Writing Matter by Jonathan Goldberg

CITATION: Goldberg, Jonathan. Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1990. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How is power embedded in the cultural practices of handwriting in the English Renaissance?
• Answer: The secretary's hand is the locus for the inscription of the individual and modernity.
  Various writing texts surrounding the English Renaissance discuss certain modes of writing as natural, but the act of instructing writing actually produces the writing presumed as natural. Throughout these practices, writing instruction anatomizes the student into a hand and an eye; writing instruction individuates students through the practices of copying; writing instruction creates its own narrative as a mimetic, natural language in the past and future; writing instruction creates an arch-writer, who functions as the right hand of the sovereign, and thereby becomes the exemplary human.
• Method: Derridean analysis, some new historicism, and a bit of antihumanist metaphysics.
• Assumptions: The entire Derridean apparatus is a heavy import. More lightly, Goldberg riffs pretty heavily on a quill and a knife through phallic and oral metaphors, respectively. I think it's utter bunkum to take these metaphors so seriously in relation to a period when knives were practical tools--in a period, namely, before sliced bread.
• Sententiae: [I honestly have extensive notes that I might put here. I would prefer not to.]

Overstanding

• Assessment: I defer to John M. Ellis' Against Deconstruction for the following:
• "First of all... Even in admitting that speech cannot exist until writing is possible, Derrida is conceding the logical priority of speech, since it is speech's existence that makes writing possible. The second point is that Derrida's attempt to shift the meaning of the word writing... also fails... Derrida, given where he wants to go next, is not in a position to advance an argument that appeals to an irreducible kernel of anything. He will soon rule out the possibility of any central, essential meaning for a word. The major objection to this stage of Derrida's argument, however, lies in its being an example of a very well known logical mistake. We begin with three terms: language, speech, and writing. The first contains the second and the third. The question is now which of these last two has priority. Derrida is attempting to prove that the third has priority over the second, in the face of some obvious arguments to the contrary. To do so, he replaces our first triad of terms (language speech, writing) with a different triad: writing, phonic, graphic. He substitutes the second triad for the first, and now writing has precedence over everything." [emphasis original] (23-4)
• Synthesis: There are some superficial resemblances between Goldberg's book and other New Historical projects, but I believe these belie the deeper methodological differences. In my most charitable reading, Goldberg responds responsibly to Ong's charge--that deconstruction creates a tyrannous similarity by interpreting all things as texts--by reinvesting in the materiality of all texts. In such an interpretation, Goldberg's approach is very sympathetic to Fleming, and possibly to new bibliographers.
• Application: Continuing the charitable reading above, Goldberg's position could support further material history. For my purposes, I'm interested in possible art-historical responses to the problem of differance: how do graphic graphics escape the problem of logocentrism, while still participating in the media of writing and print?