Inscribing thoughts: the animation of an adventure

Inscribing thoughts: the animation of an adventure

On 2nd December 1978 Roland Barthes started teaching The Preparation of the Novel, which was to be his last lecture course, running as it did until 23rd February 1980 just under a month before his death. The actual novel being prepared was published posthumously and somewhat anticlimactically in 1995: it amounted to a facsimile of the eight pages he had written. Yet, on 1st December 1979, Barthes announced that he wanted ‘to track the Work from its Projection to its accomplishment: in other words, from Wanting-to-Write to Being-Able-to-Write, or from the Desire-to-Write to the Fact-of-Writing’. ¹ In approaching the practice of writing I do struggle in this movement from its projection to its accomplishment, and thus in this short reflection on my writing practice I want to show how Barthes helps me to see how, through animating writing as a more enjoyable adventure in thought, I might be able to progress towards finding a better ethos and technique for overcoming my anxieties when I approach the task, rather than the joy, of writing.

For Barthes, and for me taking heart in his words, writing amounted to a quest, an initiation, fraught with setbacks, doubts, difficulties and painful anxiety except for, and saved by, this desire to write. But to write what? And how should this desire be understood, and understood as a quest? In her translator’s preface to The Preparation of the Novel Kate Briggs observes that in Barthes’s terms:

at the onset, ‘to write’ is explicitly a desire, an urge or impulse in search of its

object. It is only as (it) progresses – ‘as the trials that characterize the quest are, if not overcome, then at least enumerated and examined – ‘that the desire to write begins to look more like a resolution, and a translation occurs from a generalized ‘wanting to write’ to a formalized ‘will’ to write. ²

For me, there is a long gap between wanting to write, having the desire, being preoccupied by the desire, and formalizing that into the will to write that sees something actually getting written – words on a page, like these. Being kind to myself, getting perilously close to exhausting the patience, abusing the generosity and good will of editors, I might argue that I need time, lots of it: not to work up the will, but to have the time to will the writing into being. When it comes to writing, the commodity I most need to discipline is time; setting aside blocks of time, whole mornings, afternoons, or evenings, to spend time willing the words to come.

In ‘Writing Qualitative Geography’, Dydia DeLyser draws our attention to the splintering of our personal rhythms and luxuries of writing by the urgency and productivity of the work ecology in which most of our academic writing is set. ³ Such separation produces a tension, productive for some yet debilitating for others, within the general ‘call to write’. I imagine many of us would share quite distinct self-imposed protocols when asked to describe how we approach the moment of sitting down to write. The desire to write should, and perhaps for those most content with the process does, dwell within a personal passion and need; but the will to write, for me as it was for Barthes, frames out such easy dwelling towards the necessity to write as the main goal (communication of ideas) and output (professional marker) of our job. The will to write stands opposed to the desire to write: it is not an internal, personal, need but an external, institutionalized demand. The expenditure here is perhaps an ethical call, privileged as we are in having the time, money, and indeed profession that endorses such an enterprise to give time to writing.

Yet for all that, aside from this simple demarcation of the poetic and romantic disposition to consider oneself a writer juxtaposed with the imperative to produce texts in one form or another to communicate and evidence our research, there can still be moments when the desire to write exists in just wanting to write in itself. An effervescent buzz almost takes hold and in writing one enters into the experience of thought itself. Thought comes alive, directing you and not you it, and in seemingly effortless ways writing folds the past, present and future in the here and now of those keyboard taps as sentences start to shape up and fill the screen. The past is contextualized within the symbolic architecture and art that draws on the heritage and meaning of shared experience and expression in language itself. There is here a trust and orientation guiding you along without thinking: the immediate presence of the experience of facing up to the thoughts that confront you, be they erudite and difficult pertaining to knowledge, or visceral, felt and wanting in you just being you, a human being with heart beating and thoughts flying as you sit at your desk. This practice of writing drives something out of you and, like a mirror, becomes a screen for presenting your self to yourself; and the future calls as always, here materialized in whatever medium your activity is becoming archived in, but not in these moments within any precise destination but with the hope and munificence of open lines of flight that someday, someone, somewhere will share the ecstatic point that the writing is bringing into the world. It is here that we are doubly privileged in the way that we communicate and have communication with our fellow academic writers. It is easily overlooked but is perhaps the most important work in our practice of writing: supporting each other in writing referee reports, commenting on drafts, co-authoring papers, being solicited for ideas in ‘call for paper’ conference-session organization, and, above all, with having fellow academic editors who give of their time with patience and care. ⁴

I know myself as a poor, overly indulgent, writer – I can see the referee’s comments now. I am an amateur certainly – but in wanting to write in itself language is caressed to meet the call of thought taking place when you sense a manifestation of something gripping you, some thought with a life, beauty and agency of its own, such that you wonder from whence, having found its expression through you, it came. Equally, that other wonder, of reading, of absorbing and being immersed in the ideas, imaginations and experiences of other writers; and bringing some slight tale back from these literary and philosophical travels is rewarding itself. Again this is a shared practice when you find yourself running a tutorial with five fresh-faced 18-year-olds, a tad hung-over perhaps, but still entranced and intrigued by the writings of John Wylie, and thereby engaged with geography via the very immediacy of landscape and their own experiential memories of countryside now fueled by new imaginaries. Writing creatively – part of the agenda set out by Harriet and Dydia in instigating this reflection on our writing practices – demands passion. Whilst accepting that I am a poor writer I do believe I have both a passion for writing and a capacity to improve. A passion for pursuing these ideas from the frontier landscapes of continental philosophy; and a passion for pursuing these through, or for, the advocation of viscerally inscripted thoughts. I am acutely aware then, that for me, the desire for writing burns bright when language seems to meet you half way towards that expression of thought that you are trying to capture, but that it often, more often, too often, fades fast from such inspirations to aspirations beyond my skill as a writer, and thus towards exasperation, wanting and trying to write something at all that satisfies that initial desire to write. Writing is indeed a quest but I want to enjoy the scope of my ability to get better at it.

In part we are all writing for different purposes and with different objectives; and therein we have our different philosophical heroines and authorial role models. Foolishly perhaps, but understandably I think, given that the two main aims of my writing practice are towards theoretical thinking and performative documentation, my heroes are Gilles Deleuze and Samuel Beckett. (Explains a lot, but not enough.) For Deleuze, writing is an act which places us always already outside of ourselves. One can certainly feel in his writing this symptom, as if he was infected by one of his heroes, Frederick Nietzsche, as the multivalent meanings and swerves of juxtaposition within Deleuze’s texts task us, not so much, nor solely, as readers but rather as fellow travellers caught up on the waves of thought underpinning much of Deleuze’s own conceptual encounters. The task, and this is the infection, is to ‘find the force that gives a new sense to what I say’ ⁵ ; and like an infection we host and propagate the virus that keeps it alive, the thought alive, as it mutates within us. In embedding his style of writing alongside that of Nietzsche, Deleuze critiques the cult of interiority in writing: he uses humour and irony to destroy this cult, ⁶ speaking of a schizophrenic laughter forever outward-reaching, one that runs counter to ‘the whole tragedy of interiority’ such that ‘one cannot help but laugh when the codes are confounded’. ⁷ This writing is a particular experience of thinking, and a particular objective for writing; it is of course not for all tastes. And if it is upon such forces that the text be hung, it is no wonder that such texts confound easy interpretation. These texts are not so much informative products as much as experiences of thought itself, and thus performances themselves.

Aside from such theoretical aspirations I am struck by the potential performance of writing in a style of writing that is precisely more aware of its performative character. It not only desires the representation of some present now past, but also the presentation of the present in the experience of its reading. During the third seminar of The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes argued ‘that you can’t make writing out of the present but that you can write the Present by noting it’. ⁸ He explains,

Notatio (speaking and writing are different beasts!) notatio instantly appears as

the problematic intersection between a river of language, of uninterrupted

language – life, both a continuous, ongoing, sequenced text and a layered text, a histology of cut-up texts, a palimpsest – and a sacred gesture: to mark life (to

isolate: sacrifice, scapegoat) . . . What notation presents is the problem of realism. ⁹

The problem of realism is precisely that which generates the tension that snaps us back towards writing as a means to an end, towards finalizing the text to meet the deadline, to signing off and letting go; allow the process to become an object, a gravestone for the thoughts that we were having.

The other side of this points towards performance writing and its own presentational sake. ¹⁰ For me, this is not about writing performance (trying, with language more attuned to the emergent and the indiscernible viscerality of being, to apprehend and share a singular, present happening to those who are absent) but about the performance of writing archived in the written document. This performance is about folding past and future into the present; or rather what, for me, it should try and do is present the real that is equally virtual and actual, equally imagined and physically manifest; it is then less agitated by realism.

So back to the task, method or craft of writing: let’s take a less commonplace hypothesis for writing: not one as explanation but rather one of production. (Perhaps I reveal my get-out clause!) This is the key shift towards the performance writing I want to advocate. When I think about writing, when I think about how I approach sitting down to write, part of my difficulty with writing is that I am at once on the path to be travelled and already thinking towards the end of the journey (at least in my head in terms of the ideas I want to get across: I am done, I’ve done the reading, I have pursued the idea: why this extra required effort?). Some say, you only know what you think when you write. Perhaps. That is certainly true some of the time. But if we take this hypothesis of production over explanation, and not that of explaining and setting out the ideas that have driven me to get to writing, then something else is freed up in the enterprise: to take risks, to experiment. Barthes, in his fifth seminar early in January 1979, pitched his student audience back into the space of desire, that desire to enjoy writing for its own sake:

the explanation of Desire is illusory: as you explain, you only ever manage to get at what, in the subject always recedes . . . perhaps that is what Art is, what Form is: what gives us the courage to come to terms with our Desire: making thought: the animation of an adventure. ¹¹

There is anxiety for me when I approach writing, an anxiety propagated out of writing for production and generating the space (and adventure) of writing in the desire that drives it into being. For me that desire is working with a new concept or line of philosophy that challenges my thinking; thus taking one thinker’s idea and rubbing it up against another’s: the contingent logic to Alain Badiou’s event with the deconstructive architecture of Jacques Derrida’s ‘perhaps’; or Jacques Ranciere’s notion of an inconsequential community seemingly resonant with yet conceptually quite opposed to Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘inoperative community’.

I know that what I need to do is come to terms with the desire to write, to enjoy writing on its own terms; but I do still struggle. One of my self-absorbed solutions – and I am doing it here by folding and challenging my looser thoughts with those of Barthes – is to take some outside frame to help build or intimate a thematic matrix to my argument. These are allusions that build up and intimate a scene of argument, hint at angles that I myself don’t even see, acting like affective strikes akin to the artist Lucio Fontana’s cuts in the canvas of his paintings (like ‘Spatial Concept’, ‘Waiting’ 1960; Tate Modern, London), but here act like cuts in the canvas of meaning; all which I would like to suspend any explicit explanation of. Thus in past papers I have turned to theatre – ‘Copenhagen’ by Michael Frayn ¹² ; dance – ‘Shift’ by Russell Malaphant ¹³ ; literature – ‘The Hotel Capital’ by Olga Torkazuk ¹⁴ ; and, film – ‘Hidden’ by Michael Hanke. ¹⁵ Less grandiose and more often, and painfully pragmatic, I am wary about hope, and here the hope I might have for what I think I might be able to write: have low expectations and you are less likely to suffer disappointment. If that gets you to the writing desk do it.

So ‘The animation of an adventure’ sounds enticing, but it is not mere entertainment for the point is that this is about the art and craft of writing. Barthes thus continued his argument (which, it is worth remembering, ran for over 15 months) towards fleshing out novel protocols for the production of writing. The adventure insists on one thing he said: Nonappropriation. (I don’t want to appropriate the parameters of your writing adventure: writing should be fun, not an anxious task set out by others.) Nonappropriation for Barthes was the very constitutive substance of the desire to write. (Why have I started to write directly to you now?) I am here for you, not you for me. I am trying to communicate to you, but what I am trying to communicate infects how I can go about enacting that communication. For Barthes, of course desire has an illusory logic: ‘as you explain, you only ever manage to get at what, in the subject, always recedes; there is no end to the explanation of desire . . . Perhaps that is what Art is, what Form is: it is what gives us the courage to come to terms with our Desire: making thought: the animation of an adventure’. ¹⁶

To draw to a close: for me, writing in the humanities and social sciences, part of this adventure is about reassembling social and political life through theory and a performative emphasis on the micro forces of the body. One strand of this reassemblage lies in questioning and experimenting with the ways in which we register the affectivity of our passive vital bodies. These bodies, our bodies, are exposed to the material, multi-dimensional and oscillating temporalities working within, through, and outside them. But further, this direct address to our affective bodies acknowledges too that the evental presentation or presencings of the world itself, like an act of writing, constitutes us in that we inhere in them and not them in us. Is this Gnomic? Abstract? For sure: that is the point! So what does it do? Force us to think differently. But it is absolutely contingent on the world. So this is about vocabularies that express something else about the world and in part bring it into being and make it at least present in our world – as Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore note in Political Matter, ¹⁷ and how Jane Bennett enacts so beautifully in the poetic narrative of her Vibrant Matter. ¹⁸ There are so many really quite wonderful writers in geography, all of whom should not fret about being good writers per se (I think many are) because they push words to give tangibility to things like affects: tendencies, propensities, intensities, thresholds, force fields, atmospheres but also less Deleuze scientific: lingering, rumination, hesitation, stilling, suspending, moving, waiting, proximate, intimate, immanent, alluring, seductive (see Bissell). ¹⁹

Where does that leave me? Apprehensive. But wow, what a great word, apprehensive: to apprehend, but not be certain; to be apprehended, to arrest, to be arrested, to be caught dumbfounded in the flow of someone else, something else, a breeze, a warm glow of sunlight – ‘affect: to understand, practically, not intellectually. Surely here, driven by Desire, we should learn also to let go of our fears. ²⁰ We want so much from words, to hear some words: do we fail to realize that they say more than we know; that there are silences, gaps, which communicate so much, too much. How do you write that? But like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, we are trying to get off stage, from thought to word, words to argument, or rather words to impressions, all to move on, to get some orientation with the words we have got. Representation does matter, but it’s not all that matters. And getting some grip on the world, to know how to go on, to write to others, perhaps as pleas for help in trying to work out how to go on. But if there are so many words, then in writing, even if not directly in life, innovating with our expressive mediums to create new worlds is a healthy part of it, so experiment. Animate the adventure of writing, and of life itself.