1. ILLUSIONS

HIDING

Certain linguists aggressively cling to the communicative function of language: language serves to communicate.  Same prejudice with archaeologists, writing's historians: writing serves to transmit.  They must admit that, in all evidence, language has sometimes (always?) served to hide what has been entrusted to it.  If pictography is a simple, particularly clear system, by moving towards a difficult, complex, abstract system, diversified into numerous graphic registers, often at the limit of the decipherable (cuneiform ideography), Sumerian scribes abandoned readability in favor of a certain opacity.  Cryptography would then be the very vocation of writing.  Illegibility, far from being the inadequate, monstrous state of the scriptural system, would on the contrary be the truth (the essence of a practice may be at its limit, not at its center).

The reasons for this occultation may be diverse, varying according to places, epochs: religious reasons if it has to do with an initiatory relation, jealously cut off from all contact with the profane, from a taboo communication with the gods; social reasons, if it has to do with insuring the caste of the scribes, itself representative of a certain social class (the one that was in power), the protection of certain secrets, certain informations, certain proprieties.  We are habituated, by the weight of democratic values (and perhaps more distantly: Christian values) to consider spontaneously the greatest communication as a given fact and writing as a progressive gain.  This is to forget once again phenomenon's reverse: there is a dark truth of writing: writing, over the millenia, has separated those who were initiated, few in number, from those who were not (the majority), it has been the mark of propriety (via the signature) and of distinction (there are primal, vulgar writings and there are cultivated writings).  Even today, every phenomenon takes possession of a kind of writing (algorithms of mathematics, of chemistry, of botany; musical, symbolic, astrological writing; as soon as a science begins to take form, its promoters invent for it a graphic hermeticism: and so it is today with the semiotic narrative whose récit is dressed in graphic symbols); in the order of the manuscript (which, it is true, is losing ground) the more difficult a manuscript is to read, the more it is called "personal," returning to the impenetrable status of the individual.  Consequently, the graphic imaginations of certain painters, in as much as they have produced absolutely, definitively indecipherable writings (and for good reason), such as Masson and Réquichot, should never be seen as aberrations; they are instead manifestations of the other side - of the hell - of writing (the truth is in the inversion). 

part three of an unpublished text 
 written in February 1973

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