Drafts and dissatisfactions

Following last week’s post, I need to say this: if on the one hand we can speak of the pride of the work-well-done, we could also speak, on the other hand, of a nostalgia that comes with the state-before-work.

Source: Life Hacker

When we see our text in printed form, we often experience the regret of not having put it into the right words. Going over a draft and making changes to it is not, as we would be tempted to say, an effect of some cult of perfection. At the end of the day, there are texts of one draft and paintings of one layer. The need to repaint is not always felt with an urge. The sense of that ‘perfect version’ is often secured from the first dab of paint.

No, I don't think it's the dream of a perfect outcome that drives us to a redeployment of our creative resources. It is rather the acknowledgment of the complexity of possibilities that stood at the foundation of the finished text.

Returning, again and again

With a text, we have only accomplished one of the many possibilities that existed before the same text was even dreamed of. We have completed one of the possible journeys. We have given voice to one set of embodiments.

In essence, every single draft is just as good as any other. But what matters is the moment when, often unconsciously, one stumbles upon the truth that the universe of possibilities is greater, ever more complex than a single text. That moment matters because in it one rediscovers the fact of the-state-before-the-beginning. And, along with it, the pleasure of what Mircea Eliade called ‘the eternal return’: the blissful reiteration of a golden age of perfections, now lost but still capable of being re-enacted.

One's displeasure with the current state of a given text (its draft) marks this necessity of the return to where the text has not yet come into being. What is being challenged on this occasion is the origin: the sense that all that matters is what has followed after the beginning. This happens as if there were no other ways of gauging the depths of a text than by reference to its initiation. But there is more to be found in the constituency of a text, in its morphology. Its very history too needs to be regarded, with all benevolence, from a perspective that relativizes its inception.

Source: Sadie's Sketchbook

Semiotics

From the perspective of a sign theory, the apparition of a text is equivalent to the rise of a sign. What we read when we read a text is truly a sign. But signs, as we know, are arbitrary. They depend on the whim of the agent signifier and on the possibilities enabled by the system of signification in which it appears. Take these things out and you're left with a pre-sign: a sign not yet created but found in a state of pregnant potentialities. Note the plural. There is no such thing as one possibility when we speak of a text; the reader-response theories of the twentieth century have taught us this much. But the fact that an infinite number of readings can create an infinite number of texts is only a reflection of the same game of potentialities existent in the text/sign in the first place.

It often happens to me that I read a story, a novel, an essay, and I find within the text places where I would have done it otherwise. This is where I find the draftness of texts, their capacity to be different from their actual form. And here I may say I am better situated, because I can see the phenomenon not in my own text (where I may be said to be biased by a personal urge to do better) but in the text of another. In a text of someone else's making I do not perceive a deficit of the agent (the author in flesh and blood) but a deficit of the process of textual formation, which depends on arbitrary signs and external rules.

I return upon a given text because of this fundamental deficit of signification. The signs I am using are not likely to describe the Real, which resists the power of signs and which continues to live outside of the said signification. Forever and ever.

The fact that we have a science of signs doesn't change in the least the terms of the problem. Like all sciences, semiotics is not prescriptive but descriptive. It does not tell us how signification is to be done, but describes existent acts of signification, i.e. it tells us about how signification has taken place. Biology too cannot possibly tell about the making of Life, but dwells happily among lives, among specimens of the phenomenon Life. In other words, it describes them; it never gives recipes.

A triad of dissatisfactions

I would call this perpetual return upon the point before the origin of a text 'the drive towards drafting.' It comes, as I said earlier, as a regret: the sorrow, if you like, of not finding the right words. This regret highlights the imperfection of the written text and, at the same time, issues out a warrant against all future forms of writing. I write knowing that the most probable outcome is a dissatisfaction that will have to be fixed, a dissatisfaction that will have to be 'worked out.'

Source: V&A

Displeased, distraught, disenchanted. These are the three stages of dissatisfaction that come with the production of a text. First, one experiences a loss of pleasure: the text is incomplete, it requires further input, further work, further effort; if it promises anything, that can only be the expenditure of one's energies. Second, one lives to be distraught by the text. There is a panic in every text: the realization that one has to deal with the problem, that there's no way one can leave it the way it is, that one must proceed with further drafting in order to shape the perfectly imperfectible text. And then, at the last stage of this triad of dissatisfactions, one grows disenchanted with the text. This last stage is attained when the author decides that the current version is the final version. Commonly thought to be the glorious moment of a text's completion, the final version is final only by way of an abrupt decision. The writer decides, at a whim, that he/she can't go any longer. They may be tired, they may be sick. There is a nauseating impression one gets from toiling repeatedly the same field only to get out of it the same crop of frustration. And so a finish line has to be sought. Published texts are precisely that: instantiations of the finish line – a line that's always arbitrarily drawn, since at the end of the day, there's no established number of drafts a text must go through before the author makes the decision. Any draft is, potentially, the last draft. Any ending is, let’s be honest, the perfect one. But the doubt – the awareness that this could have ended differently…

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.