Guest Blog Post, Connor Syrewicz: We Incomprehensible Screw Ups

Connor Syrewicz

There is a pervasive view in many humanities departments. In most instances, it goes unspoken: a common understanding of the timeless relevance of language. Language is the base, the supposition goes, if not at least the most immanent, collective construction of the world.

If the Lacanian psychoanalysts are correct, for example, than the moment that we, as children, begin speaking and collecting meaning from a system of signifiers, is also the moment when the impossibility of impossible categories (the impossibility of a mother, for example, being wholly Mother) begin to fully impress themselves upon our psyche.

This is only one permutation of this assumption. To put the question simply: of all the signifying operations—consider even the multiplicity of signifying operations that exist within only “the arts”—why should language be considered more (or less) expressive, affective, or relevant than any other?

Would language, on the other hand, be better considered one of many expressivities which populate the human capacity to be affected?  “I can only see what I have been trained to see through learning to say,” an adage that belies not merely preference nor belief but a refusal to acknowledge, sense, or experience—in short, be affected by—any expressivity of the world beyond that which finds its way to signify through language.

What does this humble reading of language’s relevance contribute to a creative writer? This is not a call to abandon language for any other signifying practice. Rather, it is a question of whether or not a thorough understanding of a multiplicity of signifying operations can increase the capacities of a creative writer.

We experimental linguists. Neologisms, misappropriated terms, aberrant rhythms, jargons— poetries—populate the landscape of a language affecting and being affected by the signifying expressivity of other communicable forces, repetitions, and patterns.

An active language, if not intentional, unsure feet tripping across slippery rocks; an uneven and unpredictable earth upon which signification is lain; contours emerge mapping novel striations—for a moment, a multiplicity of points wandering the surface connect; an intensity manifests and then scatters, driving new processes of intensification.

Rather than creative “writing” the operation that I am describing is more akin to that of a translator; a translation, however, is no simple event.

To philosopher Gilles Deleuze, a translation is paradoxical insofar as translating from, in our case, one signifying mode to another both passes on something of the original (which relates it back to the original and all other repetitions) while, at the same time, actively manifesting difference from the original and all other repetitions. Deleuze’s point is that Western thought has almost always privileged the same over that which changes. It has always treated evolution as an afterthought, a byproduct.

Deleuze, on the other hand, does not presume that sameness is what necessarily marks a repetition and, instead, proposes to track how repetition, on the contrary, operates as a vehicle for change. Like a phrase passed through children in a game of telephone; it is not a passive process. We do not simply mimic. We screw up. The phrase passes through a number of physiological, psychological, and neurological failures, mutations, mispronunciations, and, after only a few repetitions, the phrase is incomprehensible.

We incomprehensible screw ups. Change is no phenomenon which arises from the ether. It is out of our inability to repeat something exactly as it is, our screw ups, that processes continue and splinter in novel directions. If we no longer screw up, then an equilibrium is reached; an equilibrium which, for any creature, body or system, is synonymous with death.

The creative-writer-as-creative-translator, a linguist who who subjugates language to themselves, to the unimaginable screw ups which fuel processes and, at various speeds, make a phrase, a style, a tradition incomprehensible.

The creative-writer-as-creative-translator, lost in a sea of expressivities and signifying operations, chasing language like a whisper caught in a storm, trusting that the whisper will never stagnate, be found, or effortlessly offer itself to the senses; the writers of the new, of change, subjugating themselves to their screw ups in the hope that something truly relevant might emerge, a pack of dogs chasing off in one general direction and then, slowly, quickly, dissolving into many. We incomprehensible screw ups; we give language speed, the capacity to run, tripping and falling upon new gradations, hoping not to find our way.

Guest Blog Post, Connor Syrewicz: Nothing-but-Language: Literary Theory and Creative Writing


“I cannot say what cannot be said, but sounds can make us listen to the silence.”
R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience

Connor SyrewiczHaving just graduated from a research university, this seems like a convenient forum to reflect on the intersection of what became my main fields of study: literary theory and creative writing. What has struck me most profoundly after my four years (and what this article is in reaction to) is that philosophers are better creative writers than the creative writers are. I would levy a guess that few people could find more beautiful lines written, think what you will of their theories, than those of the first chapters of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. And is there a writer—literary, creative or otherwise– who has ever conveyed the sublime joy of linguistic play better than the dense complexity of Jaques Derrida? While this list could be endless, after four years of studying literature, I came to be left with this question: How is it that those who wrote about literature became superior to those actually writing it?

For those of us unfamiliar and those of us repelled (perhaps rightly so) from theory and philosophy by its urgency or self-importance, ‘literary theory’ predicates a multi-disciplinary basis of insights (philosophical, sociological, linguistic) centered loosely around  language. In university literature programs, it functions in so far as pursuits in knowledge parallel to literature can draw a critical focus on how a reader experiences language (for the act of reading is at essence an experience of language). At its best, theory in the context of literary criticism belies the question: what of my experience (of reading) belongs to me (of course, what am I?) and what belongs to the words themselves?

Hardly approached, the question remains. What is the use of literary theory for a creative writer?

Few neither before nor since have made the point more radically than Julie Kristeva, a French semiologist: literature does not exist. There is only language. In The Ethics of Lingustics she approaches the linguistic community with an object of ‘poetic language’ (i.e. language which does not assume first and foremost communication as its goal) and follows by positing that from this view, all language is always already-poetic .

Suddenly, walls fall. Ernest Hemingway runs screaming through Tucker Max’s kitchen. Sigmund Freud is washing his hands after taking a shit in Ariana Huffington’s bathroom. A how-to manual is telling a joke to a poorly written blog post while standing in line behind a coffee table book about pop art. ‘Poetic language’ is the ambiguous line at which language approaches but never meets meaning absolutely nothing. ‘Poetic language’ is a kaleidoscope through which all writing, especially that which makes such pretensive strides at considering itself ‘creative’ writing, becomes exactly what it is: nothing-but-language.

We creative writers should be (and sometimes are: http://poeticjabberwocky.blogspot.com/2010/06/my-favorite-legal-terms-that-sound.html) looking on in a jealous rage at the rate at which scientists and lawyers create language in their everyday pursuits (‘dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane’ pulled from a schizophrenic need to find this chemical distinct from that chemical, ‘habeas corpus’ kept from the linguistic grave that is ‘dead’ language).

Creative writers! Do not fall prey to genre-writing, forcing language between some minimum and maximum point at which it is allowed to mean anything. Creative writers! We are the linguistic scientists of our time. Let us allow our vast, oft-loved and romanticized empty pages become the playful laboratories of language itself. And as we, childish scientists, send language through our experiments, meant to prove nothing at all, only valid if results cannot be repeated, creative writing becomes all that it already is and ever hopes to be: language. Not stories or narrative or characters (not that these things need to be avoided) but tone and rhythm and rhyme and meter and lineation and alliteration: just language. Beautiful, playful, surprising language. Nothing- but-language.