What a rock can teach us about writing

At the beginning of last week I attended the public lecture of Alain Badiou in Auckland. He spoke about things that I find relevant to my obsession: writing. In what follows I will try to rethink his thoughts from this perspective of mine, and see if I'm any good at linking his ideas (which are mostly about mathematics, politics, and arts) to writing. [And just to keep the necessary distance, I must say that this is not a lesson in philosophy. I could not. I wouldn’t dare.]

Badiou's lecture was built around an quote from Jacques Lacan: "The Real is the impasse of formalization." Now, to start with, one will have to recapitulate, perhaps, one's understanding of the Real (not to be confused with 'reality,' which is a different matter altogether).

The Real

The Real, that which resists signification, is what exists anterior, exterior, and independent of the human subject and language. It's what is inexpressible, unsayable, unrepresentable. It is that which we are not even aware of, since it lives outside our awareness as well. But it's there. The Real is always there. It has always already been there. We come upon it by accident (what Badiou calls 'event'). And when we do, we come to a profound and shattering realization: we find out that we have been following the wrong show; that the signs we have created are somewhat inappropriate; not wrong in the sense of mistaken, but in the sense of limited – and limitative at the same time. It's like what happens to a lump of rock when it is turned into a statue. Before the statue there's only the rock. Better still, before the statue there is the mountain with the rock imbedded in it. And this is where the story starts.

Paper, scissors, rock

Before the rock was the mountain, but I don't want to think of this mountain as a finite entity: Mount Rushmore, or Mount Killimanjaro, or Mount Everest, or anything else – take your pick. I want to think of the mountain as something indefinite, something that has no real borders, no limits, something which cannot be put into a category, cannot be turned, for instance, into an object of art; something which, to use a better word, cannot be formalized. Not yet, that is.

Source: Marli Miller

But at some point, from within this mountain, someone cuts out a rock. Or maybe they find it already separated, eroded by natural phenomena and whatnot (it doesn't matter). By separating this rock from the rest of the mountain, this someone has performed an act of signification. He/she has isolated something, removed it, turned it into something with a human purpose, something with a semantic weight. Now it becomes clear that the mountain was anterior, exterior and independent of the human agent. The untouched mountain is a phenomenon over which the human has had no influence yet. Moreover, before the intervention, the mountain contained the rock as a potentiality. In the mountain, the rock has always already existed in this instantiation, as a piece of rock to be taken out.

And so, along the same line of reasoning we can say that, before the human gesture, this rock existed as part of the mountain. The mountain was a multiplicity containing the rock as an element of itself – an undifferentiated one but still there; hidden but there.

Source: Wikimedia

The artist's turn

We can, obviously, go further with this. Our rock, just separated from the multiplicity in which it existed before, is taken to an artist, who wants to make a sculpture out of it. He/she does so, and out of the rock comes a statue. Even more obviously than in the affair of the rock, here too we are dealing with a case of signification. And it's probably easier to see how the statue, the finished, polished, man-made object is, in relation to the rock, what the rock was in relation to the mountain. In the rock, the statue existed as a potentiality. The rock had in itself this special virtue, hidden, not yet brought to light, not yet materialized, of becoming, one day, the statue we are admiring now.

We can say that the rock, in relation to the statue, is something akin to the Real. It is the Real in the sense of being anterior, exterior, and independent of the rock. Anterior in the sense of having existed before the statue; exterior in the sense of being larger than the statue – containing the statue, as it were; and independent in the sense of existing outside of any intention of the statue (if that were even possible) to become an artefact.

Source: GoPixPic

The statue was potential in the rock, but that potentiality becomes apparent only after the artist has finished it. In order for us to have an ‘aha’ moment, we need an artist who has finished his work. So we can say that it is with the event of the statue's coming to life that we realize that it has always already been there, as a possibility, as a virtual materialization.

Events and impasses

Badiou talks a lot about events, which he considers to be the most important (and original, thus far) thing to be said about Being. In Badiou's philosophy, about objects/things (sculptures, for instance) one cannot say that they are. Instead, one has to say that they happen. They are the result of events. And these events offer us glimpses of what the Real might look like. But there's a major aspect to be mentioned here. An event is not a sole possibility. It is only one embodiment, one possibility, out of an infinity of other possibilities.

The point in the case of our statue is this: the piece of rock from which it emerged could have ended up as anything else. As a representation of a dog, as another lump of rock, as chips scattered about, as a block of any shape, as a failed sculpture. It's in this mass of possibilities that we find the complexity/multiplicity of Being (the being of the rock as well as the being of the world). And it's here that we find out the truth about human action: that we, in essence, put a limit to the complexity of the world every time we perform an act of separation (the way we did it in the case of the statue).

So what does it mean to say, with Lacan, that "the Real is the impasse of formalization"?

Formalization is the phenomenon of turning the rock into a statue: the drawing of limits to a thing that appeared, in the first instance, to be infinite. Every time we create something we produce events. But at the same time, we limit the immense field of potentialities that existed in Being. In relation to this, the Real, which presents itself as an incomprehensible surplus, is that which cannot be formalized; cannot be put into forms; cannot be made into objects (of art, of use, of purpose). In other words, it raises an impasse in front of the human agent precisely at the moment when he is engaged in a rapport with the same real. It does so as a reminder. The agent is reminded, with every act of creation, that the Real is an impossibility, that no matter how hard he tries, there’s no way he can attain the Real.

When you know you can't represent the unrepresentable, you are stuck; it feels like there's no way forward, towards further signification (the statue has taken the place of all other possible statues), neither backward (one cannot recreate the rock by putting together all the pieces that made its previous structure). And this is the impasse.

Source: Davidson College

And writing

All of the above can be said about writing as well. Writing operates on language the way the artist operates on the lump of rock. Through writing, things come out of language, which were not imagined before. Words are made apparent when they are turned into written signs. Otherewise, when they are still in the spoke form, they resemble the world too much to pose any major question about their validity. Words thus written represent the formalisation of language. Of course, language too behaves in relation to the world in the way the rock behaves in relation to the mountain: it is not a perfect rendering of the world; it is only a fragmented entity, a being from within Being – a phenomenon that proves the multiplicity of the world and its unrepresentability.

What would writing be without language? A system of signification without a referent. But what would language be without writing! So much more, so more impregnated with itself!

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.