An essay from the Refusing Complicity project.
Writing begins already in failure — the failure to remain faithful to what language renders through its operations of abstraction and capture. Words signify what they exclude as much as what they describe. Foreclosing, they delimit and incarcerate, erecting symbolic walls and edifices heavy with their historical weight and epistemic affiliations. By writing, one confesses to being already in language: to be at once burdened and enamored with the alienation within oneself — and if fortunate, masterful in the art of words. Each sentence uttered is a testament to the mediation that stands in the way of the possibility of a coherent “I.” Each syntax, an illusion masking behind it an isolated “I” which exscribes from psychic distance, a tormented “I” which reproduces its spectacular alienation by looking for answers within, never without.
Such is the agony of writing, the said and unsaid, but so is that of the deed, the done, and the undone — if it is writing exercised in attempts to heal the wounded fractures of the self by looking in the mirror, indulgently attempting to overcome the extimate. One can describe this alienation within, this fracture, as inscribed by a creditor “I” and the indebted debtor “we.” It is the space between the word and the deed, the “I” that writes, and the suppressed “we” which informs. The gap that seeks to keep all in arrangement, the fence that safeguards that which is compartmentalized, the interval that sanctions the self into stasis and property. This “I” performs the severance from the social and, even when it admits it, reifies what has already been completed by aestheticizing it as open for deliberation. Its occupation with its own idiosyncratic voice masquerades as speaking with a purpose to break open an order it molds mute.
From these fractures of the self, another writing emerges: a writing that spills outside the pages of History, with its ink bleeding onto the exterior edges of the letter’s phonetic containers, flooding sideways, seeping through the page, and contaminating what’s beneath it. Smudges that feel more like scars, devouring the written word, vomiting it out, splintering the organized text, and calling the scattered masses into amalgamation. Such writing is the writing of a “we” — not a quixotic “we,” but a wounded “we,” a “we” which both constitutes and unsettles an ever-divided “I.” This “we” isn’t simply an answer to the division of the “I” as it produces it, tethered and implicated in its fragmentation. This “we” isn’t harmonious either; it is congruous. The difference is that it insists on existing in the tissue of the scar. A ghostly polyphony of the dead, and a counterpoint of the living who precondition and haunt the superstructure of the page. For this emergent writing, words mean what they don’t, marching toward their martyrdom, organizing an insurgency against the law of symbols. The pages of History are stained with emergent writing’s ink, their rhetoric obscured. The mass of ink challenges the soundness of words and interrupts their reading, as they become buried by the truth of blood, sweat, and song. This writing does not cross; instead, it extends a passage, a two-way street, between the writing and the deed: the deed that writes and the writing of deeds. It is the writing in unison, even if it is only one arm that keeps the pen balanced over the paper: the writing smuggled out of a cell and the writing of an incarcerated study. The writing done in hiding beside the glimmer of a candle, and the writing that hides. A writing below the earth’s surface, and another that crosses seas, reinterpreted, shifting, mutating, loved, and bereaved.
To write as failure then becomes merely a battle of signification, rather than an affirmation of a shortcoming to cross a threshold. The writing of the “I” signifies not a failure to cross — because in order to fail, one has to try alongside others — but a failure to be shaken out of paralysis. The writing of the “we” does not signify a success because the struggles of the lot are not measured by the standards of the Historical text. If anything, the lineage of the repressed, the tradition of the oppressed, is nothing but a series of ongoing attempts to enact unrealized disorders. Nothing but immeasurable breaks in the Historical text.
Read the next essay in the
Refusing Complicity project here.
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