To write, I meditated, must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse. A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence…
The best thing about writing is not the actual labor of putting word against word, brick upon brick, but the preliminaries, the spade work, which is done in silence, under any circumstances, in dream as well as in the waking state. In short, the period of gestation. No man ever puts down what he intended to say: the original creation, which is taking place all the time, whether one writes or doesn’t write, belongs to the primal flux: it has no dimensions, no form, no time element. In this preliminary state, which is creation and not birth, what disappears suffers no destruction; something which is already there, something imperishable, like memory, or matter, or God, is summoned and in it one flings himself like a twig in a torrent. Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiselled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.
” Henry Miller, Sexus, as quoted by Michael Heim in Electric Language. A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, 1987Globalisation of Digital Humanities: An Uneven Promise | Inside Higher Ed
Where I discuss the challenges of digital humanities scholarship in an uneven world…
Primary Passions: January 11, 2004 [On Blogging]
Today’s Ian Bogost’s post about the self-referentiality of blogging (and the humanities) made me remember this brief post of mine, published originally 8 years ago today on my now-deleted blog, Never Neutral. I wrote it when I was revising to defend my MA dissertation on Art Spiegelman and graphic narrative as a work of mourning, and at a time in which many colleagues and professors insisted blogging would damage my academic prospects. At that time I had been reading Derrida’s Résistances- de la psychanalyse (1996) and Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (1997) which had originally informed the last chapter of my MA thesis, “Postponing Suicide: A Means to an End”.
I have reposted it below.
[The strength of self-reflexivity] always stand in proportion to the capacity for communication of a human being (or animal), capacity for communication in turn in proportion to need for communication… Consciousness evolved at all only under the pressure of need for communication.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1974: 354).
One could always say: this is pure repetition. Blogging, a form of narcissistic acting out. The blogger as the analysand who comes back to the analyst’s office, to say whatever comes into his/her mind, most of the times not looking at the listener’s (here, reader’s) face. What unconscious, repressed thoughts, behavior, are expressed through blogging as a form of acting out? Nowadays it is a common-place amongst bloggers to discuss the experience of reading one’s blog in retrospect. Who dares to do that? Who, driven by what forces, could stand it? What common-places, what tropes, what topoi would we find, what traces, what shadows, what reappearing ghosts are we afraid of locating if we dared to read our past archives?
The immediacy, the real-time condition of electronic publishing implies a strange temporality, an “always-present” that allows almost unmediated utterance. The narcissistic nature of the blogger, then, poses interesting and highly complex questions in relation to writing, the subjectivation process through discourse production, the poetics of time and space, literature and art, autobiography and testimony, and, why not, trauma and pain and the role of language in processes of mourning and working-through. Blogging, as a form of meta-fiction, implies self-consciousness. Not unlike psychoanalysis and some forms of so-called postmodern fiction and art, blogging works within a double-bind: in the end, blogs may not be speaking about anything else but themselves. In other words, the only space to discuss the possibilities and consequences of blogging may be the blogs themselves. One should not forget the theoretical, political dangers this would imply.
So, a resistance to blogging would be called for. Not unlike a resistance, or shoud we say resistances to psychoanalysis. Has psychoanalysis, as a social practice, for instance, been able to exceed its own narcissism, its own self-narrative? Has its own self-consciousness been able to escape its own self-imposed limits to interact with a world, with a society trapped by injustice, lack of love, violence, intellectual and material poverty?
How will blogging (or has blogging even considered to) interact with a world that does not exist around the Internet, not even around computers? And, how will the writing and reading individual, the one who aspires to self-consciousness through communication –in this case blogging– will change? Will authors just leave behind a paralytic, handicapped form of self-reflexive, egotistical narcissism, or will it be something else?
“Literature is like drawing”: Hugo Pratt (video uploaded by JazzRoyalty)
Blue Demon: You Can’t Kill a Vampire | The Gothic Imagination
My first entry as guest blogger for this awesome project at the University of Stirling.
Lecture: "Stephen King's Wang": Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive [audio]
"A Literary History of Word Processing"
The @NYTimes on @mkirschenbaum’s forthcoming book
Tattoo
Tattoo
The light is like a spider. The webs of your eyes There are filaments of your eyes -Wallace Stevens
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there–
Its two webs.
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.
Culture fosters social cohesion by aligning people within a similar ethic of critique and engaging them in discursive networks that inevitably coalesce into communities. Cultured subjects do not celebrate themselves or their beliefs because they are never fully self-confident, but always in the process of realizing their identity between the ephemeral fullness of felt truth and the alienated, discursively mediated re-cognition of their framing assumptions. The ethic of constant self-interrogation implicit in this model is incommensurate with the glorification of any particular identity, national, ethnic, or individual, since it contains as one of the crucial moments the stepping back from habitual practice, the contestation of everything that goes without saying.
If there is an underlying universal ideology of Culture -a tacit scenario of “natural” behavior that draws on the deep logic of culture- it would simply be this: that we contest all of our unexamined assumptions, and especially those that we rely upon when we engage in Cultural critique and arrogate its claim to truth. The moment that one steps back from one’s own practices and assumes a position of greater wisdom is the moment of greatest susceptibility to error, if only because, convinced of one’s averted perspective, one is less likely to question one’s conclusions. Culture demands that we resist such convictions, and to that extent, that we resist its authority.
” William Ray, The Logic of Culture (2001: 189)To write, I meditated, must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse. A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence…
The best thing about writing is not the actual labor of putting word against word, brick upon brick, but the preliminaries, the spade work, which is done in silence, under any circumstances, in dream as well as in the waking state. In short, the period of gestation. No man ever puts down what he intended to say: the original creation, which is taking place all the time, whether one writes or doesn’t write, belongs to the primal flux: it has no dimensions, no form, no time element. In this preliminary state, which is creation and not birth, what disappears suffers no destruction; something which is already there, something imperishable, like memory, or matter, or God, is summoned and in it one flings himself like a twig in a torrent. Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiselled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.
” Henry Miller, Sexus, as quoted by Michael Heim in Electric Language. A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, 1987Today the postman brought me…
On listening, Twitter and academic research and teaching
My article from Monday 12 September for the Guardian Higher Education Network.
[I try to be very cautious about using the verb ‘revolutionise’ and the noun ‘revolution’ when discussing technology. I did not write the title, but I did write the article. :) ]
"The Consequences of Writing Without Reading" -Imprint
“Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to ____ without wanting to ____.”
"From tattoos to epitaphs, short messages can have powerful meanings" | Poynter.
Contains a link to a new anthology of literary tattoos, “The Word Made Flesh.”
