Føre

I'm back from a long weekend cross-country skiing in the mountains. Going beyond cellular coverage and wireless email really is one of the great luxuries of our age. There's something about sitting in a small cabin miles away from anywhere anyone could get a hold of you which helps you focus. Conversation seems to turn naturally towards what is important, and all the noise of the everyday fades into the background.



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Just so you don't think I'm going all luddite on you, I note that the Wikipedia article on "blog" has grown a lot since I saw it last time. It has an interesting history of early blogging-section now.

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I was listening to a part of a lecture series called "Ethics and Public Policy" just now. The lectures, made in 1991 by the funny, insightful, rambling and delightfully Jewish political philosopher Ed Beiser, concern the idea of rights and law in the public sphere. It would probably be immoral of me to suggest that one could download the lecture series from this torrent here. Would it be legal of me to say so? Hard to say.

At one point, Beiser makes an interesting argument about what I suspect are different conceptions of rights between capitalist societies like the US and proto-socialist societies like the USSR*. He says that the conception of rights in the US is a negative conception. You have freedom of the press in the US, but the formulation is "Congress [i.e. the government] shall make no law" abridging freedom of religion, the press &tc. The freedom to assemble is the freedom to not be disassembled by the government.

The formulation of the first Soviet constitution is an entirely different approach.

14. For the purpose of securing freedom of expression to the toiling masses, the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic abolishes all dependence of the Press upon capital, and turns over to the working people and the poorest peasantry all technical and material means for the publication of newspapers, pamphlets, books, etc., and guarantees their free circulation throughout the country.

15. For the purpose of enabling the workers to hold free meetings, the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic offers to the working class and to the poorest peasantry furnished halls, and takes care of their heating and lighting appliances.

So the negative conception of rights says "we won't stop you from printing whatever you like". The positive conception of rights says "here, have a printing press. The paper is over there by the ink barrels." (And in the Soviet model follows this with "here, have an oppressive military dictatorship complete with total censorship.")

It occurred to me that both these notions of freedom of the press are obsolete in their own way. The negative version is obsolete because the oppression these days comes through entirely different channels (Clear Channel & Fox News, for instance), and takes the form of oligarchic capitalism, neo-imperialism and cultural hegemony instead.

The positive version is obsolete simply because the technological revolutions made in the 17 years which have passed since the early 90s have made mass syndication and distribution available to everyone with a PC. Technology solved the problem of scarcity of mass distribution. The problem now is more the perennial one of getting people's attention. Am I right, guys? Guys?

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The Norwegian word "Føre" is untranslatable, but is indicative of how good the snow is for skiing. Good føre is good for skiing, bad is not. It is the condition of the snow which dictates whether you are gliding in a zen-like trance across soft, light, fluffy perfection or skating roughly across an icy shell roughly the constistency of a slush puppie, which drags you backwards on uphill treks and makes you go too fast and lose all control downhill - yet somehow seems to solidify into head-crackingly hard ice when you fall. We had almost perfect føre this weekend. Føre, like weather, is also a great metaphor for conditions which dictate your actions and your possibilities, like parental mental health or world capitalism or whatever.

To belabour the metaphor: going into the wild gives your thoughts great føre, until you run out of food, at which point you start thinking more and more about the ethics of cannibalism. Fortunately, Mikkel B's cooking skills don't decrease just because he is working on a propane stove in the middle of nowhere.

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Arthur C. Clarke died. Between him and Gary Gygax going last week, two of the central pillars of 20th century nerdhood have suddenly disappeared.

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I made brussel sprouts poached in cider with apples and onions last night. It tastes amazing and you should try it. This recipe is totally copied from the book I used. They just changed a sentence here and there.

One more for the blogroll

Via the always wonderful Acephalous, I found this very interesting blog: Zunguzungu. Straight to the feedreader.

He has just posted two wonderful, knowledgeable, well-written posts on the situation in Kenya. "What I don’t know, the Washington Post doesn’t know even more" is pretty much the opinionated version of the article we should have had in our morning papers today. "Fears of Regional Instability as Iowa explodes into Ethnic Violence" is the one we did have, wizh a twizt.

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More generally, I've been very encouraged lately by finding, in a short period of time: e.g. The Edge of the American West, Paul Krugman, Zunguzungu... blogs* which are written by people who are

a) Experts in their fields. As well as
b) polymaths, knowledgeable in other fields.
c) Write really well.

This gives me hope that the blogosphere is capable of moving both towards the netroots-organization of e.g. Daily Kos, but also towards some sort of new mode of public expert intellectuals who participate in the day-to-day changing of the rhetorical guard, of analysing the news and responding to the ideas of others. People who have, say, academic knowledge, but still choose not to waste their talents on the Journal of the Econometric Analysis of Advanced Eggplant Parmesan, as Michael Bérubé put it, but engage in public discourse because that's where knowledge is put to use and makes a difference in politics and in the discourse which shapes it. And these people see the value of placing themselves in the public sphere exchange of blogging: it is like open-source thinking. You work out loud and share your ideas.

And what I find so heartening is that the progressive netroots movement in the US, like Kos or Atrios, is so actively converging on the experts, using them, and responding to and being responded to by them. Paul Krugman's** ideas are routinely being thrown around and responded to in the netroots' discussions, while Krugman, on the other hand, responds to the ideas and movements in the progressive blogosphere, just as likely to quote Kos or Atrios as he is to quote some obscure economical article (from the aforementioned Journal of Econometric Analysis of Advanced Eggplant Parmesan), or other blogging intellectuals like Brad DeLong or Ezra Klein. Blogging expert intellectuals have been around for a while now, but the rate of interplay between the institutional intelligentsia and the political activists is, I think, somewhat new, and it's a Good Thing. I'm hopeful it will revitalise the stagnant public sphere of the US, and I think I see something similar starting to happen (although slower) in Scandinavia now.

* What is the collective noun for blogs? A trackback of blogs? A rumour of blogs? A flamewar of blogs? You decide.

** I just finished his book tonight. I'll try to post on it in a day or two.

I want to write a book called Speaking Truth to Power - how the rise of citizen journalism and the blogosphere changed everything

Former White House communications director and counselor to the president (Bush jr. that is) Dan Bartlett (no relation to Jed Bartlet) in an interview with Texas Monthly:

Yeah, or what if [conservative blogger] Hugh Hewitt called?

That’s when you start going, “Hmm . . .” Because they do reach people who are influential.

Well, they reach the president’s base.

That’s what I mean by influential. I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.

A Bluffer’s Guide to My MA Thesis

In honour of my poor friends in Bergen who are handing in their MA theses tomorrow (and therefore probably sitting up tonight either writing the last 8 to 12 pages or deleting the last 20 to 30 unnecessary pages, if I know them right), have handed in their theses (you guys rock!), I’m going to start writing that series of posts I’ve been promising forever. It’s going to be a sort of summary of the main arguments in my thesis and probably also a record of what I would have done differently today.

The title of my thesis can be translated as

Text, Thought, Time: The Weblog As Essayistic Process.

(sigh)

Anyway – I’ll break it down by chapter, meaning that the series will be in 6 parts. Expect some serious delays between parts.

Chapter 1 – Introduction

1.1.

My thesis originated in a strange experience I had of not being able to adequately describe certain texts. For someone like me, whose education consists mainly in developing a vocabulary to discuss what texts are, what they do and how they do it, these kinds of experiences are interesting, and should always be noticed and investigated.

The texts, obviously, were my daily dose of weblogs. Since around 99-00 I had been reading a greater and greater variety of blogs online (only some of which are in my sidebar now), and they had become an essential part of my daily reading, somewhere between the papers and the novels and the theory, I followed a small truckload of blogs through my feedreader. Not being able to describe this big a chunk of my reading seemed like an inadequate state of affairs for a comp.lit. major. Why was my morning paper easier to analyse than, say, the Daily Kos.

The blogs, at their best, seemed to be rich and complex literary texts, but still managed to evade my theoretical apparatus. On the one hand, I could easily, with a bit of work look at the individual post and use my vocabulary to describe that post. I could describe the literary techniques and tropes it used, discuss the thoughts it expressed or criticise the language with which it did these things. On the other hand, there was a huge gap between these descriptions and the full effect of the text. A lot of what these texts did and how they did it remained elusive.

At first, I thought this was a medial problem. I could describe the text, but not the mediation of it. If I adequately described the new media, I figured, things would work out just fine and dandy. But since content and media are not separate entities, this is obviously not the case. I needed to look at the way in which the media and the text affected each other. Eventually I decided that the medial structures were provoking or encouraging a new and blog-specific mode of writing which could be analysed effectively with a combination of media analysis and literary theory. So I still wanted to keep my perspective rooted in literary theory. I had a hunch – soon to be confirmed - that there was something there that blog studies seemed to be ignoring or underplaying.

So my project, as I outlined it in this first chapter, was to attempt to create a conceptual vocabulary for describing the weblog as a literary form. (Aside: I use “form” here instead of “genre” or “media” for reasons which I will get into in excruciating detail in chapter 2).

The fulcrum I found that enabled me to shift these bits of vocabulary around was essay theory. One night, having browsed an online collection of Montaigne’s Essais and a selection of blogs, it dawned on me that these texts actually had a lot in common: the focus on process; the intellectual restlessness; the love of quotation, of other texts, of the randomness of things read coming together and the verbal and intellectual playfulness - these were all superficial qualities shared by blogs and the essay. I found that these superficial qualities actually signalled a deeper relationship of methodology, composition and structure which I wanted to explore and use to develop a theoretical vocabulary to describe blogs as literary entities and then use in practice to analyse and criticise some blogs.

1.2. Definition

What follows is an attempt to define blogs. I’ll just skip lightly over this part, because you, the reader, already knows what a blog is. You read blogs, and blogs, being such a diverse and heterogenous phenomenon, are more easily described by reading lots of blogs. They are a set of practices and codes which mutate constantly and therefore are hard - indeed, impossible - to pin down. Just think of how much YouTube or Flickr, for instance, have changed what blogs are and what they do.

Anyway, I run roughshod across some medial definitions – the topology of front page, archives, permalinks, datemarkings, reverse chronological presentation, etc. etc. and I introduce a lot of vocabulary that you already probably know, in case the reader didn't.

These are the bare bones of formal, medial conventions necessary for something to be described as a blog (I strip the definition down as far as I can). They remain inadequate to describe what blogs do. As Steven Himmer says in his article “The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature”, btw the only article I have found which specifically engages weblogs as literary texts (and an interesting one), this technical definition of blogs is inadequate:

(...) [T]he structural and technical definitions many in the weblogging community focus on fall equally short of describing what is a complex, earnest, and distinct literary form. In other words, it is insufficient to explore the weblog exclusively at the level of content, and equally insufficient to focus wholly on the technical delivery of that content. Accounting for the diversity of weblogs and webloggers—yet still maintaining some larger sense of what they have in common—requires instead a careful look both at what weblogs do, and how they do it for both writers and readers.

Instead, an adequate definition of the blog will explore both form and content and the interplay between the technical possibilities inherent in the form, as well as the limitations, and how this contributes to the possibility for a wide variety of literary modes. In the by now fairly canonic (ask Google) definition of 'weblog', Jill Walker uses both technical and generic traits of the form:

Typically, weblogs are published by individuals and their style is personal and informal. Weblogs first appeared in the mid-1990s, becoming popular as simple and free publishing tools became available towards the turn of the century. Since anybody with a net connection can publish their own weblog, there is great variety in the quality, content, and ambition of weblogs, and a weblog may have anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands of daily readers. Examples of the *genre exist on a continuum from *confessional, online *diaries to logs tracking specific topics or activities through links and commentary. (...)

Most weblogs use links generously, allowing readers to follow conversations between weblogs by following links between entries on related topics. Readers may start at any point of a weblog, seeing the most recent entry first, or arriving at an older post via a search engine or a link from another site, often another weblog. Once at a weblog, readers can read on in various orders: chronologically, thematically, by following links between entries or by searching for keywords. Weblogs also generally include a blogroll, which is a list of links to other weblogs the author recommends. Many weblogs allow readers to enter their own comments to individual posts.

Weblogs are serial and cumulative, and readers tend to read small amounts at a time, returning hours, days, or weeks later to read entries written since their last visit. This serial or episodic structure is similar to that found in *epistolary novels or *diaries, but unlike these a weblog is open-ended, finishing only when the writer tires of writing (...).

I don’t think that thinking of blogs as a genre is a good idea (and neither does Jill, despite some statements in this definition), but in order to say anything interesting about blogs, we need to descend from undifferentiated formal descriptions into qualitiative subsets of the great quantitative mass (unlike certain people I could think of). Btw, see also this discussion of the blog as medium, genre or format in which Alvaro Ramirez argues that blogging is not a medium but a format. I’m still not entirely sure whether I agree with him or not, but it’s an interesting argument.

So while I have to admit I sort of detest the very concept of genre, if you tie me to a chair and beat me I might eventually start talking about the class of blogs I discuss in the thesis as a sort of genre. More on this, as I say, in chapter 2.

1.2. The weblog as literature.

(yes - i have two sections numbered 1.2. in my thesis - what of it?)

In this section, I defend the fact that I consider the blog to be an emergent trait of contemporary literature. Are blogs literature? Short answer: yes. Longer answer: yes, duh.

Ok, ok. First, there’s the argument from media: all media that can convey text can be literary (if you expand your definitions of “text” and “literary” sufficiently here, you can swallow the world – your sense data as text, your interpretation of the world as narrative, for instance). So the blog can be literary, because it can publish literary text. For instance, there are blogs dedicated to publishing epistolary novels in the novel’s real-time. Dracula is a good example. If you publish literature in a blog it’s still literature. That’s the duh part. Especially since there is now a sort-of-consensus that all language is literary (see e.g. Triztan Todorov’s genre theory).

Steven Himmer wants to go further than this, and argues that blogs are specifically literary because of their formal traits:

Calling a weblog “literary” does not require content that is about literature or even content that aims to be literature. It is not an attempt at categorizing one weblog and its author as more worthwhile in a canonical sense than any other. To the contrary, I propose that every weblog can be considered literary in the sense that it calls attention not only to what we read, but also to the unique way we read it. The weblog is (to paraphrase Colin MacCabe) the performed result of a code of particular techniques (...). The weblog collapses many of the common assumptions made about texts, as it complicates the distinction between author and audience through the multivocality of both direct commenting, and the reader’s ability to reorder the narrative in myriad ways. Owing to its ongoing creation over an undefined period of time, the weblog becomes a text that constantly expands through the input of both readers and writers. This absence of a discrete, “completed” product makes the weblog as a form resistant to the commoditization either of itself, or of any one particular interpretation.

While I find this to be an interesting argument and almost agree with it (I do agree with many of Himmer's other points here, and will return to them in chapter 2), some days I think it’s a bit of a watering-down of the concept of literature. While it can easily be argued that the formal characteristics of blogs are aesthetic or literary presentation techniques/tropes, which is Himmer’s central point, I would also like to describe the generic traits of certain kinds of blogging in terms of literature in something of the traditional sense of literature. (By traditional, I mean from the 20th century.) So instead, I think of blogs as media that encourage certain types of context simply because they are well-suited to presenting certain forms of text and not others. For instance, the link + commentary genre which blogging started out as: blogging is probably the best possible medium for conveying that sort of text. But that’s an easy example. Just wait until chapter 3, where I get all renaissance humanist on you.

And needless to say, I would strenuously argue that these kinds of writing I am talking about here are within the boundaries of literature by all modern standards, though sometimes it moves into the no-man’s land between literature, experience and science, or into something more like free conceptual play, like the humanist essay. But that's the style these days and if all the cool kids are doing it, why shouldn't the blog be allowed to do it, and why shouldn't we be allowed to talk about it?

1.3. Convergence

Between the rather tacky So 90's! covers of Hypertext 2.0., George Landow has an argument which I like. He argues for what he calls a convergence between theory and practice occurring between newer theoretical discourses – deconstruction, post-structuralism, Deleuzianism, neo-pragmatism, etc. on the one hand and hypertext and what we would now call the internet on the other. In short, the global hypertext is starting to do in very specific, practical ways what theorists have been arguing that all text is doing conceptually or linguistically. This leads to a situation in which one has to abandon “conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy and linearity, and replace them with ones of multi-linearity, nodes, links and networks.” (p. 2) Mmm. Post-structuralicious!

My method takes this convergence as a model. I use hypertext theory in order to understand how the internet and the blogging format/media/whatever interplay in the production of meaning, and I take some established literary theory – particularly essay theory and certain post-structuralist ideas about text and notions of the public sphere lifted from Habermas – in studying the literary techniques deployed in blogging. I will then try to study or create a convergence between these two conceptual apparati. (Is that the word? Apparati? Apparatuses?)

1.4 & 1.5.: meaninglessly formal drivel

In these two sections I first explain why I chose the blogs I did (short answer: I liked them and they complement each other in many interesting ways) and outline the contents of the following six chapters, which I am not going to do here.

1.6. (Full disclosure)

The chapter ends with a little aside which doesn’t really enter into the rest of the argument, but which should be noted for formal reasons. It’s an interesting methodological conundrum: I am a co-author of both the texts I am going to be analysing, since I comment a bit in both blogs. Not a lot, but I am there. I participated in creating the work. In at least one central exchange of comments, which I analyse, in one of the works, I am an active participant. So does that stop my impartiality?

Well, I would say first that impartiality is boring and that I am no more or less impartial than I would be had I not participated in the writing of the work. Some people would say yes, I suppose, but they are probably crabby old men who couldn’t make a hyperlink if their life depended on it. My argument is as follows:

There might be those who think that it is not unproblematic from an ethic of academic perspective to analyse a work that one is the co-author of, however peripherally. I am not among them, but even if I was, I believe that my voice gets lost in the din of the massive, distributed authorial function that is at work in weblogs. I am closer to the situation of the political scientist analysing structures in his own society than some board of directors handing out contracts to each other. And one must not forget that every reading makes the reader a co-author of the text. There are, indeed, many good arguments to be made that this MA thesis is a stronger intervention in the text than my presence in it as a commentator is.

That's it for now! Stay tuned for Chapter 2, in which I outline the decentralised concept of “work” at work in the blog, the blog’s role in the public sphere, its relationship to canon. Thrill! As I analyse the blog aesthetic and touch on heart-throbbing philological issues! I’m sure I’ll have it posted before the end of the Bush jr. presidency at least.

boiling water with the lid off

I just finished William Gibson's latest novel, Spook Country. As always, Gibson describes big chunks of the times we live in better than anyone (in fact, I can't help thinking that he is literally the only author I've read who looks at some of the things he looks at) and its worth reading for those observations, as well as a well-plotted, easy read. The funny thing is, I recognized huge chunks of the plot from my internet reading. I kept thinking "oh yeah, that's that thing, and that's that news story run through a blender and cut up with this other story over here", etc.

Today, as I was googling my way across the blogosphere per usual, I happened to stumble across a link - in Jill's blog, though now I've lost the post itself - to a post on Gibson's blog just when he started blogging again after a lengthy hiatus. This was in October 2004, in the run-up to the re-election of the Dauphin. I recognised the story he told from the novel. Then I looked at the October archive and realised that I got all those stories and ideas mostly from links Gibson blogged. So I can tell you now that Spook Country came together for Gibson in October 2004. That month is a record of all the little shocks and perceptions and historical forces and traumas - in seriously minute detail - that at some point stewed together in Gibson's brain into what became Spook Country.

According to the early plot outline which Amazon.com has up on the book's page (quoting the blog), he started writing his novel in June 05. That's the boiling time for the novel, I guess. Gibson has several times called writing a novel at the same time as the blog "boiling water with the lid off", meaning it's something he has to stop doing in order to generate enough energy to write the novel. Looking at these links, I'm not so sure. I think instead the blog has become a record of, and an integral part of, the idea-generating stage of writing his novels. Maybe he couldn't write the book itself, but the ideas certainly came about at these exact times.

I can't help but think that blogs are just huge assets for the biographical writers of the future. Also, the blog is a lot of fun to read. I remember the following paragraph vividly. And as always, Gibson was right on the money:

One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.

Walker Rettberg replies to Lovink

Jill Walker Rettberg has a reply to Geert Lovink's article "Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse" which, you may recall, I had a long response to back in June. Then I got a reply from Lovink, and so on and so forth. Here's everything I've written about Lovink's article on this blog.

Jill's response is great. Very considered and voicing lots of interesting objections to Lovink's essay, not least her critique of his lack of examples, and the discussion of the "positivist" argument.

Lovink replies

Geert Lovink replied to my runaway post on "Cultural Pessimism and Pragmatic Optimism", which was a reply to his article "Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse".

hi, as an activist i really do not get your obsession with 'cultural pessimism'. to me it just shows that you are unfamiliar with my work and position and confuse ruthless (self) analysis with some projected melancholic mood. to me blogs are first and foremost software, or to be more precise, a specific software culture that needs to be compared with email, usenet, web forums and so on. we activists and artists and other irregulars are not married to one specific format or platform. the other idea is, of course, that blogging emerges from a certain tendency in society, it is NOT a non-historical tool that is out there, somewhere and that can be used for optimistic or pessimistic causes.

Best, Geert

PS. if you would have used a search engine you would have found that I do indeed have a blog, was involved an early collaborative blogging and webforum experiment called Discordia and that I more than once called myself a radical pragmatist.

First: thank you for commenting, Geert! I was hoping you would stop by.

I did (and do!) indeed use search engines, but Google shows a part of your blog (net critique) which made me think it was somebody else's blog commenting on your article. So it goes. And if my post showed you that I was unfamiliar with your work, it's unsurprising, because I am. But then, familiarity with your work and position should not be a requirement for commenting on a single article by you.

But I think you might have misread my disagreement with you. I certainly never said and obviously do not think (if you are familiar with my work & positions, wink wink) that the blog is an ahistorical phenomenon. We do not disagree about the need to historicise. Our disagreement is more on what shape the historification should take, and to what pragmatic ends. I'm glad that you're still inclined after your critique to use the internet for activism, I just think that maybe your essay might make such activism more, rather than less, difficult.

Let me pull some specific critiques out of my response, which I would like to hear your response to:

1. You wrote: "I see blogs as part of an unfolding process of 'massification' of this still new medium. What the Internet lost after 2000 was the 'illusion of change'." Am I reading this right in thinking that you are saying the internet is not a massive shift in what our culture is and what it does?

2. You also react to the irrelevance of blogging. Isn't this irrelevance, as someone who seems [says Google] to sympathise with anarchist ideals, precisely the point? Isn't the fact that we can say things which are outside the capitalist machines - the printing presses, the demand for marketability, etc. - precisely the point?

3. I claim that: "[Lovink] does not allow blogs to enact the difference he claims that they eradicate, because he describes in homogenic terms a heterogeneous phenomenon." In the introduction to your article, you seem to agree that blogs are heterogenous & hard to describe under single terms, but you still try to put blogs in general under the expansive, nihilist position you describe later in the essay. How do you reconcile this difference in the phenomenon with homogenic terms like for instance "nihilist"? Isn't the proliferation of modes of blogging a counter-argument in itself?

4. You say that "It would be interesting to investigate why criticism has not become popular, and aligned itself with such new-media practices as blogging". I disagree that this is the case, and in fact find a new culture of criticism - literary, cultural, political, philosophical, theoretical - to be one of the most marked elements of what I think are the interesting bits of the blogging culture.

But the major faultline in our disagreement is still that between pessimism and optimism. I write in my original post that: "There is a claim [in Baudrillard, and your article] of celebrating a difference and subjectivity now lost, but at the same time there is an attack on the material conditions necessary to allow real difference to be actualised and flourish, coupled with what amounts to an attack on actual difference in the world today, because it is not 'real', not 'genuine' enough." In short: I think that you are attacking a tool which can allow us to actualise cultural and political difference.

Back to historicising: I suspect that your line of thought will participate in the (historical) shaping of the tool. By attacking something with a lot of possibility, you end up with an attempt at taking apart something which we (you and me and other blogger-activists) could use to do something with. Why not have an optimistic, utopian redescription, instead of what I would call a pessimistic reductive argument which falls against the tool? I think that when you try to read blogging as emerging and expressing these tendencies in culture, you are being reductive. It's too much a huge and complex and emergent phenomenon to describe like this. I suspect our energies would be better spent criticising those aspects of the culture which gave birth to what you see as the negative side of blogs than the blogs themselves. They are articulating and articulated, right? I would rather focus on their articulating capacity than one aspect of their articulation.