Writing as Drive

In the late nineteenth century, Baudelaire defined modernity as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,” – at the time this statement was revolutionary; but does it still remain revolutionary today?

It is not easy to tell, the orient has altered; the class that Baudelaire stood against has long since ceased to exist. The high-capitalist world of the nineteenth century European Bourgeoisie; triumphant, optimistic and confident of sustained inexorable rule has passed into history, become an immemorial golden age for all those necromantics who would worship the dead, just like Rome, Florence, Athens, a ghost civilization of a distant past epoch.

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, facing an organized mass socialist movement which had already claimed Russia, and was making key gains in Germany, the European Bourgeoisie were forced to decisively abandon their cultural values to preserve their political power; goodbye now to genteel decorum and refined rarefied manner, even skin thin as it was. Twentieth century fascism and our contemporary control societies have been the result of this sacrifice; the childish innocence that the modern west pleads against these phenomena is a spectacular lie.



In prizing contingency and immanence, Baudelaire had sought to manoeuvre against the spectacularly anachronistic aesthetic of his own epoch – he wanted to confront the false modesty of a demure Bourgeoisie, that could not stop speaking in classical tongues, with the shock of contemporary style - this as a deliberate strategy, an artistic Trojan horse, by means of which the world-denying Bourgeois would be forced to acknowledge - in the real terms of the present, the effects of the constitutive violence they wreaked upon the world, and upon which they depended.

In these terms, Baudelaire makes good on a strange, but nonetheless certain affinity spanning decades and genres, between himself and Wittgenstein. They both sought to take the object of thought back to the ground of social practice, they both came to reject direct political action as a viable means towards this goal, and as such both of them - each in his own individual, but nonetheless similar way – ultimately serve to shed light on the same basic issue: namely, that the real problem is not at all to take the sublime and fantastic back to the concrete, and thus there to kill it, but rather to demonstrate how the concrete itself gives birth to the fantastic sublime – as Hegel concludes the Phenomenology, citing Schiller,“from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude."



In fact, Baudelaire - and Wittgenstein too – clearly both already knew this, their own sublime and fantastic creative productions testifying as much, but more to the point, in fact, they each both declared it outright. Wittgenstein ends the Tractatus by assigning the last word to the silent supracognitive force of his own foundational principle; Baudelaire speaks in the second half of his famous quote of eternal and immutable qualities – suggesting that these transcendental elements finally join hands with the contingent and fleeting in the domain of art.

In fact, both these of two separate and distinct formulations - the silent on the one hand, the aesthetic on the other - are both equally insufficient, with the real general protocol belonging in truth to an act, neither heroic nor brilliant – although in another way, both of these things - but rather instead only just faithful to an anxiety recognized as more than just individual, this is to say, universal.

This is the proper meaning and value of Beckett, the Beckett ceaselessly cited who cannot, must, will go on – this resolution, equating to much more than mere stoicism; amounting to a kind of beautiful and stolen freedom. In this instance, which might be any instance whatever, Beckett realizes his own impotence, his own irrelevance, his own spurious stupidity, but despite it all, he steals himself and continues. In this specific case, continues to write - the truth that Beckett expresses here occurs at an immanent textual moment, relating immediately to further textual production, but – contra all vulgar Derrideans, who would genuflect before language - this is not the important point, which is rather the following: what Beckett decides here, in this phrase, in this moment, elevates writing - elevates it by subtracting from it, manoeuvring thus on this basis to change it from an exalted activity – vulnerable on such a basis to the implacably reactionary superego, into an incidental and cool generic procedure of truth.



“I can’t go on, I must go on, I’ll go on,” – the key term is this middle one, temptation switches sides here, becomes a temptation to quit, from the original temptation to move, which had in fact had spurred the initial beginning, at some point before this phrase even has begun to be seen. In other words, taking leave from a personal and idiosyncratic pathology, Beckett has become unable to proceed on this basis, for the reason that this basis now seems pathetic and weak against the tremendous weight of the work he has done, which threatens to explode language itself. The excess of this supremely immodest consequence is now oppressing the writer in an insistent and authoritative voice: “Who am I to say these things, do these things, who I am to write in this ridiculous way?” The genius of Beckett is he realizes the answer, “I am nobody at all – and for the very reason, the reason that I am nobody at all, I am anyone – and since I am anyone, I will go on, with this axiom, to serve as my watchword: because somebody could.”

This is the task for contemporary writers, writers in the most generic sense of that term, those who would be modernists, those who would create their own lives - word by word, mark by mark, point by point: to realize that, in this very act, one becomes something less than a writer, a writer in the sense of a fantastic identity, but acquires at the same time a prize a great deal more precious – namely, writing, and not just mere writing, in the terms of expressions and scrawls, but instead, more than this: writing as truth. In the instant where you would say that you are not equal to such a task, that it is too much for you, remember this, and only this: the wretched of this earth walk with you.