Fable of the written embarrassed by the writing

If I had to describe what I am doing here, I would say I am a littérateur (I do not have another term). I know that I am not, nor will I ever be, a philosopher, theorist or scholar. Nor am I a poet, essayist or novelist. I write but I do not write as these recognisable others do. I do not write in a context of peers, or for some Bubis-like patron. That is to say, I do not write the writing, the writing writes itself. The writing writes me writing it, and I permit it to do so. I have little control as it is written, and less when it is finished - it defies me to erase it. I have an idea at the beginning, and I begin, and then I am muscled aside - for the rest of the process, I stand back and let it bring itself into existence. I have never even considered putting up a struggle against the writing’s sovereignty over itself, or its dominion over my hand. I am in thrall to the writing process, not as it will come to rest in the world (as that disgusts me) but in the hot state of its appearance, its teleprinter-like updating of itself. I have the capacity of suggestibility. I fall into line with the incandescent circuits of its formation. And the outcome of my avidity before writing's own moment is that I am constitutionally unable to follow the conventions of how it should be done. I have never attempted to undertake 'research,' or make a reasoned argument, or tried to situate the text within a wider discourse. I do not read up on a subject before I write on it. 

At the point of writing I do not anticipate the substance of what I am going to say. The writing commands the content, or it divines it somehow from the world - and from it, I learn my opinions and the coordinates of my 'standpoint.' What it, in the transports of its caprice, decides, I must then defend to the death. I am consumed in its discovery of the unexpected within itself, with the sudden deviation of the path that becomes the unwieldy whole. I do not live to write, the writing lives and it is sufficient that I am present. In 2666, the character who rents a typewriter to the young author Reiter, observes that the writer, under the yoke of writing, is a mere shell, an empty thing. He also thinks that the proliferating moment of writing, what is called 'minor literature' is a sort of fog, a forest, an excrescence. I am aware, or partially aware of these states, of the emptiness and of the instantaneous wall-like forest of minor literature that perpetually attaches to 'masterpieces'. I know my fate as a 'writer' but my fervour still draws me away from good habits, I do not have the power to become (as the owner of the typewriter has become) a happy reader. The readers of writing are happy because they may temporarily share in the enthusiasm of the writing, it's mania, as if it were their own,  and then they are free to close the book and forget it. Writers are not like readers, they desire nothing for themselves but only that their texts should be happy. For the sake of my writing's happiness I have fallen into the routine of abandoning myself to intuition and the associative leaps of thought that might occur within the writing process - my fascination is directed towards the internal space of writing, the recording mechanism's recording of itself. But that version is also delusory, or at least overplays its claim. In reality, intuition is nothing but the text's commanding of me to open the window that it may enter my world and bother me forever with the guilt at my involvement in causing it to congeal into an object. A prime example of the wretchedness instigated before the work of writing is the excruciating text Democracy (AJODA #60, Fall/Winter 2005–06, Vol. 23, No. 2). I am aghast at my part in the appearance of this work of shameless fictionality which is entirely inadequate to its alleged object. It is an abominable work that, as the years pass, has gradually sobered up, solidifying into the cold and congealed remnant of previous revels. It is a text sealed from all other texts on the subject and refers to no actual instances of what it supposedly repudiates. The calcification of my works puts me in an awkward position. I am confronted with the irrefutable evidence that I have caused to come into existence certain cold cuts of my psyche that I am then unable to recognise as belonging to myself. I have set in motion that which is not mine but which will nonetheless survive me as a record. I have already indicated that a ritual state of disavowal has become my knee-jerk response to all that I have done, but this is not enough. I am caught in a cycle of making resolutions against previous texts; see my introduction (written in the worst of bad faith) to the reprint of Nihilist Communism (Ardent Press Second Edition 2009) but then automatically falling back, at the moment of disavowal, into the same pattern of allowing free rein to my demon. Bateson in his The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism, observes that 'sobriety is a moment in addiction', and that renunciation is a necessary fragment in the pattern of the addict's self-abandonment to the command of the substance, and thus to the effort to attain a metabolised second order stability.  This too, seems right - I seek to correct past errors in the text but only repeat them. I bury the past crimes of my writing beneath new writing: corrections, retractions, equivocations. My writing's predicament is starkly presented: there is a radical ontological disjunction between the writing and the written, an incompatibility or divergence that cannot be overcome but only, and momentarily, obliterated from consideration. It is no mystery that readers are happy and writers miserable. If I were to write the text again, on other terms, and write it against what it already was in the world, as I am sorely and perpetually tempted to do, I would only succeed in discovering myself transformed into another Pierre Menard. I am impelled to uncover the writing's reassertion of itself before me. It writes itself again, word for word - only more so, only infinitely richer. This apology too has already expanded and metamorphosed itself into a fiction. I imagine a narrator, somebody else, an appalling character, unthinkable even to Dostoyevsky, worse than a murderer, a type of recanter or apologist consumed by the moment of signing their confession, or refusing to sign, or by expressing with one intent an attitude to signing, revealing its counter, either signing or not signing, that is the stopping, and the setting in motion, and thus the stop that is setting in motion of precisely that which was to be both avoided and also desired above all. I can vividly imagine such a character repeatedly approaching this act of signing their name at the foot of a confessional text, a trivial confession that they imagine of world significance, and repeatedly retreating from it. At the moment of signing, as if rehearsing a scene in a Rivette movie, the character of the recanter-confessor loses the path only to make the approach again. And so, as I too make my approach, this return, to my futile and nonsensical text, Democracy, thinking to tear it to shreds, I am surprised and not surprised to find what I take to be rare sprigs of interest. And I am drawn into it again, soon becoming both immersed and persuaded once more by its right to autonomous existence. I am immediately transported back into the process of its autopoiesis, its self-authoring. Would I go ahead with the destruction of such a text if I could find one good paragraph in it? What about one good sentence? Or, one good phrase? A word? Would I save the text for one rightly placed word? Where I thought to refuse it as a whole, I now find it to be right in itself, right according to its nature as a Lyme's saturated tick is right to its. Can we not think of it as wholesome, if a demonic substance like that could be thought so? But then, in both the approaching and retreating of the confessing and recanting and that nagging question of its legitimacy in world history, and even as I am rapt by its, the writing's, ubu-like strutting on the stage of itself, I catch a glimpse, like a momentarily surfacing character in Yerofeyev, of my wretched self-awareness. I am jubilantly drunk in and of the demon, consumed by it. I am prevented from achieving self-awareness as such but I am able to sense its place. Before the work of the text, I am not self-aware but am aware of the possibility of self-awareness. I see where it might take its place if it could only override the mania of its own moment. I perceive how self-awareness might regulate the proceedings and implement the architecture by which the profusion is rooted in something external to itself (introducing explanatory footnotes, or references to precedents and authorities). And I also see, from the place of immersion, another place as if from the outside, as an out of body type experience, that this apology for the internal hilarity that the writing has become is still only an elaborate defence mechanism which serves to excuse any further abasement before the words spilling out like a slick across the page. If the text Democracy is malformed, poorly written, self-indulgent, irrelevant, an affront to sensibility then may I not claim, in its defence, that it also has its own soul? No, it is a soul, and nothing but a soul. It is a pure soul if that is what writing, at the point of writing, is. It is a pure soul if not a good soul if that is what the demonic is. The writing is a soul, then we can agree, but in its transparent desire for dominion over the writer it is also an ape screaming through the canopy of minor literature, hurling its excrement down upon the long suffering hermeneutical subject who, even now, is trying to make sense of it all. At some point, the text inadvertently titled Democracy (which only appeared in the world in order to take the space of another and more useful text) wrote itself into impertinent existence. It wrote itself as it saw fit, and to hell with its relevance to the matter at hand. To hell, it seems to say, with readers and their happy expectations of what a text on democracy should and shouldn't include. Don't read this, it mocks, it won't help. It won't elucidate your desire to understand what a critique of the democratic process must be. It is a thing of soul but also of an undemocratic nature. It dominates the garden without thriving, a perpetually dying bloom, an intractable root.