American Sociological Association Sociological Theory

The Technical Substrates of Unconscious Memory: Rereading Derrida's Freud in the Age of
Teletechnology
Author(s): Patricia Ticineto Clough
Source: Sociological Theory, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Nov., 2000), pp. 383-398
Published by: American Sociological Association
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The Technical Substrates of Unconscious Memory:
Rereading Derrida's Freud in the Age of Teletechnology
PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH
City University of New York
In a rereading of Jacques Derrida's writings on Freud, I trace the connections between

his treatment of differance and his treatment of technology and unconscious memory. I
focus on the challenge which Derrida s writings pose for a certain idea of history
including the history of technological development, and I locate that challenge in Der-
rida's deconstruction of the opposition of nature and technology, the human and the
machine, the virtual and the real, the living and the inert. In proposing that these
opposed elements are better thought of as deferrals of each other and that, therefore,
neither of the opposed elements can be ontologically privileged, Derrida's writings
offer a shift in ontological perspective befitting the age of teletechnology. In all this,
Derrida s writings show that Freud's treatment of unconscious memory is still relevant,
even while Derrida s writings offer a thought of unconscious memory that goes beyond
Freud's, that is to say, goes beyond thought of the unconscious when it is conceived
narrowly as a possession of the individual subject. Rather than referring unconscious
memory to the individual subject, Derrida returns unconscious memory to thought and
its technical substrates. It is in doing so that Derrida 's writings propose an ontological
shift.
In a reading of Jacques Derrida's treatment of differance and Michel Foucault's treatment

of the force relations of power, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has suggested that poststruc-
turalism has ontological implications. As she puts it, poststructuralism is "thought ...
trying to touch the ontic" (1993: 30). Taking my lead from Spivak, I want to offer a reading
of Derrida's writings, especially those early writings which focus on technology and Freud's
treatment of unconscious memory. This reading is part of a larger project of realizing the
ontological implications of poststructuralism and further elaborating the relationship of
poststructuralism and teletechnology long noted by a number of cultural critics.' In con-
trast to these cultural critics, however, I am proposing that the development in the late
twentieth century of teletechnology or telecommunications drew poststructuralism to the
future of thought about ontology. Specifically, it drew Derrida's writings to the deconstruc-
tion of the opposition of nature and technology, the human and the machine, the virtual and
the real, the living and the inert. Each of the opposed elements is treated by Derrida as a
deferral of each other, so that no element is ontologically privileged. My reading, there-
fore, traces the way Derrida's writings are implicated in rethinking ontology in relation-
ship to teletechnology. I, thereby, make more explicit the relationship of Derrida's writings
to the age of teletechnology.
By the age of teletechnology I mean the full interface of computer technology and
television that promises globalized networks of information and communication, such that
layers of images, texts, and sounds flow in real time or constitute a reality rather than
'The larger project concerns a consideration of cultural critics who have drawn on poststructural thought and
who have elaborated its ontological implications, often inadvertently; see my Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought
in the Age of Teletechnology (2000). Among the cultural critics who have more specifically treated the relation-
ship of poststructuralism and technology, see Avital Ronnell (1989); Gregory Ulmer (1989); Mark Poster (1990);
Manuel Delanda (1991); Samuel Weber (1995); Sadie Plant (1997); Charles J. Stivale (1998).
Sociological Theory 18:3 November 2000

? American Sociological Association. 1307 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005-4701
384 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
represent one. As such, the adjustment to the vulnerabilities of exposure to t

is beyond the human subject's mere decision to turn "it" on or off. Teletechn
fore, refers to all matter of "knowledge objects,"2 technoscientific product
kind of intelligent machine. As such, teletechnology is both a register and an
of posthuman thought. That is to say, thought is released from its reductio
consciousness; thought is understood instead as the process of ascribing to b
ious kinds the power of thinking.
Teletechnology, therefore, does not only refer to an environment or a set
objects; it also refers to agencies other than human agency, so that the tele
becomes inextricably entangled with the social-structural. That is to say, te
has urged and is part of a rethinking of the social-structural determination of
or the derivation of human agency out of that certain social-structural con
family and national ideologies, the state and civil society, and the public and p
presumed in subject-centered, nation-centric discourses, such as the modern W
course of Man. In the age of teletechnology, this configuration of social spa
"smoothed out" or "ungrounded," to use Gilles Deleuze's terms (1987: 47
being "unbundled," to use Saskia Sassen's term (1998: 81), such that the s
territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization of social spaces
Yet, I do not mean to suggest that the teletechnological refers simply to th
alization of the state or to the disappearance of any distinction between the
private spheres, the family and the nation, the economy and the state, and sur
deterritorialization of all social spaces once and for all. What is to be expect
various reterritorializations in the reconfiguration of social spaces conditioned
snationalization of capital and the globalization of teletechnology, such that
tional or the global are better understood as nodes in various networks alongs
the singular, the immanent. As the relevant distinction for political economy
that between circulating capital and fixed capital but rather between capita
state apparatuses and capital effected by multinationals and globalization, the
nation-states and the aims for their interrelationship in terms of a transna
being revised.
However, no matter how social spaces are being reconfigured, the age of
ogy, I would argue, is characterized by an increased possibility of the release
subject's agency from non-reflexive relationships to tradition, community, a
structures, as social theorists have already noted (see, for example, Beck, G
Lash 1994). But there is also the increased possibility of the human subject's
aware of nonhuman agencies-those of various knowledge objects as well as t
nent to matter itself. That is to say, there is the increased possibility of the h
becoming aware of the displacement of the transcendental figure of Being
mism of matter, or what Pheng Cheah has referred to as the subindividual, si
forces of "mattering" (1996: 108-139). In referring to the agencies immanen
however, I do not mean to suggest a mere return to the forces of nature as o
conditions of culture. While nature is not to be conceived merely as a cultural
nature also is not separable from culture or technology. The agencies of the
subindividual, finite forces of mattering, therefore, refer to an interimplicat
and culture all the way down, such that nature and culture are best unders
nonature and technoculture, that is, as technoscientific effects. After all, t
2I am indebted to Karin Knorr Cetina's discussion of "knowledge objects" and their agenc
Cetina suggests that the ontology of knowledge objects is "volatile and unfolding." It is the onto
of knowledge objects that has provoked my interests in the ontological implications of poststru
THE TECHNICAL SUBSTRATES OF UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY 385
mattering are realized as self-organizing agencies through a technoscientific

As Manuel DeLanda argues, what "has allowed us to 'see' matter as self-organ
advance in technology that materially supports the (non-linear) mathematics
mathematical technology" (1992: 134). Similarly, Donna Haraway proposes tha
such as those belonging to the fetus, the chip, the genome, or the database ar
entific productions, only realizable as "material-semiotic objects" or "materia
agencies" which, however, in no meaningful way can simply be or only be r
human agency (1998: 129).
Finally, in the age of teletechnology, the problematic of human agency ca
referred to the discourse of unconscious fantasy and unconscious memory a
there also is an increased possibility of the subject's intensified reflexivity.
Elliott has suggested, there is a strong link between an intensified reflexivity
scious fantasy and the transformation of the human subject's agency; that i
subject's awareness of agencies other than human agency blurs the oppositio
and machine, nature and technology, the virtual and the real, thereby also b
opposition of reality and fantasy or promoting an increased awareness of the
of unconscious fantasy in the construction of reality (1996). It follows that th
increased possibility of an intensified reflexivity about unconscious memory si
nology brings about a change for the human subject in the relationship of tim
that is, a change in historicity and memory. This change in the relationship
space, of memory and historicity, is a change in the ground of Being.
In linking these certain features of the age of teletechnology with Derrida's
ings about technology and unconscious memory, I want to highlight the ontol
cations of Derrida's writings. I want to show that in taking unconscious mem
ground of Being and rethinking it in terms of teletechnology, Derrida's writin
with his early rereading of Freud in "Freud and the Scene of Writing," allow
thought to an ontological perspective that denies the opposition of nature an
human and machine, nature and technology, the virtual and the inert.
DERRIDA READS AND REREADS FREUD
In Archive Fever, A Freudian Impression (1996), Derrida returns to an earlier

which he first traced Freud's steps from treating unconscious memory in terms o
ogy to when, in 1925, Freud finally treats the unconscious in the metaphor of a
machine. The writing machine is a child's toy that Freud referred to as the "mystic
pad" (see Freud 1925: 227-232). In Derrida's earlier essay, "Freud and the Scene of
ing" (1978), Derrida points to Freud's failure to recognize the existence of archiving
or technologies that are surely more sophisticated than the toy writing-pad. Der
on to argue that the metaphor of the mystic writing-pad, which Freud claimed to be t
rhetorical device for treating unconscious memory, is made available "only throu
solid metaphor, the 'unnatural,' historical production of a supplementary machin
to the psychical organization in order to supplement its finitude" (228). Derrida
that there is a relationship between unconscious memory and historically specifi
mentary machines, or that unconscious memory is inextricable from the various "
substrates" given it with historically specific technologies, to use the bolder formu
Archive Fever. Derrida also suggests that from the start a certain technology had
Freud's treatment of unconscious memory; a certain technology had drawn Freud
unconscious memory in the metaphor of a writing machine.
If, as Derrida would have it, Freud did not, perhaps could not, recognize the tec
that was overseeing his project, the same might be said about Derrida, at least in h
rereading of Freud. But in Archive Fever, where Derrida returns to "Freud

Writing" in the context of interrogating the relationship of unconscious memo
nology, what is suggested is that it is teletechnology that allowed for the
Derrida first elaborated between his own project and Freud's. Or, as I would
in "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Derrida begins to complete Freud's p
machine metaphors given with teletechnology and suggests, therefore, tha
was already drawing the Freudian unconscious to it and to the future. But
teletechnology oversees the Freudian and Derridean treatments of unconsci
of course, to raise a question about history. What history can place telete
scenes of both Freud's writing and Derrida's writing? What is history, if
relationship between unconscious memory and historically specific techni
Surely, history cannot simply be linear or simply developmental if technolo
scious memory historically specific technical substrates and if these are t
possibility of various temporal/spatial relationships for the subject or for
the subject.
It would seem that there is an "aporia of time," to use Derridean terminol
reference to teletechnology, a history of technological development is pr
nonetheless, undermines history. History, therefore, can only be impossibly
sibility is, however, productive. It is the condition of possibility of more th
allowing for the anticipation of various historicities. It is in this sense th
to understand Freud's treatment of unconscious memory as anticipatory or, better,
compensatory-that is, as compensating for what could not be thought without the machine
metaphors yet to come in the future.3 It is this future which, I want to suggest, drew
Freud's treatment of unconscious memory to it-from neurology to writing machine, from
the mystic writing-pad to teletechnology.
I also want to suggest that Derrida's rereading of Freud's treatment of unconscious
memory problematizes the history of technological development so profoundly that it
turns thought to ontology, to the ontological treatment of Being and technicity. While not
providing an ontology, Derrida's writings do undermine the ontological privileging of
Being; or, as Richard Beardsworth has suggested, Derrida's writings draw an "originary
Being" down into an "originary technicity" (1996: 145-157). Derridean deconstruction
thereby reconfigures the oppositions grounded by an ontology that privileges Being. Exam-
ples include the opposition of nature and technology, the human and the machine, the real
and the virtual, the living and the inert. As Vicki Kirby suggests, it is as if for Derrida, the
"ground of Being" is "a 'writing' that both circumscribes and exceeds the conventional
divisions of nature and culture" (1997: 61). In this sense, Derrida's project is to be under-
stood in terms other than those which restrict it to the linguistic turn; instead, differance,
textuality, and writing are all to be understood as thought trying to touch the ontic.
I, therefore, want to offer a reading of Derrida's "Freud and the Scene of Writing" that
suggests that Derrida does not dismiss neurology, biology, or nature but rather refuses to
oppose these to culture. He also refuses to oppose the unconscious to the machine. In
following Freud's steps from neurology to the writing machine, Derrida instead wants to
pose certain questions, such as: What is the machine that it lends itself as a metaphor for
unconscious memory? What is the inside and outside of the machine? What is the inside
-Richard Dienst (1994) has argued that various media technologies have used narrative to compensate for their
inability to realize the "drive to transmission": that is, the drive to record and transmit everything everywhere to
everyone everywhere all the time. As Dienst sees it, this is television's drive which, he argues, functions even
before the actual production of television hardware. Therefore, while television may not exist for Freud, its
machine metaphors and its drive are in the air, so to speak. Furthermore, I will suggest below that for Freud the
Oedipal narrative compensates for what he cannot yet say about telecommunication.
and outside of unconscious memory? In posing these questions, Derrida not only
treat nature or biology as inextricably interimplicated with culture or the mac
means to do so in relationship to a historically specific technology. It is in the
metaphors of teletechnology that Derrida draws Freud's treatment of unconsciou
to the future, to register the dynamism of matter, out of which nature and culture
always already interimplicated. In other words, I want to suggest that in followin
steps from neurology to writing machine, Derrida has a tele-vision.
STEP BY STEP TO A TELE-VISION AT THE SCENE OF WRITING
For Derrida, the mystic writing-pad, although a child's toy, is a writing machine and it h
the metaphorical capacity that Freud had been seeking in order to properly represent th
functioning of unconscious memory; that is, the mystic writing-pad has "the potential f
indefinite preservation and an unlimited capacity for reception" (1978: 222). As Fre
described it, the mystic writing-pad is made of a wax slab to which is attached, on one en
a celluloid sheet that protects the wax slab. The device works by lifting the sheet at the si
where it is not attached. This completely clears the writing, while leaving traces only
the deepest layer-the wax slab, which Freud proposed might be compared to the uncon
scious "behind" perception. The device, therefore, can turn one surface out to the worl
remaining open to every excitation, because the traces of excitation can be stored else-
where than on the writing surface.
But when the traces are stored or, better, when there is an impression made on the w
slab beneath, the impression entirely changes the network of traces which makes up wh
is below or what Freud referred to as the unconscious. So while the mystic writing-pad
proposes that unconscious memory allows the perceiving surface above it to remain ope
to the world, it also suggests that there is no presence present beneath, in the unconscio
The unconscious has no place; it is a space that is temporally dynamic, a spacing o
ungraspable traces, a temporalizing of the space of writing.
It is Freud's notion of the ungraspable trace which interests Derrida. Earlier in The
Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Freud had introduced the notion of trace as
kind of writing of forces in relationship to the accumulation and the discharge of energy
the nervous system. As Freud explained it, the primary function of the neurons is to rece
excitation and discharge energy. But Freud also argued that there is a secondary functi
of the neurons which operates simultaneously with the primary function. This secondary
function, which might be better referred to as the deferral of the primary function, is
resist the discharge of energy-to accumulate energy. This accumulation of energy seemed
to Freud to be necessary so that the nervous system could face what he described as "t
exigencies of life"-that is, to enable the activity of living.
Freud went on to argue that the resistance to discharge occurs at the "contact barriers
between neurons, so that when the discharge of energy is inhibited, the accumulated ener
forces open a path at the contact barriers. Along with resistance to discharge, a "path
facilitation" is opened or "breached"-"the tracing of a trail opens up a conducting path,
as Derrida puts it (200). The contact barriers between neurons thereby become variably
capable or incapable of repeated conduction of energy while some contact barriers offer
resistance at all. Unconscious functioning, therefore, is a matter of the different paths o
facilitation in a network of neurons and the variation in the conduciveness to repetitio
thereby allowed. But as already indicated, Freud further suggested that neural network
reconfigure themselves with each excitation, endlessly changing, and as such, they remai
fully dynamic. In this, "the first representation" or "the first staging of memory (Darste
lung)," Freud, Derrida argues, refuses to describe the neural nets as compartments for
storing memories; instead, his description proposes that neural nets compris
motion which allows the unconscious to function as a memory-making-no
keeping-apparatus (201).
Derrida emphasizes that it is the difference in the breaching, the differen
ing and timing of the traces, that makes unconscious memory possible. It is
there are paths or connections present in neural nets. As Derrida puts it:
stipulated that there is no pure breaching without difference. Trace as mem
not a pure breaching that might be reappropriated at any time as simple
rather the ungraspable and invisible difference between breaches" (20
Freud's neurology suggests that "psychic life is neither the transparency o
the opacity of force but the difference within the exertion of forces" (201
It is not surprising, then, that Elizabeth Wilson argues that Derrida has m
to draw a productive link between Freud's neurological treatment of uncon
and various new models of cognition, such as "connectionism" (1998).
Derrida's rereading of Freud's treatment of unconscious memory not only e
ers in fields such as artificial intelligence and psychology to rethink cogn
effect of relational differences in the activation between units and across
neurons)" (162). It also reinforces the efforts of these researchers to think
without origin or ends, template or stored rules-that is, as operating "in
limits of presence, location, and stasis" (201).
Derrida, after all, makes it clear that for Freud, there is no memorized co
networks. While there is repetition, it is not remembered content that is re
the repetition is of an impression or a trace which is only a repetition of th
the exertion of forces. Derrida proposes that repetition is an "originary" rep
the repetition of an original. The "originary" of originary repetition is a
crossed through or put "under erasure." Thus, repetition is labeled originary
mine the idea of an origin: "It is a non-origin which is originary" (203). I
Derrida brings Freud's treatment of repetition closer to Gilles Deleuze's tre
repetition" (1994). For Deleuze, pure repetition is repetition without an or
or a transcendental principle. It is neither a oneness turning into multipl
matter of different versions of a concept that itself remains the same. Pu
meant to grasp the irreducibility of the contingency of subindividual, singular
As such, pure repetition releases the possibility of pure difference.
In his treatment of repetition, Deleuze, like Derrida, means to revise Fre
of repetition and the death drive; both Derrida and Deleuze mean to underm
ent connection of repetition to an entropic drive to sameness or oneness. S
was suggested by Freud when he treated repetition and the death drive in
interpretation of evolution as ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny; as such, t
the death drive was understood by Freud as a return to the primitive, th
nonorganic, inert, or inanimate matter. For Deleuze, however, repetition is
lution where natural selection has been displaced by an utterly artificial
Deleuze's postbiological biophilosophy, the repetition of the death drive is n
an ongoing process of deterritorializing and reterritorializing. As Keith A
suggests, for Deleuze, "death is not, therefore, merely the negation of life b
vital life that arrives from the future and which seeks to emancipate organ
fixed and frozen forms which entrap it" (1999: 114).
For Derrida, too, repetition is creative; it makes life possible. Derrida's ar
while the resistance of the neurons to discharge energy makes repetition po
the exigencies of life might be met, nonetheless, life is not originary (espe
meant by life is the forms of organic life that Deleuze undermines with the
repetition). For Derrida, therefore, life is not already present in the nervous sy
life is made possible in the repetition of the protective resistance. But if lif
originary presence, life also is not-life. In this sense and only in this sense, De
life is death, just as unconscious memory is forgetting, the forgetting of fo
repression. Or to put this another way, repetition is not opposed to life; in re
unconscious memory, life and death are rather in a differantial relationship.
Therefore, Derrida's aim in following Freud's treatment of neurology is mad
is not to dismiss neurology and biology as inert or dead matter. It is rather to
ogy and biology back into the interimplication of nature and culture, thereby
ontological perspective that allows for a differantial relationship rather than
tional or dialectical relationship between the human and the machine, nature a
ogy, the virtual and the real, the living and the inert. Not only does Derrida's
Freud's neurology suggest that nature and culture are deferrals of each other;
gests that nature and culture are given out of differance or the dynamism of
subindividual, finite forces of mattering. At least, this is what Derrida's treat
ferance seems to imply: Differance is "becoming itself."
Differance refers to a network or a force field of differences that is nonlocata
able, or without exteriority in any final sense; differance refers, therefore, to
bility of presence or identity, except when these are constituted in the disavowal o
As Derrida suggests, differance refers to a pure interval of repetition:
An interval must separate the present from what it is not for the present to
but this interval that constitutes it as a present must, by the same token, d
present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, every
is thought on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical langua
being and singularly substance or the subject. In constituting itself in divid
dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing, the becoming-s
time or the becoming-time of space (temporization). And it is this constituti
present, as an 'originary' and irreducibly nonsimple (and therefore, strict
nonoriginary) synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions and protentions
propose to call archi-writing, archi-trace, or differance .. . (1982: 13).
The above remarks appear some years after the publication of "Freud and th
Writing," in an essay where Derrida offers his most extensive treatment of di
already in "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in its very first pages, Derrida
primary concern: There is presence and logocentrism to be put into play with
"the pre-opening of the ontic-ontological difference"(1978: 198). So often mi
as linguistic undecidability, moral relativism, or political indifference, differa
none of these, or not simply to any of these. Differance rather is meant to g
logical perspective. Derrida's treatment of differance points to the preontolog
the subindividual, singular, finite forces of mattering; it draws an originary
an originary technicity.
It is in this sense that Derrida's treatment of differance suggests a certain
Foucault's treatment of power as a "moving substrate of force relationships which by
virtue of their inequality constantly engender states of power but the latter are always local
and unstable" (1980: 93). Derrida's treatment of differance draws Foucault's treatment of
power to its ontological implications. That is, in pointing to the interimplication of Being
and technicity, as well as to the dynamism of matter, Derrida's treatment of differance
takes Foucault's treatment of the force relations of power beyond their programmed effects
in the discursive constitution of the human being as subject. Unlike Foucault, Derrida
follows Freud to his treatment of the psychic apparatus of unconscious memo

writing machine with implications that go beyond the discursive constitution o
being as subject to the interimplication of unconscious memory and the mac
TREATING THE PSYCHIC APPARATUS AS WRITING MACHINE
Although in Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud treated neural nets as

differantial traces, he had not yet considered unconscious memory as an appar
operating as a network of differences or functioning as a writing machine. Bef
do so, Freud turned from neurology to the question of unconscious memory, as
functions or reaches to and through conscious perception to the world. He tr
question as about the (im)possibility of translation which he takes up in relat
dream texts and their interpretation. Derrida follows Freud to his treatment o
text as a writing of hieroglyphics and to the question Freud thereby raises: If
unconscious memory is written in hieroglyphics, what kind of translation is
What kind of communication is there between world and unconscious memor
unconscious memory and world?
According to Derrida, the answer given by Freud is that the hieroglyphics of
text are not a translation of the world; nor are they translatable in the usual
senses of the term. Dreams do not merely refer to some reality or prior materia
have a materiality of their own, "a scenic quality," which cannot be translated.
glyphics of the dream text are not meant to be meaningful and, in this sense, the
does not refer to a truth in unconscious memory-ready for translation to co
As Derrida sees it, the untranslatable hieroglyphics of the dream text sugges
Freud, the dream is an "originary" production which gives its own grammar. Th
is irreducible to any other code, foreclosing any thought of translation as a p
re-presentation. The grammar of the dream text is singular-not because it re
individual subject but because it refers to subindividual, finite forces of repres
are singular. That is to say, the forces of repression, which make the transla
dream text impossible, have their own singular vicissitudes. The production of
text, therefore, is a creative process, not a return to a prior event or object, a
through this creative scenic production, this unconscious production of a "sc
ory," that the event of the dream can be (re)presented and interpreted.
In treating the case of the Wolf Man, Freud suggested that the screen memor
allow for the experience of an event long after the event-in the Wolf Man's
event being what Freud referred to as the primal scene-the Wolf Man's paren
in coitus a tergo([1918] 1963: 187-316). But Freud also suggested that the Wolf
likely did not experience the event at an earlier moment, at least not consciousl
might even have been the stuff of an infantile fantasy carrying the deferre
trauma. So while the screen memory allows for the stipulation of a primal sc
therefore, its interpretation, it is only the deferred effects of trauma that are
not a remembered event.
For Freud, after all, trauma points to the incapacity to retrieve the past; it refers to a
forgetting without memory so that traumatic effects are a symptomology substituting for
the event that never was experienced as such. Whatever the event was, one effect is that the
ego's defense was breached or shattered such that a hyperdefensiveness results, an impas-
sivity even. Ruth Ley's refers to the ego's traumatized or "fascinated identification" with
a fantasized event or object, such that the ego is inextricably immersed in the fantasy
object or event (1996). As such, the ego is engulfed in unconscious memory; unconscious
memory is more properly referred to as "incorporated memory," "body mem

"cellular memory." As such, unconscious memory is the unstable body of th
facing of a difficulty in remembering or in being certain about the truth of m
is, therefore, a deep link between the unstable body ego and the dream text. B
ego and the dream text are defensively meaningful, a matter of fantasy and
desire.
For Derrida, then, the connection Freud draws between the deferred effects of trauma
and the dream text is not accidental in the working of unconscious memory. In relation to
unconscious memory, the text is always produced through a "supplementary delay," a
secondary revision of an event that has never been lived in the present. Having followed
Freud's treatment of the dream text, Derrida concludes that there is no text present in
unconscious memory, that the unconscious is not a presence. He puts it this way:
There is then no unconscious truth to be rediscovered by virtue of having been

written elsewhere .... There is no present text in general, and there is not even a past
present text, a text which is past as having been present. The text is not conceivable
in an originary or modified form of presence. The unconscious text is already a
weave of pure traces, differences in which meaning and force are united-a text
nowhere present, consisting of archives which are always already transcriptions ...
whose signified presence is always reconstituted by deferral, nachtraglich, belat-
edly, supplementarily (1978: 211).
It is in similar terms that Freud will treat the psychic apparatus of unconscious memory
when finally he treats the psychic apparatus in the metaphor of a writing machine or the
mystic writing-pad. No possibility of translation will be posited between the systems of the
psychic apparatus-from preconsciousness to the unconscious, from the unconscious to
conscious perception. There will only be, as Derrida puts it, "original prints," "archives,"
"always already transcriptions." Unconscious memory not only is a movement of traces
and erasures but each of the systems of the psychic apparatus is also only this. Once Freud
treats the psychic apparatus in the metaphor of a writing machine, the psyche becomes
what Derrida describes as "a depth without bottom, an infinite allusion, and a perfectly
superficial exteriority: a stratification of surfaces, each of whose relationship to itself,
each of whose interior, is but the implication of another similarly exposed surface" (224).
It is Freud's treatment of the psychic apparatus as an infinite depth of meaning without
foundation which, Derrida proposes, is inextricably linked to his own treatment of the text.
Derrida may have already written, "[T]here is nothing outside the text (there is no outside-
text)" (1976: 158)-the infamous sentence appearing in the Grammatology, first pub-
lished in French, the same year as "Freud and the Scene of Writing" was published in
French. Although the statement-"there is nothing outside the text"-has been so often
(mis) understood to mean that there is no reality or even any materiality that much matters,
or that there is no meaning but what is given in written texts, the statement instead must be
understood as "there is no present text"-"a text nowhere present" in the psychic appara-
tus of unconscious memory. The question, therefore, is not whether the psyche is a kind of
text but, as Derrida puts it, "what is a text, and what must the psyche be if it can be
represented by a text? For if there is neither machine nor text without psychical origin,
there is no domain of the psychic without text"-without the machine (199).
What Derrida means to suggest is that the psyche is irreducible to a text or it is only
reducible to a text in the sense that the text is a defensive production, a secondary revision,
through which unconscious memory tries to reach consciousness but does not fully suc-
ceed. That is, unconscious memory makes its way into the dream text, filtered through a
secondary revision that only makes the dream text seem logical, meaningful,
While secondary revision only partially succeeds, it does make it possible to re
the dream text something that seems like the product of conscious processes,
what Freud describes as "considerations of representability" (1965: 374-385).
So, too, the text, when narrowly conceived as a written text or a literary tex
duced in a disavowal of the productivity of unconscious memory; it is, for
disavowal of differance. The production of a literary text is the production of a
a "finished corpus of writing." It is "the becoming literary" of differantial trace
the timing and spacing of differance), which always implies the disavowal of
The deconstruction of the text as "finished corpus of writing" means to open up
return it to "a differential network, a fabric of traces, referring endlessly to some
than itself, to other differential traces" (1991: 257).
The production of a text and the possibility of its deconstruction, therefore,
disconnected from the psychic apparatus of unconscious memory where there i
duction without an exteriority, or without an ur-text, but where there also is th
of differance. In its effects, disavowal produces a text, giving an exteriority to
disavowal makes the exteriority or the outside into a transcendental figure of t
and ends of thought so that outsideness loses its heterogeneity, its differance, its
its futurity. Derrida gives a list of figures that have operated in Western thought t
a text and give origins and ends to thought: "eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousi
existence, substance, subject) aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, m
forth" (1978a: 279-280). The deconstruction of the text and of the origins and
thought returns the text to differance, to production without beginning or end, th
writing machine which is an apparatus of originary repetition.
In insisting that the psychic apparatus is a matter of originary repetition, Der
Freud's mystic writing-pad into a perpetual-motion machine. It is no surprise, t
after the publication of "Freud and the Scene of Writing," when Derrida return
nature Event Context," to treat writing and communication as part of a criticism
act theory, Freud's mystic writing-pad has become a distributed network of tra
without beginning or end, which functions only to permit the pure repetition
scious memory. Against the privilege which speech act theory grants the speaki
as the origin and end of communication, Derrida instead refers communication t
machine, for which the software of the program and the hardware of the app
indistinguishable so that the distinction of form and content is inoperative and
central executor or stored rules. It is here, in elaborating a criticism of speech
that Derrida describes the writing machine of unconscious memory as "telecom
tion," when every communication is "being sent" without a sender, when the
internal to every communication-"a machine that is in turn productive," and
subject's future disappearance in principle will not prevent from functioning an
yielding and yielding itself to reading and rewriting" (1972: 8). It would s
machine other than Freud's mystic writing-pad is offering itself as metaphor f
chic apparatus of unconscious memory. It would seem that Derrida is having a t
It is with this vision, just taking hold of him, that Derrida ends his reading of "F
the Scene of Writing." He notices that Freud finally has become disappointed in
writing-pad. The mystic writing-pad has limits. It cannot go on its own; once t
has been left on the wax slab beneath the surface layer, the mystic writing-p
"reproduce it (writing) from within." For Freud, the mystic writing-pad fails
unconscious memory perfectly. Someone's hands-writing hands-are necessary
to make the mystic writing-pad work.
Derrida also is disappointed. He is disappointed in Freud. He notices that w

limits of the mystic writing-pad became apparent to Freud, he instead would pri
"organ"-that is, the unconscious that can do what it does on its own or can do i
rally." The mystic writing-pad which Freud deployed to supplement unconsciou
and make its capacity for limitless receptivity seem a "natural" matter, finally w
be devalued for its limitations, for being "unnatural." Freud seems to Derrida to
ing to conclude that: "The machine-and consequently, representation-is death an
itude within the psyche" (1978: 228).
Having dismissed the mystic writing-pad from further consideration, Freud
fail to notice that besides the child's toy writing-machine, there already are m
"in the world" which more closely resemble memory-"machines for storing arc
Freud will not address the question his treatment of the psychic apparatus of un
memory raised; he will fail to ask about the analogy between the psychic appar
unconscious memory and the machine in the context of what Derrida describes
"historico-technical production" of technology.
In addressing this question, which Freud did not, Derrida proposes that the m
does not "surprise" unconscious memory from the outside. The machine is not
aphor, outside unconscious memory. Unconscious memory is inextricable from it
cal substrates given with historically specific technologies. Derrida thereby posits
apparatus of unconscious memory, beyond the individual's psychic organization, t
forth its own method of study-a discipline other than psychoanalysis or the "soc
literature"-a discipline that can treat the "sociality of writing as drama" (
discipline, Derrida proposes, must rethink techne and technology, where "techno
not be derived from an assumed opposition between the psychical and the nonpsy
life and death" (228).
One aim of this discipline would be to deconstruct the opposition of the machi
the psychic apparatus of unconscious memory. There is to be no dismissal of natu
biology, no opposition between nature and culture, biology and technology, the u
scious and the machine. The machine is to be understood as unconscious memory de
just as culture and technology are nature deferred. As Derrida puts it: "[A]11 the
physis-tekhne, nomos, thesis, society, freedom, history, mind, etc. [are to be th
as physis different and deferred, or as physis differing and deferring. Physis in d
(1982: 17).
The thought of differance bears ontological implications for the relationship of Being
and technicity. The ontology of Being by which nature and culture are opposed is under-
mined; culture and nature instead are drawn back to the play of the differences of preon-
tological forces-the singular, subindividual, finite, forces of mattering, which subtend
and yet are immanent to the differantial relation of nature and technology. Or to put it
otherwise, the ontological implications given with the thought of differance are in the
future, to which the differantial relationship of nature and technology opens up.
But in "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Derrida only points to this future of ontolog-
ical thought. He hesitates and turns back from ontology, or turns ontology toward what he
has referred to as the "historico-technical production" of technology. Derrida thereby comes
to the end of his reading of "Freud and the Scene of Writing" only having brought the
historico-technical production of technology as close as possible to ontology, as if to cross
one through the other. Derrida will take no further steps toward ontologizing teletechnol-
ogy. Perhaps what stops Derrida is that he is unable to embrace the technology that has
given deconstruction its machine metaphors. If Freud had the disappointing toy writing-
machine, Derrida has the much-maligned television, the exemplary machine of teletech-
nology. Derrida cannot go all the way and fully articulate an ontological perspec
the technology that has been drawing deconstruction to it all along.
Not that Derrida will never again treat teletechnology nor ever again return
relationship to teletechnology. Indeed, even before he does so in Archive Fev
Post Card Derrida revisits Freud's own worries about the future of psyc
Freud's worries about his authority over psychoanalysis in the future. And tel
serves Derrida as the very form of rethinking the question of Freud's autho
Derrida places the subject of The Post Card "between the posts and the psych
movement, the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the p
the purloined letter .. ." (1987, quote on the back of The Post Card).
Teletechnology also makes an appearance in Specters of Marx where Derrid
authority of that discourse, other than Freud's, which has been both a resource
of deconstruction and which has been implicated as well in the change of tem
spatiality in the globalization of teletechnology and the transnationalization
Referring to Marxism, Derrida suggests:
Techno-science or tele-technology ... obliges us more than ever to think th

alization of space and time, the possibility of virtual events whose movem
speed prohibit us more than ever (more and otherwise than ever, for this
absolutely and thoroughly new) from opposing presence to its representat
time" to "deferred time," effectivity to its simulacrum, the living to the non-l
short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts. It requires, then, what w
hauntology. We will take this category to be irreducible, and first of all to ev
it makes possible: ontology, theology, positive or negative ontotheology (1
It would seem that teletechnology obliges us more than ever to think what
been thinking, when he has been thinking beyond Freud and Marx, raising qu
teletechnology and its challenge to the authority of both Marxist and Freudian
For Derrida, these are questions of preontology or hauntology that put onto
what he describes as the shared "history of psyche, text, and technology." W
shared history that Derrida takes up instead of ontology, a history about whic
theless, equivocates, suggesting that what the history produces is neither "abs
"thoroughly new"? What can be made of this pull toward and away from histo
and away from ontology-this "aporia of time" which is produced when the tho
historico-technical production of technology crosses through ontology?
What I think can be proposed is that the shared history of text, psyche, and
historicizes ontology, making an ontology of Being impossible or impossibly
this another way, the historico-technical production of technology gives differ
substrates to unconscious memory and thereby produces different historicities
relations of time and space. These ground Being differently. All this displaces
an ontology of presence. The historico-technical production of technology pul
Being" down into "originary technicity"-into finitude and its different hist
such, ontology is opened to the future, to the creative evolutionary process
ture, technoculture, and technoscience. Teletechnology not only offers a differ
ity specific to it but it registers and oversees the drawing of ontology into
Derrida proposes that in the age of teletechnology, we must think "another hi
a new history or still less a 'new historicism,' but another opening of event-n
ricity ... as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program
(1994: 74-75).
FROM FREUD TO DERRIDA AND BEYOND
Provoking a move from treating the psychic apparatus of unconscious memor

metaphor of the mystic writing-pad to treating it in the metaphors of teletechn
rida's rereading of Freud makes it possible to think of the unconscious as
thought's movement to unthought, for which the individual subject's identity
origin nor end. This does not mean that the subject's unconscious memory is m
evant. Rather, it means that the confinement of unconscious memory to a certai
fiction of subject identity is undermined. If the disavowal of differance still is
now may operate through something other than the narrative fiction of subjec
The metaphors with which Freud gave the unconscious, and gave it over to th
subject, are no longer all that is necessary to an understanding of the psychic a
unconscious memory.
What then of Freud's insistence on Oedipus as the narrative logic of un
memory? What of the Oedipal narrativization of the subject's identity, its sex
unconscious fantasy? After all, the Oedipal narrative not only is central to th
treatment of unconscious memory; it also is central to Jacques Lacan's re
Freud which has been so central to recent cultural criticism. What of Derrida's decon-
struction of Freud's treatment of unconscious memory in relationship to Lacan's reread
ing of Freud?
Derrida makes no mention of Lacan in "Freud and The Scene of Writing"; but there
little doubt that Lacan's rereading of Freud is already at play in the essay-enabling Der-
rida's deconstruction and at the same time being its target. Is it not Lacan's rereading of
Freud that Derrida wishes to go beyond as he follows after Freud? After all, Lacan pro-
posed that the unconscious is structured like a language and shifted the focus of psych
analysis to the speech of the subject-seemingly away from the writing machine or the
technical substrates of unconscious memory. Yet, in turning psychoanalysis to the analys
of the subject's speech and to the treatment of its disturbances, Lacan was not merely
proposing to restore to the speaking subject a unified identity or a self-same presence. F
Lacan, these only are possible as a fantasy disavowing the Other and denying unconscious
memory altogether. In relationship to unconscious memory, the subject, Lacan proposes,
speaks but with "the voice of no one" (1988: 170). Lacanian psychoanalysis, therefore,
shows that unconscious memory is a resource both for producing and deconstructing the
narrative of the individual subject's unified identity.
Derrida, indeed, recognizes a connection between his own rereading of Freud and
Lacan's rereading; Derrida finds the connecting point at the repetition of the death drive
or what Freud also refers to as "the drive for mastery." Commenting on Michel Fou-
cault's History of Sexuality where finally Foucault rejects Freud and psychoanalysis gen-
erally, Derrida differs with Foucault, arguing that the "French heritage of Freud would
not only not let itself be objectified by the Foucauldian problematization but would ac-
tually contribute to it in the most determinate and efficient way . . . beginning with ev-
erything in Lacan that takes its point of departure in the repetition compulsion . .." (1994a:
265-266).
Derrida proposes that Lacan makes clearer that Freud's treatment of the death drive as
a repetition of what is painful in order to master it severely problematizes human agency,
thereby undermining mastery "with the greatest radicality." For Derrida, when the death
drive goes into overdrive, the authority of the narrative of mastery, the Oedipal narrative,
is severely undermined. Derrida closes his comments on Foucault suggesting that "[i]t is
very difficult to know if this drive for power is still dependent upon the pleasure principle,
indeed, upon sexuality as such, upon the austere monarchy of sex that Foucault speaks
of.. ." (266).4 Has not the history of sexuality been opened up to the shared history of text,
psyche, and technology, opened to the historico-technical production of technology, so
that repetition breaks its connection to an Oedipalized sexuality or an Oedipal narrativity?
Has not the historico-technical production of technology opened Freud's treatment of rep-
etition to the thought of "pure repetition" or "originary repetition," thereby taking the
psychic apparatus of unconscious memory even beyond Lacan's and Foucault's rereadings
of Freud?
All this is to say that in "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Derrida opens philosophy to
the deconstruction of the Oedipal narrative by subjecting it to the peculiar historico-
technical production of technology and the technical substrates of unconscious memory.
He begins what finally would be elaborated as the deconstruction of the grand narrative of
the subject-centered, nation-centric Western discourses of Man. But he also begins what
has been less elaborated: the realization of an ontological perspective that refuses to oppose
the human and the machine, nature and technology, the living and the inert, so to allow for
the evolutionary transformations of technoscience, technonature, and technoculture.
AND WHAT OF SOCIOLOGY BEYOND THE HUMAN?
Against those who imagine that the influence of poststructuralism on soc

can be relegated to the past, my rereading of Derrida's writings is meant to s
ontological implications of poststructuralism may well inform the future o
especially as it grapples with those characteristics of the age of teletechno
lenge the definition of the social or the social-structural long presumed in
theory. Of those characteristics of the age of teletechnology, I have focused
logically demanding change in our understanding of nature and technology,
the machine, the virtual and the real, the living and the inert, and therefor
Derrida's treatment of the technical substrates of unconscious memory as we
implication of Being and technicity to the increased possibility of the subje
about nonhuman agencies. While social theorists have already noted the in
bility of the subject's reflexivity about social structure-about the traditions
of various communities-I am proposing that poststructuralism registers an
sibility for reflexivity about nonhuman agencies in relationship to knowledg
ing the singular, subindividual, finite forces of mattering.
But, to focus on the ontological implications of poststructuralism is to sug
of it that is nearly opposite to the reading that has been circulated among s
that poststructuralism is a radical social constructionism where, in the name
ing the opposition of nature and culture, nature instead has been reduced
terms of a radical constructionism, the inert, the nonorganic, and the biolo
ingful only when understood as little more than a construction of culture o
ination. (Although it would be too simple to say so, it might be said that
treatment of human bodies is often this kind of radical social constructionis
social constructionism, the dynamism of matter is not recognized but as I h
poststructuralism is thought reaching to the dynamism of matter, to the n
cies of the singular, subindividual, finite forces of mattering.
4Derrida is referring here to Foucault's often quoted remark:
. . . we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy
pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality and the power
its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became
the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest of confessions from a shadow
But I have also emphasized that the dynamism of matter is realized through
scientific production, that is, the dynamism of matter is given as a knowledge
realization dependent on mathematical technology. Here, too, poststructuralism i
because it points to a shift in ontological perspective that befits the volatile and
beingness of knowledge objects. As such, poststructuralism registers the dynam
matter while guarding against any biological determinism or a simplistic biolog
lutionary perspective. Poststructuralism rather suggests that evolution has becom
ological or utterly artificial if ever it was not so. In this sense, the transnationa
capital and the globalization of teletechnology only makes it more apparent that
has been participating in the construction of biotechnologies and thereby has be
pating in a postbiological evolution where the integrity of the organism is under
the technical substrates of unconscious memory, more fully recognized. The h
ject is drawn back into the interimplication of Being and technicity while the
drawn to a posthumanism in the smoothing out of the configuration of social sp
presumed by modern social theory.
Again, I do not mean to suggest a celebratory cosmopolitanism in an idealizatio
beyond-the-nation state-ism. Rather, I mean to point to thought in its grasp of th
plication of Being and technicity out of which bodies (and not only human bod
constituted on one plane or out of the dynamism of matter. It is the socialitie
bodies that demand a new sociology that can jump from and to different scales o
from the microphysical to the macrocultural. This also demands both a new poli
attends to these bodies as they adjust to the speeds of territorialization and reter
tion of social spaces, and a new ethics to attend to the becoming of new life for
unbecoming of others. All this, I have suggested, requires recognizing the break o
from human consciousness, that is, recognizing the technical substrates of uncon
memory. This is the project begun by Derrida's rereading of Freud. But I want t
last words about the unconscious not to Derrida but to Deleuze: "There is ... a difference
in nature: the unconscious no longer deals with persons and objects, but with trajectories
and becomings. It is no longer an unconscious of commemoration but one of mobilization,
an unconscious whose objects take flight rather than remaining buried in the ground"
(1997: 63).
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The Technical Substrates of Unconscious Memory: Rereading Derrida's Freud in the Age of

American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

PATRICIA TICINETO CLOUGH

City University of New York

In a rereading of Jacques Derrida's writings on Freud, I trace the connections between

In a reading of Jacques Derrida's treatment of differance and Michel Foucault's treatment

Sociological Theory 18:3 November 2000

represent one. As such, the adjustment to the vulnerabilities of exposure to t

mattering are realized as self-organizing agencies through a technoscientific

DERRIDA READS AND REREADS FREUD

In Archive Fever, A Freudian Impression (1996), Derrida returns to an earlier

rereading of Freud. But in Archive Fever, where Derrida returns to "Freud

STEP BY STEP TO A TELE-VISION AT THE SCENE OF WRITING

follows Freud to his treatment of the psychic apparatus of unconscious memo

TREATING THE PSYCHIC APPARATUS AS WRITING MACHINE

Although in Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud treated neural nets as

memory is more properly referred to as "incorporated memory," "body mem

There is then no unconscious truth to be rediscovered by virtue of having been

Derrida also is disappointed. He is disappointed in Freud. He notices that w

Techno-science or tele-technology ... obliges us more than ever to think th

FROM FREUD TO DERRIDA AND BEYOND

Provoking a move from treating the psychic apparatus of unconscious memor

AND WHAT OF SOCIOLOGY BEYOND THE HUMAN?

Against those who imagine that the influence of poststructuralism on soc

4Derrida is referring here to Foucault's often quoted remark:

. 1978. "Freud and the Scene of Writin

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