restricted sense of the transmission of meaning. Conversely, it is
within the general field of writing thus defined that the effects of
semantic communication will be able to be determined as particular,
secondary, inscribed, supplementary effects’ (SEC: 310–11). Derrida
says that a new concept of writing is bound to intervene which will
transform itself and the problematic, i.e. transform the problematic of
thinking communication on the basis of the semantic and the non-
semantic and the system of interpretation which is hermeneutics (see
SEC: 309–10).In SEC and in other texts, Derrida advances a new concept of writing
whose purpose is to overturn ‘a definition of language as communication,
in the sense of the communication of a content‘ (1988: 79). Derrida attempts
to demonstrate that the effects of semantic communication are subordinate
(both de facto andde jure) to the effects of writing – defined as the impossibil-
ity of an homogeneous context – which can simply be enhanced to varying
degrees by technically more powerfuldegrees of mediation (such as the
vulgar ‘classical’ concept of writing). This force of writing throws into con-
fusion the non-semiolinguistic concept of communication, which carries
with it the sense of bridging a gap or opening an aperture.^5
Derrida redeploys ‘writing’ in a special way not simply as a label for
words on a page (i.e. a technical medium) but as a term which he opposes
to the way in which speech is thought of as carrying the logos. Rather than
suggest that writing is merely an extension of speech, he reverses this
claim by showing that speech, the ability to produce meaning, is governed
by certain properties that have been historically recognized in the con-
ventional notion of writing. In particular, there is a force in writing that he
calls dissemination, or the way in which meaning is never self-present or
‘full’ but is always escaping to numerous other contexts, as well as being
borrowed from other contexts over time and in space.
Derrida reduces the effects of language to two – polysemia and dis-
semination. In SEC Derrida speaks of ‘the necessity of, in a way, separat-
ingthe concept of polysemia from the concept I have elsewhere named
dissemination, which is also the concept of writing’ (SEC: 316).The semantic horizon which habitually governs the notion of communication
is exceeded or punctured by the inter vention of writing, that is, of a dis-
seminationwhich cannot be reduced to a polysemia. Writing is read, and
‘in the last analysis’ does not give rise to a hermeneutic deciphering, to the
decoding of a meaning or truth. (SEC: 329)Dissemination is a force of rupture which is not reducible to ‘the horizon
of a dialectics’, to ‘the work of the negative in the service of meaning’
(SEC: 317).
Dissemination is defined as one of the sides (or effects) of the iter-
ability (repeatability) of the signifier (a word on a page, a sound in the air,126 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-05.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 126