Wednesday, March 07, 2007
18.~~~~~~~~
The First Reader
Reading over no. 17, I stumbled on an amazing omission. I had written “as soon as I realize the huge difficulty I would have in destroying my writing I know that I am seeking to go outside myself to these others.” But what of the value of communicating with myself at a later time, of self-confrontation, of creating a greater unity for my life? Doesn’t that warrant saving my writing from the fire, and hasn’t that in fact been fundamental to all my reading and re-reading?
There is a paradox within the activity of writing that I rediscover here: the very fact of language as medium, medium of thought as a painting is a medium of visual images, requires one to imagine, at times unconsciously to create, another identity than oneself. In writing books and blogs, rather than shopping lists, the recipient of writing is an identity either as friend, neutral, or antagonist who is necessary as a foil to our own identity. Thinking, hence writing, is motivated towards selected others, as a glance at our continual mental chit-chat would tell us. The act of writing is “interested”; in writing a blog or a book, at least, one seeks the continuity of one’s self, a self-identity, through the very imagining of an other as reader. Even in the most heated thrall of the process, most fully “possessed” by the illusion of ourselves alone and heroic, ranting in the most individualized style—at that moment our bodies are in fact seized by the imaginary readers we fabricate. At the height of our belief that we have fully expressed ourselves, our passion is the simulation of an other’s.
I’m not trying to say anything new here, just restating crudely the philosophers and cultural critics who have been tearing apart the “bourgeois subject”, the Author and Artist, not to mention truth seeker, as heroic figure from at least the Romantic era through Modernism. The language of self and other, identity and continuity, fits into certain discourses of at least the latter 20th century. However, here I am discovering this vocabulary and these themes for myself, grounded within my process, and finding often by surprise that my life, spanning the eras of high modernism and current post-postmodernism, responds to some aspects of contemporary thought. I am at least influenced by the fact of occasional coincidence of my thinking with that of people who have promoted their thinking in a public forum, subject to debate and contradiction, as I have not chosen to do.
I am drawn to this point about writing for others because I want to understand what would be necessary to write for myself, to know the self I am who writes and has written what I have. What is it to be the first reader? Not proof-reader, not editor, but self-reader—to find myself as my own other. This effort relates more to the discipline of self-knowing, such as Gurdjieff and his followers articulate (Ouspensky’s “self-remembering”), than to philosophy and cultural studies. And it is certainly paralleled by my other dominant and practical question: how do I play music for myself, how do I keep from being engulfed in the social resonance of my sounds, how am I the first listener.
To another reader of postmodern critique this might raise the issue, whether I am a reactionary, against the grain of history attempting to resurrect the dead author and artist of Modernism. An alternate view would see me as reacting to the ways in which this postmodern theme, too well taken, has collaborated with the pluralistic, diversified marketplace. Then I would be trying to map out the territory of an integrity, an existence, which is not for sale.
[Along these lines, you might be interested in the essay, Improvisation and the marketplace. Click here.] ¶ 9:07 AM
The First Reader
Reading over no. 17, I stumbled on an amazing omission. I had written “as soon as I realize the huge difficulty I would have in destroying my writing I know that I am seeking to go outside myself to these others.” But what of the value of communicating with myself at a later time, of self-confrontation, of creating a greater unity for my life? Doesn’t that warrant saving my writing from the fire, and hasn’t that in fact been fundamental to all my reading and re-reading?
There is a paradox within the activity of writing that I rediscover here: the very fact of language as medium, medium of thought as a painting is a medium of visual images, requires one to imagine, at times unconsciously to create, another identity than oneself. In writing books and blogs, rather than shopping lists, the recipient of writing is an identity either as friend, neutral, or antagonist who is necessary as a foil to our own identity. Thinking, hence writing, is motivated towards selected others, as a glance at our continual mental chit-chat would tell us. The act of writing is “interested”; in writing a blog or a book, at least, one seeks the continuity of one’s self, a self-identity, through the very imagining of an other as reader. Even in the most heated thrall of the process, most fully “possessed” by the illusion of ourselves alone and heroic, ranting in the most individualized style—at that moment our bodies are in fact seized by the imaginary readers we fabricate. At the height of our belief that we have fully expressed ourselves, our passion is the simulation of an other’s.
I’m not trying to say anything new here, just restating crudely the philosophers and cultural critics who have been tearing apart the “bourgeois subject”, the Author and Artist, not to mention truth seeker, as heroic figure from at least the Romantic era through Modernism. The language of self and other, identity and continuity, fits into certain discourses of at least the latter 20th century. However, here I am discovering this vocabulary and these themes for myself, grounded within my process, and finding often by surprise that my life, spanning the eras of high modernism and current post-postmodernism, responds to some aspects of contemporary thought. I am at least influenced by the fact of occasional coincidence of my thinking with that of people who have promoted their thinking in a public forum, subject to debate and contradiction, as I have not chosen to do.
I am drawn to this point about writing for others because I want to understand what would be necessary to write for myself, to know the self I am who writes and has written what I have. What is it to be the first reader? Not proof-reader, not editor, but self-reader—to find myself as my own other. This effort relates more to the discipline of self-knowing, such as Gurdjieff and his followers articulate (Ouspensky’s “self-remembering”), than to philosophy and cultural studies. And it is certainly paralleled by my other dominant and practical question: how do I play music for myself, how do I keep from being engulfed in the social resonance of my sounds, how am I the first listener.
To another reader of postmodern critique this might raise the issue, whether I am a reactionary, against the grain of history attempting to resurrect the dead author and artist of Modernism. An alternate view would see me as reacting to the ways in which this postmodern theme, too well taken, has collaborated with the pluralistic, diversified marketplace. Then I would be trying to map out the territory of an integrity, an existence, which is not for sale.
[Along these lines, you might be interested in the essay, Improvisation and the marketplace. Click here.] ¶ 9:07 AM
