Difference Takes Care of Itself: Unlocking the Viral
Why I Do Not “Write”
To write the self and to write differently. To write, already means writing differently. A “safe” passage for pure difference. Otherwise it’s not writing. This is precisely the point: “It” is not writing. It either writes or it doesn’t, if it doesn’t, then it is the writer who writes. And that is not writing. That is “creating content”. One does not create content if one ever truly writes. Real writing is an unlocking of difference.
An entity shows itself, peaking through the pages in-between the words and paragraphs. Something the writer no longer recognizes as herself. A being that seems to have occupied the written word as if by accident only. Wearing it as a suit. One such that perhaps does not really fit and points constantly to something outside of language; beyond the comprehensible. Writing aims to catch a spirit. Who often — or perhaps I should say; always — feels unhomely in the text.
If the writer understands the text, its source, inspiration; that part of herself that gave birth to it, in short; if she takes up the role of the author— that’s not writing. Writing and authorship are at an impasse. If a text has an author we could refer to, locate them in time, wire the paycheck to their bank account and so on; that piece of “writing” is now “content”. And CONTENT IS GARBAGE. This is my own personal diagnosis of the present. A calculated production of trash, the absolute and necessary precondition for “success”… It. Is. Not. Writing.
One would think that writing, linked historically to deviance, refusal, subversion; a pathological lifestyle chosen willfully — would offer space where power has no hold. Quite to the contrary; day after day, we strain and convulse to produce “Top Content”, with the audacity to call that writing. Word processors, Spell-Checkers, Anti-Plagiarism Software, Copyrights and the whole institutionalized nightmare of citation, references, bibliographies and word-counts of Academia. And fucking “Grammarly!”
All the tools and devices necessary for the deployment of mediocrity. The profit recipe. A “Grammarly Society” is exactly what the Content Writer deserves. It’s for the best really. Let them count every single word and formalize each sentence written. That’s none of our concern. Difference takes care of itself; incomprehensible and elusive — like a virus. Unlike the ‘grammarly writers of top content’, we have developed a strong immunity for viral difference. It only serves our purpose and we grow stronger.
So let’s write like a virus. Bypassing their devices and sabotaging their laboratories. There is no hermeneutic for viral discourse, no anti-septic nor inoculation. It mutates and returns once again upon every attempt to fix it in place, to cure us of it or to give it a name. They can neither rid themselves of us, nor put us to good use. Because writing has no concern for utility, the population and nor even the well-being — that is in this case the health — of the writer herself.
