Geoffrey Sirc—“Godless Writing”

Geoffrey Sirc—“Godless Writing”

Sirc compares Bataille’s attempt to break free of language while writing to his students’ struggles. Batailles tries to gain God through writing without religion.

I think Sirc’s extended metaphor here is religion. As Bataille tried to achieve God outside the dogma, so we prescribe religion instead of sacredness to our students. We give them ritual instead of worship. Or is it the other way around? “Composition substitutes the being and system of religion for the profound inarticulate nothingness of the sacred” (545).

“Composition’s theology posits a salvation, a world of successful writing for us and out students, a methodology to lead us out of despair to that world” (545).

We write from need, not satisfaction. “Composition needs to wreck itself in order to expose its fundamental need for need” (546). 

“Composition as I know it today sublimates the need for need in an artificial economy of the ‘real,’ a writing without torment, in which various effects must be pursued and satisfied in serious, meaningful effort” (546).

Composition is a salvation from a death that doesn’t exist. To be whole, real, composition should face the imperfect reality of communication.

Sirc compares the failure of composition’s economy of language to that of poetry. Poetry stresses the disintegration of language as an attempt to capture the excess. Composition holds to rules of concision as a dogmatic demand of communication. Its ends are only itself.

“We are caught in an entropic downward spiral about the ultimate usefulness, as a system of thought, of an anti-systematic on usefulness. The only way out is subversion, a fragmented openness to life and the sacred, a refusal to close a gesture on restricted intention, evading life” (548).

“This is not a writing that solves anything; it simply opens a rupture, crack the mirror so it can reflect the heart-braking reality of humanity. We sacrifice to feel our need to need, to reach a limit where words and reason cannot suffice. The sacred exists in decomposition; we kill our God to recapture a sense of the sacred” (549)

Question: Is this then the modern reinstitution of Truth to regain what was lost?

Composition never stops trying; it’s always about rules, conditions for that game, for the grasping. What sort of reality is that,then, that it deals with?

Communication isn’t the will to consensus, the grafting of realities into other minds. It’s the terminal exposing to another terminality his/her humanity. It is exposition.

“I must provide in my classes…a curriculum of heterodoxy” (552).

“There must be no profundity in teaching what amounts to mere contemplation; there must be moments of rupture, of unreasoned life” (552).

“Composition’s religion of salvation wants to end misery, not communicate it. It lacks an impulse, a communication of excessive pain, that can ‘ruin in [it] that which is opposed to ruin.’ Its religion is a hatred of chance. It never seeks to discover another language, merely to further dominate the utilitarian one” (552).

“Composition feels its religion of the word is enough, and ignores the unutterable sacred; a Bataillean pedagogy insists on a mystical experience at odds with discursivity” (556).

“Composition’s notion of ‘productive’ writing, in the way it has abandoned ideas of the university as a site of spiritual, intellectual inquiry and fallen under the sweep of this new trade-school idea of disciplinarity, rarely includes and notion of the body, which is the basis of the sacred. By installing a curriculum of writing that supports the contemporary project of technological advancement, complete with the same tired taboos of modernity, we profane ourselves, our bodies, and our world” (557).

“It is dualism’s realization that there are two worlds, not in an easy logic of contradiction, but in a tension of profound alteration…The one world does not cancel the other so much as irrupt into its identity, alter its totality” (560).

“Composition studies…are interested in clarifying the day, further articulating the day, bettering the day, never rupturing the day”

“We may not be able to teach risk, but it can be present in our courses. We can dare each other, be open to chance. We can sacrifice something; there can be moments of decomposition” (562).

Sirc ends saying he’s “ready to try teaching the unteachable.” In this, however, he’s not saying all composition is unteachable. The theology, the God, of composition is certainly teachable, but it has lost its sacred existential lifeblood that sustains itself on excess, laughter, torment. He’s ready to teach the writing that strives for the summit it knows is unattainable.