Writing; The Scene of Writing

Writing; The Scene of Writing Rüdiger Campe (bio) Translated by Bryan Klausmeyer (bio) and Johannes Wankhammer (bio) For Roland Barthes, the word or concept écriture can dissolve demarcations and rearrange classifications: 1) Écriture dissolves the boundaries between literary genres to the extent that it is at work both in literature and in criticism. (According to Barthes, this is a consequence of modernism—"undoubtedly since Mallarmé.") 2) As the "traces of a practice: the practice of writing," écriture constitutes the work insofar as the latter can be conceived independently of the (juridical) personhood of its author. (This is how Barthes accounts for the death of the author.) 3) In a usage that is, again, distinctly modern, the verb "écrire" receives mediopassive significance in Barthes (s'écrire, "to write itself"): with this, he transitions via a medial reframing of the subject of production to the differential play of the text. (This offers the possibility of recombining the operations of literary criticism and the (linguistically-based) science of literature that were separated in the first argument.)1 Arguments (1) and (3) obviously contain certain assumptions about the development of literary history and the relation of commentary to work. In order to bracket these assumptions, we will consider earlier—and certainly less prominent—examples in which "writing" is either thematized within literature or regulated in close relation to it. (In this way, we will also practice epoché with respect to a certain phenomenological tendency diffusely imparted to the "modern [End Page 971] experience of writing.")2 Our primary concern, however, will lie with a more basic and profound presupposition in the use of the words écrire and écriture, one that is especially evident in argument (2). These terms can obviously refer to writing as an instance of language in the context of orality and literacy,3 yet they also always imply a practice, a repertoire of gestures and provisional arrangements. It is this fundamental linguistic-gestural relationship4 that will be designated in what follows by "writing, the scene of writing."5 "Writing, the scene of writing" recalls distinctions—body/language, equipment/intention—which they then demand to be passed over again.† "Writing" typically refers to a movement that crosses the boundary of such distinctions in the direction of the body or of materiality; "the scene of writing" can designate a process by which bodies are linguistically marked or equipment contributes to the meaning to which it relates in an instrumental fashion. In such a case, we are dealing with the labor of civilization or the effect of techniques. Is it imperative, then, to recover these distinctions analytically, or rather to pursue the trace of how they are passed over in various contexts? Does opting for one or the other approach mean privileging one direction of passing over distinctions rather than the other (i.e., by [End Page 972] either analyzing paradoxes that spring from passing them over in their respective contexts within the history of civilization, or by pushing such paradoxes further through an interrogation of writing)? Or is it—either systematically or evolutionarily—proper to literature to move author, readers, and critics within the field of passing over distinctions, albeit without returning to the boundary or the play of distinctions in either one of these directions? Even and especially if "the writing-scene" does not designate the self-evident framing of the scene but a non-stable ensemble of language, instrumentality, and gesture, it can still designate the undertaking of literature precisely as this problematic ensemble, as this difficult process of framing. If that is the case, however, it will be worthwhile to describe the formation of ensembles and processes of framing in their limited validity and with all their fissures. Theme, Date "Writing" already surfaces as a theme in the epoch of rhetoricallybased poetics, or at least at its end—for example, in witty references to its own facticity. These occur especially where literary history speaks of the transition from the Baroque to Enlightenment neoclassicism. Johann Christian Günther (1695–1723), for instance, writes in a heading of a poem—as if wanting to free himself from the labor of writing (from mere facticity) while on the other hand lending...