Hatred of Writers

Conventions of blogging: begin from a time, a place. A post is dated, after all. Very well then: a warm day, a bright day after days of clouds and rain. A warm day, this day, in the middle of the year. And I've broken the surface of ordinary life to draw a breath upon – what? What is it that I would like to invite writing to say that could not be said in another way?

Ordinary life: even that expression is wrong. As though the extra-ordinary – writing, the capacity to write – would be higher or loftier, as though to write would be to ascend to a point where everything, all of life lies open and distant before you! As though it were not the other way round – that writing was infinitely less than life, infinitely lower, and with no importance, with the least importance of all.

Nothing extraordinary about writing. Nothing that does not make it utterly negligible, and the perspective it affords – its non-perspective – entirely spurious. From the perspective of life, writing is of no importance. But from the perspective of writing? Life seems merely a gap in writing: an interruption. Life down below, life lived elsewhere than on the plateau. And from the perspective of life, the whole sweep of life? Writing is a part of life lost from the whole, in a separate eddy. And it is as such, in my fantasy, that it must be made to rejoin the river.

Through what Cultural Revolution might writers be made to live again, in the world? The dreadful phrase 'my work'. Horror of the words 'creative writing'. The privatisation of consciousness, the opposite of that kind of collective from which life lives.

Nothing worse than writers burrowing into the night. Nothing worse than all the books written by burrowing into the night. Times of revolution demand the impossibility of private life. All life is public, the street runs through your living room. Writing, if there is to be writing, is collective: tracts, posters, bulletins, graffiti on the walls. Writing is of all and for all, with no permanence.

The walls of the Sorbonne will be scrubbed: good. The graffiti will not last: better still. Writing has joined with life; it has no separate existence. There must be no art, above all that. No private consciousness. Nothing kept from what streams in the streets. Every word must be everyone's word, everyone must write, even if they do not write …