Enclaves for self-defense

In Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel, The Discreet Hero (2013), a character has the revelation that the things of the world are spatial in their essence. But spatial in a special way. Disgusted by filth, the mass media and the cheap spectacles of publicity, he has surrounded himself with objects of perennial worth: art books, novels, music. He’s built for himself some pretty solid walls.

Don Rigoberto finds in this hoarder’s instinct a necessary reassurance and a rather bourgeois piece of mind.

"That was when he’d had the idea of saving spaces, the idea that civilization was not, had never been a movement, a general state of things, an environment that would embrace all of society, but rather was composed of tiny citadels raised throughout time and space, which resisted the ongoing assault of the instinctive, violent, obtuse, ugly, destructive, bestial force that dominated the world [...]"

What’s interesting here is not the idealisation of civilization as such but rather its enclavisation, its capacity to lock itself up in a closet of self-sufficiency. In other words, what we’ve got here is civilization’s ability to become a space, a territory. Or to be more precise: a series of spaces, a series of territories.

Corral, i.e. enclaves. Source: Terrierman

Keeping viruses out

Vargas Llosa posits the works of human civilization as fortresses built to gain good defense against threats. Security before everything else! In Abraham Maslow’s famous pyramid of human needs, security is right there, at the bottom, after physiological needs, two of the most wide-spread wants: ones that are at the same time the most desired and also the most lacking.

One is tempted to say that all is good when all is safe. But there’s another sense of the threat that makes a lot of sense in the wider scheme of things. This one indicates that the idea of threat is appealing because it offers the best justification for creation. And I mean the creation of everything: from an antidote to a virus to a dam to impede future shortage of electricity; electricity, itself created to impede our lack of light and heat. The creation of everything: from poetry, which keeps returning us to a state where we dread being but where we love to see others performing well, to photography, which keeps us from falling into some fictional dark ages devoid of images and perhaps of imagination. This urge to produce has been equivalent to our need to make things safe for ourselves.

What will happen if we ask this simple question: why is literature necessary? The great majority will say: because without it we would be uglier, worse, more wicked, less moral. You see how the affirmation of the art of writing, among all this, starts from a negation: least we become this; least we become that. Least we return to that state. Least we grow horns and hooves. Least we end up mocking Creation.

The enclaves we construct to safeguard (this word, which has never gotten into proper use because it’s been hijacked by ideologies from its very beginnings) the world – these enclaves are, in fact, vaccines meant to put our fears to rest.

Prisoners of literature

It is perhaps due to these enclaves that keep us safe (enclosures, corrals, confinements, detentions, gaols) that literature, for instance, rests on such an abundance of entrapments.

Trapped in a gesture (Sisyphus and perpetual motion, Atlas and perpetual stasis, Ulysses and perpetual transition); trapped in storytelling (Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Tales, The One Thousand and One Nights), trapped, of course, in a place (all the utopias where humanity fares better but is never allowed to live to tell the tale); trapped in admirations (Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes¸ Yasunari Kawabata’s The House of the Sleeping Beauties, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores); trapped in desires for something better, something more (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina) trapped in exercises of imagination (Le Petit Prince, Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot).

Atlas. Source: Wikipedia

To clarify. By this entrapment I don’t mean impossibility to move forth and back; not like what’s happened to an insect caught forever in the perfection of a teardrop of amber. At the end of the day, Ulysses reaches Ithaca; Boccaccio’s storytellers return to their places of origin. The enclaves are not permanent in the strict sense of the word; and it is not permanence that matters, anyway. The entrapment, however, is a precondition of everything. The will to escape, the acknowledgment of the force that keeps things at a standstill, the desire to exchange the current space, with all its certitudes and “lacks of shadows” (Wallace Stevens), for a space that hasn’t been conceived of yet, not even as a wild dream – this is what stands at the foundation of progression, of movement, of the universal sway. In order to set out on their journeys, the heroes of fairy tales must experience enclosure as a point of pressure, as an original point that can no longer contain them, that expels them like a decayed tooth. The kind of decayed tooth that Ovid, for instance, turned into; Ovid, who made Rome incapable of putting up with him and sent him off to the shores of that distant Pontus Euxinus where he was entrapped for as long as it took for the city to considered him cured. The expulsion and the entrapment that ensued were the preconditions of his Tristia and his Epistulae ex Ponto.

Perfections and the intertext

Because the threats are great, the defense also needs to be close to perfection. Hence the need for round novels, the need for systemic philosophy, the need for poems that read in one breath. Hence the requirement for authors with oeuvre, who can be recognized ten pages into their latest book. Hence the factor of elimination, applicable when the next volume is unlike the benchmark. Hence, indeed, the need for benchmarks at all, for standards that stay unchanged for as close as possible to forever.

Escher's neverending buildings, a form of intertextuality. Source: Crystalinks

The enclaves require isolationist politics; they need to be so perfect in themselves that they cannot possibly communicate beyond their borders. This is why it takes serious effort to understand intertextuality, and why, for instance, the rise of electronic literature is regarded (still) with so much scorn. Because in intertextuality the limits are negated in the name of a text that grows outside its own limits, outside its own enclave, and which, more importantly, grows in ways impossible to predict. With the intertext there seems to be no more entrapment. The growth comes, then, from somewhere else, from an internal tension, from a need to expand: a need that is organic, a need that every text has, since texts don’t grow in isolation, by themselves and for themselves. Digital writing reaches out to similar new limits (or rather to the lack thereof). For one thing, hypertext is a concrete materialization of the principle of intertextuality. A link expands the text, makes it part of Borges’ universal library – it becomes that library itself. And because of this, the digital universe, a multidimensional conglomerate of texts and codes and circuits, feels so much more at home in the notion of the Sublime. The space of the digital, like the space of the intertextual, is an enormous space, a space of non-limits, grandiose, overwhelming, disempowering. Therefore, frightening. 

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.