From the Book to Writing

Saturday evening. Books and tea. Backworld's Isles of the Blest on the stereo. It's been a long week of "teacher training," and not till tonight has time begun to thin itself out again, space to expand with possibility (and all of it unclaimed). A week without reading (or meaningful writing): uncomfortable and exhausting.

I've been re-reading Of Grammatology for a reading "couple" Jeehyun and I have formed. Her advisor told her it would be a waste of her time, and I'm slightly worried she'll have actually found it so. Reading it for the third or fourth time, I find it a slew of contradictory qualities: universal and esoteric, ahead-of-its-time and dated, eloquent and prolix. Its spirit, more than its argument (much of it now ubiquitous), most grabs me - and (dare I say this?) its prose, despite Spivak's occasional jumbling. Ian characterized the first section, "Writing Before the Letter," as a manifesto; I prefer to think of it as a challenge.

Derrida writes: "The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality. The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and, as I shall specify later, against difference in general. If I distinguish the text from the book, I shall say that the destruction of the book, as it is now under way in all domains, denudes the surface of the text. That necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary."

The change that Derrida is (prematurely) announcing, is one of thinking, of theory, and of reading - but it is also one of material (cf. Paper Machines). "The destruction of the book" is thus not merely its deconstruction, but the shift from a form whose own materiality contains its totality to one that is increasingly open, not only to writing itself, but to the new modes of time and space (diachrony and synchrony) that writing qua writing uncovers. What will this new materiality look like? Much like what you're reading here. The form of the "blog" or the "web" is simultaneously "public" (that is, "published") and "private" (that is, "rough"). It is a form that, at least in theory (if not yet commonly in practice), does not cut by way of a temporal marker the work from its writing. The end of the book (as signalled by the internet) is the end of the end of writing.

This is fundamentally what The Libray's Grain was created to realize. Whether it does (or does yet) is perhaps not presently determinable. But it has, I believe, evolved over its year-long existence to better accomodate the textual principles the new form requires. In its first form, a blog titled Verneinung, which consisted of #1-#73 (though some of these have been revised, some deleted, and some completely re-written), the driving question was that of time, of how to escape the pull of linear narrative. It's answer (an answer that The Library's Grain has dramatically complicated, but essentially preserved) was: seriality.

Clearly, the Book has already written its own death (Joyce, Mallarme, etc.). What the new form must do is preserve this death as a form of birth, to give this "death" the time and space to grow into something other than life or its end. Thus Derrida's constant insistence that the opening will necessarily require the repetition of the closure. From my perspective, and for my own project, what exceeds the novel must nevertheless repeat the novel. It must, as the second anonymous comment to "It's in My Jeans" has reminded me, in a single gesture both welcome and frustrate "Encylopedia Brown," and everything proper to his name.