tooknap press

VARIATIONS ON WRITING

In the past, the primary object that I met with in my work was writing; but I understood this word then in a metaphorical sense: it was for me a variety of literary style, its collective version, as it were, the ensemble of linguistic traits according to which a writer assumes the historical responsibility of its form and becomes attached by way of its verbal work to a certain ideology of language.  Today, twenty years later, in a sort of return to the body, I would like to move towards the manual sense of the word; it's "scription" (the muscular act of writing, of tracing letters) that interests me: the gesture by which the hand takes an instrument (awl, reed, plume), presses it against a surface, advances with pressure or a caress, and traces forms that are regulated, recurring, rhythmic (we needn't say more: let us not necessarily speak  of "signs").  The gesture will be our subject here, and not the metaphoric acceptations of the word "writing": we will speak only of the written manuscript, that which bears the trace of the hand. 

What can be said of this writing?  We will be particularly concerned with assembling what could be called a dossier of manual writing: historical and technical information, points of contact between the object "writing" and different fields of knowledge (with different prejudices), the structuring of certain graphic systems, the social and economic stakes of the activity of writing, the relations between the scriptural gesture and the body.  This dossier, the author understands, remains rather personal: issuing from readings cited sometimes quasi-literally and that most often concern (he begs the pardon of Italian readers) the French domain: I have read and taken note of what touched my intellectual sensibility.  I have not attempted to organize, to cloak this dossier in a continuous discourse, to produce a personal "thesis" on writing; what mattered to me was in some way to provide myself with suspensive reflections or, to be exact, questions.  The body of these questions, then, has no demonstrative value; it is nevertheless pregnant with a certain meaning: it indicates that writing, historically, is a continually contradictory activity articulated on a double postulation: on the one hand, it is a strictly mercantile object, an instrument of power and segregation; and on the other hand, it is a practice of jouissance, bound to the drives and intensities of the body and to the most subtle and skilled artistic productions. This is the weave of the scriptural text.  I do nothing here but arrange, spread out the threads.  It is up to you to create the design.  
  

part one of an unpublished text 
 written in February 1973