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1 The
exigency of writing 3
Lois
Weber, writer of cinema 4
Lois
Weber, writing exigence [1]
I must thank Adrian Martin twice. First for asking me to
write about Lois Weber, and second for his patience while I
did (not). I must thank Deb Verhoeven for giving me the
opportunity to teach a course based on
Hypocrites. I must thank Cinemedia
Australia, where I watched and rewatched the Australian 16mm
print of Hypocrites, and the AV
staff at the La Trobe University Library, who are always so
supportive and understanding. I must thank Caro again for
her patience in getting this ready for you to read. I must
thank Anthony Slide, Jennifer Parchesky, Maurice Blanchot
and the invisible Jean-Jacques Lecercle for having written
so eloquently and telling me so much I did not know and
Jessica Rosner for her work in restoring
Hypocrites for video release. But
this article is dedicated to Andrea and Anna and Eloise and
Kathy and Peter and Sam - and, always,
Diane. Wait,
what is the "exigency of writing" of which
Blanchot writes? Whence the urgency, the emergency, and
where directed? Another play with possession? Blanchot is
famous for his "of" (the
"of" of Blanchot is The
writing of the disaster and The
madness of the day and The space of
literature and The gaze of
Orpheus and). Is it the urgency felt by the
writer: the need to write and? Yes. Or is it the urgency
imbued by writing: the need to read and? Yes. Or the urgent
need within writing: the battle of writing and language, our
epoch's need and? Yes I said yes, perhaps most of
all, Yes. Outside
language. Writing urgently pours forth. In an. (Unending
stream.) How does such exigent writing happen? How, and
under what circumstances, does
"moralising" writing metamorphose into
something "without identity" that
"brings forth possibilities that are entirely
other"? And, how far is that process under
conscious control? How far is it the product of a
writer's will and how far the inevitable result of
writing and writing again, or of writing in the age of its
technological reproducibility? (In
parentheses Orpheus might glance forwards and backwards at
the same time). Which is to say, for my purposes that in
common usage the Film is the Book and directing = writing.
How does directing, then, create the circumstances in which
"the Film" no longer holds the ultimate
value? I would say, at least partly insofar as directing
makes "incomplete" films, films which are
inadequate - bad films, then, at least by most lights. One
of the least remarked effects of the auteur gaze in
criticism was to downplay the Film in favour of a grander,
less defensible (oh yes, much less defensible), ultimately
ungraspable text, the textual auteur. That is, to some,
perhaps to a significant, extent, auteur criticism took the
steps here suggested by Blanchot, reading writing
"without identity". [2]
Maurice Blanchot, The infinite
conversation, translated by Susan Hanson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xii. All
the other quotations in this section come from the location
cited. (I
am not Orpheus). And, subsequently, the ideologically-driven
defeat of (bourgeois) auteurism, resurrected the Film. My
own analyses nowadays almost always place "the
film" where the name of the director used to be
placed. It seems more accurate to place the weight of
authority on the present text rather than on an absent,
past, generator. The author is the identity we can do
without. But at the same time, when I do that, I am perforce
ignoring precisely that writing in the film which tends to
undermine the Film - or, rather, I am misapprehending it,
vitiating it (since I do not ignore it, but rather, seek it
out). This argument for authorship is also an argument for
Tom Gunning's book, The films of Fritz
Lang.[3]
Tom Gunning doesn't want to be an auteurist. He is
more sophisticated than that. But what he does is to destroy
the Films by writing about each of them, simultaneously
writing them into a single, unfinished, ungraspable text, a
text without identity, articulated in many permutations:
Platonism, postmodernism. A text he calls
Lang. Communism.
You are not surprised. Blanchot's is a passage of
references which is also a passage of acceptance. Here
writing again finds its "moralising" voice
- in its "terrible responsibility . . . to
undo" the discourse in which we find ourselves, to
break "the law, every law and also its
own", a missionary of transgression through
the violence of
language. [3]
Tom Gunning, The films of Fritz Lang: allegories
of vision and modernity (London: The British
Film Institute, 2000).
9335 words
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1 The
exigency of writing
no
longer the writing that has always (through a necessity
in no way avoidable) been in the service of the speech or
thought that is called idealist (that is to day,
moralizing), but rather the writing that through its own
slowly liberated force (the aleatory force of absence)
seems to devote itself solely to itself as something that
remains without identity, and little by little brings
forth possibilities that are entirely other: an
anonymous, distracted, deferred, and dispersed way of
being in relation, by which everything is brought into
question - and first of all the idea of God, of the Self,
of the Subject, then of Truth and the One, then finally
the idea of the Book and the Work - so that this writing
(understood in its enigmatic rigor), far from having the
Book as its goal rather signals its end: a writing that
could be said to be outside discourse, outside language.
Yet
another word of elucidation or obfuscation. When I speak
of "the end of the book," or better
"the absence of the book," I do not
mean to allude to developments in the audio-visual means
of communication with which so many experts are
concerned. If one ceased publishing books in favor of
communication by voice, image, or machine, this would in
no way change the reality of what is called the
"book"; on the contrary, language, like
speech, would thereby affirm all the more its
predominance and its certitude of a possible truth. In
other words, the Book always indicates an order that
submits to unity, a system of
notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over
writing, of thought over language, and the promise of a
communication that would one day be immediate and
transparent.
Now
it may be that writing requires the abandonment of all
these principles, that is to say, the end and also the
coming to completion of everything that guarantees our
culture - not so that we might in idyllic fashion turn
back, but rather so we might go beyond, that is, to the
limit, in order to attempt to break the circle, the
circle of circles: the totality
of the concepts that founds history, that develops in
history, and whose development history is. Writing, in
this sense - in this direction in which it is not
possible to maintain oneself alone, or even in the name
of all without the tentative advances, the lapses, the
turns and detours whose trace the texts here brought
together bear (and their interest, I believe, lies in
this) - supposes a radical change of epoch: interruption,
death itself - or, to speak hyperbolically, "the
end of history." Writing in this way passes
through the advent of communism, recognized as the
ultimate affirmation - communism being still always
beyond communism. Writing thus becomes a terrible
responsibility. Invisibly, writing is called upon to undo
the discourse in which, however unhappy we believe
ourselves to be, we who have it at our disposal remain
comfortably installed. From this point of view writing is
the greatest violence, for it transgresses the law, every
law, and also its own.
