Is this Writing?

Roland Barthes writes much on the topic of writing. Except that for Barthes, writing is not always the act of simply placing one’s intention in small black letters on the page. Far from it. Writing becomes something else and other gestures are forms of writing. For example Japanese cooking in Empire of Signs is writing. In an essay on fashion, he says what Coco Channel does is writing.

What is writing then? It seems a gesture towards that which is, perhaps, a perfectibility beyond us. Not that perfectibility is even possible, but that the gesture towards a perfectibility, towards an order in a world of chaos becomes a gesture that is larger than any intention. Serious work of any kind is perhaps writing? Barthes says, "Writing is precisely that act which unites in the same labor what could not be apprehended in the mere flat space of representation."

While thinking about these things on a recent weekend in New York, I began to look around the world and see if I could read in it instances of writing. This first materialized on the subway where the studiousness of people lost in their own world while waiting to arrive at 89th Ave from W 14th St. seemed a form of writing. The writing of the moment in the gesture of time passing. Could this not be apprehended in a mere flat space of representation? Is this serious work?

Yes. It is serious in that it requires one’s absolute attention, the gesture becomes the person. The person is that moment. In that moment, they are writing. The writing of the moment is the old woman’s deliberateness to put on lipstick perfectly though in every gesture from opening the tube to inspecting the color to the moment of confusion when she attempts to replace the cap the wrong way smashing the perfectly formed tip, this is a gesture of writing, but a failed attempt.

In the Met, it occurred to me that those small moments of looking that are perhaps moments beyond looking are also writing. Are these instances of writing?

Does the perfecting of the image in the photo become an instance of writing? Or is it simply recording the moment without thinking? The latter couldn't be writing, could it?

Does imitation become a way of writing a text?

A text that has already been written once, and

now it again becomes the author that copies, a copy

that is the author, the copy not of the image before

the person, but the person who "writes."

An autobiography as Derrida would have it.

Is the father in the background teaching his daughter to write?

Is this couple in some way writing? Or reading the writing of Monet on the wall to the right of them? Or is it possible they read no writing at all and are only involved in the writing of each other?

"It is also an emptiness of language that which constitutes writing; it is from this emptiness of language that derive the features with which Zen, in the exemption from all meaning, writes gardens, gestures, houses, flower arrangements, faces, violence."

Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs