Forerunners to Writing
The question, at the heart of all peoples, is rarely asked: what holds us together? Is it, as Marx proposed, the value and necessity of value we place on others such that we may esteem our own self-worth? Is there nothing left but the German Idealism of a utilitarian society, homologous to Rand’s idea of objectivism? If we are to assume this is true, how, then, does one explain the multiplicity of origination of languages? If we have truly arrived at a post-ideological world, whose worth is based only on the products of the laborer, why are we still attracted to the glow of the fantasmatic spectre of ideology? To put it simply: because we have not reached Marx’s gloomy prediction of Western capitalism.
What we have reached, however, is the diversification of religion and thereby language (everywhere you go you see Muslims, Christians, etc.). Religion is no longer territorial, it has, to quote Deleuze, ‘deterritorialized’ itself. With this in effect, we have observed a growing curiosity in linguistics: the study of the nature, structure, and variation of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. With bilingualism on the rise in Western culture, children are developing what I am tempted here to call a ‘natural’ language, of sorts. Children are becoming more and more exposed to other cultures at younger ages, they are looking for and becoming cognizant of experiences their parents were never allowed. Topologically, they are developing in the space of abstraction far quicker than any preceding generation, and, with this, comes a (re)birth in the arts.
As children develop interests in cultural exchange, they begin to act in the very way Schelling describes ideologists: they do not know what they are doing, yet they are doing it. How tempting to recall the formula for fetishistic disavowal: ‘I know very well, but still…’. In terms of the Marxian proposal, we reach the conclusion: ‘I know very well that money is a material object like others, but still…[it is as if it were made of a special substance over which time has no power]’. We see the same pattern in the linguistic development of children – how many children have not ‘invented’ their own language by superficial means? How many children have taken the language they are taught and manipulate it to form a certain matrix by which they can perceive their world? Or, perhaps for better clarity, they fortify their social reality: the world in which they live. Is this not the idea of the poet? To insulate him- or herself in a world which subverts the universal for the sake of the particular? Indeed, it is.
What we are confronted with, then, is the beginning of the development of the individual as a writer. It is the responsibility of the guardian and other children (though they know not what they do, they do it anyway) to nurture this interest to the maximum it may be achieved. If we are to consider the Lacanian ideas of the Other and the Real, we reach an interesting thesis. Briefly, let us consider one of Freud’s illustrations in his seminars on the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis:
A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing around it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm, and whispered to him reproachfully, ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.
A Freudian psychoanalysis will yield the following (generalized) conclusion: he dreamt this to prolong his sleep, he did not want to face the reality of the situation. A Lacanian analysis, however, yields an entirely different interpretation: in the dream, the father faces the guilt of letting his son burn, he is suffering from the effects of the Real inside his dream, and he only awakes to escape the reality of the situation. By placing the watchman as a mediator, he may place his grief on someone else so that he may attend to his own matters. When the mediator fails, he feels an immense guilt and must escape the reality of the guilt that he feels – so he wakes up.
Interestingly, this correlates much in the same way to the development of the writer. He or she must write to enter into the reality of things: they must not let themselves be consumed in artificial distancing between the individual and the event, so they write about it to experience it. At the most elementary levels of development, writers will say they write to ‘actualize the reality of things as they pertain to me.’ They put pen to paper to experience the Real, whereas others experience the Real through modes of dreams or belief without thought.
This set of thoughts sets into motion the ultimatum of the writer: am I to write essays (and fiction) or am I to stick to the realm of poetry? For the essayist, his goal is to present a unified reality into which all his works flow; for the poet, her goal is to submerge undulating, universal ideas into imagery and metaphorical language, that does not, necessarily, achieve an end result, a ‘totality’; rather, the poem is an end within itself. The essayist is a masculine writer: he believes in the idea of a universal totality into which all of his works contribute, with a few exceptions; the poet is feminine: she believes in the not-all (that is, there is no reason to encapsulate all problems) with no exceptions. For the essayist, he must find a critical reading of himself and of others to formulate ideas.
A short-circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network—faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a ‘minor’ author, text, or conceptual apparatus (‘minor’ should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense: not ‘of lesser quality,’ but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a ‘lower,’ less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. This is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (short-circuiting philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy, that is to say, economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-circuiting the highest ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious libidinal economy). What such a reading achieves is not a simple “desublimation,” a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its ‘unthought,’ its disavowed presupposition and consequences.
And this is what an essayists wants to do, again and again. The underlying premise of the essay is that, for instance, Lacanian psychoanalysis is the privileged instrument of the approach, whose purpose is to illuminate a standard text or ideological formation, making it readable in a totally new way—the long history of Lacanian interventions in philosophy, religion, the arts (from visual arts to the cinema, music, and literature), ideology, and politics justifies such an approach. The essay, then, is not filled with ‘new’ ideas, but a series of connections in the philosophical field—of short intervention in art, philosophy, theology, and ideology.
Essays, then, intend to revive a practice of reading which confronts a classic text, author, or notion with its own hidden presuppositions, and thus reveals its disavowed truth. The basic criterion for the essayist is that they effectuate such a theoretical short-circuit. After reading one of these essays, the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time.
The poet’s job is to further the ideas presented by the essayist. The poet must take on the larger responsibility: she must submerge the ideas of the essay into everyday occurrences. The developing writer will most likely waver between the two, before finally choosing one topic to stick with for a time, and, even then, it is still probable the writer will change. The majority of this essay, heretofore, will focus on the role and development of the poet throughout poetic inception: from absolute literalism to abstraction to mythoology.
And hopefully it will become a little more clear as the essay progresses.
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