Why writing is NOT a miracle

I talked about miracles not long ago, and somehow it seemed relevant to discuss writing in relation to them. Relevant, but not immediately available, since writing (unlike miracles) is premeditated, i.e. we know what it is going to lead us to before we have experienced it at all.

Stultifera Navis

The miraculous side of writing, if such thing is ever possible (if it is ever allowed to happen within the bounds of the marvellous), is not a thing easy for us to acquire. That, of course, has nothing to do with writing in particular, but rather, more generally, with the way we are taught and with the way education happens upon us.

Source: Studio Bendib

Schools do not work by means of sudden discoveries, but via a gradual, painstaking, scholastic unfolding of all forms of knowledge, of all techniques and all distinctions. Jacques Rancière insists that our perception of education is wrong from the get-go. We assume, he argues, that between the teacher and the disciple there is (there must be!) a difference of intellects. There’s always the Titan who knows and the pygmy who has no clue. It is between these two tragic figures that we tend to negotiate the meaning of learning. One is smart (too smart), while the other is stupid (too stupid). There is nothing left between these extremities: no territory where the teacher can be stupid (at least a little) and the student smart (at least for the length of the season of their education). In fact, the difference is so colossal, the disciple is in a constant state of stupefaction. He/she needs to be shaken into reality in order to realize his/her own presence in the equation. He/she needs to be told and re-told how little they know and how much they still have to learn. And that stultifies them (to use a term Rancière employs a lot). Seen from this perspective, education is a capital promise; rarely a fulfillment.

Read the prescription!

Rancière doesn't deny the existence of a fundamental inequality in the phenomenon of education. But (he argues) this is not an inequality of intellects, but rather an inequality of volitions. It is the willingness to learn (to give up everything else in order to learn) that truly makes a difference between the one who knows and the one who doesn't. And then again, the one who doesn't know is not necessarily inferior. He/she is simply not interested. Or (which is worse) he/she is not interested because he/she is constantly kept in check by a massive apparatus of social and political constraints which give them tasks to complete, jobs to finish, positions to fill, thus making it impossible to approach education in ways that are non-professional.

And so, we get to learn writing according to prescriptions. Not only are we force-fed with genres, templates, models, we are also reminded of the sanctions applicable in case of non-compliance. Consider plagiarism, and the qualifications of dishonesty, stealth, or wrongful appropriation. A whole rhetoric of criminality scares the soul out of us every step of the way.

Miracles, of course, are not possible under such conditions. The thing that singularises miracles is their disrespect for rules. In order for a miracle to take place it has to contravene. It has to surprise by non-compliance. And this is why writing, when taught in schools, isn't much fun.

Remember Descartes? He started his method with a negation of all schools. That’s why his realization (Je pense, donc je suis) comes as a shock, as a surprise that reconfigures the ground of all education; as a miracle, to some extent. Once Descartes discovers the essence of man in his ability to reason, the fun can start all over again.

No epiphanies, please!

But schools forbid situations where the learner comes suddenly upon a realization, especially when the realization doesn't happen under the mentor’s control. They are even fiercer when it comes to self-taught individuals. Auto-didacticism is rejected by educational institutions for obvious reasons: if you’re capable of teaching yourself, what’s the use of the school? The school is an institution, there’s no secret in it. And thus, to most of us, the discovery of writing is not a discovery at all but an encounter with the disciplining power of schools.

Source: Edudemic

Sadly enough, we don’t perceive the encounter with writing as an explosion, as rapture. Writing is prepared for us and we are prepared for the meeting with writing. There’s an arranged marriage between us. We learn how to draw circles and lines and how, for instance, to associate the letter C with an open mouth, and D with an open mouth carrying a stick. In essence, writing is first drawing, which is acquired ability to reproduce (i.e. approximate) things. As Serge Tisseron points out with a pert psychoanalytic wink, writing as a graphic gesture has its origins in drawing, or the leaving of traces upon a page. There is, in other words, another stage that precedes the inscriptional technique we call writing. Writing, you see?, really has no chance to surprise us.

History and materiality

But there is another, more obvious reason why writing and miracles are not exactly on the same page; and that is the fact of writing’s history. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we come in contact with writing not as a craft but as a mass of accumulated productions. Millions and millions of pages, infinities of words, letters impossible to count. The deluge is apparent not only in the traditional forms, but also, and more prominently, in the new digital media. Now, more than ever before, writing comes to us wearing the outfit of endlessness. Now, more than ever before, it is possible to see Borges’ infinite library materialized as an exceptional accumulation. Of course, this is not a thing of the twenty-first century. The superabundance of texts has been called to attention at various points in the history of writing; but to a reader at the beginning of the twenty-first century it appears more pressing because of the diversification of the means of production. We already have behind us a history so vast, a multitude of texts so baffling, an ease in handling writing tools so obvious, it is impossible to pretend we didn't know. Writing is upon us before we open our eyes. We wear it on the bracelet in the maternity ward: the label to carry for the rest of our lives.

Source: ABC News

And then there’s also the material maintenance of writing in general. Writing implements used to come, not long ago, in support of writing, as consequences of writing (post-writing, so to speak). The new digital technologies, however, precede, motivate, encourage writing. They make writing unavoidable. Among the machines of our times there are many which have been invented with the sole purpose of generating new forms of writing. The multimodal composition that dominates the online world is not a consequent but a precedent of digital writing. Writing is now designed rather than laid upon the page in a reliable linear fashion.

Source: Digital Trends

Design, of course, presupposes conscious planning, scheduling, forecasting, organization, programming, calculation, premeditation, scheming. The design of digital texts is a cunning design. It makes writing fit into patterns that are no longer appreciated by other humans, but by machines. Digital writing is first and foremost writing to the satisfaction of algorithms. And that makes writing, once again, incapable of performing miracles.

Of miracles

When I first encountered my smart phone, the first thing I noticed was that it was unlike anything else I had known or experienced before. And when that realization struck me I also became aware of the affective possibilities suddenly made available to me. I grew fond of the piece of technology in my hand, and this fondness took over my other reactions, my other possible representations of it. I was, in a way, emotionally invaded by the encounter with my smart phone.

The encounter, in itself, appeared to me in the form of an affective avalanche, something in relation to which I was powerless; powerless because it suggested to me a possible loss of rationality. So powerless, I was intimidated. That piece of technology, right there, was showing me how little I meant, how little I could achieve without it. How could that not be terrifying?

The new

What I’m describing here is novelty: the newness of all technological encounters; of all encounters in fact.

The technology in my hand was new to me – and because it was new, I had no previous experience to compare it to. As a consequence, at that moment of the first encounter I perceived it as a miracle.

Miracles are like this: they come to us by ways that are unknown to us; unprecedented, uncalled-for, unjustified, and unnecessary (insofar as no necessity has called for them to take place).

Transfiguration, by Ludovico Carracci
Source: Wikipedia

Faced with miracles, we are utterly hopeless because we have no point of reference to help us penetrate their meaning (if meaning is what they are endowed with). This stands to show that miracles are not miraculous in themselves. They become so when they come in contact with us. A miracle can only be miraculous to a human being. An earthquake shattering an entire city comes as a shock to its population, but not to the ground underneath. The earth contains the earthquake. The earthquake has always already existed there, as a potentiality, within the logic of the earth (which is, needless to point out, non-human). When the earthquake ‘shakes’ the earth it is really, truly, us who are shaken. It is us who are traumatized, not the ground. The ground doesn’t suffer. It has no affective reaction to the earthquake.

Miracle and premeditation

Miracles, like catastrophes, are surprising – to put it briefly. And so are technologies. To go back to my smart phone, my first encounter with it had, like I said, the attributes of a miracle. I was prostrate in front of it. I was having a mystical experience of the desired unknown, in front of which my reason surrendered.

What’s even more important, I wanted the experience to be repeated. And this is another thing characteristic to miracles: once experienced, we want them repeated; we want more of them. It’s either because we have not understood them and want clarifications, or because the experience was so powerful, so drug-like, we need another fix.

But what happens when this experience is re-lived is this: it simply loses the shine. It is eroded by repeated use, like a shirt that doesn’t look the same the second time we put it on. The more we wear that shirt, the worse it is going to look. And this goes on and on, until the shirt becomes a rug. That’s when we can say we’ve worn the miracle out.

The first impulse we have then is to say that miracles are not written: they happen in a territory where writing has no standing. We are tempted to say this because, unlike miracles, writing is premeditated. Writing exists on the presumption of its material support: from the letters of the alphabet to the pen and paper required to jot words down, everything in writing is predetermined. Miracles, on the other hand, appear from nowhere. They are striking in the sense of a hit-and-run accident. Like lightning bolts, like landslides and avalanches, like the wrath of gods. Indeed, we often associate miracles with the divine. Not because of their make-up, but because of the force with which they become apparent to us. And that, it seems to me, is the force of revelation.

“Behold, I make all things new!”

Revelation and prophecy are the two major ways whereby truth is made apparent to us. This is not only in religion, but in any manifestations of our relationship to Being (the totality of existence, human and non-human together, which is often, but not always, associated with God).

Midtown Manhattan, 1944, by Andreas Feininger
Source: Simotron

The truth about Being is that it is overwhelmingly more complex than we can imagine; that it can only appear to us in fragments, through separated events, and never as a whole. A prophecy is one such fragmented representation insofar as it provides a hint as to the complexity of Being. A prophecy is a forecast of our desired command of Being (a desire never truly fulfilled, since all we can perceive, if anything, is a fragment of the Whole). And while prophecies are forward-moving, revelations takes backward steps towards the same aspect: the truth of the complexity of Being. Through revelation we acquire confirmation of what, in prophecy, was only a guess. As Georges Florovsky made clear, though,

“In sacred history, ‘the past’ does not mean simply ‘passed’ or ‘what had been,’ but primarily that which had been accomplished and fulfilled. 'Fulfilment' is the basic category of revelation. That which has become sacred remains consecrated and holy forever.”

It only makes sense to call something revelation if it’s accompanied by novelty. Old things are not revealed. They are known in advance. They cannot surprise. But this is a kind of novelty that we are always prepared for, insofar as we already expect to be surprised by it. The prophecy, of which revelation is a fulfilment, has made us aware of everything.

If I find out that bungee-jumping adventurers have died before, even if this happened only once, the possibility of death from bungee jumping imposes itself with the force of the thing already revealed. What was required to make the plane of potentialities apparent to me was that one occurrence alone. Now I know that it is possible to die from bungee jumping, and that’s the reason I’ll never do it. Never, as in that ‘forever’ found in Florovsky’s quote given above.

Terrible revelations

Simple logic of revelation: once something has been revealed, nothing can un-reveal it. Once a particular technology was invented, we can never say it has never existed. Insofar as Being is concerned, once we have understood that it is the repository of truths that come to surprise us, it will always present itself as capable of surprises. And so, we always expect to come out surprised from the encounter with Being. And that’s why we fear it: because surprises often hurt. In the texts of Christian mystics, revelations are always terrifying, painful realizations of a truth that cannot be named or spoken. They speak of joy and enlightenment, but this is a painful enlightenment, one that requires the deep wounding of the humanness in the mystic.

Life of Francis of Assisi, by José Benlliure y Gil
Source: Wikipedia

Freud’s Uncanny is the occurrence of something familiar in an unfamiliar environment: of something we knew from a prior experience but never expected to encounter again; not here, not now. The uncanny is a miracle we want to reject, because it is too terrifying. Just like above. To Freud, it is through ‘miracles’ that we relate back to the Unconscious. To Florovsky, it is through ‘miracles’ that we relate back to the Divine. To Heidegger, it is through ‘miracles’ we relate back to Being. Of course, they use different words to designate these miracles: Uncanny, Revelation, Event. But do they sound similar, the three of them? Maybe not overlappingly so, since they are situated differently, treated by different means. But the Unconscious, the Divine, and Being do have things in common; the most prominent of which is the reference to something that we perceive as an overwhelming complexity, as an entity we strive to attain but never succeed. And that gives us food for thought when it comes to writing. Because writing is, in spite of everything we suspect, capable of enacting miracles.