Revolutionary words

Michel Serres says in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: ”It’s better to do than to judge, to produce than to evaluate. Or, rather, it’s in mining coal that one learns if it is grey or black. It’s better to create than to criticize, to invent than to classify copies.”  

Gilles Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition: “We learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do’. Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me’, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.”  

Michel Serres says in the same conversation: “One word on that word author, which comes to us from Roman law and means ’the guarantor of authencity, of loyalty, of an affirmation, of a testimony or an oath,’ but primitively it means ’he who augments’ – not he who borrows, summarizes, or condenses, but only he who makes grow. Author, augmentor... everything else is a cheat. A work evolves by growing, like a tree or an animal.”

The author is the guarantor of loyalty. He makes the world grow; he augments. Writing begins with the ability of reading that is being able to read the signs of the world. The signs are objects for an encounter opening up for new relations. To think is to unfold or decrypt the signs in the process of constructing words. 

The writer reads; he affirms that which is becoming. In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze writes: “To affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives. To affirm is to unburden: not to load life with the weight of higher values, but to create new values, which are those of life, which make life light and active. There is creation, properly speaking, only insofar as we make use of excess in order to invent new forms of life rather than separating life from what it can do.”

Writing is intimately linked to reading and learning, so in many ways the creation of knowledge is intimately linked to writing. However, all writers know that they know more than they can put into words.

Serres writes in The Birth of Physics: “Knowledge is not seeing, it is entering into contact, directly, with things; and beside they come to us… Objects, in the distance, change their skins, they send one another kisses. In the distance the square tower, angular, stiff, coarse; it comes to me, round, sleek and smooth. A phenomenology of the caress, voluptuous knowledge.”

Serres says in the conversation: “So, it no longer depends on us that everything depends on us.” In other words: reading is more important than writing. It is a more creative act, because this process already anticipates writing.

The signs are already out-there to be read (it no longer depend on us), but everything there is depend on us, on our awareness. This has nothing to do with knowledge and putting things in predefined boxes and systems, but awareness of what is, what happens and what takes place.

In that sense writing might be seen as a continuos reminder of what takes place, although this reminder is a never ending process.

Writing new lines ... revolutionary words.