The Banana Peel Project

How can the world, which is given as the object of knowledge, be at the same time also the place where the ethical subject of truth manifests and tests itself? How can we have a subject of knowledge that takes the world as its object through a techne, and a subject of self-experience that takes the same world, in a radically different form, as the place for its test [épreuve]? And if the task we inherit from the Enlightenment is to interrogate the foundations of our system of objective knowledge, then it is also that of interrogating what the modalities of the experience of the self are grounded on. (Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject)

Let’s begin with the practice of writing.  Writing is, if nothing else, a problem.  A problem to be thought about, worried about, and—if all goes well—overcome.  Leaving aside any questions about whether such a victory can ever truly be fully successful, and at least for the moment sidestepping any doubts as to the value of such an exercise, I present a simple problem: How do you begin to write that which has not yet been thought?

It begins with a letting-go, a cautious release, a step into the unknown.  Setting the fingers to work with no discernible goal is, for the reflexive mind, a terrifying endeavor.  Who, after all, knows where such movement might lead?  Trepidation and uncertainty are surely understandable in such a situation.  Exposing thought for what it is—a haphazard, improvisational affair with no guarantee of coherence or clarity—is a kind of nakedness that cannot be concealed.  No, the nakedness of writing must be flaunted if it is to be anything other than paralyzing.

The activity of giving form to the as-yet-unthought demands that the writer be comfortable with chaos, with the threat of a possible dissolution or forgetting of self.  But the problem is far from resolved.  Spinning freely in the pregnant void of space, distracted and confused by the effervescent meaningless of mixed metaphors, something must eventually be grasped.

Writing, of course, is a form of communication.  A strategic selection of possible meanings of the word, excluding (as discourse tends to do) those designated obsolete and rare, yields the following:

communication, n.
•    Interpersonal contact, social interaction, association, intercourse
•    The action of communicating something (as heat, feeling, motion, etc.), or of giving something to be shared
•    The transmission or exchange of information, knowledge, or ideas, by means of speech, writing, mechanical or electronic media, etc.
•    Access or means of access between two or more persons or places; the fact of being connected by a physical link, or by a practicable route; connection, passage (between two places, vessels, spaces, etc.) (OED online)

Scattered among all of these definitions are metaphors of movement, of a transposition between entities, each of whom has something at stake in the exchange.  People, things, and places risk much in such encounters—stability, identity, autonomy, and security are all up for grabs wherever communication happens.  The act of writing is just such a destabilization, involving the movement of thought between diverse spaces and places.  It is the willful establishment of a relation of intra-action between writer and reader (even if this reader is simply the writer in another moment).

Writing is, in this sense, a “medium” or meeting place.  But it is a medium of a very special kind.  It is a form of working-together, of recognizing that neither writer nor (potential, present, or future) reader will be the same when the exchange is over.  And to understand the activity of writing in this way—to see writing as a medium of mutual creation—is to understand it as a form of communication.

There is another sense in which writing “works”.  It is a mode of production, a way of making something new.  Writing demands respect, both for the materiality of the practice and for its power to shape and re-shape the entities it touches.  It entails an obligation to recognize that it is impossible to say (or articulate, or write, or render) anything without transforming it in the process. It requires, like modernism, “a feeling of obligation to grasp and participate in the transformations [of things]”.

This sensibility takes the mode of a keen awareness that the taken-for-granted can change, that new entities appear, that our practices of making are closely linked to those entities, that we name them, that we group them, that we experiment with them, that we discover different contours when deploying questions and techniques…Such an obligation, once it becomes reflexive, can become an ethic of experimentation. (Rabinow, Anthropos Today)

Experimentation is, of course, just a word that grown-ups use when what they really want to say is “play”.  Writing is a practice of figuration, a creatively self-conscious activity.  It is the quiet clicking of keys, the constriction of the iris, the rhythm of neural networks, the concatenation of symbols.  The practice of writing must be constantly tested, against the world and against itself, if it is to continue to work.  To play with writing—not just in the sense of playing with words but in the sense of relentlessly messing with its form, its mode, and its object—is to keep it alive.

The end of all this experimentation is a re-membering, a reattachment of body parts which had been forgotten in the first few moments of spinning through space.  After floating around naked for a while, unsure of where my fingers were taking me, a toolkit has gradually been assembled, brimming with shiny new gadgets and tools.  And I seem to have written quite a lot.

Now, let’s go find some more problems.