Undo a category like the ones on the left, and what happens to the posts? They are kept, but dispersed – kept without connection (although, unpleasantly, Google searches reveal the presence of posts on the net that I’ve long deleted). Kept, but dispersed. But hardly kept, since they can be found, now, only by chance. This gives them an uncertain future – for who will find them, and by what search? And who, finding them, will know the whole of which they were once part?
Perhaps blogging only appears to be a fragmentary form; posts are divided by a span of time – a week, a day, an afternoon; the white space around the post is a correlate of this temporal division. But is the post itself divided? In what sense does it embody interruption, rather than forcing it out all around it, and allowing it to mark as margin only the interval between writing and not writing?
This is so even for the post discovered by chance, as from, say, a Google search. A kind of silence surrounds it, that is true, made present by the space of the page, but this does not mean writing includes silence, or that it is fragmented in itself.
No writing without sense, without the horizon of sense; but is there a way for writing to break that horizon? A way of speaking that wears out sense, that pushes sense beyond sense? Continuity: the madness of a text that does not stop. Or then a disrupted speech, the line that breaks sense even as it appears to grant it.
How delicately it must be balanced! How difficult to let the fragmentary evidence itself! If it’s necessary to break with every notion of value, not just because today’s techniques are already outmoded (the fragmentary is not an avant-garde), but because the outmoded is the condition of what writing would point towards in the name of the fragmentary, of the fragmentary demand.
Then it is this indication that is important, not the external form of the fragment. Or rather, fragmentation begins only where writing points beyond what it is, where the said is doubled by a saying – not as it would be spoken by this or that individual, but by writing itself, by the fact that there is writing.
When does the chance of saying begin? In one sense, the place of saying was taken by the gods who spoke by way of writing. The gods, the Muses – then the Ideas, then God: what is writerly inspiration but the engagement with writing as it speaks itself? But haven’t the gods got to disappear, and this disappearance be experienced as it is before saying, infinite questioning, can speak in its own name?
It has no name – this is what is realised; or that the name God was only a placekeeper. No name – and what is it to write so as to allow names to undo themselves, to become indications – and then to allow the whole of what is written become a single quivering arrow?
Lars Iyer's Blog 