Nodebooks. The Notebook and the Writing of Infinity

Nodebooks. The Notebook and the Writing of Infinity is concerned with the notebook's exceptional capacity to create relations in excess of itself. The strange nature of the notebook seems to be that it is hardly defined by some thing which it is, but rather by the effects of its doing. This relational effect is here called the nodebook; the book of knots. Like the knot, notebooks grasp at their surroundings, bring into the middle and send things on their way again. This middle is the relational environment where writing might exceed its determination and endure by differentiation. With the notebook's nodebook, what is finite participates in what is infinite, to potentialize writing's continuation. A first case study ('End-less Writing') deals with the treatment of notebooks in creative writing pedagogy, to analyze the event of coming-to-writing. The notebook backgrounds the emphasis on writing's objects and generic codes and foregrounds writing's activity. It operates as a means-without-an-end that may pull any objectification of writing back into the writerly modality and baffle the assumed importance of intentionality and the imperative of finishing. Any use value of notes, measured against the projected or actualized objects of writing, is continuously outplayed by values that emerge no sooner than in the immediacy of writing's coming-to-be. This activity is presented as being end-less: adventurously exceeding both 'aim' and fatal 'resolution.' The second case study ('Enc(o)re') considers the notebooks of Bracha L. Ettinger in order to ask what happens to notes once they have been committed to the page. Scribbling in a notebook is a kind of writing that may already come to expression when language has not quite settled on its terms and objects and thus it inscribes an asignifying regime in excess of the language of signifiers alone. In this way, the scriptorial vulnerability of thought coming-into-being with writing's form is traced in ink: prearticulate inclinations remain in-formatively suspended in writing's form. Notes make felt the potential for what might still be, despite the fact of inscription: enc(o)re (Fr. 'encre' ('ink') and 'encore' ('more, yet, still, anew')). The perspective of the unfinished and fragmented being affirmed in their interminable potential leads into an aesth-ethics of writing without power which resists the taking of the Last Word. The third case study ('Contenuance') looks at the posthumously published mourning notes of Roland Barthes to question what happens to notes once they have been released. A majority of published notebooks come into our hands posthumously. This posthumous status, we tend to imagine, is obtained by the contingency of their maker's passing. And yet, the posthumous paradox somehow seems to always have been alive among the lines: something traced in ink, something etched in History, is quickly swept up by the end-less event of writing which further differentiates a process once halted in temporary resolve. To be posthumous is to be interminable. The posthumous is nodal. What is contained (Fr. 'contenu') endures ('continuance') by differentiation ('nuance'): contenuance. The analysis here scrutinizes whether the inexhaustible nodal effect of the posthumous can be preserved and argues that publishing notebooks with posthumous respect means respecting the posthumous. The latter argument is then further elaborated with a proposition for the manner of publishing notebooks. The posthumous interminability of what was interrupted, exists in the differentiations of an end-less writing; the ethereal knotcraft of a notebook's nodebook; the inclinations of the ink's enc(o)re. If the nuance by which notes endure is oriented by the hesitancy and errancy of writing's form ('enc(o)re'), then these preserved vulnerabilities beg posthumous release's concern. The analysis proposes the facsimile as a technology for a 'publishing without power' that keeps writing and Work, writer and Author, at a loving remove. The notebook's nodal effect whereby writing endures as it takes part in relational processes that are informed by it and yet exceed it has a mournful significance that is expanded in the study's conclusion, toward a theory of grieving ('Real-time Déjà-mû'). The study addresses how the life of the griever is affected by continued encounters in the surviving cosmos that spread across multiple modalities of moving-feeling as instances of unheimlich déjà-mû (Fr. 'already moved'—'already felt'). These emerge in Real-time: an atemporal paradox where traces of past occasions are immemorially differentiated into live immediacies of experience. It is because singularities survive immanently in the world beyond the subjects and objects in which they were once actualized that there is a creativity of grieving by which it might make itself bearable; by which life ravished might make itself felt.

Jaar van publicatie:2022

Toegankelijkheid:Open