of the meaning of 5. As is shown in Derridas powerful analysis of Le writing in Tristes Tropiques. 6. Franc ois Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974). 7. Jacques Derrida, Form and Meaning, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 15758. 8. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 27. 9. Derrida, Differance, in Margins of Philosophy, 78. 10. Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind, trans. Laurence Garey (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), xiii. 11. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricur, What Makes Us Think, trans. M. B. Bevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 152. 12. Ibid., 107. 13. On this point, see Changeux, Neuronal Man, op. cit. 100. 14. Ibid., 168, 169.
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