Certainly it is necessary to refuse the forms to which we are subjected; necessary, too, to resist the banalities of discourse (political, literary critical) which uphold, without reflection, a particular notion what we are and of what we might achieve. Steve’s writings at Splinters exemplify this resistance sometimes through direct confrontation, sometimes through laughter.
Who refuses? Who resists? I would say the self or the subject – but there is a danger of passing over the movements and processes specific to self-formation. In particular, to attend to literary writing, as Steve does at In Writing , is perhaps to understand that the individual self, the one who writes, is only an after-effect of a more discreet movement.
I admire both the righteous anger and the humour of Steve’s blogs at Splinters. What binds them to his more ruminative blogs at In Writing? It is, I think, a question of a style – of the way in which a life is given style in writing, through writing, according to the demands to which this life has subjected itself. Subjection, yes, but the ascesis of writing and commenting is not reactive, as Nietzsche suggests, but might be bound (as Nietzsche also suggests) to a practice that is both active and affirmative.
Above all, refusal must not be understood negatively; to affirm the resistances specific to a writing linked to what is called literary modernism is to answer to what, in the literary work, demands that it break with the idea of the chef d’oeuvre, the work that is achieved, sufficient unto itself.
A writing splintered in order to write of the splintered – or a least, a practice that never relinquishes the modesty required to draw close to, say, Bernhard, Blanchot and Beckett. Read the longer essays gathered at The Gaping Void and the demand of what is generally derided as ‘literary modernism’ becomes clearer: responding, seeking to write of Bernhard, Blanchot and Beckett, it is necessary to find a style in which to illuminate what flees in the literary work without, for all that, preventing it from fleeing.
Lars Iyer's Blog 