Writing after the precedent

In academic environments, for instance, the precedent is given as bliss; a surplus, yes, but one that must be embraced as a literal source: a spring, a birthplace, a cradle, a home. Being with the source (and at the source) is, here, a being-home. And indeed, it is only in the formulation of the precedent that one can find one’s home. According to this logic, to be without a precedent (which is to say, to be original) is to be homeless, in the most fundamental sense of the word.

Because this homelessness is hard to bear, an entire project has been created for the elimination of the predecessor. Indeed, there is no such thing as poetry without the rejection of the forerunner. As Robert Pinsky has pointed out somewhere, poetry is always what it is not, insofar as poetry can only say something that doesn’t already exist. In order for poetry to be creative it has to formulate something from scratch. Otherwise it is mere epigonism, unproductive repetition, pleonastic nonsense. So here we have the to-be-or-not-to-be of creativity: to be with a predecessor, and therefore redundant, or not to be with a predecessor, and therefore acknowledged as original.

Of course, we are familiar with this project of the rejection of precedence, because we are citizens of postmodernity, and its discourse of demythification is familiar to us. It has given us plenty of space to think of precedence as something we might be better without.

Whacking the forerunner

There is a "contamination anxiety" shaping the artistic choices of writers in general. Jonathan Lethem says it is a symptom of modernism. If what one fears in relation to the source is its ability to contaminate (to impose itself as a necessary repetition), then the source is in truth not venerated but abhorred. The source needs to be buried under the weight of its own significance, never to see the light of day again. If such is the case, then the original/initial is a parasite: one that parasitizes literature – insofar as we think of literature as a domain that renews itself all the time, instead of accepting to be caught up in the continuous loop of reiteration.

Source: Alcalde

The parasitical original/initial stands there, in the middle of everything (whence it can radiate its venom) like an inconvenience. It upsets the natural flow of things. It grows like a boil about to burst. And because of that it needs to be evicted, excised, operated out; removed like a gangrene. Any discussion of precedence needs to employ this language of repugnance if the writer were to be liberated from the terror of antecedence.

This aspect becomes apparent when the predecessor has grown to a size where it cannot be avoided. When it has become an automatic reference, a mental trick the role of which is to sort out the inconvenience of creativity, this source (this precedence that exceeds) disturbs purely and simply. It has no other function than that of inhibition. And its shadow is cast so thickly upon all acts of creation that no exercise can ever come out immaculate, unaltered, un-referenced. Take the example of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of the Classics. When they come up in any context they take the shape of ‘it goes without saying.’ It’s this ‘without saying’ that is troublesome to the writer who is striving to make a name for him/herself. This writer arrives at the feast of recognition already burdened by a name that is not their own. Their very name has already been worn by others, hijacked by them, stolen before the acknowledgment of any presence (their own presence most importantly).

So the ideal situation for a beginner would be to ignore this precedence that obstructs his development. To ignore it, i.e. to make it seem invisible. One would have to write, therefore, with the only intention of hiding the traces of the forerunner. Every instance of writing will have to be an affirmation of one’s originality, even when that originality is a figment of one’s imagination.

But this project would be forever obstructed by the affirmative presence of the discourse that stands behind writing. The discourse, the overwhelming precedent of all forms of creative action, poses the precedent as necessary. Only someone growing in the shadow of a precedent can be counted as significant to a discourse. They would have to acknowledge the shadow even in the most original of their moments. Because there is no situation worse than that of a poet without precedents. That’s what the Academia will argue.

The foreigner that speaks better

The fear of the one-without-precedent is the typical fear of originality, insofar as the original is terrible. Let us say it again: the original is impolite, distinctive; in other words, the original is truly foreign.

The antidote to barbarism is subjection to familiarity. And here is where the precedent is in its most powerful state. The precedent is a guarantor. Without it, the city may crumble. Without it, there will be no rules. Without it (to embody a seventeenth-century fear of John Locke), humanity is likely to return to its state of pre-humanity: a state without laws, without governing bodies, and therefore without foreigners.

Source: www.twainquotes.com

In the land of the precedent everything must fall under the rubric of domestic familiarity. The whole family, down to the newborn, needs to know perfectly well the extent of the precedent in order to reconstruct the entire genealogical tree of the family’s ‘romance.’ And so, the problem of the precedent isn’t quite a problem of the poet alone, but one that transgresses professional or artistic boundaries.

But the poet is the figure we are interested in, because in the poet it is easier to trace the trajectory of thoughts; because the poet writes or memorizes, and therefore, brings along with him/herself the specter of the predecessor. With his (inherited – how else?) ability to inscribe, a poet materializes this specter better than any other sign-maker, because it’s in the case of the poet that the dependence on the precedent appears in the form of an artistic culpability. I take this from Harold Bloom, who mentions “the only guilt that matters to a poet, the guilt of indebtedness.”

A poet cannot speak without speaking the language of someone who spoke before. And the antecedence of this speech act is sure to (im)pose the precedent as a guest: a foreigner, someone who comes from outside the current event, like a specter that haunts.

So the precedent is a foreigner who speaks. And one whose speech is taken to be a better form of expression. The cult of ancestors depends on this better-saying in order to assert a tradition whose sole purpose is to salvage the future from its straying away from the source.

A battle against redundancy

The project of writing-after-the-precedent takes shape under the spasms caused by the fear of tautology. Tautology, i.e. the thing already said and which can't be said again because saying-again is punishable by law (the law of grammar or that of logic, it matters not).

Tautology comes about as an interdiction in its own right, one rhetorical in nature but which poses precisely the problem of the precedent as a necessary absence. In order for the precedent to be acknowledged it has to be obliterated. It has to be acknowledged as non-presence. Pure absence, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out, is not exactly the way to put the problem in relation to the trace. A trace is not a lack. A trace is always already present, always already formulating the present event, the present utterance.

Source: Write Right

A trace, i.e. a presence of the precedent as an absence-that-matters, is something akin to inscriptions, where what is being inscribed is always already there in the form of a discourse that returns. Of course, this discourse is pushed to the margins all the time, minimized, reduced to an apparent absence, in order to maximize its efficiency. Discourses are productive only if they are well hidden; if their subjects don’t get a glimpse of the game that is being played in the background. That’s why Derrida insists on the absent presence that characterizes a trace. With the trace in full sight, the discourse would be exposed (and therefore lose its efficiency). Without it, the discourse would thrive, because it is the absence that articulates its power, its very possibility to be. So in order to avoid discursive suicide, the trace (the precedent) has to go; it has to be as though it had never been. But this is far from being a killing of the precedent. On the contrary, it marks the consolidation of its position. A precedent that isn’t perceived as present is a precedent capable of influence. One can see this in the case of truisms, where the impossibility to locate the precedent is truly frustrating, but where one knows that the precedent exists because one can see its effects.

The reader, my guest

Addressed in the second person, the reader is always a guest. But a guest who is given the freedom to mess up with the dishes and to turn tables upside-down.

A reader who behaves well is not a happy situation. A reader who respects the author too much and has perfect table manners every time he sits at the author's feast is an epigone, an imitator. He does everything for the author but nothing for the text. And in this equation that we're interested in it's the text that matters, because it's in the text that the author's survival can be hoped for. But it is also in the text that the author is at his most fragile. It's in the text that the author is most exposed. That is why readers find it so easy to impose themselves upon a text. Every reading is a different reading, as the saying goes.

So again, one needs to be rude to be a good reader. In fact, let's face it: the reader is a parasite. He or she feeds on the body of a text and the carcass of an author who has worked hard to produce that text. So we should know from the very beginning that nothing in the order of politeness can be expected from such a boor, from such a scavenger.

But the parasite, this one and only guest at the feast of an author who's given his all, is, funnily enough, the author's only ally. The reader, in his impoliteness, doesn't treat the text as a non-entity. That would be the job of a non-reader, if I’m allowed this simple thought. The text perused by the one who reads it is very much present in the reader's body. The body of work that makes up his or her ecosystem is a body that accumulates reading experiences. A reader is made up of all the texts they have read. Like Giuseppe Arcimboldo's bust of the Librarian, which is a conglomerate of carefully ordered books, the reader too is an atlas of texts. This means that every text is taken carefully. It is read with the intention of enlarging the collection. Of course, as in all collections, some pieces will be valued more, some will be valued less. But none of them will be disregarded. Not even those that have been disrespected, abused, desecrated, murdered. Those more than the highly valued ones, because in order for one to have high regard for an object one needs to have a perfect understanding of the objects of a lesser value. In order to parade with my estimation of haute cuisine I need to know what living on instant noodles is like. Otherwise I would have no point of reference. And so, when I happen upon a sample of haute cuisine I have no idea what miracle I have just encountered. The biblical saying "Do not throw your pearls to pigs" has its origins precisely in this phenomenon.

Source: Colour Music

So it's in the estimation of the marginal that we are to understand the strength of the essence.

The parasite, as an outsider, has this ability to articulate for the body everything that the body has been taking for granted. That's why the speaker of a foreign language can see the shortcomings of the new language, as well as its creative potential, more so than a native speaker of the same. The former comes to the new language as a parasite. He/she attempts to learn the language not by showing respect to it but by defiling it. They learn this language by doing violence to it. But it is in this violence that the language finds the way of moving on, of evolving into something it was not when approached by the native speaker (who is, in the strictest of senses, an epigone, a mere imitator). It is with the Barbarian, therefore, that the hidden potentials of language become apparent, because the Barbarian has no reason to pay homage to something that’s not his/her own. Derrida says this:

“When you introduce something into language, you have to do it in a refined manner, by respecting through disrespect its secret law. That's what might be called unfaithful fidelity: when I do violence to the French language, I do so with the refined respect of what I believe to be an injunction of this language, in its life and in its evolution.”

The Barbarian who comes to the new language with the intention to spouse it does so with a clearly preconceived intention of being unfaithful.
The same happens to reading in general (if only for the fact that learning a new language is a way of reading). Reading makes room for the text to expand, to grow to a proportion never intended by the author.

The nostalgia of writing

Here's a question: are texts nostalgic? Not in the sense of being overly reflective, and therefore sentimental, but in the sense of having to come to terms with some loss experienced once the words are on the page, once the text is 'out there.' Can we speak of a text's Golden Age, to which the said text refers to as though to a paradisiacal age of innocence and bliss?

Source: Elite Daily

In an interview published by Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle in their Technologies of the Sign, Jacques Derrida made reference to "a body of letters laid out on a page and that you no longer carry within yourself." That, to him, was the printed text. And by the printed text I understand the text presented back to the writer as a confirmation of their work.

Well done!

The sight of the text that grew within one's mind (within one's body, to be more precise, because this growth doesn't preclude the participation of one's entire physicality - the way, for instance, Lacan said once that he didn't think with his head but with his feet) generates a double-edged reaction.

On the one hand, there's the pride of the work well done. With the words that appear, one receives a sort of congratulation for having followed closely the procedures, methodology, and all the conventional tracks that make a text possible. It is only by this following, this compliance, this willful subjection, that a text can come to light. There is, inherent in any given text (written or not), a code that prescribes all this procedural deployment. In order to swim, one has to jump in a mass of water because water and body have the properties needed for swimming to take place. (We can laugh our heart out reading the seventeenth-century play The Virtuoso, by Thomas Shadwell, in which the protagonist teaches theoretical swimming, which involves no water, only mental effort and dry land; but the satire points out precisely the inaccuracy of a purely theoretical approach). In the same way, in order to speak, one needs to use one's vocal chords and to articulate the words inherited through the genetic memory of language, because speech can only materialize through vocal chords. In order to write, then, one needs to follow the steps that make the appearance of written words possible.

And so, written texts confirm the validity and functionality of a long series of procedural requirements. The fact that a text has been written confirms that I have properly understood, internalized, and employed the practice of drawing letters and then of forming words from those letters; it confirms that I have properly employed the sequential logic of grammar, spelling, punctuation etc., that I am appropriately situated within a discursive setting, and that I have access to tools proper to the trade. I am, with every text I am producing, a monument to the technicity of writing.

Dissatisfaction

And so, when I see the text (my text!), when I find it laid down on a manuscript page, mounted on a computer screen, printed in a book, I find pleasure in the recognition of that text. But wait; there's something else to be said. What I recognize in such a moment is not quite the mental pre-formation that lived in my head. The form taken by my ideas is not equivalent to the form taken by my words - basic lesson in semiotics. What I recognize is the logic of production that exists/has always existed behind every finalized text.

Since writing is a techné (a craft), it carries inside it, in its foundational code, the memory of how it comes to light and of how it has to be midwifed into that light. In other words, in every text I read I find the DIY of writing; I see, as it were, the luminous way from head to hand, the accepted (the only one possible) physical way in which a text can become a written text. That's why I can only learn to write through imitation. And so, when I get a chance to reproduce the same procedures, I am reassured that I have followed the right path. A sigh of relief accompanies my encounter with my own text. Task completed!

Source: All Things D

There's little room for critical attitudes here. I can throw any number of tantrums, I can complain at will, I can deplore the condition of my dependence on a pre-established set of procedures, which mocks my freedom at its most fundamental level, but I can't change the Way. And so, because I am not likely to change anything, I am left with the satisfaction of the job done properly. With that sense of having finished what had to be finished. It's interesting to note that this sense of satisfaction is brought about via a deep dissatisfaction: the certainty that the Way has precedence over me; that the Way bends my will; that I am subjected to the Way. And so, I regret to be satisfied. I am sorry for not having it my way but only the Way's way.

Every happy gesture of production (every instance when something is created as a result of the faithful application of preordained codes and procedures) carries within it a loss of agency. So when we are most satisfied we are also at our highest dissatisfaction.

Going back

What can be done about this almost neurotic experience of writing? Apparently nothing. Not when we imagine this 'doing something' as a forward movement. There is no correction possible 'after' the text. Whatever drafts we may produce, they are not aimed forward but tragically, self-referentially, backward. A draft is not a promise of a better text but a correction of a text that, in following all the practical steps that brought it to light, has also caused its own doom. With every version we generate we reiterate our fundamental dissatisfaction of having to employ imperfect methods, of having to follow a crooked Way, but mostly of having to accept that this Way, crooked as it is, is the only one there is.

Source: B.J. Keeton

Because a draft is a statement of dissatisfaction, it is also a reference to the happy state in which the text existed before taking its physical form.

Hence, the text arrives at its fruition laden with a nostalgic reiteration of its non-physical origins.