Writing is one of the most efficient forms of taming. Not because of its being a perfect vehicle for the dissemination of power discourses, but because it features important characteristics of power itself.
Handling the abstract
Systems of
power interfere between world and subject, so as to direct the gaze of the
latter away from the former and concentrate attention on the discourse of power
itself.
Source: Elite Daily |
Writing
marks precisely this kind of interposition. Prior to the written sign (in what
Walter Ong called "oral cultures"), the link between the subject and their
world was an unmediated one. In order to speak, the speaking subject referred
straight to things. He/she inhabited the utterance, as well as the world. Once
the written sign comes about and once it starts acting as a representation of
the world, this direct link is lost. Henceforth, the subject no longer refers
to the world but to the sign. The world is lost behind a veritable barrage of
signs, which now exercise their tyrannical influence over the subject by
limiting their choices to that which can be written. The unwritable is ugly,
undesirable, underdeveloped.
The myths of
representation date back to the installation of these abstract signs. And it is
perhaps not without significance that the earliest forms of writing were
instruments of power, available only to the king and the temple.
The very
foundation of our concept of history depends on writing and its attributes. The
straight line, the undeterred progression from point A to point B, the
development of a logical argument, the organization of events along a common
trajectory, the sense of evolution – all of this is a product of writing.
Indeed, Darwin would not have existed without the alphabet. To reach the stage
where we can think of ourselves as products of evolution we need, first and
foremost, to have had an idea about how things can progress, how they can order
themselves linearly, how they are subject to causality. These are possible only
after writing; writing, which cuts through the chaos of the world and separates
things from signs, concrete objects from abstract representations.
The straight line and the promise of survival
It is when
the linearity of writing is put under question that we come to realize how
important it really is. In Mallarmé's throw of
dice, in Apollinaire’s calligrammes, in
all the efforts of Concrete Poetry, the
experiment, the taking of the rule unseriously, is felt like a discomfort.
Having to devise a new geometry for the poetic space (for the very space of
writing itself) appears as a transgression. It is with this transgression and
the feeling of discomfort that comes with it that power asserts itself as
unavoidable.
Source: Sewaholic |
Power is
advertised as an ideal place of eternal bliss. Power promises the comfort of
the commonplace, the corner where the mind ceases to be restless, irregular,
and chaotic. There is pleasure in transgressing the predicates of power, no
doubt, but this pleasure is one of the masochistic type: it takes pain as a
premise.
Every
discourse contains in itself the ability to turn into tyranny. And this
tyranny, this ultimate assertion of power as unavoidable, is achieved through
techniques of control, but also through claims to eternity. Constraint and
generosity: the two major mechanisms through which power is maintained in
place.
What's
interesting is that, at some point, writing's major promise of infinite
preservation ceases to be a promise and becomes a naturalization, a right. It
becomes what-things-really-are: a
fact, an argument, a certainty.
Writing
promises to be lasting, and ultimately – ever-lasting. Writing preserves what
otherwise would be lost in a sea of speeches. Writing is, in other words, the
real solution to the problem of the Tower of Babel. It posits itself as
evidence of what-things-really-are.
Life without
writing is unavoidable. This kind of ultimate declaration can be found in the
foundational statements of all systems of power and their accompanying
ideologies.
Road traffic
without road signs is impossible.
Life without
a system of economic exchange is impossible.
Wealth
without capital is impossible.
A city
without streets is impossible.
Identity
without Big Brother is impossible.
Afterlife
without righteousness on earth is impossible.
All these
are statements of power. They are employed in order to reassure the subjects
that the system works, that it is efficient, that it is the only option there
is. And so writing behaves like power, since it asserts its fundamental
capacity to record, to make history, to form consciousness.
And since
we're talking about consciousness, it's worth nothing that in an ideal power
situation the subject gives away their agency. In writing, the subject loses
his/her ability to memorize because he/she gives their ability away to writing,
thus asserting writing as a system of absolute storage: the room where nothing
ever is lost.
The safe haven
Systems of
power create products that reflect back onto the system itself in order to
idealize it by means of abstract formulas. See the rules for good writing: the
pedagogy of it, the schools and libraries and theaters erected in order to
glorify it, the idealization of the things of writing and of the writer's
figure, the hierarchization of species of writing so as to highlight the ideal
to the detriment of the marginal.
When writers
themselves talk about writing, this idealization is at its best articulation.
Sylvia Plath:
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt."
Here, on the
one hand, writing is put forth in terms of audacity. On the other hand, though,
it is judged in terms of its very means of materialization. So it looks like
we're talking about two different notions of writing: the technology and the
means of expression; the craft and the tools. The overlap is not at all
irrelevant, since by employing the tools one justifies the authority of the
craft. And why is self-doubt "the worst enemy of creativity?" Because
(ridiculously simple!) by not-writing one ceases to be the subject of writing.
This self-doubt is the doubt of a self that has been constructed in relation to
writing as a system of power. If the writing subject doubts himself, he
consequently doubts writing's ability to manifest itself in the subject; i.e.,
his faith in the ideology of writing is shattered. This is why, as perceivable
in Plath's admonition, writing, like all power, comes about with a demand to be
employed.
Source: Charlotte Rains Dixon |
Access to
power is often described as an act of courage. Power absorbs (in order to
prevent) the rebellious energies of its factions. And so, dealing with power
means dealing with that which is too much for the individual to bear. One needs
to have "the outgoing guts to do it" in order to access the
apparatuses of power. One needs to be a hero in order to write. With this
statement, it is not the subject that is being glorified, but the discourse
itself, and the ideology that is an articulation of it. Writing is not only a
technology, it is also a safe haven. It is the place where one is promised
freedom, provided one has correctly employed the tools.
"You must stay drunk of writing so reality cannot destroy you" (Ray Bradbury).
And so we
come to embrace that which writing can give us. We partake in the "joy of
writing," in the "pleasure of the text," in the "incredible
lightness of being [with words]". There is a lot to enjoy in writing, just
like there’s a lot to enjoy in every system of power, in every ideology.
The side that's always bright
What is
fairly easy to notice is power's reflective justification. Its apparatus of
self-promotion runs on references to a past that has always been directed
towards the glorious present. This is the myth of the Golden Age, the narrative
that keeps power alive. In the case of writing, it goes like this: without
writing we wouldn't have had books, cathedrals, roads, cars, computers,
marriages, burials, jobs, conscriptions, supermarkets, cemeteries, cafes,
philosophy, ethics, literature, history, cards, the game of Monopoly, cinema,
theater, air conditioning, tractors, profit, capital, politics, inspiration,
news, distribution of wealth, social welfare, Sunday markets, fast food chains,
the beautiful art of calligraphy, Chinese and Japanese pictographs, payrolls,
accountancy, urbanism, laws, order.
While this
is true (and it doesn't take a double-decker of intelligence to see the truth
of the statement), it is also true that without writing we could have had the
alternatives. The long list given above (far from complete, of course) is a
list of effects of writing. It
doesn't prove anything – especially it doesn't demonstrate the unavoidability
of writing. It merely catalogs late developments of a system of power. This
is a very efficient method of self-assertion, which works perfectly with
ideologies, because it glorifies power nostalgically and sets it in stone.
Source: LHS Writing Center |
Power
doesn't operate in terms of the conditional tense. It is what it is, not what it could have been. There are no if's, no but's, no let's-assume's.
What you see is what you get – the ultimate justification of power, its most
resounding victory. All could-have-been's are obliterated. They never existed,
therefore they could never have existed. Which is false, because any current
form of power was, back in its day, itself an alternative, one choice among
many, one path to be taken at a crossroads.
Of course, with
power things cannot be presented as haphazard. What's more, power falsifies all
evolution, to the extent that its current state is presented as the only
evolution possible, the only end of the only road ever given. That, once again,
is the way power asserts itself, how it rejects all competition.
Power aims
towards monopoly, and it is not hard to see, from the above, how that might be
the case when it comes to writing. Verba
volant, scripta manent. In this, speech is made impotent compared to the
alphabet. Hence the confidence in written things: newspapers, books, official
notices. "It's true because they wrote about it in the paper" is an
argument that still holds, now, in the third millennium. It is the argument of
the power of writing; the argument of writing as power.