(A little meta-note on a meta-tone:
Exactly two years have passed since I last tried to retry... maybe I'll try every two years and it will die after two days every two years... what is this with the number two?
Never mind, I have some stuff coming out of me, so I'm putting it here, just to fill the space...
And once here, this time I'll really try to use this space a sort of a research diary. An outlet for messy thoughts.)
The
question of order/structuring: THE question that arises
immediately when it comes to writing about something in detail, at length: in
what order to say all the things that swarm, how to prioritize, weigh
points/aspects, how not to subordinate one thing to another, since linearity
automatically involves some sort of before- and afterness… The writing on the
paper is by force linear, at least in appearance, but this appearance limits
the possibilities of linking things, the links would need to go into too many
directions.
The sitemap of a study that would want to
even just try to follow the “nature” of a complex phenomenon (and which
phenomenon is not complex, once you start looking at it from closer…?) would
contain numerous links, internal and external ones, and often show circularity
in the references and also create endless series of traces… [cf. http://desordre.net/plan]
Writing
(or rather: its product, the text) is linear,
the links it allows to make are mental/virtual, the thrust of the text needs to
be a movement forward, rather than into many directions, for a logic and an
argument to unfold and become legible, intelligible. This linearity enables the
unfolding/explication of a model, by
definition simplified, of a segment of reality a phenomenon. If we accept the
impossibility of describing reality in full detail – see the Borgesian thought
experiment with the map and the territory – then we admit the usefulness of a
model, and consequently the usefulness of linear writing, the explanation that
develops in time linearly.
Such
linearity nevertheless enables, involves – or even calls for, or rather
inevitably ends up in – a root/ tree
structure, splitting ends (which could – should – reconnect, but often
aren’t?) that represent the different aspects and directions thought
wants/needs to take. This tree structure, however, implies a hierarchy, an
inevitable subordination, wanted or not. And this logic of hierarchy involves,
relies on a centralized thought, which establishes itself even if the original
intention was not to prioritize in a hierarchical manner. Deleuze dicit.
The
linearity/arborescent structure of writing is also foreign to thought itself.
But is thought as it emerges something intelligible
or communicable at all? Thought is at first (or forever) something amorphous,
even if we link it to language and say there’s no thought without language (and
therefore linguistic structures) and comes in bunches (thus the problem of
noting down thoughts – can’t type fast enough and the emerging though(s) are
requesting thinking in all of the many directions they show/promise, and they
urge following all of those at once, under the menace of them vanishing into
immediate oblivion... [a thought recorder would come so bloody handy for the
moments of inspiration... a machine that could record the several layers at the
same time and then replay/render them disentangled, in a linear thread or a 3D
image…] Something like this would be Deleuze’s rhizomatic writing: a writing that corresponds to the messy
“structure” of thought. The a- or anti-structure, decentralized, the map which,
if it doesn’t cover the entire territory because it cannot be the same size, at
least it is made of the same material, the same stuff, has the same complexity,
the same kind of connection between its components, a living organism rather
than a cold and rigid model…
The price
to pay is clarity, potentially intelligibility – the norms of, and therewith
the belonging to, a discourse, the critical/academic discourse, which would
resist/refuse such degree of deviation from its established ways, such a degree
of disregarding its expectations. You need to be a Deleuze or a Derrida to sell
stuff like that.
Planes/plateaus can be something like a
compromise or alternative to rhizomatic writing.
[TBC]
