Alexis's Response Pt. II

[Larsson, Anna]

#792

“Writing is a solitary activity. While it is commonly assumed that writing is usually performed as a communicative act and therefore social in its intent, the experiential fact is that at the moment of writing I am here by myself at this desk or in this writing space.” Van Mannen doesn’t seem to be reaching for the social, communicative aspect of writing in the passages that lead to the statement quoted above. Rather, Van Mannen points to an “Orphic” attitude toward writing as a way of seeking, of delving into experience and emerging with meaning. I think it’s a mistake to conclude that this is a lonely process. Even alone, language is social. Language is a social property of our experience even in solitude, and it’s a way of imagining, apprehending, and appreciating the absent-presence of the others who inform our languaging.
“It is traversing this writerly space where there reigns the ultimate incomprehensibility of things, that we may sense the unfathomable infiniteness of their being, that we may hear the uncanny rumble of existence itself.” I think the experience of writing can feel very profound, but it is hard to describe that profound feeling without seeming pretty cheezy, but I don’t think that’s all there is to the above quotation. It reminds me of the “gap between concept and reality, object and thing” that Jane Bennett writes about, on Adorno’s “negative dialectics,” in Vibrant Matter. “For Adorno, this gap is ineradicable, and the most that can be said with confidence about the thing is that it eludes capture by the concept, that there is always a ‘nonidentity’ between it and any representation”(13), but it seems that the quality of action, in engaging with the gap, is part of the process of writing and its always-incomplete nature, a becoming that can never be or have been. Van Mannen calls for a sense of wonder as the guiding attitude for this process, whereas Adorno calls for a clownishness, but both attitudes seem to have a common source in the understanding that the project upon which the writer embarks is an impossibility but nevertheless compels the writer forward toward the un-complete-able horizon where the gap between the thing and the concept could close.

I like this emphasis on the never-completedness of languaging and knowledge-making.

Cited:
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

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