The flow of writing

Here's a concept to employ in a discussion about writing: fluidity. To be fluid: to flow, to go on, to proceed, to leak, to seep, to be restless.

Fluidity, the condition which, according to Zygmunt Bauman, characterizes postmodernity, is a state where fixed bounds, firm concepts, immortal ideas don't hold sway. Liquid modernity, Bauman's trademark concept, which he found to be better suited to define what we usually know under the name of 'postmodernity,' can be said to be defined by lack of discipline. If discipline is distribution of order in a coherent system, so as to assure of the system's permanence, then fluidity (of which liquids are a remarkable species) is, indeed, anything but disciplined. In a fluid state, things never stop taking shape; they never stop becoming. Note: liquids don't make shapes; they take the shapes of their holders. In other words, they are shapeless, in the sense of not having a shape of their own. This is, perhaps, the simplest thing one can say about water, for instance, which offers a readily available metaphor for all the liquid conditions of matter.

The liquid state of writing

Now what exactly could one say about writing that might be derived from this understanding of fluidity as shapelessness? Can we say that writing has no shape, that it cannot be captured in a form? One would be very tempted to answer yes. To do so, one could use with relative ease references to the history of the art of writing. In fact, regarded historically, writing is marked by a continuous readjustment of its borders. The history of writing is the history of writing well, and this should suffice to illustrate the extent to which this art and craft of inscriptions is prone to upset fixity. Every step in the evolution of writing, one might say, is a statement of a dialectical restlessness. Which would be a valid statement, if it weren't made irrelevant by the wrong angle from which history is employed as a concept in this case. When one points out the obvious instability associated with writing, one reaches out to a form of idealism, where the material aspects of writing are ignored. What is being pointed out instead is the evolution of writing products, i.e. of texts. And that’s how we get into arguments of genres, fashions, and other things subjected to deterioration and frequent renewal.

Source: Shinichi Maruyama

But texts are not the real materiality of writing. There is something even more essential about writing, and which precedes the appearance of concrete, visible (let's call them publishable) texts. And that is a stage of pre-signification, when a text may be said to exist in the same way a baby can be said to exist in the mother's womb in the form of a fetus (a virtual baby, a baby-to-come, a baby in the making).

This is where the concept of fluidity is really applicable to writing: at the moment before the generation of texts, when all one has is a potential. A likelihood, a to-come-ness of the text that is advancing towards its own materialization. This likelihood, which in the case of the baby is the fetus stage, is given, in relation to writing, the shape of inscriptionality. This is at the same time the potential of a surface to receive inscriptions, as well as the potential of inscriptions (not yet materialized) to do violence to a surface: to emerge by scratching that surface, by embossing a mark into it, by altering its initial purity, its writinglessness.

Inscriptionality

Writing as inscription takes the shape of the surface on which it is designed to appear. It is, in other words, limited by the edges of the container (the tablet, the scroll, the page, the screen). But – and this is crucially important – liquids are not definitively bound to a container. Their fluid state defies the very idea of stability, since liquids are perfectly adaptable to other containers as well; in fact, to any kind of container. As Bauman points out, the fluid state is a state of shifting based on the malleability of the medium. And so, in order to see writing as a liquid entity, one needs to look at its material ability to change shapes. The move from tablets to scrolls and from them onwards to codices and manuscripts and prints is but one proof of writing's liquidity. But changing material support is like changing genres. Nothing special about it, apart from the possibility of generating new ways of writing, by means of new affordances and new facilities.

Source: Cassandra Warner and Jeremy Floto

But there's something else in the picture, something that may be considered to be, at the same time, the promise and the threat of writing. And that is, again, inscriptionality. Because writing, when materialized, reveals its very potentiality (the fact that it has always already been possible for it to materialize), it follows that at the moment of inscription one is faced with two alternatives: to write, or not to write. At its most fundamental, writing is, indeed, a problem of decision. But a decision which will carry on all the consequences of the choice made by the inscriber.

Pregnant writing

That which has been written can be removed at will, and that which has been left unwritten can become inscription at a future point in time. It's in this play of alternatives that writing finds its material significance. Since it is subjected to the laws of evidence, writing is appreciated only if it has materialized; if it can be seen. But that does not mean that one cannot speak of a state before the inscription, when writing is still present, and even more pregnantly so.

Pregnant writing is writing always about to take shape. It is, at this pre-material level, a liquid entity, something that promises and at the same time threatens to take shape, i.e. to materialize to the detriment of other potential materializations.

Of course, this is not an exclusive quality of writing. The same can be easily found in all artistic forms, where in order for something to be, it must have existed before in a liquid state of potentiality. Being is being-possible.

Source: Kate MccGwire

All solid forms are first liquids. Metal is melted in order to be put into shapes, a tree is a moist and fragile sapling before turning into the hard surface used in the making of furniture, etc. It is precisely in this liquid state that precedes solidity that writing also finds its place. But to see this, one must not think of alphanumeric texts pressed into the surfaces of pages. One must think, perhaps, of incoherent scribbling, shapeless traces left on the same pages (or any other surfaces) by tools that follow not the rules of the alphabet but the rules of inscriptionality, or potentiality to inscribe, which is vaster and heavier with possibilities. One must think even further back, to a state before any inscription.

An aside about the white page

When the problem is put this way, writing appears as a form of emancipation from the tyranny of the tabula rasa. Tyranny because in its presence nothing grows; nothing is allowed to grow. In order for the white page to remain white, and therefore to remain a page, nothing must come to light. But as soon as a sign crops up, the surface is no longer a page; it becomes a manuscript.

A script produced by a hand. A handwork that makes apparent a system of notation. That's what writing is. And it is what it is (emancipation, liberation, a declaration of independence) precisely because of the liquid state in which writing exists prior to its taking shape. Without it, without the promise and the threat of its coming to light, nothing would ever exist: neither now, nor in any future. The fact that this potentiality is not visible beforehand does not matter in the least. Hindsight is a perfectly valid tool of knowledge; one can see, in consequences, the importance of a precedent; so one can develop ways of seeing causality by tracing back the progression from potential to fruition, from seed to tree, from fetus to baby, from maybe to yes, from idea to text. As Borges would have put it, every writer creates his own precursors. Just as every splash of water creates the history of the molecules in its constitution.

Writing and reading: two cases of crass infidelity

If we agree that the reader, in his distant majesty, is an unwelcomed guest (since invitation can only be extended to someone you knew beforehand), what can we say about the writer? In this landscape where the-one-who-comes-after reigns supreme, what is left to be said about the one-who-comes-before?

The reader, we say, is the great infidel of the text. His/her beliefs, his/her predetermined acceptance or refusal of texts, are issues all writers have to deal with, whether they do so consciously or not.

Two ends of a spectrum

So the central point is this commitment to the text. The text, this in-between, this only thing that matters, this only point of junction between a reader who misbehaves and a writer who should not expect anything better! This is the crux of the matter. And every approach to the text, whether from the readers' quarters or the writers' camp, will have to be situated in such a way as to ratify one of the two forms of fidelity.

Now, as I've intimated, the reader is not exactly a follower of the text. Or rather, the text formed in the reader's mind is not necessarily in conformity to the primary text.

The author, of course, stands at the other end of the spectrum of infidelities. While the reader is given to an excess of self-affirmation, he/she is one whose excess is in preparation.

The writer's table is full, and the meals are hearty and exceptionally sweet. That's because, not unlike a handler of fly-traps, the author partakes in the game so as to set a trap for readers; to bring them to the text and keep them glued there for as long as possible.

Source: Amy Wilson

In order for this feast to be acceptable the writer is required to set the table well before the encounter. The best dishes are, of course, those prepared so as to please the palate of virtual party-comers. The writer, as a chef, knowing full well that this is the case, will have to adapt their recipes so as to come as close as it gets to the dietary requirements of their paying customers, the readers.

There are secret ingredients, of course: things thrown into the pot to make the dish sweeter. Some of them are visible (and therefore easy to imitate), while others depend on downright guesswork. But the truth is one: they will have to feature on the plate. The writer will have to handle them properly, or else they’re lost in the footnotes of one’s reading list.

Generous or not: the writer’s choice

Quantities may differ, yes. At the end of the day writing is not the obstinate application of an identical recipe, since (among other things) we are not all eaters of French fries. Just by way of an example…

But if we take popularity as a measuring rod, it wouldn't be hard, would it, to recognize that the most appreciated texts are those most peppered with ingredients dear to the readers' palates. The more generous an author is in this department, the more they will reap the harvest of success. And let's not talk here about big names and pretend they have acquired their reputation by the shear value of their work. We know it's not like that. We know that popularity has to have taken place at some point along the way. Otherwise no Shakespeare would have ever shown up.

Proof? Yes. Who, outside of academic circles, has the vaguest memory of Thomas Kyd or Thomas Nashe? Would you know how to spell their names if you only heard them mentioned somewhere? Who finds it relevant to mention the names of those who collaborated with Big Will for the writing of some of his plays?

Source: WFPL News

But this may be beside the point. I was talking about writers who give generously to their readers. Parsimonious authors, on the contrary, are poorly read by others. Those who spend little time getting ready for the encounter with the reader won't fare too well; geniuses or not. As pointed out by Roland Barthes, who saw in the reader an anti-hero of misbehavior, in texts capable of generating pleasure the author is required to pay tribute to the reader's capacity to pay back in reading currency:

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.”

Now, don't think of the author as a slave who labors all day long to satisfy the appetite of a gourmand whose only business is to throw interminable tantrums. The author also has a life of their own, where the reader has no access. But the evidence is heavily one-sided. As Alberto Manguel says, just to set the record straight:

“Readers are bullies in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.”

So there.

A tale of two egotists

The author is always on the ready for the coming of the reader, which is a premediated coming, an effort to lure. So saying that he's taken by surprise by the arrival of the boor who peruses their text is utter nonsense. The author does everything in his/her power to assure that the text is read, that there are readers to partake in the pleasure of this perusal. In other words, writers do all they can to make sure they are appreciated. Sounds narcissistic? It is. Because yes, when all chips are down the author will be minding their own game. Stuff the reader! They can do their own dance all they want; I'll have my own. This is what the thinking mind of the writer thinks. Although, perhaps, not too many will admit to it.

Thinking this way is not only honorable, it is also a very practical way of putting the problem. Because way down, in the remotest recesses of their consciousness, writers know that this is their only real chance, their only true shot. If they want to achieve immortality they need to impregnate their readers with it. So readers is what they need: delivering bodies, pregnant souls, wombs that hold the offspring of their otherwise-invisible talents.

Every writer must learn this truth of their dependence on reading, and they do so very early in their career. Hence the notion of implied audience. At the same time, readers grow accustomed to their special status as soon as they figure out their ways of reading a rebours. Hence the notion of reading as a creative gesture.

Source: Huffington Post

So you can see how terribly selfish both readers and writers are. They perform their acts while their minds fall back upon their own interest. Forever and ever. As a consequence, the success of any writing venture depends on how the two egotists merge to agree first and foremost on the relation that emerges between them at a given time. The merging point is where the parties meet and greet or meet and growl. Whatever the effect of the encounter, what becomes of real importance is the negotiation of this very slippery relationship that emerged at an uncalled-for moment, in the form of an uncalled-for address.

Let’s not love reading more than it deserves

As the reader approaches a text from a perspective that's independent from that of the author, it wouldn't take much to label him/her as an individual who is simply running their own interests to the detriment of the author. Although this statement is too harsh and certainly reductive, it is not overly-exaggerated either. By virtue of their own nature, the reader plays this comedy of errors where misreading is a crucial trick, the core of the very feat of text production.

Source: BBC

But the reader is not only a schemer. He doesn't only exist to ruin the author's dinner party with their ill manners and irreverent antics. The reader is also a skimmer.

Reading on the surface

Readers don't read whole texts; they don't peruse entire literatures, don't ingest shelves upon shelves of books. Look at what’s achieved after a lifetime of reading, multiply it by ten, and you’re still only beginning to see the extent of one’s volume insofar as this illustrious business of reading is concerned.
If anything, a reader's effort is not quantifiable in numbers of pages read a day, a week, a month, a lifetime. The worth of this effort is measured in the extent (some would say "depth," but I find the word somewhat eroded) of one's understanding. Because there's no point in reading if the text remains unread. What’s more, not-understanding is also part of the equation; and when comprehension yields negative results, quantity turns sour.
So let’s not think in terms of numbers.
Let’s not turn this activity into an event of mythical proportions that no reader should be associated with. As an activity of the intellect, reading depends on the brain and on the mind's capacity to retain information. That, in itself, is enough to put us on a track of relativization insofar as the cultural myth of the encyclopedic mind is concerned. While it may be reassuring to think that humankind has this ability injected into the members of its species to keep intact all the information ever encountered, the possibility of that to take place is null. Of course, there are individuals whose minds are great containers, who, like heroes of Olympus, can boast thousands of pages given to memory, millions of words recited without the faintest hiccup. But that doesn't prove a iota about the species. The great majority of us are still within the natural limits of the average mind, struggling with phone numbers, let alone difficult passages from Shakespeare or the German Idealists.
In fact, the very idea of an encyclopedia is proof of the fact that storage doesn't take place inside a reader's mind but outside it. It’s in the book that everything can be found; it’s for the sake of the book’s capacity to preserve texts that the writing of it was done in the first place. Insofar as there is a dictionary, one will never have to fall prey to any passion for definitions. Insofar as there is a cookbook, nobody should learn by rote the list of ingredients and cooking methods. Learning by rote is only a personal feat, and it should stay that way, whereas cooking a fine meal depends on how you can transform the recipe (always theoretical text, always a reference point) into a palpable dish.

Reading for the network

The evidence that someone's an effective and efficient reader is not in how much they can reproduce (venturing to premise that one can only reproduce something one has read). What is truly important here is the ability to create connections between the bits read at various points in time. A truly great readerly mind is a systemic mind; a mind given to the creation and maintenance of networks of texts.
When one reads, one enjoys the rediscovery of precedents. But those precedents are not present as monoliths. On the contrary, it is bits and pieces that one retains from something one has carefully perused. This means that reading is the successive addition of texts to texts. Reading depends on reading. To be able to read, one must have already read. Not the same text, but some (never all) texts that make up the present text's environment: its textuality. Hence the familiar conclusion that every text is intertext; that no text is ever isolated, simply because its reader is not isolated either.
So the pleasure of the reader is, indeed, acquired from being able to connect. Being able to say "I've seen this before" gives more satisfaction than the discovery of something entirely new. Not to mention the fact that complete newness is not enjoyable; it works against our instincts of conservation and against the basic need for comfort we acquire from treading pathways trodden by others – or even by ourselves, in earlier instantiations of our lives as readers.
This is when our capacity to memorize is most gratified: when, out of the nebulous hodge-podge of accumulated experience, where nothing stands out unless it is intentionally brought into the foreground, we pick out this particular episode, this particular fraction of a text, which we had thought forever lost, never preserved.
The anxiety of reading is to be found when, at the end of a novel, for instance, sometimes even the names of the protagonists are not immediately retrievable. This is also the moment when the reader experiences doubt of their own intellectual capacity. But this is a wrongly perceived problem, an anxiety with no justification, because nobody reads a text with the express intention of turning it into the cells of their own blood.

Source: Burak Arikam

Not even the most fundamentalist readers of a text can imagine a world where no other text is possible. The whole of life would stand to prove them wrong. The fact that fundamentalists insist on the importance of a single text ("Sola Scriptura," a dictum so utopian it must hurt) proves, to my mind, a deeply seated anxiety in relation to the alternative texts that compete for one's attention along with the text considered fundamental. Indeed, the struggle to read one text alone is a struggle to eliminate all other texts from the epicenter of one's experience; and that is a very unnatural striving, one with little chances of success.
It is more natural and perhaps more realistic to think of writing as a process of interactivity. The way present texts interact with earlier texts when I keep my mind and eye on a particular page is the only valid proof there is that I am a reader, one who never allows the present text to obliterate the texts that are not immediately present but which have effectively seeped into my intellectual capacity to read – to recognize a text when I see one.

The reader, my guest

Addressed in the second person, the reader is always a guest. But a guest who is given the freedom to mess up with the dishes and to turn tables upside-down.

A reader who behaves well is not a happy situation. A reader who respects the author too much and has perfect table manners every time he sits at the author's feast is an epigone, an imitator. He does everything for the author but nothing for the text. And in this equation that we're interested in it's the text that matters, because it's in the text that the author's survival can be hoped for. But it is also in the text that the author is at his most fragile. It's in the text that the author is most exposed. That is why readers find it so easy to impose themselves upon a text. Every reading is a different reading, as the saying goes.

So again, one needs to be rude to be a good reader. In fact, let's face it: the reader is a parasite. He or she feeds on the body of a text and the carcass of an author who has worked hard to produce that text. So we should know from the very beginning that nothing in the order of politeness can be expected from such a boor, from such a scavenger.

But the parasite, this one and only guest at the feast of an author who's given his all, is, funnily enough, the author's only ally. The reader, in his impoliteness, doesn't treat the text as a non-entity. That would be the job of a non-reader, if I’m allowed this simple thought. The text perused by the one who reads it is very much present in the reader's body. The body of work that makes up his or her ecosystem is a body that accumulates reading experiences. A reader is made up of all the texts they have read. Like Giuseppe Arcimboldo's bust of the Librarian, which is a conglomerate of carefully ordered books, the reader too is an atlas of texts. This means that every text is taken carefully. It is read with the intention of enlarging the collection. Of course, as in all collections, some pieces will be valued more, some will be valued less. But none of them will be disregarded. Not even those that have been disrespected, abused, desecrated, murdered. Those more than the highly valued ones, because in order for one to have high regard for an object one needs to have a perfect understanding of the objects of a lesser value. In order to parade with my estimation of haute cuisine I need to know what living on instant noodles is like. Otherwise I would have no point of reference. And so, when I happen upon a sample of haute cuisine I have no idea what miracle I have just encountered. The biblical saying "Do not throw your pearls to pigs" has its origins precisely in this phenomenon.

Source: Colour Music

So it's in the estimation of the marginal that we are to understand the strength of the essence.

The parasite, as an outsider, has this ability to articulate for the body everything that the body has been taking for granted. That's why the speaker of a foreign language can see the shortcomings of the new language, as well as its creative potential, more so than a native speaker of the same. The former comes to the new language as a parasite. He/she attempts to learn the language not by showing respect to it but by defiling it. They learn this language by doing violence to it. But it is in this violence that the language finds the way of moving on, of evolving into something it was not when approached by the native speaker (who is, in the strictest of senses, an epigone, a mere imitator). It is with the Barbarian, therefore, that the hidden potentials of language become apparent, because the Barbarian has no reason to pay homage to something that’s not his/her own. Derrida says this:

“When you introduce something into language, you have to do it in a refined manner, by respecting through disrespect its secret law. That's what might be called unfaithful fidelity: when I do violence to the French language, I do so with the refined respect of what I believe to be an injunction of this language, in its life and in its evolution.”

The Barbarian who comes to the new language with the intention to spouse it does so with a clearly preconceived intention of being unfaithful.
The same happens to reading in general (if only for the fact that learning a new language is a way of reading). Reading makes room for the text to expand, to grow to a proportion never intended by the author.

Writing to address the reader

I want to talk a little about the relationship between writing and rhetoric, because the two are tied in a bundle often taught together in schools and which, therefore, makes them impossible to separate.

The rhetorical aspect of writing consists, of course, of its intention to persuade. To persuade, i.e. to change the state of someone's mind. Where someone should be understood as a generic addressee: an individual, a mass, a culture, the whole world of writing and reading.

The address

There is, in persuasion, an unpronounced resistance to utterance. The addressee doesn't want or doesn't expect to be addressed. The address takes place in a call-for-attention that is in itself uncalled-for.

Source: Rock Surfers

So writing comes about as a duty to formulate a truth in such a way as to render this resistance inoperational. If you know how to write down a demand, it will grab your reader even if he/she was utterly uninterested in what you wanted to say in the first place. This would be, in rough terms, the primary principle of rhetoric.

There is this anecdote in Amélie Nothomb's Life Form, where the protagonist tells the story of how she learnt the art of addressing audiences.

“Already at the age of six I was forced by my parents to write one letter a week to my maternal grandfather, a stranger who lived in Belgium. My brother and my older sisters were subjugated to the same regime. Each of us had to fill an entire letter-sized page addressed to this gentleman. He answered with one page per child. ‘Tell him what happened at school,’ my mother would suggest. ‘He won’t be interested,’ I retorted. ‘That depends on how you tell it,’ she explained.”

The grandfather is, obviously, a character in the background, someone who's not here and now – a distant audience of the kind all forms of writing must take into account when they play the game of persuasion. But what is of utmost importance in Nothomb's allegory is the problem of the address itself. Note that the grandfather has never asked for those letters. Even if he had (the novel doesn't show this to have been the case), the situation wouldn't change, because what is certain is that the demand to address him (the demand formulated for the author of letters) comes from elsewhere. It is the mother who operates as the one who calls for writing. This demand is an external demand, something called-for by the present rhetorical situation, in which the grandfather represents the invisible, mute, unknown reader.

And so, in the first place, the writer is moved by puzzlement. The writer doesn't know what stands before her. The writer is taken by surprise by this demand for an address that is uncalled-for.

Behind this puzzlement is the reality of the fact that the writing act comes about not only without knowing its invisible-but-present audience, but that it also comes about as an addressed unpreceded by a call. Most of the books of the world have been written as the world had no need for them. In order for a need to become apparent, one has to be aware of that which is desired; one has to know it. I desire that which I do not have, but which I can see present in the world: unattainable by me, and therefore desirable, but desirable because already-seen. So a text that doesn't exist in the first place cannot be wanted. Lists of books-to-read work precisely because those books exist and the would-be reader knows of their existence.

The desire of persuasion

With persuasive writing, the desire is that of convincing an audience that appears to the writer as a nebulous presence: something we are sure exists out there, but which we cannot immediately associate with our own writing act.

Source: Pick1

In other words, the fact that there is an audience doesn't mean that this audience is my audience. To make this audience mine I need, first and foremost, to come forward with a request to have its attention. Ladies and gentlemen is that kind of formulation. Neither the ladies nor the gentlemen are known to me, the utterer. They are just common nouns – known to exist but not bound to listen to my utterance or to read my argument. Writing comes to address precisely this lack of connection between me and my audience. It is through writing that the connection is written: formulated the way all uncertainties are formulated, by means of a call into a rhetorical void. Everything that follows will be fairly easy to perform once the audience is here, with me, walking along, nodding, turning their eyes towards the elevation whence I pronounce my address.

Offerings

Because the reader is unknown and must be brought to the table, he/she needs to be offered something. The address of writing is, in essence, an offering to the reader. I need to give something away in order to gain my audience. I need to tickle the indifferent spirit of my audience in order to make it aware of my presence. That's why the beginnings of all written texts need to be renunciations of the author's essential hermeticism, his/her unavoidable reference to a self that is not translatable, not understandable without mediation. To put it otherwise, by writing I make concessions to my reader by facilitating their understanding of me (and my text); i.e. I cannot remain sufficient to myself. My writing marks a rupture in my self.

In this respect, all texts are rhetorical, even those that don't purport to be exercises in persuasion. A shopping list is the visible form of the desire present in me but invisible to the exterior. A shopping list is an interesting exercise is writing, because it takes its very author as its audience. Of course, the purpose of the writing act (because purpose stands on an equal footing with the address) is to store information that is threatened by the plague of forgetting. But at the same time it is (and the shopping list shows it without a shade of doubt) a way of pointing out to the self that the items written on the list are truly desired.

Once I see potatoes on my shopping list I can swear I need potatoes.

Saying it well

Things may be more complicated when it comes to literary productions, or the highly-elaborated productions in the department of rhetoric and persuasion. But in essence they are similar to the situation described by the shopping list. The author puts forth a call for recognition that the reader needs to read accordingly. If the reader fails to read, the text has two options: it will either be horribly misread and therefore killed, or it will be read differently, and therefore brought to life. But in both instances, the separation from the writer is immediately apparent. After the address, anything is likely to happen.

Source: MC's Whispers

This is why eloquence is so important. Eloquence, or well-saying, is the means by which utterances are formulated so as to make sure they hit their target. The target, i.e. the audience. Eloquence is the long-exercised aim in a game of archery in which the arrows are always shot in the dark.

Knowing-your-audience, the desideratum of all rhetorical situations, is therefore nothing but a red herring. There's no such thing as knowing your audience. Simply because your audience isn't there for you to see, and neither is it there unchanged, set in stone, like a fruit waiting to be picked. Audience is not even something to be named in the singular. Audience is multiplicity: it evolves constantly, sometimes exactly while it is being addressed. Not only that, but the text itself can be approached by audiences never considered by the writing subject. What's more, some of these audiences do not approach my text in its totality but only for the parts that serve their present interest or curiosity.

Faced with these perfectly volatile conditions, writers are forced to return upon the address as the only real chance of making a move. Their ability to call for attention is the only weapon to be used in this battle of the spirits. Their act is not a statement of power but an invitation. They do not conquer, but offer to sacrifice. And this offer to sacrifice happens, oddly enough, when nobody is requesting it. Isn't writing quite something, then!

The absence concerning reading

I spoke last week of reading as presence: the urgency and utmost necessity of a text to be there in the first place, meeting and greeting the reader, after having occupied the territory well before the birth of said reader as reader. But nothing is simple when it comes to reading or writing. Their complexity means that something said can (oh, frustration of all frustrations!) be said otherwise, or counter-said, by the same person - sometimes in the same sentence, by means of the same words.

Source: Monash University

What I want to say for real is, in itself, simple. Reading - that thing that requires the precedence of a text in order to start functioning - is also dependent on a special kind of absence.

A slight detour

To explain this statement, puzzling in itself, and perhaps intimidating (at the end of the day, what on earth can a reder do when the text he/she is meant to read is said to be not?), I need to take a few steps back. Time-wise.
In late-seventeenth century, George Berkeley showed that vision is not what we believe it to be. He made it his task to prove that vision was, really, an adaptation of our sense of touch. And to that effect he pointed out that we see only that which occupies our field of vision, and that it is from this axiom that we derive the whole gamut of illusions associated with seeing (and hence, since we're visual beings, with thinking).
That which stands before my eyes limits the very possibilities of my sight. In theory, given the complexity of the world and the limitless possibility of my eyes to see everything that is seeable, the object taking over my field of vision bars the world away from me. Hence the paradoxes of the sense of sight: for instance, the fact that my thumb, if lifted in front of my eyes, can obliterate the steeple of a church which, taken in absolute terms, is tens of thousands of times larger. The point Berkeley was trying to make was that our appreciation of distance was wrongly thought to depend on our estimation of size, whereby we deem an object that appears small to us as being far away, and, vice-versa, a large object we figure out to be closer to the eye that sees it. To Berkeley, it was all in the way vision worked, by means of minima visibilia, i.e. the most minute particles perceptible by sight. These particles, he said, are the same, no matter what we have in front of us. So that our visual experience is, really, the mere play of combinations between these minimals.
What I need to retain from this, though, is simply the idea that what I see hides away from me the rest of the world.

Frames and visions

Of course, Berkeley was not the only philosopher ever interested in this problem of obliteration. Traces of his musings can be found in the theories with regards to frames in objects of art.
Let's take painting and photography as the reference points here, but it won't be hard, I hope, to see all arts as one in this respect. What happens within the frame is one possible description of whatever happens in the world. But the world is far too complex to go by this limited perspective; there's more in it than meets the eye of the viewer. All it takes to see this is to take that proverbial step backward and look outside of the equally proverbial box. The box in this case being, obviously, the frame. Once you do that, you start seeing - seeing the world and its complexity. You see the wall that surrounds the frame, the building that contains the wall that surrounds the frame, the urban space that contains the gallery that contains the wall that surrounds the frame. You end up seeing the whole universe that contains... etc. etc. etc.

The impossibility of seeing through

It's exactly like Berkeley's theory of vision: the object of art, which we have understood to be a truth, is only one truth. It is only one slice of the big cake. But there's much more to be eaten where that slice came from. The fact that we don't munch up the whole cake is due to the fascination we have developped about this particular slice. A fascination that feels like a terror: as if we were afraid that the taste might change, we keep nibbling at this slice, at the same time prolonguing our confidence in the slice we know (we call this pleasure, don't you know) and worsening our fear of the rest (the unknown). Knowing the Snow White trick, we are afraid that one side of the apple might be poisonous in spite of the other side being perfectly good to ingest.
And all this because of the way our field of vision is taken up and taken over by that which is right in front of us. An expression of the limitation of our senses, no doubt, since we are creatures incapable of seeing through. Whover has created us has deprived us of the easiest way of dealing with the world: since the straight line is the closest route from point A to point B, wouldn't it have been more efficient to have the capacity to see through the things that occupy our field of vision? Wouldn't it have been easier to be equipped with X-ray vision and avoid the problem of having to move the thumb away in order to see the steeple?

Are transparent texts possible?

Fingers and texts - they work in similar ways when it comes to seeing what's behind. The same theory of the frame must be brought to bear in order to understand this overlapping capacity of texts. So when it comes to reading (let's not forget where we started!), the same will apply, hopefully.
The text I am perusing is there, in front of me. It has to be there; otherwise there would be no me reading. But the same text also acts like a screen, hiding from me all the possible texts out there, in the vast and open spaces of textuality.
And with this - one may draw attention, again, to the tyrannical nature of the obvious. The birth of a text is the death of a multitude of other texts. The birth of one text: this is what it takes for the rest of the possible texts to disappear. And what's really deceiving is that the obvious (the object right in front of my eyes) hides its fragility behind the argument of one. Like the steeple compared to the finger, the multitude of alternatives is infinitely greater than the given text. But we are blinded by the finger. Again and again.
The finger, this perfect hiding place, this detail of anatomy behind which we can lodge an entire world. With it, we keep ourselves busy. Fingering the
world - is what we do with a text, with every text that promises too much; with every text that promises to be the World.
But what a field of understanding opens up when we do see the trick, the multitude hidden behind the one! When we figure out that the game consists of not seeing only the obvious!

Discovering other texts

Once this absence/invisibility concerning reading is taken into account, one might also hope to solve, among other important things, the problem of the writer's arrogance. The special status of unicity (i.e. the originality of every creator) is nothing compared to the vastness of alterity (everything that's different, everything that's an alternative, all the authors in the world and all their flying texts). But in order for that to happen, in order for us to be able to see beyond the given, we would need a major overhauling. We would need to be endowed with X-ray vision. And that, as we all know, isn't possible beyond the scope of technology (where, by the way, it is only an illusion, only a species of wishful thinking that would make even Superman roll over with laughter).

Source: Astrobiology

So what's the solution? What's the way out of this aporia? My bet: Critical Reading, i.e. reading that takes the proverbial step backward as its most productive tool. In order to see the background we need to relativise the foreground. We need to make room for more stuff to come into our field of vision. And so, as they say, a step back is the only way ahead.
This is how we are to understand the absence concerning reading: as something that needs to be discovered, unframed. In other words, the absence concerning reading is a presence that hasn't been found yet; a presence that begs to be found and one that promises to render itself findable. But to enable this finding the reader needs to go through an essential metamorphose: he/she must become a writer. Because, remember?, only a writer can bring about something that didn't exist in the first place. The reader-as-discoverer is a reader that creates. And unless we accept that Reading is a creative act, we have but one option in terms of naming: call it authorship. If you dare.

'Coz reading and writing are not the same

Reading and writing are different – in case there was any suspicion they might be otherwise. One proof is the fact that different institutions have been erected to serve their corresponding purposes. There are libraries for readers and academies for writers. Readers need stockpiles of books, of finished texts, of texts that have been read and accepted. Writers don’t get so physical about things, although they rest on the same stockpiles of books. Academies are built on abstract ideas; they are institutions of the imagination. Whatever is physical in an academy is there only to support reading. Because yes, in order to be a writer you need to be a reader too.

Source: The Puzzle

It’s one thing to think like a writer, and attempt, at all costs, to break the ice, to make room for the unprecedented, to send to hell all formalities and good manners – and an altogether different thing to think like a reader. The reader, you see, is born out of conventions. A reader needs to see on the page what he/she already knows. Once a book is picked up, a string of words is expected; or, if the book is an album of photography, the reader expects those pages to contain the photos promised on the cover.

This is one level. Then there’s another level. It’s the one where readers expect the expected at the level of formulation.

‘A text must be readable’ is what I can say to generalize this idea. A text must have this thing about itself that makes readers feel comfortable inside it, that brings readers back to the page, back to the pleasures that characterizes the act of reading.

It’s because of this that Beckett (aware as he may have been of his transgressions) ended up being read almost exclusively by academics. And why Judith Butler was given the crown of bad prose.

Bowing to the mighty reader

You don’t just play games with the reader’s mind, because the reader is, ultimately, the one who sanctions the text you’ve produced. The reader is the checkpoint; the armed police, the censorship bureau.

This, of course, is not to say that Beckett is not enjoyable, that Butler doesn’t cause so many minds to think, that one cannot read their work without feeling whatever one feels when one is satisfied. But truth is this: most readers (if we don’t take the part of those exclusivist purists who believe that you can only be called a reader if you are capable of reading Beckett and Butler with the breakfast coffee and be amused by them), most readers, I say, are annoyed when the text fails the test of compliance with conventions. Ease of reading being, yes, but one of those conventions.

Source: Huffingtonpost

Why is that? Well, maybe because reading is a collective activity in a way that writing is not. Reading is taught in unison. When you learn how to read you start by sounding out the words. You make those words audible and understandable to the ears and minds of others. When the word is sounded out, the sounds are released into a space that is public in nature, a space that is shared by all the words of all the other utterers who happen to perform their own readings (their own putting-into-public-space).

The space of reading is virtually open to all readers and all reading practices, and so it cannot be but communal. We belong to reading communities, as someone like Stanley Fish would suggest – communities of intelligences, which have already agreed upon the terms in which your own reading is about to be performed.

We learn how to read as if there were always someone out there who might demand that we read the text to them without a lisp, without an excessive rolling of r’s, without wicked pronunciations. Reading the text to them, not for them. This is where the major difference appears to stand. Because writing is, indeed, writing for someone; as though the other were incapable of writing. The often-expressed excuse, the one we know too well, the I-don’t-have-the-talent-for-writing argument so many are willing the voice at the drop of a hat, proves that, at least at the level of personal beliefs (and it doesn’t matter whether these beliefs are sustainable or not), writing is not for all to enjoy. Not the writing that requires skill and elegance, that is; i.e. the artistic writing, if you pardon my cliché.

A literacy of surprise

The schools that teach you how to read and write don’t teach you to write creatively. That’s because creativity is goddamn hard to teach – I’d say impossible in many situations. Those schools only teach you how to read and write the common texts: the texts by means of which the language of power is disseminated, through which institutions assert their presence, through which the reader/writer admits of his/her disempowerment. Here, in such cases, writing too is a form of reading – in the sense that it must happen in a common space, under the sanction of a common law, with the strength of a common ability.

Being able to read the ticket you got for miss-parking your car is equivalent to being able to fill the payment slip. That’s why the two of them come together: the fine on one side, the payment slip on the other. The language of power and disempowerment make it clear as daylight that the two things are meant to be understood as one. You take what is given and give what is demanded. You read and write at the same time, since what you’re doing is called acknowledgement.

When you read you acknowledge the presence of the text. You enter a territory where the text has already been, waiting for you. It’s not the same with writing. When you write you bring the text with you. You populate the blank page with words that where not there in the first place.

So writing goes hand in hand with surprises, with events. The appearance of a sign on a page is equal to an explosion on a field covered by snow.

Wow! You didn’t know that sign, down there, was possible. You didn’t know the page was capable of containing, in its whiteness, in its blamelessness, a sign – any sign at all.

Source: The Gnomon Workshop

A writing literacy would require, as far as I can imagine it, familiarization with the idea of surprise. A writer must know how to build suspense, how to hold on to the silence of the page and use it to advance his cunning plan of catching the reader unaware. In order to learn to write one needs to learn how to cook up a storm, but also how to keep it in check till the right moment. Writing is, indeed, about finding the right moment. I don’t mean ‘the moment of inspiration’ (at least that cliché I can skip!) but the moment when what is written reaches a climax; when the text has an impact. Like an asteroid hitting a planet and transforming it forever. There’s no denying that a word on a blank page transforms the page. Leave a dot on that page, a full stop, nothing more – it is enough; the page is no longer what it used to be.

What the page becomes, once the sign has been placed there, depends on the sign itself. A musical score is different from a short story, and a blueprint is different from a drawing. Although the page was the same in the beginning (a territory of unblemished whiteness), its potentiality is limitless.

After the fact

There’s no surprise where reading comes from, since reading comes post festum. Things have already happened, the desserts have already been eaten by the time reading arrives at the table.

Reading relies on a fundamental anteriority: the anteriority of the text. While in the case of writing the text is invisible until it is inscribed on the page, in the case of reading the text must be there in the moment of inception. Even if we bring into discussion the various ways of reading, the various theories that one can use as support for one’s perusal, we need to admit that reading relies on the precedence of the text. Those theories are anterior to one’s employment of them. The game of reading is, therefore, a game of consciousness, of rational choices, of decision-making based on sight.

With writing, the possibility of liberation, of breaking free from the shackles of texts, and especially of pre-texts, is the key factor. At the end of the day, one can chose not to write; and when one does choose that, one leaves the page white – one doesn’t alter anything. In the case of reading, however, things aren’t that clear-cut. Yes, one may chose not to read a text, but one cannot chose to un-see the text; one cannot pretend there’s nothing there, when the text presents itself to the senses with the certainty of sensorial evidence.

Source: Life in La Ville Rose

The fact that there is a text is unavoidable when you are a reader. Even when the page is white, you can still read it; you can read its whiteness, its thickness, its texture – you can read its pageness. You can read the protest on a page unoccupied by text. But move your perspective a little and try to think with the mind of a writer. The white page is now nothing. A potential, no doubt, but still nothing yet. An unfulfilled potential, to be more precise.

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.