between writing and design by thomas - bernard kenniff
Translation points the way to this region: the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fufillment of languages. The transfer can never be total, but what reaches this region is that element in a translation which goes beyond transmittal of subject matter. 1
In The Task of the Translator , Walter Benjamin suggests that the fulfilment of the text is to be found in the space opened up between the original and its translation. Something is always lost in translation, but good translation manages to echo the qualities of the original beyond its written words. In the reflection that follows I suggest that the non-linear translation between design and writing is bound to a similar condition. Each task, and its object, contains its potential translation ‘between the lines’. 2 Design and writing are reconciled in a space that is generated by their shared dialogue.
ll se peut qu’écrire soit dans un rapport essentiel avec les lignes de fuite. Écrire, c’est tracer des lignes de fuite, qui ne sont pas imaginaires, et qu’on est bien forcé de suivre, parce que l’écriture nous y engage. 6
If writing, as Gilles Deleuze suggests above, is related to lines of flight ( lignes de fuite ), then the space of writing is heterogeneous, characterised by increased possibilities, instability, openness and immediacy. Writing deterritorialises. It fissures and ruptures, stretches and reconfigures. It permits, among other things, risk and uncertainty. What does this mean for the writing subject? Creative writing, particularly in education, is a mode related to the development of the self. Not the discovery of the self, but its becoming through an action that destabilises a given architectonics and reconfigures another. Writing allows you to momentarily stand outside yourself.
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Similarly to Benjamin’s realm of reconciliation , William Whyte argues that the meaning of architecture should be found in the relation between the various (and necessary) transpositions between the different genres that characterise its process: from drawing to model, model to fabrication, detail to construction, construction to occupation, etc. 3 This suggests that there is a potentially meaningful dialogical space generated by the act of switching modes or what, in creative writing, Fiona English has called re- genring . 4 Writing is spatial in a dialogical sense. It brings up relations, movement and translations that link the self to another, an interior to an exterior, a word to language, or a part to a whole (however stable). It is spatial because it situates the author, the action and its result in space and time. Writing, as Jane Rendell succinctly states, takes place . 5 This, however, is not to suggest that stability may be evoked from the reciprocity between text and designed construction – this is not where the potential of translation or transposition rests. The question we should ask instead is: what space are we writing?
Thomas-Bernard Kenniff
The characteristic of creative activities that allows one to take flight and stand outside oneself is expressed by Tzvetan Todorov, reading from Mikhail Bakhtin, as exotopy . 8 The best way to experience the exotopy of writing is to read something you have written a few years back. The author is both you and not you, simultaneously recognisable and unrecognisable. Reading your own writing is also entering someone else’s head.
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