Writing Scenes and the Scene of Writing: A Postscript

Writing's lack of independence of the world,its dependence on the maid who tends thefire, on the cat warming itself by the stove; itis even dependent on the poor old humanbeing warming himself by the stove. All theseare independent activities ruled by their ownlaws; only writing is helpless, cannot live initself, is a joke and a despair.

—Franz Kafka, Diaries, December 6, 1921

I. Why Scenes?

When, beginning in the nineteen sixties, 'writing' became an attractive concept and was for a while, at least, almost ubiquitous, the notion was either critical of certain assumptions in traditional literary criticism or it was not oriented toward literature at all. Instead, it was often related to philosophy, science or the fabric of society at large. The concept of writing was critical of traditional literary criticism insofar as it aligned with the death of the author. Roland Barthes's name is indelibly linked to this claim.¹ The philosophical endeavor was led by Jacques Derrida, and it emerged from his work on Husserl's Logical Investigations first and then the Crisis of the European Sciences (Writing and Difference). A few years later, Michel Foucault reintroduced the author into the theorists' dictionary, but the author reappeared under the name of a "function" as Foucault would say. It was a cold look backwards, delineating a mere position in the field of culture. The design of this position could vary historically and regionally, and it was exposed to contingencies of institutional organization. Speaking of the author lost its familiarity, the flavor of self-evidence it had possessed for centuries, culminating arguably in the days of Hippolyte Taine in France and Wilhelm Dilthey in Germany. And again, Foucault's authors were only coincidentally actors in the field of literature. Importantly, he was concerned with philosophers, scholars, and scientists rather than literary writers when he analyzed authorship as constituted by the rules of property law on the one hand and philological practices on the other. While this investigation revoked the death of the author in one sense and deepened it in another, linguistic and media studies, a decade later, began to emphasize the irreducibility of writing, even beyond Derrida's grammatology. Roy Harris and Jay Bolter and, to a certain extent, Vilém Flusser dealt with writing as an autonomous semiotic system, separated from the spoken word and its semantics (Harris, Signs of Writing; Bolter, Writing Space; Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?). If writing is no longer construed as the mere expression of a preceding oral word, then there is no longer a need or even a place for reversing the customary priority of the spoken word, as deconstruction would have it, and prioritizing writing instead. Writing, as it came into its own with Harris and others, included not only punctuation and the graphic layout on the page or other notation surfaces, but importantly also numbers, mathematical and technical symbols, ornamental elements in writing and even the broad field of the diagrammatic. Flusser would speak of alphanumerical writing, implying thereby again that literature was by no means his first concern.

If, nevertheless, 'writing' as used in the one or other of these senses has been embraced by literary studies since the 1960s, the implication has been, deliberately or not, that the study of literature was moving out of the zone of self-evidence and self-sufficiency. In its conceptual fabric, 'writing' exposes literary activity to a broader environment, or, the other way around, it looks back at the literary activity from somewhere else. La chose littéraire can once again become the object of critical attention without, however, observers taking for granted that they already know in advance what they are looking at. In Šklovsky's parlance we may say that 'writing' defamiliarizes literature in order to bring it into focus.

It may be worth noting that the English 'writing' like the French 'écriture' can mean both the linguistic system or structure and the activity performed, whereas these two meanings are distinguished, e.g., in the German Schreiben or the Italian lo...