The space(ness) of writing

Writing-as-space is a lucky metaphor; but one that makes apparent the combinatoric nature of inscriptions. It brings about the notion of site, but site as self-contradiction (not as conscious construction but as the result of luck).

To quote Foucault again, to create a network with him, in the sense that he must have had in mind when he talked about the nature of modern space:

“The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.”

My question now is: can I see writing behind this definition of space? Is writing “the space in which we live”?

In all appearance, yes: writing is the space in which we live. If this was not apparent after the invention of the press, it has categorically become apparent after the growth of the digital sphere. The digital sphere, itself a space: a space not because it has geographical coordinates but precisely because it is virtual. The virtual nature of the digital is nothing but a technological restatement of the virtual nature of writing tout court.

Of zeros and ones

In this space that is vastly virtual (and therefore real), writing is primarily a means of creating connections and mixing complexities. Here, in the digital universe, writing appears as a juxtaposition of digits. I am not so much interested in the digits (the famous downgrading of letters in relation to numbers) as I am in the juxtaposition that articulates them. The series of 0’s and 1’s that make up the structure of digital texts is capable of creating meaning out of the very operation of mixing and matching.

These 0’s and 1’s, in their glorious simplicity, are suspect companions. Taken separately, they represent the exact opposite of each other. 0 means closed, while 1 means open. With 1, a circuit becomes active; with 0, it becomes inactive (it is said to be either on or off). When seen at their most fundamental, these 0’s and 1’s are, really, instances of life and death. The putting of them together embodies, in one of the many possible ways, Foucault’s assertion concerning heterotopic structures: the fact that they are such that their elements “are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.”

It is only through the combinatoric function of the digital discourse that 0 and 1 are brought into a state of coexistence. This is what brings about the scandal of meaning, a scandal that governs any semantic instance. See Ferdinand de Saussure’s signs, which are purely arbitrary creations, unlikely bedfellows, just like digits forced to stay together. See the algebraic signs that stand for addition and subtraction (+ and –). See the logical operators that enable the establishment of truth (true and false, yes and no). All of the above are matters of language, and most importantly, matters of writable language.

The binary code used by computers allocates a sequence of bits to every function or operation possible in the computer’s refined and complicated brain. A bit is in itself defined as an either/or situation. A bit (short for ‘binary digit’) is precisely the articulation of this proximity of 0 and 1. Based on this primary distinction between the two values, a magical juxtaposition ensues, one that makes many things possible. One that makes everything possible. Everything that can be worked out by the digital brain.

Counter-site

Writing is, as shown at least by the case of 0’s and 1’s, a space of arbitrariness, where meaning occurs at the conjunction between basic bits (of information, of logic, of computation, of truth). Things that are put together are corralled into signification by force. It is the force of arbitrariness, or of entropy, that makes it possible for writing to turn up at all.

But writing isn’t just a meeting space. It is a site that contradicts its own siteness. It is, in Foucault’s words, a “counter-site.”

Let’s try to explain.

The logic of space is similar to the logic of signification, at least in the Saussurean sense, which doesn’t allow for simultaneity. A sign is a sign insofar as it can be told apart from another sign. (Let’s leave it at denotation and ignore connotation, for the sake of the argument.) In other words, signification tolerates juxtaposition but doesn’t do well with overlapping: signs can stand side by side but not one above the other. The same applies to a space, in the traditional, Leibnizian sense, of “that which results from places taken together” (a precursor to Foucault’s definition of space as connectivity). In order to have space, the world needs places; the network needs nods; planet Earth needs continents linked together by masses of water (or maybe vice-versa, if we were to look for an aquatic reason to geography). But most importantly, in order to have space the world needs places distinguishable from each other.

The overlapping of masses of earth can only lead to geological scandal: to earthquakes and all the catastrophes that come with it. Note, though, that even when it takes place, the overlap is not permanent; at some point, the two masses will return to their initial position, and the earth will go back to its original lack of ambiguity. The overlapping of written signs can only lead to semantic scandal: homography. If two words are spelled identically and yet mean a different thing, they can only mean what they mean depending on context. Without the context (the putting of texts together), there would be either gobbledygook or perplexity.

Language does its best to avoid this state of bafflement. But writing is not bound by the same constraint. On the contrary, writing is precisely the intoxication of language. Writing is the place where language is mocked, where it is made to mean.

The negation of space, the negation of writing

In this process of creation of meaning writing acts out the function of heterotopias, defined by Foucault as

“[sites] that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.”

Heterotopias negate the right of places to be what they have been designated to be. They negate the geological right of two masses of earth to staying beside each other, never over one another. They negate spatiality in the sense of calling into question its relation to distinctiveness, to uniqueness. Hence the example I mentioned last week, of the church, which is not one but many spaces. It is not completely public, nor completely private, but a part-public-part-private conglomerate.

But isn’t that what writing is as well?

Writing is language, in the sense that it would not be possible if it hadn’t always already been inherent in the code of language itself. But at the same time, it is also non-language, in the sense that writing transforms language, so as to render it representable as a series of signs, as a bit string. The 0 and 1 of digital writing is present here again. Life and death, on and off, present and absent, open and closed, writing and language: it’s here again, there again. But it is in writing that this ambiguous distinction/confusion is made possible. It is only writing that relativizes the solidity of language, its apparent non-ambiguity, in order to make itself apparent.

Writing 'as if'

Michel Foucault indicated that “our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.” The relationality of our world, which encompasses everything from globalization to network theories, offers me a way of thinking about writing as a site. So that’s what I’m concerning myself with this week.

Writing is a distributive business. It is the art of putting together disparate elements. The words of a vocabulary, the rules of a grammatical system, the ideology of a culture, all these things are assembled by means of writing. The assemblage is synchronic, i.e. it works in a right-here-right-now fashion. It amasses elements in an apparatus that transgresses the immediate inconsistencies of its components. At the same time, the assemblage makes apparent order in the seemingly chaotic structure of the world.

Writing is a heterotopic site

For the above reasons, one could say that the assemblage we call writing presents some of the features of what Foucault termed heterotopia. A heterotopic entity is a structure, an arrangement of parts, but one that does not homogenize smooth similarities. On the contrary, heterotopias bring together unlikely bedfellows: aspects of life, of ideology, of discourse, that don’t belong in the same class or don’t answer the same exigencies of classification.

Foucault was very specific. He pointed out concrete instantiations of the heterotopic phenomenon: places that don’t seem to serve any of the sharply divided functions normally associated with the role of a site. What characterizes a heterotopia is the fact that it doesn’t exist exclusively in the public realm,nor exclusively in the private sphere. It features in both, and yet in none of them.

Time for an example. A church. It is a place that’s not completely public, since certain restrictions are imposed onto whom can attend services or pay a tourist’s visit. But the church is not completely private either, because circulation of visitors, worshipers, and other participants in the service is not restricted in principle. Anybody can walk into a church and see what’s taking place there, even if they are not of the specific religion that is being served right there, right then.

Source: Prestige

In order to be accepted as a visitor of a church, one will have to fulfill certain functions, perform certain rituals, execute certain gestures that commit one to the site as such. Taking your hat off or crossing yourself at the threshold determines your affiliation to the place; not to the religion in all its complexity and ideology, but to the specific site in which you are observed at this particular moment.

The way we pretend

But I would like to notice that my affiliation depends on a whim. At the end of the day, I could fake those gestures only in order to seem as though I were a member or an acceptable visitor. Drawing a cross on my chest (an act of writing in its simplest form of inscription) is a task for the completion of which I don’t have to be a Christian. But once I’ve done it, I have fulfilled the conditions of acceptance that will allow me access to this particular site: the church I want to visit today. My religious beliefs notwithstanding, I have entirely satisfied the site’s ideology, as well as its ability to work as an assemblage (i.e. its ability to contain me, the unbeliever, or me, the one whose interest is purely touristic).

This is where I want to place my understanding of the gestures we make when we write. As techné, or craft, writing does require this faking of gestures, this apparent affiliation, this game of resemblances and illusions. As in the case of the church, writing too is prone to invite simulations.

Let’s put it this way: we write as if. We write as if we were intimately accustomed to the craft of writing; as if writing had revealed itself to us in all its complexity; as if it had shown us the full range of its technical and ideological possibilities.

But, in fact, this absolute knowledge is impossible. It is impossible because it depends on temporary coordinates that are not stable. Writing changes along with the material conditions that make it possible. It also changes along with the ideological edifices and mentalities that inform its necessities. So writing is very much a modern site (a la Foucault’s definition), because of this liminality of its condition. As Lieven de Cauter, who has made it his mission to expand on Foucault’s incomplete theory of heterotopias, concedes:

“A stay in a liminal space or a liminoid space is, by consequence, mostly temporary. Some people, however, dwell in heterotopias: priests, gurus and wandering philosophers, actors, artists, bohemians, musicians, athletes, entertainers and even architects and urban designers…”

References to writing are absent here, but that doesn’t stop me from imagining the writer as a dweller in a limbo. At the end of the day, a writer does operate in this gray area where connections are made, where ideologies and materialities are brought together to coexist within the limits of one text, of one oeuvre.

Source: COE online

Like the elements that enter in the composition of Foucault’s heterotopias, these ideologies and materialities that make up writing are only partially drawn into the scheme of the written document. They do not cease to exist in their original place. They only temporarily inhabit this site, this page, this text. And that is a fact that highlights the heteropia-like condition of writing.

Playing with impermanence

A writer’s stay in the limbo is said to be temporary, and that’s for the reasons already mentioned above: it’s not because they can’t hold their ground, but precisely because they can. A writer who is capable of managing the instability of the ground that stands beneath their feet is one that will dwell happily in temporariness.

The temporary aspect of the problem of writing is also given by the fact that writing deals with newness, with perverse forms of originality that constantly erode the ground, constantly contribute, destructively, to the redefinition of that ground. A poet, as Robert Pinsky put it somewhere, is a person whose work must be placed against the grain of poetry. A poet creates things that do not exist, things for which there is no definition yet. Otherwise we wouldn’t call them a poet, a creator, a maker of things.

It’s this absence of things that defines Foucault’s heterotopias: the fact that this presence-together made possible by a poem, or by any text for that matter, is writing’s fundamental function. The text is a hub of sorts. By means of a centripetal force that brings disparities to a common denominator, it creates a new topos, one that is neither here nor there. This topos, which might be referred to as the site of writing, is the point of convergence, the place where poetry materializes.

So a poet can be said to only simulate their own presence; to fake their compliance with the rules and conventions of the business of poetry, insofar as what we define as ‘poetry’ is a set of artifacts and operations already assimilated, already agreed upon (and therefore rendered useless). Writing against these agreed-upon facts, the poet creates meaning in the same way in which an intruding church-goer crosses themselves in spite of their ‘improper’ belief.

(to be continued)

Writing in order to be

Let me return once again to Michel Foucault’s interview from 1968. It’s in order to see (once again) what he meant by the obligation to write. Perhaps the most important, the most intriguing angle from which this obligation can be regarded, is this one, where we encounter the body that writes.

 

Where there’s writing there’s a body. Here’s a syllogism with good chances at appearing too obvious to be taken seriously. But the relationship between writing and body is far more complex than what this syllogism is about to recommend.

 

I disappear, therefore I am

It’s not in the presence of the body that one is likely to find the impetus to write, but in its disappearance. Now, of course, there are ways and ways of coming to terms with this disappearance of one’s own body through the embodiment of the text that is one’s only possible future. For a start, one could realize that this disappearance is not death; not exactly death. When I say my body has disappeared in the process of writing I am not uttering that Romantic ideal of the genius who lives for and through himself: that perfect mind, that perfect consciousness, that superhuman presence that fared so well in the nineteenth century and seems to have died (or maybe not yet) with Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Flame, ominously published on the cusp between centuries, in 1900, or better still, with his Charter of Carnaro, from 1920. (The genius dies in relation to his kind; he lives only insofar as he is misanthropically placed on a cliff overlooking humankind with aloofness).
No. What I mean by the disappearance of the body is that almost mundane oblivion that overtakes every writer when their scribbling is in action: even the person who puts his culinary desires into words on a shopping list, even the person who writes the ticket to punish me for my wrongly parked car.
In the process of writing, one needs to get rid of one’s body, so to speak, to put a distance between their selves and their words. It is only in this disappearance that writing can take place without the writer worrying about consequences. Otherwise, there’s too much fear, too much reflection, too much distraction; too much of the world and too little of the text. So, when writing, one is really hiding oneself in order to allow the text to come to life. It's a situation that resembles hunting. In hunting, the animal is lured by an invisible body. The animal is afraid, obviously – it is worried for its life. But the hunter is afraid too – worried that the hunt will not get to its expected outcome; that there will be no game to take home; that – if you like – the scenario of the hunt will not be materialized. A disappearing body is the guarantee of the game's appearance. An immaterialized body expecting the materialization of a text – this seems to be the right formula for the understanding of writing as an action performed through/with the body.

 

Foucault

This is my take. Foucault’s goes, obviously, a little further. To him, writing appears as an obligation to please this disappearing body by offering it the chance to stay away from the society that builds walls and constraints around it. When writing, the body disappears not only in relation to the text and the page on which that text is being laid down, but also in relation to the external pressures of the world. Writing is, at its core, a form of fantasy. It starts from an impulse to liberate the self and goes so far as to affirm that self to the obliteration of the world. This is why writing is different from speaking, as Foucault insists in the interview: because the former evades the world, while the latter addresses it, lives with the world, embraces it as a place for communication. The body is torn between the two, since speech needs it in order to materialize itself in the world, while writing rejects it precisely in order to come to life.

“Another reason why writing is different from speaking is that we write to hide our face, to bury ourselves in our own writing. We write so that the life around us, alongside us, outside, far from the sheet of paper, this life that’s not very funny but tiresome and filled with worry, exposed to others, is absorbed in that small rectangle of paper before our eyes and which we control. Writing is a way of trying to evacuate, through the mysterious channels of pen and ink, the substance, not just of existence, but of the body, in those minuscule marks we make on paper. To be nothing more, in terms of life, than this dead and jabbering scribbling that we’ve put on the white sheet of paper is what we dream about when we write. But we never succeed in absorbing all that teeming life in the motionless swarm of letters. Life always goes on outside the sheet of paper, continues to proliferate, keeps going, and is never pinned down to that small rectangle; the heavy volume of the body never succeeds in spreading itself across the surface of the paper, we can never pass into that two-dimensional universe, that pure line of speech; we never succeed in becoming thin enough or adroit enough to be nothing more than the linearity of a text, and yet that’s what we hope to achieve. So we keep trying, we continue to restrain ourselves, to take control of ourselves, to slip into the funnel of pen and ink, an infinite task, but the task to which we’ve dedicated ourselves.”

 

Putting the body together

Indeed, “we write to hide our face.” The writer, even when he/she is an author with a photograph proudly printed on the back cover of a book, is an entity without a face. His/her text is to a certain extent a reconstructive procedure: an attempt to form a face. This is because an author’s identity is not the identity of their face, but the identity of their work. Their name too is, in fact, nothing but a form of ID. So the creation of a text is, really, the creation of an identity. And this identity keeps forming, keeps coming to light, with every text written, with every word taken out of its linguistic context and placed in the context of its newly acquired text.

The problem is that we’ve come to identify writing almost exclusively with authors of books, and that’s why we can’t see this reconstructive nature of writing, this obligation to write in order to form a face and a body. But take once again the example of someone who’s writing a shopping list. Where is that person’s face? Where is their body? What can we say about that person if we found their shopping list (as we often do) fallen onto the ground, left to disappear once the work has been finished (once shopping has taken place)? Nothing. Nothing about their body, that is. But there is an identity right there, on that little piece of paper, and that identity comes to life as the result of writing. That's how that “dead and jabbering scribbling” is a guarantee for the person who wrote the list that he/she will be remembered – if such might one day be their desire. Remembered, obviously, in the sense of re-membering, of putting that person back together from the little scribbling on that paper.

 

We cannot write forever

But what’s really painful to see is, as Foucault points out, the failure of this process of self-disembodiment. Yes, we’ve acquired, through writing, a sense of standing apart from the world. But the world doesn’t die when we push it aside. We realize that, instead of being apart from it, we are a part of it.

Writing cannot happen forever, i.e. we cannot be forever in the process of scribbling. In contrast, the world never ends. It is. It exists on the outside of our selves and awaits, patiently, for us to switch off the fantasy we are fantasising about. We’re never going to be like the geometrical figures in Abbott’s Flatland. True, complete, irreversible disappearance from the world would be, indeed, a form of imprisonment on the page, a transformation into a character, into a diagram, into a geometrical material. I don’t know if that would be better. I don’t know if Foucault really meant it that way. (Him, the critic of imprisonments?) But one thing is certain: he saw the impossibility of such a project. As a consequence, he sees writing as a temporary transfer at best. We leave the world to live in a fantasy, but at some point we will be obliged to return. And when that happens, we find that the world is there. It has never left. The world is where we return; it is where we’ve never departed. This is the pain and the pleasure that come with writing. Whoever thought it would be easy!

Writing, aka arrogance

More often than not, the thing we call Writing is associated with some form of humility. Listen to people who tell you how they've grown into writers. They will produce stories about humble beginnings, about shyness, indecision and the whole gamut of self-deprecating sentiments. (I generalize here, of course. Not all writers talk about writing in these terms; but try the exercise on a handful of them and you'll see).

I'd like to think about writing in a different way: not as humility but as arrogance. And once again, I start by making use of Foucault's interview, mentioned last week.

Endless work

Foucault imagined the obligation of writing as a promise; as a kind of prize one sets up for oneself, so as to reach the end of the process basking in the glory of having succeeded. But at a more careful reading, one may find that this promise is in fact a certainty. One sets out on the journey towards the end of one's work knowing that the end will be reached. But reached in a peculiar way. The completion of the task, the writing of the page, the finishing of the manuscript - all these are forms of work that start anew as soon as the finish line has been crossed. A writer knows that the present task is not the Task. That the sentence, the paragraph, the page, the manuscript, don't represent the Race of all races. When one writes with a conviction that the present work is the only work ever produced (that once this assignment is done there will be no more assignments) one sets oneself up to fail as a writer.

Source: Huffington Post

Listen to Foucault:

"Ultimately, we always write not only to write the last book we will write, but, in some truly frenzied way – and this frenzy is present even in the most minimal gesture of writing – to write the last book in the world. In truth, what we write at the moment of writing, the final sentence of the work we’re completing, is also the final sentence of the world, in that, afterward, there’s nothing more to say. There’s a paroxysmal intent to exhaust language in the most insignificant sentence."

Now if this doesn't sound arrogant I don't know what does. Notice that Foucault speaks of writing as an attempt at reaching an ultimate end. That appears to contradict what I've said so far. But now comes the trick; because the truth is different. Yes, the task is there; yes, the hope to produce the ultimate text is the very fuel that keeps writers active in their jobs. But language has always already indicated to the writer that exhaustion is impossible insofar as it (language) is concerned.

In order to contain language, we would need to overpower it. And that, of course, is absurd. Absurd because, in reality, it's the other way round. Whatever use we make of language, we're only tasting samples. Language, in its totality, is too vast to be defeated. We never see its limits, so how could we even hope to advance towards the end of language?

Let's not despair, though

But Foucault's proposition is full of optimism. He doesn't see writing as a cause for depression. But that's because his writing is perpetual discovery. He uses it as a tool in the quest towards knowledge. To Foucault, writing is not solid representation but temporary construction. It is not a system of notation but an epistemic prop. It is not dwelling but moving about.

Source: Pleruduriel

As Michel Butor said in an essay published in the 1990's, writing resembles nomadism. The success of the nomad is not in the choosing of a place to stay, but in the consideration of all places as probable, yet impossible, settlements. In other words, there's more pleasure in moving on than in stopping to enjoy the view. There's more to be found in acceleration than in stasis.

It is within this kind of approach that writing appears as a promise of success. Having reached one end is no cause for celebration. The novelist in Stephen King's Misery, mentioned last week, smokes his cigar and drinks his champagne not because he's decided to retire after this book, but because he is setting himself up for the next glass and the next smoke. He is setting himself up for the experience of writing as a progression towards an impossible End.

Writing, seen from this angle, is more akin to the story of the prince, in Dino Buzzati's "Seven Messengers." There, a young prince sets out on a journey to reach the ends of his father's empire. He travels and travels, in the company of his messengers, hoping to find that final frontier. But the more he advances, the more he is struck by the truth of his endeavor: there is no end. There is no pause for his search. He has one option alone: to move forward, to produce traces of his journey, encountering new territory every step of the way, leaving the old behind, advancing towards a continuous confirmation of the limitlessness of his father's empire; and, ultimately, towards the only possible end: his own death.

The arrogant creator

Erica Jong says: "No one asks for a new book, but you need to write it." Herein lies another truth about writing, another revelation significant to the condition of the one who writes. The world is already full of texts. It is already busy coping with its own immensity. So writing really originates in a need that belongs in the writer; it is, as it appears, a gesture meant to satisfy an individual need for success: the author's desire to see his own text elbowing its way through a world already choked full of texts.

This is also an act of irreverence. At the end of the day, by forcing his own text into a world inhabited by the texts of his predecessors, the writer implies that the predecessors were insufficient; that they came about with important gaps in their bibliography. Gaps that need to be filled by the writer; gaps that only the writer is capable of filling. And so, the world should be thankful to the writer (this writer), to the fact that his existence makes possible the completion of a work left incomplete by the predecessors.

Source: Big Think

The history of writing is the history of arrogance. Not only established writers do it. Authors of love letters do it too. Had there been a perfect love letter in the world, wouldn't it be easier to copy it? Wouldn't it be easier to multiply the archetype instead of adapting (i.e. destroying) it? The author of love letters knows that if such an archetype did exist, it would forever be devoid of an important component: the author's biography; his/her alterity. Love letters, like other forms of writing, are not centered on the text but on the fulfillment personal wish. Because at the end of the day, as Erica Jong observed, nobody has asked for a text to be written. As with creation, so with procreation. Nobody has asked for any particular child to be born either. And yet texts are written, babies are brought into the world.

Human arrogance is what this is. We need to be ashamed of it. We need to be thankful to it. Without it, we would never offend tradition. Without it, we would never move on.

From threat to treat

I'd like to take a look at the question of writing through a few things Michel Foucault said in an interview given in 1968, but published only recently. In this interview, Foucault speaks about writing as an obligation. And that’s what I’m on about this week.

In order to produce a text, in order to sit at a table at all, one needs to feel the itch to do so. We've seen this already: it's been said by all writers, the respectable ones as well as the mediocre ones. This urge, this necessity, is necessary to anyone who believes in writing as a career or as a self-healing mantra. But unlike Cioran, Kafka, or Doris Lessing, Foucault chooses to see this compulsion to write from its luminous end, i.e. from its point of arrival, from the last page, as it were. Although he doesn't exclude the pain that comes with writing, Foucault sees the practice through the lens of the pleasure that follows. And so, he manages to write off everything that's Romantic, gloomy, obsessive, suicidal in writing, and as a consequence produces an image that bursts with optimism.

Source: www.michel-foucault.com

Obligation à la Foucault

What's important, though, is that - true to Foucault's general view on writing - this obligation is not a given. Not a given in the sense of something received like a punishment that cannot be escaped. This obligation isn't written the way destiny appears in some tales in the Arabian Nights, marked in the corner of one's eye, so as to be known from the very beginning. To Foucault, the obligation to write comes gradually. It stretches like an organ that grows and grows in order to incorporate the newer, more soliciting, functions that keep arising as the practice of writing is being perfected.

"This obligation to write, I don’t really know where it comes from. As long as we haven’t started writing, it seems to be the most gratuitous, the most improbable thing, almost the most impossible, and one to which, in any case, we’ll never feel bound. Then, at some point – is it the first page, the thousandth, the middle of the book or later? I have no idea – we realize that we’re absolutely obligated to write."

Foucault's uncertainty, the fact that he keeps repeating "I don't know" (he does it through the interview a number of times), is an indication of this process. One never knows what is happening until everything has happened.

Source: Jamie Sheffield

One never knows what the first step brings with it until one has taken the first step and seen its consequences. It's only at the end of the track that the runner realizes the extent of his victory. In the beginning - before the starter pistol has shot its caps, before the pen has left the first marks on the page - the only thing that's known is that there's a race to be run; that there's a page to be written. Nothing else. Blankness all over - that's what looks the runner and the writer in the face in that state of a race-to-come.

Moving forward

The knowledge that there's a race to be run is what gives the writer the impulse to go further and further. The anxiety that comes with the whiteness of the yet-unwritten page becomes the promise of its being filled sooner or later. One still has that anxiety rushing through one's blood. One needs the next fix in order to make oneself functional for the rest of one's day, for the rest of one's life. Writing experienced like a drug, like a medicine, like a panacea. And all starts with the promise that exists in writing: the promise of a success.
Every written page is a success, even if one will feel the urge to remove it later, to be done with it, to even hate it to the point where one wants to see it destroyed. There is a sense of success even in the certainty of the doubt. Even in Hemingway's anticlimactic axiom, "The first draft of anything is shit." What counts is the production of that first draft, the running of that race. Mario Vargas Llosa too said somewhere that he writes in the hope of reaching the stage of rewriting/editing, i.e. bearing in mind the pleasure to be experienced on the other side of the finish line. For Vargas Llosa, the truly pleasurable facts of writing come after the groundwork: after he's covered the track and crossed the line. Work first, party later. But party, nonetheless!

Foucault:

"By writing that page, you give yourself, you give to your existence, a form of absolution. That absolution is essential to the day’s happiness. It’s not the writing that’s happy, it’s the joy of existing that’s attached to writing, which is slightly different. This is very paradoxical, very enigmatic, because how is it that the gesture – so vain, so fictive, so narcissistic, so self-involved – of sitting down at a table in the morning and covering a certain number of blank pages can have this effect of benediction for the remainder of the day? How is the reality of things – our concerns, hunger, desire, love, sexuality, work – transfigured because we did that in the morning, or because we were able to do it during the day? That’s very enigmatic. For me, in any case, it’s one of the ways the obligation to write is manifested.”

Pleasure belongs in the end

So if writing is, in this scheme of things, an obligation, it is an obligation to please the self. In the other examples I discussed in my previous posts - in the embarrassing weakness deplored by Cioran, in the neurotic need of Kafka, in the self-scolding of Doris Lessing - this obligation to write was one meant to reveal writing as a way of constantly hurting oneself; of taking aim at one's self so as to punish it for its incapacity to reach conclusion (the dream, perhaps, of being able to write the Book of all books). Foucault, however, who aimed for clarity but, more than anything else, for closure (the philosopher's hope to facilitate understanding by reaching the point where clarification has been achieved), regarded writing almost as a treat. Not the process itself, of course, but the end of it: the moment when, like Paul Sheldon, the novelist in Stephen King's Misery, the writer enjoys a glass of champagne and an expensive cigar every time he finishes a new book.

This type of thinking about writing concentrates on the finish line. It is only concerned with the beginning insofar as beginnings are the necessary first steps towards satisfaction.

Source: Kerry Drumm

Foucault doesn't talk much about his failures, and neither does he say much about his pain. That's because his process of writing is peppered with well-placed re-fueling stations.

At some other point in the interview, he declared his conviction that writing was a way of making light in things that appeared, in the beginning, devoid of luminous finality. So since writing is discovery, the pleasure of having written is equal to the pleasure of having discovered something new. And as long as there's new text, there are new pleasures to be found at every turn. The pleasure principle is refuelled, and writing can go on, in the expectation of finding new stations along the way.

If, as it's often suggested to students in Writing classes, a text needs signposts in order to give readers the pleasure of visiting familiar places, one discovers in Foucault's take on writing a similar jocular principle: a game with promises made to himself.

Through writing, Foucault discovered what he wanted to say. He made light in his own mind by moving forward in his own text. Things were not (could not) be clear in the beginning. Remember? At the start, the race is only a virtuality. It hasn't even begun, it hasn't yet presented itself to the writer as a process at all. At the start, before the pistol has been shot, there's only a darkness that awaits illumination. Only the end clarifies. Only in the end one sees, looking backwards, one's own work, one's own progression. Finis coronat opus. And so, there is champagne beyond the crossing line, and an ocean of laughter. The day is over; long live next day!