The Scenes of Derridean and McLuhanian Writing: Signifier contra Medium?

David E. Wellbery regards Derrida’s deconstruction as a theory that introduced writing into the signifying scene, undermining thus the centuries-old solid position of the ’outside’. Derrida’s enterprise opened space for new reading patterns getting access to those horizons of the text which until then were considered only aspectual elements, like in case of various Freudian models describing the psyché. Although students of the so-called Toronto School and the Anglosaxon media studies, built also on McLuhan’s concepts, might agree on that Derrida was fully aware of the partially (and in some cases even fundamentally) deterministic role of technical media played in discursive changes and the history of European thinking, the same scholars continually tend to accuse deconstruction theory of disregarding its own medial space. Whereas the reduction of the Derridean archive to texts might only stem from the different standpoints and methods of McLuhan’s followers, the problems raised so cannot be easily dismissed. The response to those might even contribute to a better understanding of deconstruction theory. Therefore this paper is concerned with the distinction between signifier and medium, shedding some light on the Derridean form of writing, functioning as a McLuhanian medium. Does deconstruction theory on the signifying scene substantiate the mediality of writing, or does it simply reverse hierarchies taken as granted before? After new waves of the German Kulturtechnik and Mediendiskursanalyse, and that of the French Médiologie, it is high time to reread Of Grammatology from a McLuhanian perspective, in order to identify the different scenes of writing utilized by the father of deconstruction theory.