Writing 'as if'

Michel Foucault indicated that “our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.” The relationality of our world, which encompasses everything from globalization to network theories, offers me a way of thinking about writing as a site. So that’s what I’m concerning myself with this week.

Writing is a distributive business. It is the art of putting together disparate elements. The words of a vocabulary, the rules of a grammatical system, the ideology of a culture, all these things are assembled by means of writing. The assemblage is synchronic, i.e. it works in a right-here-right-now fashion. It amasses elements in an apparatus that transgresses the immediate inconsistencies of its components. At the same time, the assemblage makes apparent order in the seemingly chaotic structure of the world.

Writing is a heterotopic site

For the above reasons, one could say that the assemblage we call writing presents some of the features of what Foucault termed heterotopia. A heterotopic entity is a structure, an arrangement of parts, but one that does not homogenize smooth similarities. On the contrary, heterotopias bring together unlikely bedfellows: aspects of life, of ideology, of discourse, that don’t belong in the same class or don’t answer the same exigencies of classification.

Foucault was very specific. He pointed out concrete instantiations of the heterotopic phenomenon: places that don’t seem to serve any of the sharply divided functions normally associated with the role of a site. What characterizes a heterotopia is the fact that it doesn’t exist exclusively in the public realm,nor exclusively in the private sphere. It features in both, and yet in none of them.

Time for an example. A church. It is a place that’s not completely public, since certain restrictions are imposed onto whom can attend services or pay a tourist’s visit. But the church is not completely private either, because circulation of visitors, worshipers, and other participants in the service is not restricted in principle. Anybody can walk into a church and see what’s taking place there, even if they are not of the specific religion that is being served right there, right then.

Source: Prestige

In order to be accepted as a visitor of a church, one will have to fulfill certain functions, perform certain rituals, execute certain gestures that commit one to the site as such. Taking your hat off or crossing yourself at the threshold determines your affiliation to the place; not to the religion in all its complexity and ideology, but to the specific site in which you are observed at this particular moment.

The way we pretend

But I would like to notice that my affiliation depends on a whim. At the end of the day, I could fake those gestures only in order to seem as though I were a member or an acceptable visitor. Drawing a cross on my chest (an act of writing in its simplest form of inscription) is a task for the completion of which I don’t have to be a Christian. But once I’ve done it, I have fulfilled the conditions of acceptance that will allow me access to this particular site: the church I want to visit today. My religious beliefs notwithstanding, I have entirely satisfied the site’s ideology, as well as its ability to work as an assemblage (i.e. its ability to contain me, the unbeliever, or me, the one whose interest is purely touristic).

This is where I want to place my understanding of the gestures we make when we write. As techné, or craft, writing does require this faking of gestures, this apparent affiliation, this game of resemblances and illusions. As in the case of the church, writing too is prone to invite simulations.

Let’s put it this way: we write as if. We write as if we were intimately accustomed to the craft of writing; as if writing had revealed itself to us in all its complexity; as if it had shown us the full range of its technical and ideological possibilities.

But, in fact, this absolute knowledge is impossible. It is impossible because it depends on temporary coordinates that are not stable. Writing changes along with the material conditions that make it possible. It also changes along with the ideological edifices and mentalities that inform its necessities. So writing is very much a modern site (a la Foucault’s definition), because of this liminality of its condition. As Lieven de Cauter, who has made it his mission to expand on Foucault’s incomplete theory of heterotopias, concedes:

“A stay in a liminal space or a liminoid space is, by consequence, mostly temporary. Some people, however, dwell in heterotopias: priests, gurus and wandering philosophers, actors, artists, bohemians, musicians, athletes, entertainers and even architects and urban designers…”

References to writing are absent here, but that doesn’t stop me from imagining the writer as a dweller in a limbo. At the end of the day, a writer does operate in this gray area where connections are made, where ideologies and materialities are brought together to coexist within the limits of one text, of one oeuvre.

Source: COE online

Like the elements that enter in the composition of Foucault’s heterotopias, these ideologies and materialities that make up writing are only partially drawn into the scheme of the written document. They do not cease to exist in their original place. They only temporarily inhabit this site, this page, this text. And that is a fact that highlights the heteropia-like condition of writing.

Playing with impermanence

A writer’s stay in the limbo is said to be temporary, and that’s for the reasons already mentioned above: it’s not because they can’t hold their ground, but precisely because they can. A writer who is capable of managing the instability of the ground that stands beneath their feet is one that will dwell happily in temporariness.

The temporary aspect of the problem of writing is also given by the fact that writing deals with newness, with perverse forms of originality that constantly erode the ground, constantly contribute, destructively, to the redefinition of that ground. A poet, as Robert Pinsky put it somewhere, is a person whose work must be placed against the grain of poetry. A poet creates things that do not exist, things for which there is no definition yet. Otherwise we wouldn’t call them a poet, a creator, a maker of things.

It’s this absence of things that defines Foucault’s heterotopias: the fact that this presence-together made possible by a poem, or by any text for that matter, is writing’s fundamental function. The text is a hub of sorts. By means of a centripetal force that brings disparities to a common denominator, it creates a new topos, one that is neither here nor there. This topos, which might be referred to as the site of writing, is the point of convergence, the place where poetry materializes.

So a poet can be said to only simulate their own presence; to fake their compliance with the rules and conventions of the business of poetry, insofar as what we define as ‘poetry’ is a set of artifacts and operations already assimilated, already agreed upon (and therefore rendered useless). Writing against these agreed-upon facts, the poet creates meaning in the same way in which an intruding church-goer crosses themselves in spite of their ‘improper’ belief.

(to be continued)

Writing to create confusion

I would like to know if there is a fundamental need for plagiarism in us, since the crime of misappropriation is so wide-spread that it appears to be much more than an epistemological shortcut.

When speaking of theory (in its original sense, I presume, which is that of looking at, of speculating), Baudrillard proposed something scandalous. Forget about reference, he says; forget about the need to cite a textual primordiality.

Source: EDL

Because it's false, he suggests, to think that theory (call philosophy, call it writing) reflects reality. It does not. It is not some original, presumably clear, unambiguous, precedent that I have to discover at the moment of theorising/writing. What I really have to find is the incontestable rupture generated within reality itself when I take up the task of philosophy or that of writing. Since both writing and philosophy are engaged in this game of signification (which, because it's a game, cannot be said to be stable), it makes sense to imagine that what really happens in both cases is a form of struggle: the effort to put the mysterious and forever-impenetrable Real into prefabricated moulds that are irrelevant to it.

Circling about to find mere nonsense

What we say about reality is not about reality. It is about us.

Writing is not the writing down of reality but the writing down of writing itself, through its essentially simple (and therefore repeatable) affordances.

It's in things that transcend writing (as well as in things that transcend theory) that the referent should be sought for, since it's there that we should be able to locate the Real itself. But such an enterprise would be ridiculous, because there would be no access granted to us in places where signification has no access. The same with philosophy: who can get where thought is incapable to penetrate?

What we are in search for at the moment of our attempted access is a referent impossible to locate.

Therefore we are doomed to go round and round, in repetitive circles, saying things again and again; plagiarising, to be more specific. We plagiarise our impotence and the impotence of those who tried before and reached the same verdict.

Sonja Hinrichsen, "Snow Circles." Source: Ufunk 

The certitude of this lack of reference forces us to look for meaning in what has already been said; because what has already been said has the advantage of having proven the existence of a (fabricated but apparently sufficient) reference.

Where there’s plagiarism there’s apparent certitude

Significance operates through tautology, because in order to signify one needs to establish a fundamental stability of the sign. One cannot speak of a valid sign unless one agrees that the given sign will have the same meaning when encountered again. This is where Michel Butor finds the resemblance between writing and nomadism: when a nomad finds a place with good water, he/she signposts it, leaves a mark on the ground, even if that sign is a mental calculation of coordinates. This signpost of the nomad is the mark on a page: a letter. This is why writing depends on a wandering hand, on a nomadic organ.

And so the origins of writing might be found at this curious moment when the nomad calculated his/her chances of finding good water based on the probability of coming this way again, in a foreseeable future.

Baidrillard, however, wants a system based on first encounters, when there were no certitudes, no signposts, no letters, no already-founds. And what’s more important, he doesn't want to go any further than this ontological search for the improbable referent. It's not the reference that needs to be sought after, but precisely this struggle to find it: the days and days of walking under a torrid sun, not knowing where the next source of fresh water may be. Not knowing if there is any water to be found in the foreseeable future. Not knowing if the nomad will live to reach it and to re-enact the pleasure of quenching their thirst.

This type of search, Baudrillard says, and rightfully so, is catastrophic to signification. It can only lead to nonsense, because it has originated from nonsense.

If we were to be honest about our significatory enterprises we would admit that there is, indeed, a permanent lack of reference at the bottom of everything. And because of this, every time we think we have acquired meaning, we discover that we have been taken by surprise. What we are surprised by is not our ability to make meaning but the fact that the world seems to fit into the categories we have created for it. But the world only seems to fit into those categories. It never does. It never did, it never will.

The only surplus that matters

When we signify, we appear to be taking something from the real and filter it through our well-crafted, seemingly efficient systems of signification. But that's not exactly what we are taking. If we started thinking along these lines, we would in fact develop the conviction that the world is indeed accessible, that it is preordained to fit into our categories; as if the categories existed before the world; as if we existed before existence.

If we do take something from the world, that can only be the confusion that the world itself yields to us. Confusion, i.e. lack of respect for categories. If we do think in these terms, then we should not be surprised to discover that our duty should be to preserve that confusion. To preserve it and, as Baudrillard suggests, to magnify it; to make the world even more impossible to penetrate.

"The absolute rule is to give back more than you were given. Never less, always more. The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us - unintelligible. And if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible."

Of course, Baudrillard circumvents here the crucial problem: the fact that this making-more-unintelligible can only be achieved by means of a certified system of intelligibility: language. That's why he doesn't want to desert philosophy. That's why I don't want to desert writing.

SourceL Choose Your Metaphor

But the major point to be brought to bear here is that we need to do things as if we were provoking these catastrophes of meaning. Since language cannot be avoided, we are doomed to get stuck in repetitions, in restatements of often identical traces. But turning against the outcomes of language (this syntax of representation that resides in words and sounds) makes room for the awareness of the real referent: the reality that exists beyond signs. This is a catastrophe in the midst of which repetition is itself a form of sabotage. Here, plagiarism is not a statement of weakness but one of strength. Here, repetition is a way of mocking the gullibility of the wrong belief that a sign can reach a state of self-satisfaction where it can be declared unique.

The felony of reading

To plagiarize, we are told, is to a commit a crime. It is, perhaps, to be some kind of Ted Bundy or the Unabomber, carefully planning a hit, ready to work out a life of fame at the expense of their unsuspecting victims.

Source: Condé Nast

Corry Doctorow has things to say about copyright and plagiarism from the point of view of someone who’s seen things made and done at the legislative level. And what he’s seen is, by all appearance, the criminalization of users (readers, watchers, listeners etc.) by the corporate universe.

“At root, DRM [Digital Rights Management] are technologies that treat the owner of a computer of other device as an attacker, someone against whom the system must be armored. Like the electrical meter on the side of your house, a DRM is a technology that you possess, but you are never supposed to be able to manipulate or modify.”

A lot can be said about the new forms of control put in place to supposedly protect us, the users, from being prosecuted. (Lucky us! To be so efficiently shielded against ourselves!) I don’t want to go into the details of how a DRM functions, how it purports to make bits of information uncopyable, how it acts as the antibody of a system that’s weak in the face of the scandalous multitude, us.

What I want to retain from the above is this: like in any criminal law, the purpose of copyright laws is to make the essential assumption that every user (every citizen) is a potential criminal. Like all laws, the laws of copyright run on suspicion. Yes, you need to be always on guard, always prepared to spot the intruder, always ready to cry: Catch the thief! Catch the thief!

Psychopathic executives, paranoid legislators

It is precisely this suspicion that the enforcers strive to quieten. It makes sense, doesn’t it, to board up the windows when you know that someone is coming for you. It makes sense to disrupt the crime that’s about to be committed. But we might have a problem with this takenforgrantedness. We might have a problem with it, because reacting against something that’s about to be committed means reacting against something that hasn’t been done: something that, in essence, doesn’t exist as such; a virtuality, a fiction.

In this, I see obvious signs of paranoia: the projection of a constant, largely imagined, fear, founded on an imagined threat, on the basis of a never-attainable solution.

In a radio program I was listening to the other day, the hosts were citing a fairly recent research project claiming that more and more individuals showing psychopathic traits are being welcomed as managers or CEOs of corporate structures. The conclusion was easy to imagine. Of course, they said, of course. What would you expect when the entire environment designed to uphold accomplishment is based on the easy principle of success without scruples?

The same goes, I think, with the paranoid mentality of legislators: since the only way to pass laws is by manufacturing the promise of success against virtual crimes, of course all we are going to end up with is an environment of suspicion. Everybody’s going to look over their shoulders: have I been trespassed against? Has my property been under threat?

Psychopathic executives, paranoid legislators: are we all well up in the attic? Can we function properly? Can we be said to embrace normality at all?

In this normality, the user is a villain. Yes, the user, who materializes the product’s function. The citizen, through whom the legal system is brought to light. It is the user that brings about the threat, the possibility of a crime to be committed.

Prosecute your readers!

To keep within my area of interest, I’d have to say that the reader of a book is, virtually and therefore undoubtedly, a likely criminal. Reading the work of another is, in essence, a form of home invasion. No matter how we twist the facts and force the meanings, the reader performs their actions without the author knowing who they are; without the author even knowing that they are defacing the text (mocking the original, bringing about a meaning possibly never intended). Since this is how things work, every author would be entitled to file a complaint against every single one of their readers for plagiarism and slander. For plagiarism because, at the end of the day, the reader is using precisely the words created by the writer, without changing a bit. For slander because the reader makes a false allegation against the writer: the allegation of incorrectness.

In theory, every writer should be entitled to call for prosecution. But then there’s this little reality of their complete dependence on the criminal. Because without the user, without the perpetrator, who would be there to acknowledge the work?

Source: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

This paranoid return upon a threat that’s never fully materialized (no single prosecution will ever take away the suspicion) makes, therefore, sense only in the abstract. It is a speculation we’re talking about here: an apparatus of repression speculating in order to justify the presence of its laws. Write as you like, do as you please; at the end of the day you, the author, are the one losing: either at the hand of the reader (who will never be stopped from reading, i.e. trespassing), or at the hand of the legislator (who will take away your individuality to place it under an abstract complexity called copyright). It’s “the electric reader at the side of your house” that matters: a text that we own but cannot alter. Hence the important idea that even self-plagiarism is a crime.

Of plagiarism and commandments

Plagiarism is another way of dealing head-on with the surplus of the precedent and the problems caused by it. But plagiarism, the use of others’ words without acknowledgment, is truly nothing but a legal pronouncement. In essence, access to words is free of any injunction. It has always been free, ever since word combinations were made possible; ever since words became pronounceable, i.e. repeatable.

What has made the free use of words (and of texts in general) questionable is the law of copyright, a new-comer to the party of authorial accreditations.

Kidnapping texts

To put it simply, copyright is a prescription of property as well as one of propriety. It dictates the limits within which texts must be enjoyed and, at the same time, establishes the right avenues (the only acceptable ones) for the acquisition of enjoyment. What’s more, the phenomenon of misappropriation of texts has been endowed with an important affective charge, observable in its very etymology: the word plagiarism is derived from the Latin plagiarius, the meaning of which happens to be “one who kidnaps the child or slave of another.” With this reference to family, to the social structure closest to one’s being-in-society, enough provisions have been made to distinguish the act of plagiarism as a criminal act with intimate implications. Being plagiarized (finding one day that someone out there has copied your words, your ideas etc.) feels very personal precisely because of this; precisely because misappropriation is a crime against one’s family, against one’s home (insofar as one can be said to live within one’s own texts, within one’s language), against one’s blood and sweat.

Source: University of New Brunswick Libraries

While this emotional investment cannot be neglected, the commotion around the notion of plagiarism is equally due to the economic nature of the problem under scrutiny. The economy of ownership makes things interesting only insofar as they belong to someone who can be identified in a crowd. And so, the inviolability of ownership turns out to be based primarily on the recognition of a face, of an identity. No claim can be made for a case of plagiarism unless the face of the plaintiff is known, unless their name is pronounced in the public market. One will, therefore, have to think of ownership of texts in terms of hospitality – welcoming someone into one’s own text, inviting someone to be there and to behave as though the interior (the text) were their own.

This is what the logic of writing for a reader sounds like when put in the simplest of terms. But this is a flawed logic, because the welcoming implied by the host is not exactly attainable. Hospitality is in essence a form of hostility (Derrida). You don’t just give away your property to someone else; you don’t just let them use it as pleases their heart. Offering my house as a place to stay doesn’t automatically imply that the visitor can enjoy complete freedom in relation to it or in relation to me. On the contrary, if anything, they will be faced with the restrictions raised by my hospitality: don’t walk around naked, don’t spill coffee on the carpet, don’t watch tv unless you asked for permission, don’t use my toothbrush, don’t monopolize the toilet seat, don’t read my books unless invited to, don’t make free use of any texts. And I mean any!

Owning things

At close scrutiny, all of the above prove to be very weak statements. There is nothing inherent in any text that makes it subjectable to ownership.

Possession is the result of an economic exchange; or to put it otherwise, possession is the result of an arbitrary concord. There is a contractual basis (and bias) to all possessions, and one that creates an imbalance. The contract stipulates primacy of one individual user to the detriment of others. It establishes inaccessibility as the measure of all access. Only insofar as others are denied access to the text can the owner be said to enjoy his property in full. In other words, ownership over a text is not meant to singularize the user; rather, it is meant to transform the others (the outsiders) into transgressors.

Since on the other side of interdictions there are other, more subtle, interdictions, the right to be undisturbed in one’s enjoyment of property creates the desire for possession in all the contenders (i.e. in all of those who have been left out: the barbarians). And so, in fact, possession invites transgression, insofar as it establishes the grounds for the formation of desire.

The issue here is not the use, but the property. In principle, if something can be used by one individual it can be used by another individual in the same way. (What one man can do another man can do.) There are no biological or economic limits capable of altering one’s access to texts, to objects. Physically, objects are identically situated in relation to all who live and who experience them. I can see and touch a book or a table to the same extent that anybody else can see and touch them. I can take that book or that table and furnish my living room with them, and there is nothing to stop me from doing this; nothing, that is, but an abstract formulation, a statement made before me (chronologically as well as spatially), a law that precedes my coming into contact with the book or the table.

(c) Dave Coverly. Source: Penn State

Once ownership has been asserted, the object is thought of in terms of precedence. Whereas before it was a matter of horizontal distribution, in which equality of access was the mot-de-jour, now access to objects is arranged vertically. There’s the owner, who is regarded as originator, the ordering principle, the starting point of the very idea of distribution; and then there’s the subsequent user, who must have a different experience of the same object, one implying not the object’s qualities but the presence of the owner.

One should be able to see here already a general theory of writing and reading, in which reading can be said to be misappropriation of anything that preceded it: of any written utterance. Any reader could be prosecuted for plagiarism, since he/she makes use of texts produced by others.

Writing/stealing (as if the past didn't exist)

"There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism – self-denial."

– G.K. Chesterton.

Source: Art News

“A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copyright. It is taken as a law, both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute, like the law against murder, and as naturally inherent in our world, like the law of gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.”

– Jonathan Lethem.

“Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own – artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts.”

– Jonathan Lethem, via Henry Jenkins, via Michel de Certeau.

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

– T.S. Eliot.

"Imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery – it's the sincerest form of learning."

– George Bernard Shaw.

Source: Tom Phillips

“Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work.”

– Jonathan Lethem.

“I have no copyright restrictions on my work—economically or legally—in perpetuity. I don’t believe that the result of my lifetime’s labor will have any economic ramifications, even long after my death.

I don’t doubt that it will have intellectual ramifications, though, but those consequences are entirely based on the work being made freely available for all. If I were to propose an economic model, the entire premise of my work would be undermined.”

– Kenneth Goldsmith.

“My book ‘Newspaper Blackout’ is a collection of poetry made by redacting newspaper articles with a permanent marker, leaving only a few words behind. (Imagine if the C.I.A. did haiku). Essentially, I destroy someone else’s intellectual property to create something new.”

– Austin Kleon.

"All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overhead. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation."

– William S. Burroughs.

“Ours is an economy based on plentitude and abundance; the more copies of our work there are out there and the more readily available they are, the greater the impact our works will have. This is in contrast to economic forms based on scarcity: diamonds, paintings, fine watches.”

– Kenneth Goldsmith.

“Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different—cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise—in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many Shakespeare Rimbaud poems as you like.”

– William S. Burroughs.

“Take a newspaper.

Take a pair of scissors.

Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.

Cut out the article.

Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.

Shake it gently.

Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.

Copy conscientiously.

The poem will be like you.

And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.”

– Tristan Tzara.

What happens on the other side of an interdiction?

Spending so much time preoccupied with the surplus of the predecessor, the need to annihilate the ancestor, and the abusive superiority of the precedent, made me think of interdictions. All of the above are – aren’t they? – founded on things prohibited in a past that I am compelled to observe without questioning, since that past (along with its multitude of predicaments) belongs in a tradition that is my home, my identity, my Self.

By the judgment of this tradition, not allowing the antecedent to lodge in the present tense is an act of rebellion, and therefore it must be prescribed under the rubrics of the verboten.

Cycles, circles

We take interdictions to be denials, and this assumption generates desire packed-up with a lot of pressure: the pressure of temptation. The biblical apple tells precisely this story of the will to act posed against the directive to halt agency. And as there, the least permissive the interdiction, the more we want to be there, on the other side of it: to be part of the elite that is allowed to roam freely on the other side.

But then there’s something about that interdiction that’s not quite denial but precisely the contrary of it: permission, invitation, authorisation. This is what causes the enthusiasm and the pleasure that come with the forbidden fruit. We bite into it and we close our eyes in bliss. That's the positive side of things, the beautiful dream of ours. But that's not where the problem is. The problem is precisely on the other side. Once we’re there, once we’ve been granted access, the initial attitude changes. The initial euphoria turns, quite quickly, into habit. The habit of being the possessor of a formerly interdicted object dilutes the object’s value a great deal. That’s how ancestors become issues of little interest. When, virtually and practically, anybody can be the ancestor, there’s no point trying to defend the axiom of uniqueness.

Miracles are no longer miracles if they take place every day. Imagine a world where everybody has acquired the ability of walking on water. The fact, while certainly providing everyone with a much-cherished skill, will, at the same time, downplay the same skill. There will be no more excitement in a world of Jesuses strolling on the surface of a river on their way to work. I’d take this hypothesis even further and say I’m quite sure most of us would return to catching a bus for the same purpose. There would be more excitement there: at least the surprise of meeting forgotten friends or seeing the intricate unfolding of life in real-time.

On the other side of an interdiction we would reconsider the limits of rebellion. Every revolution requires a focus, but every focus requires objects of desire. When the desired object has been acquired, out goes the revolution too. And most inevitably, every revolution is followed (or so history is teaching us) by long massacres, when the most viciously executed victims are the most fervent among the former supporters. So, on the other side of an interdiction a gap is created, where new insurgencies become possible, indeed desired.

Source: Wikipedia

In other words, on the other side of an interdiction there will be another interdiction. The story goes full circle; it will never reach a point of no return. Like Ouroboros eating its own tail, there is never an end to our desire to want.

Desire without fulfillment

Maybe the acquisition of a desired object is, then, not the best thing to do. In any case, not the one to guarantee satisfaction. Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, in their conversations on the past and future of the book, point out this thing about collectors: many of them are not interested in the enjoyment that comes with possession. They’re more excited at the thought of the acquisition itself. As soon as a new entrant occupies a place in their collection, they are willing to sell it, and for a price sometimes lower than the initial payment. Such are the pleasures of those who see their desires fulfilled. And such is the extent of the desire to desire: the need to be forever short of something crucially important.

Jacques Lacan was able to develop (via Melanie Klein, via Freud) an entire theory of the so-called objet petit a. The unfulfillable desire that comes with an object that, once lost, will never be acquired again (ever!) – this is what the theory is about at its most basic. There is always an object (degradable yet renewable) that requires our immediate wish to possess. There is always an object, that is, which appears to the subject as an expression of the Other: exterior, independent, exceptional, different. This object is not static. It is not given as an absolute. On the contrary, it is subjected to a perpetual process of transformation – a process of becoming.

Interdictions fit very well this attempt at a definition, insofar as interdictions are always conceived of in relation to objects that cannot be attained – that mustn’t be attained. So that all the work the subject is capable of doing is reducible to a continuous projection towards a fantasy, towards a fiction that tantalizes the self.

Production of a surplus, generation of an event, redistribution of the once-known/once-had, invention of a predecessor…

Promise/prohibit

The acquired object suddenly becomes redundant. What was once the apple of paradise is now peanut butter on any preschooler’s sandwich. The object reaches this stage of democratization through a moment of crisis with a double ramification. On the one hand, the object is found be on a deviant course, advancing farther and farther away from its centre of significance (i.e. it is less and less important). On the other hand, the possessor of this object discovers that the world of interdicted objects is much larger than it was believed to be, and that the appeal of that new world is as great as it has always been, if not catastrophically greater. This awakening is the revelation of one’s fundamental ignorance. But it’s tempting to be there, where one is embarrassed by one’s own lack of knowledge, because being there promises the acquisition of some knowledge: one’s knowledge of one’s own lack of knowledge. The Socratic paradox: scio me nihil scire.

That’s how interdictions work. They promise and, by promising, prohibit. They make room for error because it’s in errors that the desire to try again resides.

Source: Jeroen van Honk

Saint Augustine, the guardian of interdictions, once said that if a man were able to rise above humanity he would find himself in an even more horrible situation, being alone in a stratosphere where the universe reveals itself to be even larger, more threatening than it was while he was among his fellow humans. In a sense, this is a metaphorical pronouncement of the same principle: what lies on the other hand of an interdiction is an even larger set of interdictions. Only Saint Augustine wanted this to be the mother of all interdictions. He wanted it to persuade us of the futility of all things human. He posed the temporal imperfection of humanity against the eternity of the divine. And, for many centuries, we believed this to be the case.

Gradually, though, we have come to see that the pleasure acquired from challenging interdictions is just as infinite as the paradise that lies untouchable beyond the borders of our world. That’s how we ended up writing to acquire a sense of accomplishment from words, the most elusive objects of language.

Writing and a necessary divorce

Whatever the angle from which we choose to look at the problem of the predecessor, one thing is certain: in order to be, in order to speak, the predecessor must be sacrificed. Otherwise life with him/her is impossible.

Living with the predecessor is like dragging yourself through an impossible marriage. Like a spouse who wouldn’t let go, the antecedent comes as a compulsion as well as an interdiction. Their work needs to be known in order to avoid tautology, but at the same time it needs to be avoided - and for the same reason. As such, he/she parasitizes the present act of writing to the point where it causes the writing self to be stuck in a state of mute inaction. Some forms of the legendary writer’s block are caused precisely by this fear of the words already uttered. The writer who fears this, fears the look of the words on the page because the appearance of those words will be the confirmation of the forbidden repetition.

Source: Wikipedia

Divorcing the forebears

As I have been insisting for some time now, the precedent has to be annihilated. This is not only an imperative; it is also the way things are.

Take the cult of the ancestor. The immense respect the thinking/writing subject appears to pay to those who came before them is in fact an attempt at removing said ancestors from the immediacy of life.

The concreteness of life is refused to the dead; it remains the exclusive domain of the living. Think. Nothing in life is venerated. In life, things happen. They happen without significance. In order for significance to be attached to them, these things-that-happen need to be looked at in hindsight. At the moment of the encounter they were nothing. They started being (and becoming) once they were removed from the realm of the unconscious and the trivial.

The ancestor is in a similar situation. They exist now because they have passed the test of significance. They are now venerated. They mean something. They have, indeed, an excess of meaning. But it’s precisely this respect with which they are regarded that pushes them aside. Through veneration, the ancestor is delegated to the domain of the special. There are festivities dedicated to them; there are special marks in the calendar to remind the living of their pre-existence.

This is the crux of the matter: in order to exist, the ancestor needs to be brought into existence; they need to be remembered. Membered again, piece by piece, the bones put together again so as to recreate the skeleton, the flesh pasted onto those bones to generate the person whose veneration is the object of the cult.

Of parasites and cults

The ancestor can only come to be through an effort of the living. This effort, this energy spent in bringing about an object of veneration that no longer exists, transforms the predecessor into a parasite.

In medical terms, a parasite is an organism that lives upon another organism, which is chosen as host because it is a functioning organism - an organism that produces. A parasite, therefore, is an organism that doesn’t produce; it only consumes, and it consumes that which the host has brought into being through labour.

So the parasite feeds on the host’s labour. In order to allow the parasite to live, the host needs to work twice as hard. Therefore, the nonproductive parasite is really, in the most medical of senses, a burden.

Source: Kevin Sloan

The ancestor is a burden because it forces the living to deploy twice as much energy than what would have been needed in a concrete, day-to-day life sequence. The ancestor is a surplus that needs to be taken care of. To ease this burden, a techné needs to be developed. A techné, i.e. a craft, as well as a trick. This techné, with its operations and affordances, consists of a radical separation from the ancestor. The holidays that result from the compulsion to venerate, the offerings, the special dishes one cooks in order to please the ancestors, all these things are operations of this techné. Repetition, which is the principal mechanism in the machinery of a cult and at the same time the function of a techné that works, is at the same time remembrance and reassurance.

By repeating the ritual of veneration, the subject sighs in relief knowing that the parasite is well fed at low costs. Doing things the way they need to be done means, in reality, reducing energy to the minimum. If the cult was well put together and well implemented among the subjects, one does not need to labour and come up with ways of venerating. Those ways have already been devised.

Tradition is built on shortcuts.

The ancestor is fed on leftovers.

Their very image is replicated on cheap paper.

Venerated ancestors generate more kitsch than any hated predecessor.

Hatred would have required, indeed, originality - homelessness, unrecognizability, perpetual renewal. See how many ways we are still devising to hate Hitler, to reject Stalin, to accuse the Devil. But how little we really do to love Christ, Mahomed, the Buddha.

The ancestor that demands respect demands in fact the simple techné of repetition. And repetition is simply a way of putting the ancestors to rest.

The fact that repetition is so simple, perhaps horribly easy to perform, is the reason why institutions, discourses, ideologies have been devised. They have come not as aids to the ancestors but as ways of imposing the authority of their own memory. They don’t complicate things in any way. On the contrary, they simplify them, in the sense that they estrange the ancestors even further, by hiding them behind rituals that are more important than the ancestors themselves.

An end to love?

So the festival commemorating the ancestor is a reminder of the separation created between the living and the dead. The ancestor must go, must be hidden behind ritual and felicity in order to be present at all; in order not to come as a perceivable burden (which would radically change their status from something cherished into something loathed).

Yes, the annihilation of the predecessor is embedded in things. It comes with veneration itself. Without reducing them to the status of special events (i.e. things that don’t occur very often) the predecessors would be too much to bear.

Without this annihilation, the predecessor would be a cause of perpetual anxiety. An ancestor too present would transform the worshiper into a depressive.

So now it should be quite easy to see that the rejection of the precedent that comes with every act of creation (with every renewal) is the natural, organic way of things. The world should not rage against the original, since the original (that which belongs to the source) is the only way out of the aporias perpetually created by traditions.

Tradition is, indeed, a state of being stuck, of being immobilized by the pressure of repetition. There’s nowhere to go. There’s only here to stay: a here that is perpetual (the here of the ritual).

But this being-stuck is, funnily enough, the way out of the problem I have described as the surplus of the precedent. If the predecessor is kept within this repeatable cycle, he/she is no longer a threat (if by threat we understand the threat of the original, of the unprecedented). Hence prayers that demand love, ceremonies that promise bliss.

Love, the easy way out of the problem...

Love, the unconditional compliance...

Love, the desertion of reason...

Love, the barrier to questioning...

Love, the acceptance of dogmas...

Love, the end of strife...

Love, the beautiful but oh, so permissive...

This is true insofar as a loop is only one loop, one of the many possible loops, one of the particles of sand in a vast desert.

Love is not one Love but many loves – particular, regimented loves; they make sense in closed (and enclosed) systems and cannot migrate into other systems. The Christian principle of agápē annuls these particular loves; but, generous and promising as it may seem, it proposes a utopia, a quasi-impossibility, since “love of all” is impossible in the world.

Source: Raichel Williamson

When Gilles Deleuze spoke of deterritorialization (this complicated, barbarous term that makes tongues twist), he spoke of a necessity to dissolve the borders of territories, to break the cycle that creates those loops, to open the world. To do so one needs to accept the challenge of being homeless again, of being barbarous like the word that describes the situation, of arriving at things by a back alley, furtively, like petty criminals who steal what’s not their own. Like thieves, like plagiarists.

Writing after the precedent

In academic environments, for instance, the precedent is given as bliss; a surplus, yes, but one that must be embraced as a literal source: a spring, a birthplace, a cradle, a home. Being with the source (and at the source) is, here, a being-home. And indeed, it is only in the formulation of the precedent that one can find one’s home. According to this logic, to be without a precedent (which is to say, to be original) is to be homeless, in the most fundamental sense of the word.

Because this homelessness is hard to bear, an entire project has been created for the elimination of the predecessor. Indeed, there is no such thing as poetry without the rejection of the forerunner. As Robert Pinsky has pointed out somewhere, poetry is always what it is not, insofar as poetry can only say something that doesn’t already exist. In order for poetry to be creative it has to formulate something from scratch. Otherwise it is mere epigonism, unproductive repetition, pleonastic nonsense. So here we have the to-be-or-not-to-be of creativity: to be with a predecessor, and therefore redundant, or not to be with a predecessor, and therefore acknowledged as original.

Of course, we are familiar with this project of the rejection of precedence, because we are citizens of postmodernity, and its discourse of demythification is familiar to us. It has given us plenty of space to think of precedence as something we might be better without.

Whacking the forerunner

There is a "contamination anxiety" shaping the artistic choices of writers in general. Jonathan Lethem says it is a symptom of modernism. If what one fears in relation to the source is its ability to contaminate (to impose itself as a necessary repetition), then the source is in truth not venerated but abhorred. The source needs to be buried under the weight of its own significance, never to see the light of day again. If such is the case, then the original/initial is a parasite: one that parasitizes literature – insofar as we think of literature as a domain that renews itself all the time, instead of accepting to be caught up in the continuous loop of reiteration.

Source: Alcalde

The parasitical original/initial stands there, in the middle of everything (whence it can radiate its venom) like an inconvenience. It upsets the natural flow of things. It grows like a boil about to burst. And because of that it needs to be evicted, excised, operated out; removed like a gangrene. Any discussion of precedence needs to employ this language of repugnance if the writer were to be liberated from the terror of antecedence.

This aspect becomes apparent when the predecessor has grown to a size where it cannot be avoided. When it has become an automatic reference, a mental trick the role of which is to sort out the inconvenience of creativity, this source (this precedence that exceeds) disturbs purely and simply. It has no other function than that of inhibition. And its shadow is cast so thickly upon all acts of creation that no exercise can ever come out immaculate, unaltered, un-referenced. Take the example of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of the Classics. When they come up in any context they take the shape of ‘it goes without saying.’ It’s this ‘without saying’ that is troublesome to the writer who is striving to make a name for him/herself. This writer arrives at the feast of recognition already burdened by a name that is not their own. Their very name has already been worn by others, hijacked by them, stolen before the acknowledgment of any presence (their own presence most importantly).

So the ideal situation for a beginner would be to ignore this precedence that obstructs his development. To ignore it, i.e. to make it seem invisible. One would have to write, therefore, with the only intention of hiding the traces of the forerunner. Every instance of writing will have to be an affirmation of one’s originality, even when that originality is a figment of one’s imagination.

But this project would be forever obstructed by the affirmative presence of the discourse that stands behind writing. The discourse, the overwhelming precedent of all forms of creative action, poses the precedent as necessary. Only someone growing in the shadow of a precedent can be counted as significant to a discourse. They would have to acknowledge the shadow even in the most original of their moments. Because there is no situation worse than that of a poet without precedents. That’s what the Academia will argue.

The foreigner that speaks better

The fear of the one-without-precedent is the typical fear of originality, insofar as the original is terrible. Let us say it again: the original is impolite, distinctive; in other words, the original is truly foreign.

The antidote to barbarism is subjection to familiarity. And here is where the precedent is in its most powerful state. The precedent is a guarantor. Without it, the city may crumble. Without it, there will be no rules. Without it (to embody a seventeenth-century fear of John Locke), humanity is likely to return to its state of pre-humanity: a state without laws, without governing bodies, and therefore without foreigners.

Source: www.twainquotes.com

In the land of the precedent everything must fall under the rubric of domestic familiarity. The whole family, down to the newborn, needs to know perfectly well the extent of the precedent in order to reconstruct the entire genealogical tree of the family’s ‘romance.’ And so, the problem of the precedent isn’t quite a problem of the poet alone, but one that transgresses professional or artistic boundaries.

But the poet is the figure we are interested in, because in the poet it is easier to trace the trajectory of thoughts; because the poet writes or memorizes, and therefore, brings along with him/herself the specter of the predecessor. With his (inherited – how else?) ability to inscribe, a poet materializes this specter better than any other sign-maker, because it’s in the case of the poet that the dependence on the precedent appears in the form of an artistic culpability. I take this from Harold Bloom, who mentions “the only guilt that matters to a poet, the guilt of indebtedness.”

A poet cannot speak without speaking the language of someone who spoke before. And the antecedence of this speech act is sure to (im)pose the precedent as a guest: a foreigner, someone who comes from outside the current event, like a specter that haunts.

So the precedent is a foreigner who speaks. And one whose speech is taken to be a better form of expression. The cult of ancestors depends on this better-saying in order to assert a tradition whose sole purpose is to salvage the future from its straying away from the source.

A battle against redundancy

The project of writing-after-the-precedent takes shape under the spasms caused by the fear of tautology. Tautology, i.e. the thing already said and which can't be said again because saying-again is punishable by law (the law of grammar or that of logic, it matters not).

Tautology comes about as an interdiction in its own right, one rhetorical in nature but which poses precisely the problem of the precedent as a necessary absence. In order for the precedent to be acknowledged it has to be obliterated. It has to be acknowledged as non-presence. Pure absence, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out, is not exactly the way to put the problem in relation to the trace. A trace is not a lack. A trace is always already present, always already formulating the present event, the present utterance.

Source: Write Right

A trace, i.e. a presence of the precedent as an absence-that-matters, is something akin to inscriptions, where what is being inscribed is always already there in the form of a discourse that returns. Of course, this discourse is pushed to the margins all the time, minimized, reduced to an apparent absence, in order to maximize its efficiency. Discourses are productive only if they are well hidden; if their subjects don’t get a glimpse of the game that is being played in the background. That’s why Derrida insists on the absent presence that characterizes a trace. With the trace in full sight, the discourse would be exposed (and therefore lose its efficiency). Without it, the discourse would thrive, because it is the absence that articulates its power, its very possibility to be. So in order to avoid discursive suicide, the trace (the precedent) has to go; it has to be as though it had never been. But this is far from being a killing of the precedent. On the contrary, it marks the consolidation of its position. A precedent that isn’t perceived as present is a precedent capable of influence. One can see this in the case of truisms, where the impossibility to locate the precedent is truly frustrating, but where one knows that the precedent exists because one can see its effects.

Writing and the surplus of the precedent

It is in the process of re-production mentioned in my last week’s that one encounters the anxiety of writing. This re-production makes apparent that the predecessor is always a deterrent, insofar as he is, chronologically as well as conceptually, the firstborn.

By acknowledging the fact of the re-production of ideas, one becomes aware of what I would like to call the surplus of the precedent. This is an excess impossible to escape, since writing is, by its very nature, an act of production. As production is progression from nothing to something, producing means bringing about a surplus: an object that didn't exist before. And so, every inscription is an excess. But the surplus I started to talk about last week is that of the predecessor. And this is what I'm going to talk about now as well, even at the risk of producing dreadful repetitions.

The difficulty of freedom

The fact that ideas have a history means, of course, that there was a time when they did not exist. But locating that time, that paradise of signification where one could pick and choose from a range of virgin ideas roaming freely the green pastures of pre-meaning, is an operation hard to perform. Not only would it take endless effort to identify that time of spotlessness, but arriving at a conclusion (provided such arrival is possible at all) would bring little satisfaction to the finder.

Wenceslas Hollar, The Sword of Damocles. Source: Huffington Post

What is more important in this equation, though, is, once again, the awareness one acquires of the pre-existence of their own ideas. With this major breakthrough, one comes to the realisation that there is room for one’s own idea in the world; that the world is permissive insofar as the absorption of concepts is concerned. But at the same time one finds out, quite brutally, that the way concepts work has little to do with the falsely glorified assertion of freedom. The spirit that roams freely is a myth that goes nicely with all the other romaticisms related to writing. That is, it goes straight in the basket of busted myths. If anything, the individuality that creates grows extremely anxious at the acknowledgment of patterns. One finds out, for instance, that there is a form in which ideas need to be put, be they beautiful or glorious or absolutely novel, as the case may be. While this is supposed to provide reassurance and to calm the spirit that doesn't know what to do with the so-called freedom, in reality the recognition of patterns causes doubt, degringolade, anxiety. When many can do one thing, and when that thing is so well delimited that little escapes from the confines of possibility, the likelihood of another's doing it better looms over the entire project like the sword of Damocles.

The way out of this impasse is the way of originality. But in order to be original one needs to be without patterns; one needs to work outside genres, outside communities, outside recognition. Unrecognized, one's work is without value, in the sense that there is no axiology in place (yet) to assess the worth of this work without patterns. Originality eventually leads to more anxiety, since to be original means to be in a void, to be where nothing or very little has existed before. And unless one is never anxious in a situation of freedom, the creative act cannot be enjoyed; there can be no jouissance in writing.

Ignorance is bliss

Re-writers need to be oblivious of precedence if they were to operate at all within the field of writing.

It is precisely this oblivion, this need to ignore the fact that a text was written before, that brings along a very powerful element of hope.

Writing in full awareness of the precedence of those who did it before transform the writing process into something like a phobia of repetition. The anxiety of influence, to use now the term so frequently used by literary critics, is the phobia of coming again, of arriving at a text already formulated by a predecessor. That, in the field of creative writing, where success is measured in terms of originality, is doubtlessly problematic. If saying it again is not permitted, then the very act of saying is fraught with a fear of repetition. Hence the anxiety.

The anxious writer who seeks emancipation from this fear perceives the act of inscription as something that has to be without borders. But borders, when it comes to writing, are impossible to ignore. And so, the desire to write in a creative manner is constantly faced with this frightening reality of the other who is always a surplus, in the sense of being a parasite intruding the process of writing not in order to participate creatively but in order to deter. This third element is the reminder that precedence is a fact, and, more significantly, that it is a fact present at this particular moment, while I, the writing individuality, am trying to proceed with my own writing.

Moreover, because the precedent cannot be located with any degree of exactitude, it appears to the subject as a plurality.

To put it in more practical terms, every awareness of the precedent generates a further awareness of an entire plane of precedence, where ideas pre-exist, and along with them the signs that one could use in order to build one’s own idea.

Domenico Feti, Ecce Homo. Source: Zinzendorf Jubilee

And so the creative writer has the privilege as well as the terror of knowing the extent of precedence. To be without this terror, writers have to be able to forget the obvious. They have to be well trained in the art of not recognising a precedent when they see one. This is not unlike the Christian principle of kenosis: Christ's purposeful forgetting of his divine nature, which is the only way he can die on the cross, like a mere mortal. Had he remained divine, he would have never accomplished that most humane act of bleeding to death; conceiving that dying was his utmost gesture of creativity, his point of distinction, his originality.

The eternal game of pain and pleasure

I don’t believe in the myth of the talented writer. But to use this myth as a figure of speech, I would say that a truly talented writer is not one who finds it easy to write but one who finds it easy to perform a slalom between the texts that precede their own text. And this is a form of wisdom rather than one of talent. A wise writer, rather than a talented writer, is capable of seeing the signposts left in the field by their predecessors, and by being able to see them they also become capable of eschewing those signposts before committing the crime (drastically sanctioned by the creative environment in which they operate, and which is founded on the principle of originality) of repetition. Of course, in order to acquire this habit one needs to train oneself. One needs, first and foremost, to learn the conventions of writing. Conventions which act not as aids but as constraints.

“Don’t go there” is the maxim, indeed the warning, that guides a creative writer. The writer who is aware of the possibilities left in the field after everything (or almost everything) has already been said is one who, then, can turn strictures into possibilities.

It’s like in the quasi-absurd joke about the guy who masturbates using a hammer. He bludgeons his sexual organ with all his might and screams in pain every time he hits the target. A friend who sees him asks: Hey, as far as I know, masturbation should cause pleasure. Where is your pleasure?" And the answer is: “I get my pleasure when I miss the target.”

Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son. Source: The Masterpiece Cards

The certitude of pain leaves room for very little pleasure. Indeed, pleasure is possible only in an accident, when the hammer doesn't hit the target. The omnipresence of pain that preceded the act has made room for little satisfaction. And one can imagine the protagonist of this anecdote purposefully missing the target, so as to acquire the pleasure associated with the act.

But the point is that restriction (pain) is being turned here into possibility. The pleasure-to-come is worth all the effort and all the (unavoidable) anxiety. Cohabitation with the threat - one of the great truths of writing.