It is naive to think that writing is a simple two-stage process: first you decide what you want to say, then you say it. On the contrary, as all of us know, you write because you do not know what you want to say ... Writing, then, involves an interplay between the push into the future that takes you to the blank page in the first place, and a resistance. Part of that resistance is psychic, but part is also an automatism built into language: the tendency of words to call up other words, to fall into patterns that keep propogating themselves. Out of that interplay emerges, if you are luckly, what you recognize or hope to recognize as the true.
(J.M. Coetzee,
Doubling the Point
).
Coetzee's deconstructive account of the writing process directs attention to the materiality of language, the linguistic automatism that is a function of language's materiality, and the writer's stuggle to harness the autopoetic energies inherent to language during the act of writing. In this way, his remarks help explain why writing (and especially teaching composition) can be so challenging.
Writing, as George W. Bush might put it, is "hard work." The successful writer (and here I will resist constructing an extended metaphor of writing as war) must be prepated to encounter opposition and resistance throughout the writing process. Novice writers, and some experienced ones who forget what they've learned, tend to approach writing naively, as the direct expression of a preformed thought or idea.
However, as thoughtful and honest writers will tell you, writing - with a few instrumentalized exceptions (such as, perhaps, writing a grocery list, though Derrida's theory of
differance makes even this act of writing more complex that it would initially appear) - is rarely, if ever, so straightforward a procedure.
If, to deploy a familiar trope, writing is a journey towards the truth, or at least some sort of knowledge, the route that the writer must take is a circuitous one in which the available pathways are not immediately recongizable. Indeed, the writer will frequently be disoriented and discover that what appeared to be the safest and most direct path is filled with obstacles that necessiate a rerouting.
Writing is a matter of resistances. Like thinking, or cognition, with which it is virtually synonymous, writing is a recursive process. As we write, the very transcription and inscription of our thoughts, which do not exist independent of the linguistic forms, words, in which they are materialized, makes it possible for thinking to continue into the future.
Coetzee characterizes this compositional proces as a kind of "interplay" during which linguistic pattern formation in which words come to cohere into units that are positioned or arranged in a recognizable and thus sensible and coherent shape. Coetzee's account of writing as a kind of linguistic pattern formation identifies two types of resistance with which the writer struggles.
Both of these types of resistance include an affective dimension.
The first type of resistance is "psychic," Coetzee's term for the psychological obstacles - doubts about one's authority, anxieties about being original, clever, aversions to exposing oneself to the gaze of the Other, etc. - that can generate writer's block and impede the process of composition. Here, then, the affective dimension involves the emotions the writer experiences when facing the space of writing, figured by Coetzee as the blank page.
Lacan and Zizek, not to mention numerous literary writers who offer testimony to the anguish and suffering (
jouissance) involved in writing, remind us that these negative affects are a necessary component of writing. The writer must 'tarry with the negative' and work through these affects, which, particularly if one is excessively egocentrically oriented, can become debilitating obstacles. However, when the writer risks becoming a dupe of language and recognizes the impossibility of
not falling into error, nonsense, or madness (the terrifying "night of the world" in which relations to the other are literally severed), these negative affects can shift valence. The extreme anguish writers feel when tarrying with the desubjectifying and inhuman force of language can morph abruptly into ecstatic
jouissance.
Such shifts occur when these negative affects are not registered immediately as signs of one's personal failure but are instead posited externally as an element immanent to the act of writing. When looked at awry, from a dialectical perspective, these affects appear as obstacles that create productive resistances that exercise and test the writer's constitution or will to power in a way that ultimately makes him or her stronger. In this way the affects can act as catalysts, not obstacles.
The second type of resistance is material. It has to do with the machinic quality of words, which are always and already endowed with significance and meaning that is beyond our control. The connotative and denotative force inherent to language puts constraints on the writer's ability to make use use of them, to shape them into sensible utterances, the meaning of which is fixed within a particular composition.
In another post I will say more about the affective aspects of this second type of resistance.
