Writer's Journal #1
Writing as Benign Labor vs. Auto-Exploitation
Pieter Brueghel’s “The Harvesters”
I have recently found myself compelled to start writing again. This appears to be less a product of an overwhelming desire to realize a particular idea as it is merely one defined by the absence of any kind of structure in my daily life. The next month and a half marks the first time during adulthood that I can reasonably say that I’ve few, if any, actual obligations. Instead of attempting to blithely pass the hours by in anxious anticipation for my journey to the veritable ends of the earth (Australia), where I’ll be for approximately half a year, I’ve taken it upon myself to engage in some kind of productive activity in the interim.
Precisely because of this, I would like to inaugurate this series by examining the act of writing or, more appropriately, the kinds of assumptions that lead to writing being deemed a “productive” activity. Can the act of writing be considered relaxing, if even a leisure activity, because of the necessary labor involved in its production? And to what extent does the reterritorializing logic of psychosomatic extractivism - the turn towards “auto-exploitation” - allow for writing to not prove a benign exercise performed for its own sake?
I recently took the time to finally read a recent interview with the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han published in the Spanish newspaper El Pais. Much of the profile pays considerable attention to Han’s conscious refusal to participate in the ruthless drive towards the optimization of the self, the turn inwards towards the exploitation of one’s subjectivity under the auspices of “self-improvement”. This is a recurring theme in his books such as ‘The Burnout Society” and “Psychopolitics” and informs - though he invokes Weil when discussing it - his decidedly Lafargueian approach to living. Time, for him, is to be spent playing Bach on the piano and tending to plants, rather than engaging in anything that could be at all considered “productive”. Han never exactly clarifies what he considers to constitute a “productive” endeavor, but his approach to writing is instructive:
Maybe I write three sentences a day, which then becomes a book. But I don’t try to write, no. I receive thoughts.
Han’s general ambivalence reflects what I consider to be the central challenge writing poses toward easy categorization as a productive activity; the activity of writing assumes a degree of necessity in most people’s lives, insofar as it is a form of communication, but this communicative aspect also serves to prevent writing from ever being done for the pleasure of oneself. It is never done merely for the sake of doing so - it is always forced to contend with the presence of an ulteriority that marks it suspect, a labor performed at the behest of another.
It is this that I am struggling to grapple with. That I have a semblance of an audience on this platform makes it even more difficult, as it forces me to constantly contend with this aforementioned sense of ulteriority. My writing is not my own and, to the extent that I do write here, it has inevitably become conditioned by an internalization of a demand, irrational as it may be, to write at the behest of others. Han’s trepidation or general apathy appears to emerge from a similar kind of concern. Writing today forces you to approach your life in much the same way as a land speculator conducts an appraisal. Which parts of your person are you most comfortable extracting, what of you contains the most value for consumption by others?
This approach is contrary to the way that I seek to structure my journal. I started writing in part because I found myself moved by another friend’s attempt at a similar endeavor. His writing sought to coax out the possibility of a new world, one capable of transcending the narrative relativism endemic to our myopic fixation on the sanctity of the subject, through the expressive power of love. What this perspective affords is the possibility of re-orienting the ulteriority that plagues contemporary writing to channel it in the service of a higher purpose, the communication of a radical refiguring of humanity capable of overcoming the kind of “auto-exploitation” that pervades all social activity.
What I seek from writing, then, appears to be the opportunity to slow down, to afford myself the time to engage in such necessary introspection and inquiry. I would rather let the ecstatic spirit of communication take me spontaneously than find myself beholden to the regimentation of the ineffable. I am certainly not the most qualified, nor the most articulate, individual to be trying to realize this through language, but it’s certainly more rewarding than doing nothing. Until next time.
Song Of The Week
I’ve no idea if links are capable of being shown here, but I thought to include one or two songs per journal entry that I think my readership might appreciate. You can find them below:
Disco Inferno, “Footprints In Snow”
Strawberry Switchblade, “Since Yesterday”