From Word To Word

Commenting on my recent post, Some Reflections on the Medium, Dave Humphrey suggests that perhaps writing for the web has caused me to trade depth for frequency, though I think and hope that he does not intend this as a criticism. He describes this less deep and more frequent writing as promiscuous, an adjective I often use to describe the way that I read many kinds of text at once without any predetermined program, merely pulling books from my shelf as they surprise my interest. I am interested in these three adjectives, one implied, two explicit: shallow, or at least less deep; frequent; and promiscuous.

I have tended to avoid the metaphor of depth in describing my own writing, mostly because it entails for me an ideal that I do not find appropriate to every situation. Instead, I most often speak of rigour, which implies a metaphor of labour, where the rigorous one is the one who does the work that is required or expected of the job, or I speak of propriety, which implies a metaphor of social relation, where the proper one is the one who does what is required or expected of the relationship. Both of these metaphors appeal to me more because they recognize that depth is not always what is required, that at certain times it fulfils the demands of rigour and propriety to be relatively shallow. By returning me to the metaphor of depth, however, with which I am still uncomfortable, Dave makes unavoidable the fact that writing for the web, at least in this particular mode, has indeed forced me into a relative shallowness. It has limited the number of subjects that I can take up with propriety and rigour. It has forced me to take up improperly and unrigorously subjects that required a depth that I was unable to give them. To this extent, I accept and am troubled by Dave’s use of this word.

I accept with much less reservation his idea of frequency. Not only does it describe accurately how the web enables a much more frequent and therefore open mode of publishing than does the traditional publishing industry, but it bears connotations of the sound or energy wave, which I think are particularly apt. In order for a sound wave to be sent and received, it must be modulated to the proper frequency, and it here that the idea of propriety returns. What the web offers in return for an impropriety of depth, it returns here as a propriety of frequency. I am able to write at the proper speed and with the proper rhythm, with the proper frequency, so that I can hear and be heard. I am intrigued by this idea, and I may return to it as I have more opportunity to reflect on its implications.

Dave’s last suggestion, that my writing for the web is promiscuous in the way that my reading is promiscuous, relates to this idea of frequency also. If what I read is not programmatic, though at times it has this element, and if the films that I watch and the conversations that I conduct and the activities that I perform are similarly without curriculum, if they are promiscuous in this sense, then it is perhaps only proper that my writing be promiscuous also. Perhaps it is precisely in this respect that the web offers me a frequency that is proper to me. Perhaps the rhythm of my reading and my thinking and my life can be best described by this idea of promiscuity. I may need to return to this possibility also.

I know that it has only been a few weeks since I began writing this thing that bears some resemblance to a blog, but the experience has been so singular for me that already I feel the need to reflect on what I have been learning. It is not so much that I have been surprised in my expectations, but that I had no real expectations to surprise and have found that perhaps I should have expected more.

As I have already indicated in a previous post on Writing for the Web, I have found the most difficult aspect of writing for the internet to be the demand for speed and brevity, and I have been experiencing this pressure as an intensification of the anxiety that I described in On What I do not Write, the anxiety that what I write will be inadequate because of insufficient introduction, contextualization, and rigour. I always feel that I am doing an injustice to the authors and texts and ideas that I am discussing, because I do not give them the time and the space that I feel them to deserve.

In my recent post on Ivan Illich, for example, I would have liked to give whole pages to the life that he chose to live, on the death that he chose to die, on each of the books that he wrote, on the places he worked, on the people he influenced, and these pages would have been what were proper to him. He required volumes to do him justice, where I could give him only paragraphs, or only sentences, or nothing at all. Even more troubling is the way that the demand for brevity forced me to be entirely reductive in my explanation of his ideas and their influence on me. What I found myself able to write was not even a just summary, not even a just recapitulation. This is the position in which this medium seems always to place on me, the effect that it seems always to have on me.

I do not have a solution for this position and this effect. Even my current length and style stretch the conventions for the medium of the blog. Anything longer or more rigorous would quickly become entirely unwieldy. It might be possible to push conventions even further with the sort of serial writing that I have been attempting through the posts on Other Things, but it would not be nearly sufficient to do justice to many of the subjects I would like to discuss. To some degree at least, I must be content with this inadequacy, even as I feel that I must continually draw attention to it.

I am finding, however, that what writing for the web offers me in return is not just the openness to response and to sharing that Dave Humphrey and Chris Land have noted, but a mode of publication that accommodates the rhythm of a lived life. It would not be possible for me to write in the sustained ways that the traditional publishing industry requires, even in the unlikely event that it would publish the sorts of things that I would write, because writing, for me, takes place in the cracks and the crevices of other things. I write words between marking papers and feeding bottles to babies, sentences between stirring pots on the stove and digging stumps in the yard, paragraphs between reading stories to children and conversing with visitors. The web allows me to write even despite the fact that I do not have, and do not want, the space to be a writer in the traditional sense.

This is not to say that I do not value the media through which writers have traditionally published themselves. My appreciation for the book in my hand and the pages on my fingers approaches the quality of a fetish. Even so, I recognize the fact that many people, even some who might have useful things to say and useful ways to say them, may find the traditional press unsuited to the ways that they want or need or are forced to write. My duties as a father, and a husband, and a friend, and a teacher, and a student, and a cook, and a gardener, and a reader, all make the avenue of the publishing industry an absurdity for me, and I am unwilling to sacrifice any of these things to any degree whatsoever in order to make that avenue less absurd. The rhythm of my life and of my writing are not compatible with the traditional press.

The internet, however, accommodates not only my rhythm, but many rhythms. Though its natural movement is celerity and brevity, it can be made to open itself to other ways of writing than that of the expert and the professional. It allows me to be a writer who takes the practice of writing seriously without needing this practice to be a profession or even a professionalism. It allows me to write as an amateur, not in the sense that I take writing and thinking lightly, but in the sense that I do not make these things my profession or depend upon them for my livelihood. It allows me the freedom to write in ways that would otherwise not be available to me.

It seems to me, then, that the task laid for the writer of the web, or at least for this writer of the web, is to find ways to both resist and welcome the web. The task is to reject the impulse to write hastily and thoughtlessly for the sake of being current, but yet to embrace the impulse to write according to a personal and idiosyncratic pace. It is to write with a rigour and a slowness and a lengthiness that challenges the web’s demand for currency, and yet to write with a singularity, an intimacy, and a personality that is made possible by the openness of the web to the amateur and the nonprofessional. It is this balance that I am trying to find.

I am currently working on two other posts that I have not had the time to write during the week, but in both cases I am fighting an instinct that I often seem to have when I write, and I thought perhaps I might exorcise this particular impulse if I took some time to reflect on it. The impulse is this: whenever write, I feel compelled to say first what I will not write, to surround what I will write in prologues and prefaces, in preambles and disclaimers, in afterwords and codas, in introductions and appendices. I always find myself saying, “Here is the context that you need to understand what I will write,” or “Here is the list of cautions and provisos that should condition what I will soon tell you,” or “Here are the directions and avenues that I have not yet had time to explore,” or, in every case, “Here are the reasons why what I write will fail to say and be what I intend.”

This impulse, given freedom, is paralysis. It is the expression of an anxiety that springs from confronting the impossibility of writing. It dwells on what is absolutely true but what nevertheless must be ignored: the fact that what I write, once it is written and has passed away from me, is always both far more and far less than what I can know or intend. It trembles before the choice to write that knows what writing is, before the choice that is a “nevertheless”, an “even so”, a “despite of everything”.  Anything I write is necessarily written in the shadow of this choice.

Dave Humphrey has recently posted an interesting and thoughtful response to my discussion of Writing for the Web and Echographies of Television, arguing that what I perceive to be the speed and brevity of writing for the web is actually a kind of incompletion that is itself a request for others to join the discussion. I do not like to disagree with Dave, so I am glad that in this case I am in agreement with him. I would affirm that what is best about teletechnologies is their capacity to invite and accommodate the response of others. They enable dialogue and interactivity in ways that traditional media does not, and this is the very reason why I do choose to write through the medium, even though I write in ways that sometimes run counter to some of its tendencies.

When I argue that writing for the web is characterized by speed, brevity, and utility, I am not precluding the possibility that it is also characterized by openness and invitation, and Dave does well to make me recall these aspects of the medium. I am only suggesting that good writing on the web must find ways to disrupt the medium’s obsession with speed and currency, must affirm its possibilities for hospitality, because it is these possibilities, as Dave argues, that enable the web to be such an effective disruption of traditional print media, putting in question traditional ideas of authorship, scholarship, ownership, disciplinarity, etcetera.

The possibility that the web enables, and that Dave rightly affirms, is that we might write and think differently in a public space, without the restrictions of the academic institution or the publishing industry or the physical page. The danger is that the loss of these restrictions will encourage us to stop writing and thinking at all in disciplined ways, in ways that take whatever time and space is required to do their subjects justice.

This afternoon I met with a friend of mine, Don Moore, who has just defended his PhD in English Literature and has just completed his teaching for the semester so is now available to come and entertain me. In preparation for a course he will be teaching in the fall, we have decided to read Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler’s Echographies of Television (Malden: Polity Press, 2002), which means that I may well be writing on this text off and on over the next few months.

Our conversation today only brushed on the text itself, focusing more on the course that Don is preparing, but we did discuss briefly one of the ideas in the first section of the volume, “Artifactualities”, which is an interview with Derrida. The idea relates to one of my recent posts, “Writing for the Web“, where I suggest that writing for the web is driven primarily by the need for speed and currency. Derrida, speaking more broadly of technological media, which he calls teletechnologies, makes a similar suggestion. He says, “The least acceptable thing on television, on the radio, or in the newspapers today is for intellectuals to take their time, or to waste other people’s time there.” This demand for haste, he argues, “can reduce certain intellectuals to silence,” as they “refuse to adapt the complexity of things to the conditions imposed on their discussion.” In other words, the choice before the intellectual is to simplify the complexities of thought to the speed, the brevity, and the utility that teletechnologies require, or to be silent.

I would affirm Derrida’s analysis here, and also his solution, which involves, in part, a decision not to be of this present time, to be anachronistic, untimely, and disadjusted, in order to “not necessarily miss what is most present today.” This mode of writing and thinking in ways that are out of their time and place in order to reveal the question’s that their time and place conceal is exactly what I want to accomplish in this space that is not a blog. I want to write in ways that, while certainly not escaping the teletechnologies that structure and enable it, call attention precisely to the question of how these technologies impose a certain structure and rhythm on public discourse. I want to write slowly and lengthily, so that what I write requests that you read slowly and lengthily, so that perhaps together we can begin to ask what we have lost by acceding to the demand that writing be always in haste, in brief, and in utility.

I was at my friend Dave Humphrey’s house on Saturday night, sitting on his screened porch, drinking coffee, and listening to a nearby tractor drown out the sound of the wildlife: a lovely evening. In the course of the conversation, Dave mentioned the way that I use email to send letters rather than messages and use this blog to write essays rather than posts. “Luke,” he said, “you need to learn to write for the web,” though he knows that this cause is lost. Because our conversation was not focused on this topic directly, and because our wives put up with too much pseudo-intellectual discussion from the two of us already, I did not respond much to Dave’s remark, but I was struck by the indefinition, at least for me, of what it means “to write for the web.” What characteristics distinguish this mode of writing from other modes? What is gained and lost by this kind of writing?

I have no intention of trying to address these questions fully in this format. A book would probably be required, and I have neither the degree of interest required to finish it nor any degree of hope that someone would publish it. However, several ideas have occurred to me since our conversation, and perhaps they may serve as the basis for a more serious thinking of the topic.

1. Writing for the web seems to imply first of all speed. It is written quickly, published immediately, received by its readers almost instantly. Its value is in its currency. The email’s advantage over the letter is that it can be sent immediately from where I sit at my desk and be received instantly by its intended audience. The advantage of the blog over the newspaper column is that I can update it, edit it, and syndicate it in real time. The characteristic of speed is so central to writing for the web that it is almost definitive of the mode.

2. Because writing for the web finds its value in its currency, it also tends to be characterized by brevity. Emails are generally shorter than letters. Messaging is shorter yet. Twitter even shorter. All of this, of course, is to facilitate speed. Writing for the web must be brief in order that it be current.

3. Because writing for the web is driven by both speed and brevity, it is also characterized by functionality. It is hardly writing in this respect. It is communication. It tends toward the shortform, the acronym, the image, the list, and the phrase. It values functionality over literary interest. This is not always bad, of course. There are times when speed and clarity of communication are to be valued over literary style, but functionality in writing for the web has almost entirely displaced the literary.

4. Because writing for the web is concerned with speed, and therefore brevity, and therefore functionality, it is also concerned mostly with the present, rarely with the future or the past, with preservation and archivization. While the web is certainly used to archive many things, and while certain functions of the web are focused exclusively on archiving knowledge, writing that is for the web is not often preserved, is not often intended to be preserved. It is possible but not likely that a famous figure’s collected emails will ever be published in the way that collected letters were published in the past. Not only would the contents of these emails probably be of much lesser literary interest because they have lost their currency, but there is every chance that they would not even exist, having been deleted as soon as they were written and received. Messaging and twittering would never even be of interest to posterity at all, dealing entirely with the trivial and the transitory. In this respect, blogs are perhaps different, because one of their central functions is to archive, but there still remains the question of how much of this sort of writing will be worth reading once it has lost its currency.

In any case, it is for these reasons and othes that I choose to write the web differently. I choose to write letters as well as messages, to archive the letters I send, and to archive the letters that people actually write me in return. I choose to write essays rather than posts, to be as concerned with the words that I use as I am with the ideas that I communicate. I choose to write slowly in a medium that demands speed. I choose to write lengthily in a medium that demands brevity. I do so, not only because it pleases me to do so, but because I want to raise for others the question of how writing for the web has perhaps prevented us from being writers at all.

I came to read William Golding’s Pincher Martin (San Diego: Harvest Brace Jovanovich, 1956) yesterday in rather a strange way. My first opportunity to read Golding was in Grade 7 or 8, when we were supposed to read Lord of the Flies, which curriculum writers always suppose will be interesting to young readers because of the age of the antagonists, but which is too psychologically complex for most preteens to understand and enjoy. I was a constant reader at that age, but I was bored enough by the first few pages that I left the rest of it unread, bluffing my way through test as I almost always did.

It was not until after I had graduated from my second literature degree and was reading more or less promiscuously for my own enjoyment that I ever read one of Golding’s novels, The Spire, which I liked so much that I went back to read Lord of the Flies, Darkness Visible, and The Pyramid, in that order. By that time I had exhausted my appetite for Golding and moved on to something else without having read Pincher Martin, and I might never have read it if a friend had not lent me a book, called something like The 100 Best Fantasy Novels, just before I was to teach an offering of my Fantasy Literature course last year. As I usually do when I cannot find enough time to read something thoroughly, I just photocopied the table of contents and the bibliography, which listed all of the books in any case.

Making this photocopy was one of those seemingly insignificant actions that produces entirely unexpected results. I started reading some of the novels from the list, avoiding those that seemed simple sword and sorcery novels, selecting those with authors I had enjoyed previously and those with copies readily available in my local used bookstores. Some failed to impress me very much, but some of them have become favourites: Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell (Frogmore: Panther Books, 1972), Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (London: Sphere Books, 1986), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), and several others. Pincher Martin was also on the list, and I had even added it to my list of books to purchase on LibraryThing, but I had never had the chance to buy it.

On Thursday evening, however, my regular ballhockey night was cancelled, and since I was already at that end of town, I stopped by Sunrise Books. There, sitting atop the first stack of books I saw, was Pincher Martin. I bought it, read a few pages at a local coffee shop, then spent most of yesterday finding space to read it between parenting and cooking and raking the yard.

It is one of those books that has an ending that should not be spoilt, so I will refrain from spoiling it, but it begins as an account of a sailor whose ship is torpedoed and who finds himself on what is little more than a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. The novel describes his efforts to survive on the island and intersperses this account with flashbacks to his previous life, but its primary narrative is clearly the progression in the sailor’s emotional, psychological, and spiritual condition. Confronted with his past life, his current situation, and the decision that connects the two, he comes to see himself as the last maggot in a tin box, the one who has eaten all the others to become the biggest and the fattest. He begins to see the rocks of his miniature archipelago as teeth in a mouth that is somehow his own. He begins to project various figures from his life, real and imagined, onto the statue he has constructed. In short, he begins to go mad, or perhaps to believe that he is mad, or perhaps to be lead into the belief that he is mad.

The writing is typical of Golding: intense and imagistic, surreal and troubling, but also beautiful. His sentences are often long, full of clauses and subclauses, rhythmic. I found myself wanting to read the prose aloud, so that I would not rush through the linguistic quality of it in my eagerness to follow the sense of the narrative. I think a reading of the book is benefited greatly from this kind of slowness, is able to immerse itself in the richness and the intensity of the prose, in the sense of reasoned madness that pervades the story.

What impresses me most about the novel, however, is a quality of Golding’s that I have never really been able to articulate. When I finish one of his novels, I am certainly stimulated intellectually and narratively, but many novels provide this same kind of stimulation for me. With Golding, I also come away feeling what might best be described as spiritually troubled, or conflicted, or disquieted. I am always less able to look into myself with equanimity. I am always forced to confront possibilities in myself that I would rather leave unconfronted. Pincher Martin does this unnervingly well. It confronts us, or it does me, with our own possibilities, and it is this, I think, that recommends it more powerfully than any other quality.

As I was making notes from Lyotard’s Postmodern Fables (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) yesterday, I came across a quotation that I flagged but failed really to consider on my first time through the book. It reads, with some of its parenthetical clauses removed, “Just as terror must be excluded from the community, so must it be sustained and assumed in writing as its condition.” As I was reading this for the second time, this association of terror and writing suddenly brought to mind a section from Nelson Algren’s Nonconformity (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998). I was certain that he too had compared writing to terrorism, so I went back to my notes to see what I could find.

In the event, Algren’s comparison was not of writing to terrorism exactly, but of writing to criminality. He says, “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery,” and he quotes Edgar Degas as saying something to the same effect, that “the artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed.” Algren, while using the image of the criminal rather than the terrorist, recognizes the same relationship that is recognized in Lyotard’s text, in the lines that Lyotard’s text caused me to remember from I do not now know where, and in various others of the authors I have read, most recently Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites (New York: Grove Press, 1969), where writing is closely associated with resistance, treachery, and criminality.

I do not know whether I believe in this association as categorically as Lyotard and Algren others seem to do. It seems to me that I have, on occasion, encountered good writing that was neither the product nor the perpetrator of a terror. I do, however, recognize a fundamental truth in this linkage between writing and the terrible. I know that I am never free myself of a kind of terror that causes me to choose writing, even while ebeing terrified of this choosing, and I know also that this terror often finds its expression in a writing that is calculated to terrorize. Even more, there lurks in much of what I have read, sometimes deeply hidden, a sense of terror, in the face of the blind and terrible confrontation that brings the author to writing, in the face of the impossibility of writing this terror, and in the face of having to awaken this terror in others, as an alarm or as a warning.

I have been reading Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Postmodern Fables (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), one of which relates to what I am doing, or hope to be doing, with the Luke’s Wiki project that I am beginning on my Moodle site. In “The General Line”, Lyotard talks about the second life that we all maintain, the secret life, the no-man’s-land, that is separated from public life by a “general line”. This general line is what separates the life that everyone sees from the life of the individual, the life of absolute privacy and absolute freedom.

This private and secret life is not a way to conceal something, to hide a secret. It is a way to be alone with myself apart from any secrets that I may be hiding from myself. Lyotard says that the second existence suspends the first “a little; it dwells within it from time to time and sweeps it away, but without one knowing anything about it. The second existence does not really wrong the first one; it opens little parentheses within it.” He goes on to say that “You grant your hours of solitude to that existence because you have a need not to know more. That is how it is that you can encounter what you are unaware of. However, you wait for it. And you can try to make it come. You read, your drink, you love, you make music, you give yourself over to the ritual of your little obsessions, you write.”

This second life is critical to Lyotard because he sees it as being “at the very foundation of human rights.” He argues that it is “the human right to separation that governs our declared rights,” because “rights and respect for rights are owed to us only because something in us exceeds every recognized right.” If, therefore, the general line begins to dissolve, if there is no longer a secret and hidden life, “if humanity does not preserve the inhuman region in which we can meet this or that which completely escapes the exercise of rights, we do not merit the rights that we have been recognized.”

Yet, according to Lyotard, the general line is coming under attack in liberal democratic societies, not from the overt and violent denial of privacy that characterizes totalitarianism, but from a subtle and unrelenting demand that we express ourselves continually, that we give our opinions instantly, that we publish and represent ourselves entirely. “Heavy pressures,” he says, “are put on silence, to give birth to expression.”

All of which leads me to my current project, which, to no small degree, involves the kind of publishing and representing of the self that concerns Lyotard so much. By trying to find a way to present my writing in ways that permit it to be partial, incomplete, varied, and interconnected, I also permit it, in effect, to be presented in ways that are more total and more exhaustive. The more effective the project is, by which I mean, the more completely my writing begins to take place in this other mode, the less of my writing and my thinking remains in the second world and the more it appears in the first.

Lyotard’s concern is one that disturbs me, because it articulates a concern of my own that I have often felt but never been able to verbalize. It is obvious to me that my writing will necessarily differ depending on the audience to which I direct it, that this current mode of writing, intended for anyone who might want to read it, will be very different from the mode of writing in which I conduct personal correspondence or the mode of writing in which I struggle to articulate new ideas to myself. It is for this reason that I have resisted requests from several people to post our correspondence on blogs or other forums. I felt that, somehow, though there was nothing personal in these exchanges, to make them public was to violate a boundary of privacy, the “general line” of a conversation and a relationship, to use Lyotard’s phrase.

I feel much the same conflict about Luke’s Wiki. In most cases, including the short reflections I have already posted, the writing that I wish to present in this format was not intended for a general audience. It is the writing of my second and secret life. Publishing this sort of writing causes me discomfort, not because it embarrasses me, though some of it does embarrasses me for other reasons; rather, it causes me discomfort because it represents a radical reduction of the secret space that makes me separate as such.

After all, will it ever again be possible for me to write in the ways that produced this kind of secret and secondary writing when I am always cognizant that it will likely appear in my first life also. What space does this leave for me to be hidden and separate? This is one of the questions that I think the project will increasingly pose to me.

This is not a blog. After all, there is really no need for any more blogs. There are already substantially more than 100 million blogs on the internet, and almost all of them are saying things that are far more interesting than what I will say.

This is a place where I can think publically and where others can think with me if they care to do so. It is an amalgam of writings that is concerned, not with entertaining a public audience or with occupying a space within the sphere of the web, but with enabling a different way for me to think together with others, about literature and philosophy, about edible gardens and preserving fruit, about documentary film and open source software, about the many things that I find worth thinking and writing.

It is also a place where I can write, not just as an act of communication, as most public forums increasingly demand of the writer, but as an act of desire for words and for language. The title of this blog that is not a blog testifies particularly to the literary aspect of what I want to do through it. It is from Roland Barthe’s The Lover’s Discourse (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), and the full quotation reads, “From word to word, I struggle to put into other words the selfness of my image, to express improperly the propriety of my desire.” To me, this space is a chance to perform the struggle that Barthe describes, to write myself, to write my desire for writing.

Of course, it is a blog also, whether I want it to be or not. It uses a popular blog software package, is indexed by technorati, and falls within the distressingly wide and imprecise definition that popularly pertains to a blog. Even so, it’s concern is elsewhere.

I would like to thank both Mike Shaver for hosting this thing and Dave Humphrey for badgering him until he did.