People. Newspapers. University of drums.
Avengers. Ambassadors. Beadles of obelisks!
22nd Canto, The march into the tunnel
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, books are well written or badly written. That is all. Wilde made subtler claims than this but even so, it is a good place to start an exploration of minoritarian literature. He meant to say that in relation to moral claims for art, the question of the successful formal achievement of the work is of greater importance. But there are also circumstances where qualitative evaluations are transformed into a sort of morality. Non-aesthetic criteria are brought into play wherever good works are contrasted with bad works.
Oh, life forever contaminated
Movements of the internal being
The works of the detested enemy, almost without exception are bad works. The poetry of the detested is always subject to contempt, and the contempt is expressed as a qualitative evaluation. But in the space designated for detestable literature, another motive for writing grips which has nothing to do with either morality or the difficult matter of good versus bad writing. That which is already designated bad is, by omission, permitted the space to go much further, and therefore to generate unverifiable and exceptional, even unhinged worlds – Wilde says, it is always the unreadable that occurs.
I have really become hard only by thin layers
I am Gong
Marginal writing is directed towards the writer’s circle. It approaches as close as it is possible to get to the state of writing for writing without disappearing altogether. It seeks to activate for a few others, whose fewness is an essential component in the writing, a recognition of an edge to writing at that point of falling into non-writing. Works created in the detested space of bad writing are always vulnerable to accusations of inferiority and irrelevance. Peripheral phenomena by definition do not receive the energy sufficient to realise them as immediately significant.
I was then at Honfleur and getting bored. So I resolutely brought in some camels there. That didn’t seem to be called for. Never mind. It was my idea.
Intervention
However, the marginal writer does not seek to move his writing towards the centre where it might maximise energy resources created by mainstream popularity, promotion, availability and so on. And nor do does the marginal writer seek a total aesthetic transformation of the mainstream in order that their objects may be set at the centre of another world.
In the old days I had too much respect for nature. I put myself in front of things and landscapes and let them alone.
Intervention
On the contrary, the practice of a marginal aesthetics involves the securing of a line of attention directed specifically to this object which is made to appear as an exception, as something else, as being beyond taxonomic classification. The writer in the space of bad writing establishes life-forms which could not exist anywhere else but at the edge of the literary world. The line of attention which sustains a specific object at the extreme periphery is a form of energy... and it is this line, or animating beam, which fixes the written object as a sort of life-form, a literary extremophile.
What tires me so much are my continual interventions.
I’ve told already how I fight in the street with everybody; I box somebody’s ears, I grab the women’s breasts, and using my foot like a tentacle I put panic into the subway cars.
A dog’s life
The relation between the created life-form and the line of energy which sustains it, defines the character of marginal environments. This self-attenuation, and precarious state, defines what once was called arte provera, a methodology of self-impoverishment directed towards realising a critical body always at the point of its own disintegration. The line towards the impoverished body is sketched out by the writer’s milieu: the life-forms created by the milieu are destined to be loved by few, hated by some, and ignored by the many. Disinterest is essential to the stability of the extremophile, its delicacy is correlated to its being hard to find, and prized rarity in the literary domain is synonymous with not being an object of popular consciousness. The extremophile therefore is not found by the many but is looked for, and perhaps recognised, by only a few.
Woe to him who goes for groceries
The epoch of the visionaries
The stability of an entirely written world, where each extremophile remains as it is only through its as a realisation of possible extremophile phenomena, and where the artificial world which holds it at its centre is precarious and therefore true to itself, is dependent on the insecurity of the energy supply which has been secured to make it come true. The marginal writer, as in arte Provera, seeks to shave the beam of light directed on his creation to the merest thread. He hides it further and further out, as if it were a distant planet. He hacks at the line, interrupting it, so that it must be renewed by his readers. He removes the life-form in order that the energy beam reaches out into an empty space, the space where the object is described only by its absence.
Pon was born of an egg, then he was born of a codfish and while being born made it explode, then he was born of a shoe through bipartition
Birth
The extremophile object which lives so distantly from the centre, survives as long as the writers’ circle survives. It is the outcome of their activity but also an expressive product of the society within which the circle itself is set. Wilde: Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. The writer belonging to a writers’ circle engages the world by fleeing to its edge and recording its forces as a distant object with a tenuous hold on life. The extremophile unveils the world in the act of hiding from it.
Plume apologised immediately
Plume at the restaurant
In the interested activity of the writers’ circle, the extremophile becomes a means of creating a world around itself. It realises its own other world, of which it is the subject... it inhabits the centre of that space where events occur in relation to its perception of them. It produces its world and in its production, it engages this world – the world which it records within its space but which it cannot perceive, the hidden laws which it cannot comprehend. The created environment is a set of self-separating extreme conditions supporting strange and incomprehensible lifeforms which nonetheless articulate what this world really is. Wilde calls self-separation ‘individualism’ which he relates to reductive process, but really he means that which is irreducibly unique: Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
If someone brusquely serves him a dish with a root in it, a big root, ‘come now, eat. What are you waiting for?’
Plume travels
The extremophile world, at the edge of the world, extends the totality of all things by including itself as the unprecedented term in that totality. The extremophile survives as itself to the extent that it is an exception which nonetheless belongs to the world. It has energy drawn to it by enthusiasts, they draw the energy portion due to the extremophile away from other objects, which are thus diminished. The extremophile seems to suck a beam of energy to itself from all that which has already existed and thereby diminishes the glow of everything else by the same proportion that it begins to glow as itself. The extremophile is a relative object which exists in relation to optimophile life... its glow seems to suggest that everything else ought to disintegrate.
...then he was born of a rhubarb leaf at the same time as a fox
Birth
Plume and Pon are Michaux’s affect-burdened extremophile clowns, attenuated and flickering beings at the edge of existence, who precipitate extreme reactions against themselves whenever they enter the institutions of the optimophile world. They do not exist except at the threshold of institutions which rage against their apologetic and acquiescent comportment. Plume and Pon’s excruciating and humiliating existence occurs entirely at the point where latent authority emerges in relation to them. As theoretical beings, the existences of these clowns has flickered and died, flickered and died numerous times over the years. They are obviously significant but what is the politics that attaches to them?
Meanwhile, a great lout of a policeman over his shoulder was saying to him,
‘Listen, I can’t do anything. It’s orders. If you don’t talk into the mouthpiece, I’m going g to beat you. Understand? Confess! You’ve had fair warning. If I don’t hear you, I beat you.’
Plume at the restaurant
They do not act, and yet they are innately toxic to the institutions of the optimophile world – provoking disciplinarian apparatuses into extreme response against them. We can infer that their compulsive contact with this world suggests an innate if submerged aggressive hostility to it. Their predicament describes a form of atopy in which such hypersensitive individuals triggers anaphylactic-type, disciplinary-evacuant reactions, in the external environment – Plume and Pon are therefore both hyperallergic and toxic – or rather, they have separated the triggers and causes of the organisation of the world and included them as the poles of their own characters.
‘Those who are chilly,’ says Plume, ‘had better cover their heads with newspapers. That keeps you warm’ The others understand. Soon all the dead are cowled in newspapers, cowled in white, cowled and rustling.
The Night of the Bulgarians
Thus, being classified as a species of aggressive passivity (of a for-itself type... that is of a type which aggressively struggles within itself to assert its passivity within the world) Plume and Pon may be understood as the embodiment of a form of politics. In fact, Plume and Pon are revitalised in our need for their impossibility. At long last, eighty one years since their creation, they have found us voraciously ready for them. They have found those who are prepared to accept them.
He was born of a zebra, he was born of a sow, he was born of a stuffed monkey, one leg fastened to a mock cocoa tree
Birth
The impossibilist politics of Plume and Pon does not actively seek to be realised generally (or through ‘interventions’) but in its irreducibly extreme internal being exposes through its presence the otherwise veiled constraints of the generality, and inadvertently activates disciplinarian mechanisms against itself.
‘I can be of no help in this matter,’ thought Plume, and he went back to sleep.
A tractable man
If Plume and Pon are to be understood as militants, they still do not positively offer themselves as an example of militant practice, they do not carry anything forward into the world but their own peculiarity. However, the terror of the world is found both reflected and unveiled within them. In their tractability, in their refusal to fight back we discover both the specifics of the manic involvement of the world in individual life and its refusal to let them be. We also perceive a plane of complicity upon which those who oppose the world are shown to conform to it in their activating mere variations of disciplinarian interventions. The degree of the optimal environment’s inhumanity, even its inhuman discontent with itself, is always to be discovered in the measure of Plume and Pon’s unhuman discomfort.
