Territories of writing

I was trying the other day to park my car in a rather busy urban area, where the chance of finding a spot is usually equal to its weight in gold. I saw plenty of empty spaces in an area that looked like a balding spot on top of an otherwise hairy skull. Of course, I followed my instinct and drove straight to the place. But the perspective of parking my car was crudely severed by a sign planted at the edge of what I had taken to be a free parking lot. Unauthorized parking strictly prohibited. Tow away area. Being a literate person with a clear understanding of how division of public spaces works, I took off. What else was there for me to do? To stay would have meant to accept the punishment.

Source: Consumer

What truly stopped me in my parking adventure was a piece of writing. Two incomplete sentences, two phrases. A message direct enough to require no compliance with the rules of sentence structure. A text or, in other words, a virtuality.

The power of signs

I was stopped in my progress by something untouchable, unseeable, unperceivable. I was stopped in my progress by a fiction. But a fiction extremely powerful and extremely efficient. So efficient, it caused my immediate submission. This text, which did nothing else apart from making me imagine an entirely virtual situation where a tow-away truck would come from nowhere to tow away my well-behaved car, this text drew, for me, the borderline between the acceptable and the unacceptable. I was, when faced with this text, awakened to my subjection to written signs. Yes, of course, I could not pretend there wasn't a reality behind those phrases that put a halt to my parking. I was aware that the meaning of those words could materialise from this sign, like Alien from the stomach of its victim, and that, with this event, - unwanted, no doubt – I could find out that what the text was saying was what the text could do (Austin's theory of the performativity of language, and all that). I was also aware that, once that happened, it would be too late. I will have already transgressed the caution and will have seen the consequences.

But still, I could not dismiss the power of the text to convey all this to me. I could not dismiss the fact that the text was present there as a last line of defence before my irremediable transgression, my civic crime. I could not, in other words, dismiss the text's territorial authority.

How territories are drawn

Would it be difficult to realize how territorial writing is? Michel Butor once spoke about how similar writing and exploration are, and brought about the metaphors of the man who travels territories in search for familiar spots, or clues. When no such clues are present, Butor says, i.e. when the territory is new, these clues must be created. Someone who's been wandering about criss-crossing a desert area in search for water and had no foreknowledge passed on to him from previous generations (let's say he's a stranger who got lost or a settler who has no idea where things are placed in the new field), that person, after having discovered a spring or a pond or whatever it is that water stays in, will make a note of that place. That place will be inscribed in his/her memory as a mental formula: an equation that promises to yield the same result every time it is put in practice. A map which will be greatly aided if he manages to construct some physical representation of it, some actual notation (a real map).

What is happening at these moments, when a discovery is followed, necessarily, by recollection, is called signposting.

Now I'm going to give an example I've already used once (not on this blog, though), and which I think can explain this idea a thousand times better than I can. It's an example from exploratory computer games of the Age of Empire kind.

Here, the player sets out on a quest. He/she starts from a very small territory, considered to be their own headquarters, and move sideways to find (and found) newer, richer, more promising territories. One of the game's purposes is to reveal a map that is hidden under a black blanket that renders everything invisible. The uncharted territory becomes one's own when the player places a signpost in this darkness of unknowing, this gloom of ignorance. It's like flags planted on top of difficult, yet-unreached, summits: the Edmund Hillary kind of story.

Foundations

Finding (and therefore founding) territory is, in other words, very much like putting written signs on a piece of paper, is what Butor says. Sign-writing is, indeed, sign-posting. With every letter and every word and every sentence, the writer constructs familiarity for later on; he/she makes sure there will be something to remember, something to find again in the newly-founded territory. Been there, done that – it's what the written text conveys. But this, in itself, is not a territorial claim. In order for it to become the utterance of a territory, one needs to make reference to law. One needs to make reference to law because ownership over territory is a legal matter. In the case of texts, the signposting value of writing is manifested in the oh so familiar problem of copyright.

In order to be able to sanction one's use of a text already created, one needs the backup of specific laws: the laws that prohibit appropriation without acknowledgment of source. But what's interesting to see here is that in contexts where copyright is not specified the recycling of pre-existing texts does not constitute a problem at all. To be more precise, in such cases one can't speak of signposting in relation to writing. There is nothing to be protected, nothing to raise electrified barbed-wired fences around.

Obviously, the presence of an alternative relativizes the absolutism of a rule. And so, with the kind of writing engaged in problems of territoriality, one sees the weakness of the foundation. One sees that everything is arbitrary, everything is deconstructable. Parking one's car in a sanctioned place is prohibited only by the presence of the text. Without the text, there is no caution, so no sanction, no fear. Without the text, there is no territory. Nothing to be defended, nothing to be kept clear, nothing to be subjected to. The text, the sign - this is where everything lies. This is where my fear of transgression had the better of me. This is where I lost my agency to a fictional account.

Beware of the lions

To return to Michel Butor's thought, let us see that the unfounded territory is always guarded by some kind of threat, which is in fact a .restriction. On medieval maps, uncharted territories were bordered by the cautionary message Hic sunt leones! Henceforth lions – henceforth only dangers. Nothing can protect the adventurer who dares to cross the border of the known world. Now this can be interpreted (easy task!) as a mere warning: all done in good will, to the sole benefit of the reader who might not know what to expect from the Beyond. But there is another aspect to the message. The lions in the message (abstractions, no doubt, since no lion will ever be encountered on the drawn map) cut progression short in order to return attention towards the interior. This is not so much a be-careful-when-you-enter-the-Unknown kind of message, as it is one that glorifies the interior. Here, on the inside, where you are right now, things are cosy and fulfilling. There is nothing to be afraid of. The lions are out there. As long as you're here they can roar all they want, nothing will jeopardize your well-being.

Source: Rob Oakes

What is curious in relation to this is the presence of the text. The barrier between safety and danger, between the known and the unfamiliar, is marked by the sentence Hic sunt leones. There is nothing else to stop the adventurer from skidding into the uncharted. A string of signs is all it takes. The word has been vested with so much authority that it alone can play the policing role of keeping the curious within the confines of the regulated knowledge: its proper territory.

Of course, this power is entirely virtual (like all forms of power, no doubt). The proof of this is that transgressions are (have always been) possible. The sentence written on the map is a narrative, and precisely because of this, it can be re-interpreted, re-formulated. Dante's warning (Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate) is, on the face of it, an inverted warning: it does not cause panic about what might lie without, but draws attention to what lies within. The point here is still a territorial one. What one finds here is yet another text, another cautionary formula meant to exercise textual power over the unpardonably curious. But what is said is essentially identical. The interdiction, formulated as a seemingly innocent, benevolent warning, places the text on the border between a form of reality and a form of fiction: the border between the reality of power and the fiction of transgression. Here, texts show their true power. Here, a text can change everything: compliance into transgression, subjection into dissent, legality into crime, the right of staying into the duty of never-leaving.

Writing and power

Writing is one of the most efficient forms of taming. Not because of its being a perfect vehicle for the dissemination of power discourses, but because it features important characteristics of power itself.

Handling the abstract

Systems of power interfere between world and subject, so as to direct the gaze of the latter away from the former and concentrate attention on the discourse of power itself.

Source: Elite Daily

Writing marks precisely this kind of interposition. Prior to the written sign (in what Walter Ong called "oral cultures"), the link between the subject and their world was an unmediated one. In order to speak, the speaking subject referred straight to things. He/she inhabited the utterance, as well as the world. Once the written sign comes about and once it starts acting as a representation of the world, this direct link is lost. Henceforth, the subject no longer refers to the world but to the sign. The world is lost behind a veritable barrage of signs, which now exercise their tyrannical influence over the subject by limiting their choices to that which can be written. The unwritable is ugly, undesirable, underdeveloped.

The myths of representation date back to the installation of these abstract signs. And it is perhaps not without significance that the earliest forms of writing were instruments of power, available only to the king and the temple.

The very foundation of our concept of history depends on writing and its attributes. The straight line, the undeterred progression from point A to point B, the development of a logical argument, the organization of events along a common trajectory, the sense of evolution – all of this is a product of writing. Indeed, Darwin would not have existed without the alphabet. To reach the stage where we can think of ourselves as products of evolution we need, first and foremost, to have had an idea about how things can progress, how they can order themselves linearly, how they are subject to causality. These are possible only after writing; writing, which cuts through the chaos of the world and separates things from signs, concrete objects from abstract representations.

The straight line and the promise of survival

It is when the linearity of writing is put under question that we come to realize how important it really is. In Mallarmé's throw of dice, in Apollinaire’s calligrammes, in all the efforts of Concrete Poetry, the experiment, the taking of the rule unseriously, is felt like a discomfort. Having to devise a new geometry for the poetic space (for the very space of writing itself) appears as a transgression. It is with this transgression and the feeling of discomfort that comes with it that power asserts itself as unavoidable.

Source: Sewaholic

Power is advertised as an ideal place of eternal bliss. Power promises the comfort of the commonplace, the corner where the mind ceases to be restless, irregular, and chaotic. There is pleasure in transgressing the predicates of power, no doubt, but this pleasure is one of the masochistic type: it takes pain as a premise.

Every discourse contains in itself the ability to turn into tyranny. And this tyranny, this ultimate assertion of power as unavoidable, is achieved through techniques of control, but also through claims to eternity. Constraint and generosity: the two major mechanisms through which power is maintained in place.

What's interesting is that, at some point, writing's major promise of infinite preservation ceases to be a promise and becomes a naturalization, a right. It becomes what-things-really-are: a fact, an argument, a certainty.

Writing promises to be lasting, and ultimately – ever-lasting. Writing preserves what otherwise would be lost in a sea of speeches. Writing is, in other words, the real solution to the problem of the Tower of Babel. It posits itself as evidence of what-things-really-are.

Life without writing is unavoidable. This kind of ultimate declaration can be found in the foundational statements of all systems of power and their accompanying ideologies.

Road traffic without road signs is impossible.

Life without a system of economic exchange is impossible.

Wealth without capital is impossible.

A city without streets is impossible.

Identity without Big Brother is impossible.

Afterlife without righteousness on earth is impossible.

All these are statements of power. They are employed in order to reassure the subjects that the system works, that it is efficient, that it is the only option there is. And so writing behaves like power, since it asserts its fundamental capacity to record, to make history, to form consciousness.

And since we're talking about consciousness, it's worth nothing that in an ideal power situation the subject gives away their agency. In writing, the subject loses his/her ability to memorize because he/she gives their ability away to writing, thus asserting writing as a system of absolute storage: the room where nothing ever is lost.

The safe haven

Systems of power create products that reflect back onto the system itself in order to idealize it by means of abstract formulas. See the rules for good writing: the pedagogy of it, the schools and libraries and theaters erected in order to glorify it, the idealization of the things of writing and of the writer's figure, the hierarchization of species of writing so as to highlight the ideal to the detriment of the marginal.

When writers themselves talk about writing, this idealization is at its best articulation. Sylvia Plath:

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt."

Here, on the one hand, writing is put forth in terms of audacity. On the other hand, though, it is judged in terms of its very means of materialization. So it looks like we're talking about two different notions of writing: the technology and the means of expression; the craft and the tools. The overlap is not at all irrelevant, since by employing the tools one justifies the authority of the craft. And why is self-doubt "the worst enemy of creativity?" Because (ridiculously simple!) by not-writing one ceases to be the subject of writing. This self-doubt is the doubt of a self that has been constructed in relation to writing as a system of power. If the writing subject doubts himself, he consequently doubts writing's ability to manifest itself in the subject; i.e., his faith in the ideology of writing is shattered. This is why, as perceivable in Plath's admonition, writing, like all power, comes about with a demand to be employed.

Source: Charlotte Rains Dixon

Access to power is often described as an act of courage. Power absorbs (in order to prevent) the rebellious energies of its factions. And so, dealing with power means dealing with that which is too much for the individual to bear. One needs to have "the outgoing guts to do it" in order to access the apparatuses of power. One needs to be a hero in order to write. With this statement, it is not the subject that is being glorified, but the discourse itself, and the ideology that is an articulation of it. Writing is not only a technology, it is also a safe haven. It is the place where one is promised freedom, provided one has correctly employed the tools.

"You must stay drunk of writing so reality cannot destroy you" (Ray Bradbury).

And so we come to embrace that which writing can give us. We partake in the "joy of writing," in the "pleasure of the text," in the "incredible lightness of being [with words]". There is a lot to enjoy in writing, just like there’s a lot to enjoy in every system of power, in every ideology.

The side that's always bright

What is fairly easy to notice is power's reflective justification. Its apparatus of self-promotion runs on references to a past that has always been directed towards the glorious present. This is the myth of the Golden Age, the narrative that keeps power alive. In the case of writing, it goes like this: without writing we wouldn't have had books, cathedrals, roads, cars, computers, marriages, burials, jobs, conscriptions, supermarkets, cemeteries, cafes, philosophy, ethics, literature, history, cards, the game of Monopoly, cinema, theater, air conditioning, tractors, profit, capital, politics, inspiration, news, distribution of wealth, social welfare, Sunday markets, fast food chains, the beautiful art of calligraphy, Chinese and Japanese pictographs, payrolls, accountancy, urbanism, laws, order.

While this is true (and it doesn't take a double-decker of intelligence to see the truth of the statement), it is also true that without writing we could have had the alternatives. The long list given above (far from complete, of course) is a list of effects of writing. It doesn't prove anything – especially it doesn't demonstrate the unavoidability of writing. It merely catalogs late developments of a system of power. This is a very efficient method of self-assertion, which works perfectly with ideologies, because it glorifies power nostalgically and sets it in stone.

Source: LHS Writing Center

Power doesn't operate in terms of the conditional tense. It is what it is, not what it could have been. There are no if's, no but's, no let's-assume's. What you see is what you get – the ultimate justification of power, its most resounding victory. All could-have-been's are obliterated. They never existed, therefore they could never have existed. Which is false, because any current form of power was, back in its day, itself an alternative, one choice among many, one path to be taken at a crossroads.

Of course, with power things cannot be presented as haphazard. What's more, power falsifies all evolution, to the extent that its current state is presented as the only evolution possible, the only end of the only road ever given. That, once again, is the way power asserts itself, how it rejects all competition.

Power aims towards monopoly, and it is not hard to see, from the above, how that might be the case when it comes to writing. Verba volant, scripta manent. In this, speech is made impotent compared to the alphabet. Hence the confidence in written things: newspapers, books, official notices. "It's true because they wrote about it in the paper" is an argument that still holds, now, in the third millennium. It is the argument of the power of writing; the argument of writing as power.