Reading Blonde’s, Joe’s and Michael’s posts.
I think B’s discussion of speed is useful for beginning to articulate some of the problems posed by Joe and Michael, specifically the problem(s) of agency and/or desire, which is another way of saying the difficulties that fiction has in the realm of politics. When Michael writes that fiction “respond[s] to the culture in which we live as we live in it,” and Joe writes that he wants his writing to function in the world (what he calls “purpose,”) I’m hearing a similar argument, that writing should work immediately in the world, make it a better place etc. I’m not sure anyone will argue with this desire: I believe we all want a better world, and we all hope that writing is way to achieve this. And innovative writing, because it breaks the rules of realism and realistic narrative, might be the ‘best’ type of writing to do this.
But we can’t forget Blonde’s post, and Virilio’s idea of speed, or Dromology, what Blanchot calls Impatience (“It is impatience which makes the goal inaccessible by substituting for it the proximity of an intermediary figure. It is impatience that destroys the way toward the goal by preventing us from recognizing in the intermediary the figure of the immediate” [Space of Literature 80]). The problem with the desire of wanting our writing to work immediately in the world is complex, but for this post, can be broken down into two points. First of all, the desire of the writer plays an almost non-existent role in how her writing will be received. If it played a larger role, we’d all be rich, famous AND important (in whatever order you chose). Writers simply don’t have much say in how their writing will be received. The second problem is the problem of impatience, with the word “immediately.” I don’t think immediacy is the answer. I don’t think we can expect our writing to immediately affect the world. If writing has any culture work, it will be in the future, in vague and hidden (obscene) ways, in hard to discern, important, subtle ways. This is why, on one hand, I can welcome Michael’s naïve writer, but on the other, I’m afraid the naive solutions, because they may be immediate, will be superficial, fading into history like Upton Sinclair. This is also why I mistrust Joe’s desire (or actually maybe his solution) for a socially responsible writing, as imaginative writing primarily used as immediate political activism seems to me to be fairly ineffective intervention. I just don’t see where it works, and in the case of writing by women in the later part of this century, I feel that the attempt to privilege “engaged’ writing has led to a serious regression, both on the aesthetic and political levels. Not to mention the almost total erasure of non-realistic women writers. But that’s probably another post.
Jeffrey
2 comments:
yep on blanchot...almost included that in my speed post. and what you say about the problematic position for non-realistic (haha great phrasing) women writers is right on the money...
Upton who? Yes, Jeffrey’s point on the quickly fading efficacy of such engaged writing, naïve or no, is well taken, and I wasn’t intending to assert any permanence or predictability of the effects of that naïve writing, unless they were to take the spectacular form of, say, a passenger jet being driven into the WTC, though one could say that the efficacy of this text, too (one that I read differently than was intended by its naïve writers), has dissipated since the 24-hour images faded from our television screens. Rather, I meant to imply that the naïve writer’s work may have a peculiar (if temporally local) efficacy because of at least four pressures: 1) his narrative is (he thinks) the only one he can tell, 2) it must be told, 3) the manner of that telling (in its artful artlessness) uses the only language he has to communicate it, and 4) he succeeds in telling despite working against significant cultural resistance. However incorrect any or all of these assumptions may be for that writer, the desperation created by this confluence of perceived pressures, I think, can provide extra fuel for his/her spectacle.
However, I’d also say that my comments about writing responding to the culture in which we live as we live in it were not also intended to imply that such writing should, would, or could have an immediate effect, utopian or otherwise. That that writing could be undertaken immediately, respond immediately to the immediate culture, in the languages of the culture (or imminent languages derived from it), is possible, perhaps desirable (though that’s not always my mode) for reasons that are not always political. And these responses to culture can be published immediately thanks to blogs like this one (though that also is generally not my mode). But I’m finally less concerned (or try to tell myself I am as I read a review) about the effects of any of this writing (politically, financially, aesthetically) because, as Jeffrey points out, our work, dare I say our art, is, once published, out of (our) control. One solution to the lack of immediate effect of any specific writer, of course, is publishers like those represented here who consistently introduce accidents into the terrifying flow of information, perhaps slowing the roll of the conventional, the nostalgic, the totalitarian visionary at some point in the future. But it’s a project that requires continuity to have any effect at all.
Virilio’s formulation (in GROUND ZERO) of Blanchot’s “intermediary figure” is the “imposture of proximity,” virtual achievement, virtual enhancement, virtual victory, enabled/displayed by “simulators of proximity (TV, the Web, mobile phones)” to whose virtual images we surrender because of a suicidal faith in Progress. And I suppose it’s this application of impatience toward which my thoughts on responding to the culture in which we live as we live in it (or are about to) are directed. That is, I am concerned, finally, with the production of an accident of some sort inspired by the culture in which I live. How it is read or misread, how it benefits me financially etc. is TBD (mostly) by others. I’m suspicious of predictions and control—the business of those agents of states, media, corporations who mostly provide the content (and spy on our uses) of the simulators of proximity. Uncertainty and terror is, yes, where we live, and our accidents, if we place them somewhere visible, can remind some one of this, I think to their benefit, because it promotes introspection and investigation, it slows things down, works against “the miniaturization of action,” Virilio’s term for automation. But I wouldn’t say that anonymous benefit is what I think about as I’m constructing the accident. In the process of construction, I share at least pressure number 2 with the naïve author.
Finally, regarding Joe’s comments above, I’m very interested in hearing more from him or others about the relation and responsibilities between writer and reader and writer and writer he posits in paras. 2 and 3.
Best—
Mike
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