The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

188 Practical criticism
Robert Young (1981). The Oxford
Literary Review and Diacritics publish
relevant articles.
EC
Practical criticism See ANALYSIS,
CRITICISM, NEW CRITICISM, READER.
Presence To begin, three examples:
Rene Descartes’s famous pronouncement
‘I think therefore I am’; the signature that
binds us to a contract; and the proverb
‘The letter killeth but the spirit giveth
life’. What links these seemingly disparate
phenomena is that each is based on
a certain conception of presence as a
source of authenticity and guarantee of
meaning. Thus, the stability of Descartes’s
‘I’ is supposedly underwritten by the fact
that this thinking subject is present to
itself within consciousness. Following the
same logic, a signature is meant to testify
to the present intentions of its bearer at
the moment of signing. The proverb,
finally, effectively privileges the spirit –
an internal essence associated with the
ultimate presence of God – over the
destructive powers of writing. This valorization
of presence as a site of truth and
authentic meaning is ubiquitous throughout
the Western world and dominates all
aspects of our thought. As Jonathan Culler
suggests in On Deconstruction (1982):
Among the familiar concepts that
depend on the value of presence are:
the immediacy of sensation, the presence
of ultimate truths to a divine consciousness,
the effective presence of
an origin in a historical development,
a spontaneous or unmediated intuition,
the transumption of thesis and
antithesis in a dialectical synthesis, the
presence in speech of logical and
grammatical structures, truth as what
subsists behind appearances, and the
effective presence of a goal in the
steps that lead to it. The authority of
presence, its power of valorization,
structures all our thinking.
Speaking more specifically, this valorization
of presence is part and parcel of the
logocentric history of the West, of its
desire for a stable ground or foundation
(the logos). However the logos is conceived
– Being, Essence, Origin, Truth,
etc. – its role is always the same: to
anchor and fix meaning. Its ability to do
so is, in turn, based on the assumption that
the logos is a site of unmediated presence.
Escaping the play of differences by which
meaning is articulated, the logos constitutes
a pure and self-present signified.
This logocentric emphasis on presence
is seen most obviously in its privileging
of speech over writing. From Plato to
the present day, the history of Western
thought has consistently considered
speech to have a privileged relationship to
truth. When we speak, we seem to have
direct access to our thoughts. The voice
that is always present to the speaker at the
very moment it issues forth, is inextricably
linked to understanding. At the same
time, the spoken signifiers seem to fall
away – to efface themselves – in order to
reveal an unmediated and transparent
meaning. Speech is therefore the sign of
truth located within the realm of the logos
that guarantees its authenticity. Writing,
on the other hand, is held to be incapable
of bypassing speech and is thus construed
as the mere sign of a sign: the written
signifier of the spoken word. Its written
signifiers, moreover, introduce a material
barrier between meaning and its communication.
As a result, writing has traditionally
been treated as a medium divorced from
truth. In this sense, writing is like an illegitimate
or orphaned child. Without a
father (speaker or logos) to control it, writing
can slip out of our control and become