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.

To be anxious about writing

Writing appears at the intersection between desire and anxiety. On the one hand there’s the desire to write; a desire to produce signs and, with signs, meanings. On the other hand, though, a strong trepidation accompanies the act of writing. While writing, the writer is aware that he/she is situated within an environment that preceded their coming into existence as writers, or their coming into existence full stop. 

Source: Fine Art America

Writing is possible, I would say, only in the stressful conditions of a precedent that owns the field and dictates the rules of engagement.

Self-harm 

The production of signs does not happen in a vacuum. I can never honestly declare that what I have said or written is devoid of any collateral implications. What’s more, the thing that lies there, on a piece of paper or hanging in the air over the heads of my audience, cannot be said to be the result of an independent mind, or of a talent that stands on its own. Producing signs is, perhaps, a wrong phrase to use in relation to a creative undertaking. Re-producing is a much better way of putting the problem. When I write, I recycle modes of writing, techniques, genres, rhetorical imperatives, theoretical affordances, ways of putting the problem, ways of asking questions, ways of presenting an interiority that is otherwise invisible to the outside. All these things were already there, way before my decision to write. They were there, produced by others, many of whom will forever be anonymous to me, but who have contributed, through their concerted efforts, to the creation of an ecosystem of precedences which surfaces every now and then in the form of cliches, commonplaces, platitudes, apophtegms and aphorisms. Here, among the illustrious precedents (always illustrious, because always made to shine by those who take precedence as a matter of adoration), the writer is made to realize this unequivocal truth of re-production: their writing has already had a life in a past that informs the present. And so, no act of writing can escape the persecution of the precursor. The one who came before is a subject better situated in relation to the production of signs, and that is simply due to the chronological advantage of having been there before. 

Because of this persecution of precedence (or “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom would have it), writing is often experienced as a form of self-mutilation. In order to produce the simplest text, one does violence to one’s self. One forces the self to take up roles that do not belong to the self but to external factors: cultural paradigms, ideological injunctions, rules of social circulation, in short: the semantics of everything. And in order for all this to happen, the self has to go through painful metamorphoses. From the mirror stage onward, the self is constantly subjected to cosmetic surgeries. These operations readjust the morphology of the self so as to make it match the external conditions. The truth of the matter is that, in order to be a self, one needs to be a multitude: the expression of everything already expressed, and which is being reproduces through the act of writing.  

The corralling of language 

But writing cannot go naked in the world. That would be a perversion. Free writing is perverse in the most etymological sense of the word; in the sense that it is inverted, that it goes against the grain. Free writing, the way the Surrealists, for instance, imagined it, upsets terribly the disciplines of writing. It does so because the text generated by these means is almost impossible to read. Now of course, what I mean here is that the structure of writing (which is an ordering of language) requires us to do things. This structure demands compliance with its pre-existent pattern. Writing is a series of patterns created so as to assure that all future forms of writing are recognizable. One might be able to detect an ideology of writing behind this statement. Ideologies are, at a fundamental level, systems of forced reconciliation between the strictures of a system and the natural propensity of the elements in that system to go about haphazardly, so to speak; to roam freely the green pastures of the pre-systematization. All elements in a system are, prior to their affiliation to that structure, well... unaffiliated. Their lack of affiliation would be, if we were to think in terms of freedom, the tendency of those elements to act outside the system. 

Unsystematized objects are objects without a class. But this classification made possible by expression (writing et al), this bringing of objects to a common denominator, can only take place through an act of violence. 

Source: Modern Notion

Systematization means taming. The animals roaming the green pastures are corralled into an enclosure where their access to their former freedom is no longer possible. That is what happens at the moment of writing as well. If we do understand writing as the taming of language. 

Writing is language written down, language forced into the strictures of inscriptions (representability, categorization, grammar, punctuation, etc. etc.) Language, in its non-written version, doesn’t consider grammatical appropriateness as significant. It doesn’t consider it at all. 

Imagine an animal which has never experienced the reality of an enclosure! 

To keep within the field of zoological illustrations, let’s say that taming by means of structure is not unlike the quasi-scientific anecdote of the golden fish that is released from its bowl. When allowed to swim freely in a pond (so the anecdote goes), the fish will keep swimming in tight circles, unaware of the vastness that’s surrounding it. This example stands to illustrate that habituation to the confinements of systems is quasi-permanent. Of course, it doesn’t mean that liberation is impossible. There will always be escapees, runaways, deserters. But awareness of the very possibility of freedom is limited by the habit of living inside a confinement. That’s why those jailbreakers and runaways are so few. 

Once corralled, I would say, one belongs in the corral. 

Anxieties 

Now we need to agree that the corral is not perceived as a problem by just about anybody. On the contrary, most of the people who write (who use inscription in its pragmatic forms) will have no clue that writing can imprison. Form-filling, box-ticking, assignment-writing, do cause anxiety, but this anxiety is of a different type, of a different level of magnitude. One that leaves no scars. 

It these cases, it is not the inscription that causes the psychotic event but the consequences that derive from that inscription. In other words, the anxiety comes after writing, not before it. Have I done the right thing? Have I ticked the right boxes? These are customary questions experienced by writers of this kind. 

Source: National Geographic

But the other type of anxiety I have in mind, the one I’ve been talking about here, is the anxiety that comes with creative writing. When writing happens under the auspices of a creative imperative, the writer becomes aware of the environment of their own inscription, and they become aware of it before the inscription has materialized. A creative writer writes knowing that they are operating in a field where things have been done before, things that are now limiting the range of possibilities. Once Anna Karenina was written, it cannot be written again. Not in the same way, not by using the same succession of words. By contrast, the filling of forms and the writing of assignments depend precisely on repeatability. Writing the same words does not constitute a problem. Producing the same signs is the rule. It does not hurt at all to walk in the footsteps of a predecessor.

The power of habit

“But woe unto you, O torrent of human custom! Who shall stay your course? When will you ever run dry?”

(St. Augustine, Confessions)

Vilém Flusser wrote a very enlightening essay about the power of habit, which is very much in tune with the point I made last week. Habit (remember?) is what happens to miracles when they are worn out. It is also what happens to technologies. In the essay, Flusser highlights something we know too well: that novelty is scary; it frightens us, it makes us have second thoughts.

The ugliness of beauty

We cannot function well in the company of novelty, because what is new is unknown to us. We are exposed in front of new things. Naked. Impotent. Exposed because opened-up, as is the case with miracles, which reveal to us a truth that we have never been aware of, in spite of the fact that it has always existed there, in the kingdom of miracles, indifferent to us. (Paul Valéry found it deplorable that we, humans, often attempt to count the stars; us, who count for nothing to those stars!)

Source: Gehad Elgalad

And so, goes Flusser's argument, new things don’t come to us as beautiful. They come to us as an almost unbearable tension: the tension between what we know and what we are experiencing right here, right now, as foreign to us. This tension is so high, we can’t resist its power. We lose the battle with novelty at the very moment it becomes apparent to us. That’s perhaps because any new thing is a reminder to us of how immense and yet-unknown Being is, and how threatening to our comfort its manifestations are. Jacques Derrida speaks of “the as yet unnameable,” which, not unlike Flusser’s idea of novelty, is a shock we receive at the level of existence as well as at that of language, and which catches us in a knowledge and linguistic gap. Derrida assures us that the only way this unnameable can be experienced by us, who have no experience of it, is

“in the formless, mute, infant and terrifying form of monstrosity.”

There it is, right there, the adjective that best defines the encounter with the new: terrifying. It is the very term Flusser uses to talk about novelty.

So. New things are so new to us they are terrifying. They are monstrous; they are frightening; they are ugly. And this is the paradox of beauty pointed out by Flusser: in its earliest form (in the form it takes at its birth) beauty (if we agree that, for instance, the appearance of an angel is beautiful, or the emergence of a work of art that is unprecedented is beautiful too) always appears to us as ugliness:

“Thus ‘art’ is that human activity which aims at producing hateful, ugly situations, situations that cause terror.”

No wonder we spend so much time and so much energy to reject new things. We have done so every time writing and reading were given new material support: when we moved from clay tablets to scrolls, when we moved again from scrolls to codices, when we stopped reading hand-written manuscripts and started reading printed books. Not to mention the jump to computers – which, as we know, has caused so much criticism, in which ‘ugly’ is an often-used appellation.

The terror of miracles

The crucial tension in miracles is that of their initial ugliness. No miracles were miraculous at the moment of their occurrence. Their miraculous nature was made apparent later on, when reflection became possible, when we discovered we were no longer mute, no longer incapable of creating signs to explain the “unbearable lightness of being,” to use the title of a well-known novel. When they happen, when they take place (both as in ‘happening’ and as in ‘occupying a pre-existent space’), miracles are reflection-less. The shock of their novelty impedes us from thinking about miracles, which right then, in their initial manifestation, are mere happenings: “as yet unnameable.”

Source: Kev Design

This is Flusser’s point too. Things beautiful start by being ugly, more likely to be met with rejection than acceptance. However, as soon as we get past that initial moment of shock, once we have accommodated within us the novelty of a piece of technology, we can start talking about things as beautiful. It is only now, after the shock has been processed and we acknowledge that we’ve survived the encounter, it is only now that we can truly speak of beauty as an aesthetic category. In order to move on from terror into beauty, an act of courage is necessary, since, according to Flusser,

“this is that grey zone into which those artists have climbed who have attempted, at the risk of their lives, to utter that which is unutterable, to render audible that which is ineffable, to render visible that which is hidden.”

The heroic gesture of poets (of writers, or artists, of those who have the clear-sightedness of critical perspective) is what opens for us, simpler mortals, less complicated searchers for the ineffable, the safe pathway towards admiration. Harold Bloom was right in saying that true poets always misread the poetry of their predecessors, thus creating, for their own readers, the possibility of admiration. It’s easy to understand how: a “looking-over-again,” as Bloom calls this misreading, renews the text: it presents it to the future readers as novelty. And so a miracle is enacted again, and writing can go on, miraculously, towards its completion as an art of miracles-in-the-making.

We can only admire that which we can manage, once the ground-breaking work has been done for us.

On the lowest rung

But this isn’t where the story ends, because we have an interesting tendency of repeating what we can manage. And so, the miracle that started off as a terror becomes beautiful, and then pretty. It reaches one grade lower. This is the manageable beauty of things enjoyed by the masses (and I don’t mean masses in a disparaging way, but as a collective appreciation of things that were once the object of a minority of odd perceivers, of freaks who used to enjoy ugliness perversely).

Once we’ve reached this stage, the next step comes about as little surprise: the intense use of a thing turns that thing into kitsch. This is the ultimate step in the degradation of something that was once beautiful, once terrifying, once of the order of miracles “as yet unnameable.”

Source: The Guardian

Kitsch is prettiness in excess. But most importantly, it is the result of habit. Habit wears out a shirt; it tatters our raptures; it makes something that was unbearably visible into pure invisibility, into non-presence. Pretty things are invisible things. They participate in the life of art by not participating: by remaining invisible and by turning miracles, for instance, into common occurrences.