READING AND WRITING

One sin that the Internet induces is a gluttony for information. All knowledge and written information is out there. As long as you have enough printer paper, you can download The Origin of Species or The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Old Testament and not pay a penny. And if you find these tough-going, there is an abundance of "a guide to..."s to help you on your way (just to assure you that specialities are the preserve of those who specialise in them).

This inevitably produces the sensation that it is possible to know and understand everything, if only one has the time (needless to say, nobody does or will). It is part of the injunction of the superego - compulsory jouissance - which seems to me to be Zizek's greatest insight. We have discussed it before : the command to have a nice day, to enjoy yourself, to be happy. If you are unhappy you can get therapy. If you have a disappointing sex-life you can get viagra. If you are ignorant, you can find information to enlighten you. You, as an unfulfilled human being, have no excuses.

Writing on the internet exacerbates the problem, partly because it adds to the glut, and partly because in adding to it there is the need to absorb more of it (and more of it) first. This endless absorption can make writing anything impossible (though, having used this excuse many times, I suspect the impossibility of writing comes first, and the mission of reading is a convenient by-product).

Anyone who keeps a blog seriously will feel the divine presence of the Big Other over his shoulder as he writes. There are blogs whose standards one aspires to, and whose authors one imagines - quite without foundation - read one's every word. When I explore further, often these authors are several years older than me and educated to a much higher level than I am in the subjects that I try to write about. (You see what I mean - even now I'm trying to justify myself to unknown readers against unknown writers...)

So in order not to disappoint them, my imaginary readers, those whose own blogs are my benchmarks, I will try to write a post on a given subject, leaving no stone unturned. I will begin reading and arrive at a choice : to explore other unknown paths, evoked by whatever I am reading, or to continue onwards. If I explore an unknown path, I will be back where I started, for each path has further unknown bifurcations, and so on and so on. The result is that I become so far removed from my original path, that the initial topic will be lost. It is rather like exploring South America, but at each turn having to return to Spain or Portugal, or dash to the nearest museum, to reach the cause, and the cause of the cause (and so on and so on).

Maybe others are less so, but I am terribly guilty of this, and I must stop it. No more seven-books-at-a-time for Paddington! No more terror at incomprehension!

*

On the subject of writing (and Zizek), I went to see Zizek! last night. Lots of great ironies : the first being that (a) the Director of the film, Astra Taylor, has an MA in Liberal Studies and (b) that the party Zizek associated himself with and campaigned for in the early 1990s was called "Liberalna Demokracija Slovenije". Two other highlights were his affectionate idea of Judith Butler struggling to describe a bottle of iced tea, and his comparison between the immanence of surplus value and the objet petit a (more of this in a later post, maybe).

But the most immediate thing I took from the film was his account of how he writes. Apparently resistant to the idea of writing, he simply writes notes, and more notes, and more notes - and then edits it all. This seems like the perfect strategy, for it softens the act of Writing. Writing (with an uppercase W) takes us back to where we started : it is an attempt to write everything. One knows it is thwarted because one knows one does not know everything ; but perhaps, one day, one will, and one will be able to write. Every writer loves taking notes, because notes are the encapsulation of something fresh and, well, noteworthy. Every writer loves editing, because it is the proof that one has finished the act of writing more educated than when one began. Most writers hate Writing because, if for no other reason, it is the most concrete form of the death-drive imaginable. It threatens to fossilise the notes and the education. It makes one feel stupid.

I am terribly guilty of this too, so ... No more writing for Paddington! Only notes and editing!