Dictionary.com defines logocentrism as “a method of literary analysis in which words and language are regarded as a fundamental expression of external reality, excluding nonlinguistic factors such as historical context." According to the site, it can also mean “excessive faith in the meanings of words or their specific usages."
However, to best understand the term, we must first look to the field of linguistics. In linguistics, the central domain of research is speech. This is because the field defines language as the set of rules that speakers (speaking or signing) acquire when they are young. From as early as less than a year old, we acquire language, and barring any neurodivergent conditions, we acquire language with one hundred percent success. Language is also performed as speech. Writing is an artifact of that speech. Think of it as a snapshot of where we are linguistically at any given time.
Writing is also not acquired with one hundred percent success, nor do all people in the world have written language in their systems. So, when we write, we are representing something that exists beyond the scratches we make on paper (or keystrokes on the keyboard).
German philosopher Ludwig Klages was keenly aware of this relationship, and in the 1920s, he coined the term logocentrism. “Logos” is the Greek word for speech, thought, law, or reason, and a logocentrist is someone who would view speech as the central principle of language and philosophy. The philosopher Derrida further explains:
Speech is the original signifier of meaning, and the written word is derived from the spoken word. The written word is thus a representation of the spoken word. Logocentrism maintains that language originates as a process of thought which produces speech, and that speech then produces writing. Logocentrism is that characteristic of texts, theories, modes of representation and signifying systems that generates a desire for a direct, unmediated, given hold on meaning, being and knowledge.
In this relationship, “writing is considered exterior to speech, and speech is conceptualized as exterior to thought." Writing in this regard would be considered a signifier of a signifier, in keeping with Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics, which holds that all signs communicate meaning, and that this meaning contains two parts: (1) the form of the sign (signifier) and (2) its meaning (the signified).
C.S. Peirce also developed a theory of semiotics in which the relationship of signs is tri-part: (1) the specific physical form of the sign (vehicle), (2) the aspect of the world that the sign carries meaning about (sign object), and (3) the meaning of the sign as understood by an interpreter (interpretant).
As outlined by de Saussure and Peirce above, a reader is twice removed from the writer of a given work. “Logocentrism thus asserts that writing is a substitute for speech and that writing is an attempt to restore the presence of speech."
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