The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

I'm re-reading Melville's Moby-Dick (the hyphen in the title is consistently forgotten) on a long weekend, and it's even better than I remember. Every sentence is a toe-curling delight. Every chapter brings some new sense of recognition. Although the novel was written 150 years ago, it still communicates easily with me. Some recognitions of similarity are particularly sad, though like the last line in this passage.

But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way - he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States
"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL"
"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN"

150 years. Nothing much has changed.

Harold Pinter (1930 - 2008)

The sad news today was that Harold Pinter has died. His Nobel prize lecture from 2006 was a tour de force, and if you haven't seen it, you should really have a look at it. There are Spanish subtitles on this one, but it has the best image and sound quality.



Elsewhere: Guardian obit, NY Times obit. Interesting interview in The Guardian.

And the Nobel Prize in Literature goes to... some guy I've never heard of

Jean-Marie Gustave Le who?

author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.

It's "Let's Insult the Newly Dead", live on DICK FM, with your host, John Ziegler!

Back in the day, David Foster Wallace wrote an epic and tremendously good 24-page article called "Host" on the apoplectic fury of American right-wing talk radio. The article, in addition to being collected in Consider the Lobster, is now online in full (you have to click the coloured boxes to get the full effect). Now John Ziegler, the talk-show host that Wallace covered in the piece has responded to Wallace's death in an editorial. And he's being a bit of a dick about it:

I was neither as surprised, nor as upset by this tragedy as the many in the elite realm of reputable literature seemed to be.

(...)

I also believe that there is an equally fine line between real genius and just plain weirdness. In my experience, Wallace had very little of the former, so he exaggerated the latter.

I particularly like how he stressed that the literary world is an "elite realm". For more, we now go live to Scott Eric Kaufman at Edge of the American West. Scott?

Oh, no

Writer David Foster Wallace hanged himself Friday night.

That's just incredibly sad. He was one of the greatest American writers of his generation, and one of the ones that I loved the most.

With acute, embarassing self-awareness of the risk of seeming pathetic¹, the kind of state Wallace described better than anyone, Shakespeare springs to mind (Wallace's magnum opus was a book called Infinite Jest):

"I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"

I was just reading a long interview with him yesterday, done just before the publication of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I feel like the guy I was talking to yesterday died during the night.

Update: here is an old post of mine which contains links to some of Wallace's wonderfully intricate, deeply insightful and break-a-rib-funny essays. And here is Scott Eric Kaufman's reaction to the news over at Edge of the American West. I thought of "Good Old Neon" when I heard the news, too.

1. Thereby robbing the gesture of much of its intended effect. But fuck it: I really, really mean this.

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.

in which me & Doris Lessing catch a play

Nine years, ten months + change ago, I was on a class trip to London. Ostensibly a trip to experience the glowing, happening centre of Imperial European culture - theatre in particular - it ended up being for all intents and purposes a party/socialising/sightseeing-trip. We had just started the IB a few months earlier, and didn't really know each other that well yet, so we ended up mostly getting drunk alot, going shopping and seeing sights and trying to get to know each other. Seeing the British Museum through a haze of near-hallucinatory hangover was a bizarre and unforgettable experience. The Rosetta Stone, for me = angst, weltschmertz, nausea.

One night between parties we finally went out to catch Ibsen's An Enemy of the People with Ian McKellan (whom you know probably as Gandalf or Magneto). The play was great, as far as I recall, but I was tired and not quite firing on all cylinders. During intermission, I was roaming around in the lobby outside the Laurence Olivier Hall or whatever it was called. As I was heading back from the bar with a soda, I passed a sweet-looking old lady with her hair rolled up in a bun. My English teacher Margaret pointed her out to me and in the sort-of-blasé, but very tense way one whispers "that's the queen" or "that's the prime minister", she whispered "that's Doris Lessing".

The funny thing: that afternoon, I had gone to a mother-huge chain bookstore in downtown London and bought two books as christmas presents for my parents. One was Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner for my father the noirist, the other was Walking in the Shade, volume II of Lessing's autobiography, which had just come out that summer. What sucked about all this: I had left the book in my room at the hotel. It would have been too cool to just happen to bump into Doris Lessing while catching a play in London on the very day I bought her book and getting her signature. What are the odds of that? I had never met her before, and suddenly I meet her on the same day I bought a book by her.

So anyway, the Nobel Prize in Literature 2007? That's Doris Lessing.

And its about time, too.

DFW & no more paper

David Foster Wallace keeps popping up in blogs and magazines I read these days.

First, there's a new sort-of essay online here. It's the introduction to a volume of American essays he has edited (or as he puts it, Deciderized) for Houghton Mifflin.

He also has a huge essay online over here I should read soon.

So I went looking in the Wikipedia article, and hey, look, there's the title essay to his latest collection of essays. I swear: who even bothers with paper these days?

Og for de norskspråklige: Preben Jordal gir en introduksjon til DFWs essayistikk i siste Vagant. Jordal har også oversatt novellesamlingen Oblivion av ham. Special Bonus: Han klarer å presse inn et stikk til bloggere i artikkelen.

Krutt & kanoner

Det diskuteres kanon chez Ellefsen. Her er en kjapp opprissing av mine synspunkter:

kanon er ikke kun en estetisk størrelse, men også en politisk. Det vi snakker om her er egentlig to forskjellige ting. Det ene er det som vi i andre sammenhenger kaller sjangerforventninger, dvs. det diskursive feltet som presenterer teksten til lesning. Det andre er en politisk rangering som legitimerer en nasjonal og kulturell identitet. Personlig finner jeg tanken om at noen kan sette seg ned og bestemme hvilke bøker som er viktige for meg svært utiltalende. Hvem valgte dem? Snakker de på vegne av alle?

Kort sagt: Jeg finner en del motstand mot kanons normative egenskaper. Argumentative kanoner, som prøver å argumentere for sine valg uten universaliserende terrorisme a la Bloom har jeg dog sansen for. Men det kaller vi jo med dagligtalen litteraturkritikk og er noe helt annet.

(...)

Joda, f, det er noen kritikere som er kanoniserende normative. Men den typen kritikk er kjedelig. [Whoops. Der var jeg visst normativ.] Jeg foretrekker de kritikerne som har en kjerne av feilbarlighet. Dem som sier at dette er _min_ mening om hvilke bøker som bør leses og at jeg ville foretrukket om du likte noen av disse, du også.

Og om jeg får lov til å tenke nykritisk et øyeblikk, så er jeg ikke så interessert i hva det var Lillehammerkanonene siktet på når de skrev kanon (mange bra folk på den listen, altså). Et langt mer interessant spørsmål er: hva er konsekvensene av kanon? Er det ikke å skape en ide om hva den norske kulturen er? Er den ideen ikke normativ, regulerende? Jo.

Blooms estetiske kanon er kulturell og derfor også terroriserende. Den inneholder en ide om hva kulturen bør være. Bloom er ikke åpen for at hans kanon er netopp *hans* kanon. Nei, det er Den Vestlige Kanon, store bokstaver. Hvorfor tror du at de konservative i USA (de normalt konservative, altså, ikke nykonservative) har trykket Bloom til brystet?

Jeg spør meg selv hva vi skal vinne med å diskutere kanon. Kan vi virkelig komme frem til en bedre kultur på den måten? Eller inneholder alle bedre kulturer denne regelen i sin grunnstruktur: At normativitet ikke kan være et trekk ved dens deskriptive tekster?

Og dessuten så er estetikk og politikk to sider av samme sak. Du kan aldri skille de to. Både i forstanden at alle estetiske dommer deltar i et politisk felt (det betyr noe, politisk, om man liker f.eks. Dag Solstad eller Hanne Ørstavik) og politikken er i bunn og grunn et sett med verdidommer som oversettes til praktiske regler. Et annet ord for verdidommer er estetiske dommer.

Jeg burde i øvrig legge til at jeg liker Blooms kanon. Jeg syns den er god, og mange av verkene er også på min kanon-liste. Men han er bare så satans skråsikker og liksom-objektiv.

Cultural pessimism and pragmatic optimism

I’m sorry for the long-windedness, but what follows is an incredibly long post which I’ve been sort of writing by accumulation, a line here, a paragraph there, since at least February. Now it’s just been sitting on my hard drive for three weeks and Baudrillard shuffled off this unreal mortal coil and Lovink just got quoted about his view of blogs in Morgenbladet, so it has some topical urgency, so I might as well just post it. But it is a bit of a patchwork creature.

Ok, so let’s talk a bit about cultural pessimism. As I mentioned in a previous post, the thing I found most useless about the thinking of Jean Baudrillard was his constant pessimism. Surely, one would think, the first task of any branch of theory or philosophy is to create working conditions and conceptual frameworks for praxis. If a theory doesn’t help you live your life in some way, or doesn’t lead on into something which is helpful to you in some way, then it is by definition not worth spending time on. (Though it might be interesting pursuing it, if one thinks it might eventually lead to something useful, or even if one thinks it’s merely interesting, one should pursue it. Often, something which one thought was unimportant or mostly irrelevant turns out to be important and practically useful 80 years down the line, like for instance matrix mathematics. This is the short version of the defence of basic research in the natural sciences, without which we wouldn’t have the theory of relativity or the atomic bomb.) Obviously, there should be as wide a range of possible values of “helpful” or “your life”, but in the end, if a philosophical system makes you want to lie down and die, or sit in your office and smoke cigarillos all day, while writing incomprehensible essays on how things used to be so much realer, then that would seem to me to be the definition of bad theory.

I always wonder, with people who claim in their writings that everything is useless, that nothing can be done, etc.: why do they write at all? More to the point: why do they publish? If everything is useless, why spread the word? Isn’t that spreading of the word actually an act of violence and malice? Wouldn’t the thing to do be to shut up about it? Keep people in a state of ignorant pseudo-bliss? No, if you publish philosophy, theory or whatever at all, there must be a rhetorical imperative. What are you trying to do to the reader? What political action are you trying to provoke? What change in mindset?

So I consider the imperatives of theory and philosophy are to find private methods of dealing with the existential situation that comes after the death of God and the birth of modernity and finding public political strategies for creating new and better (“better”) ethical regimes in that situation. Also, if they can help us have a little fun along the way, that would be great.

*

Which is just a preamble for talking about this article: “Blogging, the nihilist impulse” by Geert Lovink. Ever since Audun L mailed me the link, I’ve wanted to respond to this take on blogging. Lovink is following in the footsteps of Baudrillard not least by exhibiting a strange pessimism of new media, and manufacturing negative attributes in them. The article has a view of blogs which I can't identify with, but seems to me to be an excellent example of cultural pessimism in action.

“It is of strategic importance to develop critical categories of a theory of blogging that takes the specific mixture of technology, interface design, software architecture, and social networking into account”, Lovink begins, and I wholeheartedly agree (although I’m not entirely sure what "critical categories of a theory of blogging" really means), until I read the follow-up:

Instead of merely looking into the emancipatory potential of blogs, or emphasizing their counter-cultural folklore, 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". This void made way for large-scale, interlinked conversations through freely available automated software.

You're just skipping along through the paragraph and... wait, what? The illusion of change? As if to say that now, of course, we are no longer blinded by this illusion. The internet has not changed our lives. All that change was just an illusion. Of course the sudden proximity of all text, the ability to sift through vast seas of information in seconds, the ability to textually communicate meaningfully over vast distances in seconds, all this is just an illusion of change, not actual change. Our cultures are exactly the same. When actual change comes along, I presume, we’ll really feel it. But, then, actual change won’t come, because here comes Baudrillard to harsh our mellow:

blogs were the actual catalysts that realized worldwide democratization of the Net. As much as "democratization" means "engaged citizens", it also implies normalization (as in setting of norms) and banalization. We can't separate these elements and only enjoy the interesting bits. According to Jean Baudrillard, we're living in the "Universe of Integral Reality". "If there was in the past an upward transcendence, there is today a downward one. This is, in a sense, the second Fall of Man Heidegger speaks of: the fall into banality, but this time without any possible redemption." If you can't cope with high degrees of irrelevance, blogs won't be your cup of tea.

Here, I think, we see the beginnings of a nihilist anti-democratic school of thought which I think is the last stop of the Baudrillard train. There is a claim 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. Down this road lies an aristocratic, and possibly even protofascist way of thinking, where somebody gets to decide real modes of living vs. unreal.

But here the contradictions begin. Further down, Lovink laments that “a dominant culture, such as the Californian techno-hippies, failed to emerge and if it exists, it is tricky to label” and that “Blogging comes close to what Adilkno once described as "vague media". The lack of direction is not a failure but the core asset.” So what exactly is it: does one want normalization or a non-vague media? Fact is that people are vague, when taken all together. Individually, they are engines of difference, producing the plurality of cultures. Any media which is democratic is also vague, when seen as a totality. When seen individually, in its production, however, it is something else entirely. The acknowledgement that all value shades into vagueness when a large enough sample is taken is lacking here. (This part-whole dialectic, btw, is something which runs through the entire study of blogging, in my experience.)

So there is a bait-and-switch here: on the one hand Lovink is saying that blogging means irrelevance, banality and the eradication of difference, on the other hand, he himself overlooks and smoothes over the difference which is actually found in blogs by using these massive generalisations which pervade the article (claiming that there is a cynicism folded into the media, for instance, or statements on the general form of blogs are this, blogs are that which he sprinkles liberally throughout). He does not allow blogs to enact the difference he claims that they eradicate, because he describes in homogenic terms a heterogeneous phenomenon.

Furthermore, the claim of banality and nihilism is more of a problem than the phenomenon itself. Blogs are a media, not a genre (as Lovink acknowledges, but fails to incorporate into her argument). When they are used properly, they are tools that help you generate meaning. Used properly, they can be the opposite of banality: the establishing of meaning and relevance in everyday life, in one’s textual universe, one’s experiences, etc. So when Lovink says that a high degree of irrelevance is the scourge of blogging, what I see is the ugly head of instrumental reason rearing itself. It demands the question: irrelevant in relation to what? To what end? We’re all doomed to banality anyway, right? No: life is irrelevant. Books are full of the irrelevant. Art is completely irrelevant. Desiring relevance and meaning in everything is precisely the force which renders life in modernity meaningless and instrumentalised. To paraphrase Tom Stoppard, if things being rational were a criterion for their being allowed to exist, the whole world would be a soy-bean field. This is the very force which one should be opposing, and which blogs can be a weapon against when used right.

What I think the real problem here is, is that Lovink simply hasn’t read enough blogs. His sample size seems too small, when I think of the enormous difference of blogs I have come across in the course of writing my thesis. I think he has read a couple of “representative” ones, and called it a day, ignoring the wild proliferation of modes of blogging which exist in the shade of the A-list bloggers. When he talks about the “almost self-evident equation between blogs and the news industry”, I think to myself: this person has never read any of the blogs I read regularly. Or this little chestnut: “To "blog" a news report doesn't mean that the blogger sits down and thoroughly analyzes the discourse and circumstances, let alone checks the facts on the ground. To blog merely means to quickly point to news fact through a link and a few sentences that explain why the blogger found this or that factoid interesting or remarkable, or is disagrees with it.” This is nonsense, and all the best bloggers know it (even most of the bad ones know it, they just lack the ability to do it). While some bloggers are into the link + commentary school (Jason Kottke is one of the most interesting ones), good blogging is pretty much the same as good analysis, good content. Further down, Lovink says “Bloggers rarely add new facts to a news story. They find bugs in products and news reports but rarely "unmask" spin, let alone come up with well-researched reports.” And if this has not been proven thoroughly wrong by the political history of blogging, already (I think it has), surely it will be.

The London Times noted that Houellebecq "writes from inside alienation. His bruised male heroes, neglected by their parents, cope by depriving themselves of loving interactions; they project their coldness and loneliness on to the world." Blogs are perfect projection fields for such an undertaking.

Yes, but the point is that it’s perfect for almost any communicative action that happens over a certain amount of time. It’s perfect medium for creating loving, meaningful, collective interactions as well.

So far it has not proven useful to interpret blogs as a new form of literary criticism. Such an undertaking is bound to fail. The "crisis of criticism" has been announced time and again and blog culture has simply ignored this dead-end street.

Actually, I disagree extensively in my MA thesis, for certain values of literary criticism, anyway.

Criticism has become a conservative and affirmative activity, in which the critic alternates between losses of value while celebrating the spectacle of the marketplace. It would be interesting to investigate why criticism has not become popular, and aligned itself with such new-media practices as blogging, as cultural studies popularized everything except theory. Let's not blame the Blogging Other for the moral bankruptcy of the postmodern critic.

Yes. Criticism celebrates the marketplace. I can hear them shouting now. “All hail the marketplace!” Judith Butler sings, with Hardt and Negri on backing vocals. “Glory to the almighty dollar”, Jacques Derrida calls out from beyond the grave, in his silver-lined coffin. But beyond this incredibly weird statement, the empirical problem returns once again, because criticism has aligned itself with blogging. Extensively, actually, all across the world. For one example, one could point to the cluster of popular blogs around the Valve, containing people like Michael Bérubé, Scott Eric Kaufman, Bitch Ph.D, etc. and so on and so forth (there are hundreds of them, thousands).

“One thing is sure: blogs do not shut down thought.” Well, thank the Free Market Forces! But what is thought, to cultural pessimism? There is a sense here, I think, in which thought can be had in a vacuum. Lovink concludes her article: “Isn't the document that stands out the one that is not embedded in existing contexts? Doesn't the truthness lie in the unlinkable?” And I wonder to myself how we would find a document that was not embedded in existing contexts. How we would read it. The answer is that we can’t. All rhetoric, all language, depends on having a set of contexts, which are known, and a set of unknown or new elements, either in the combination of old elements or the adding of new ones. The truthiness, or whatever he calls it, lies in communities, in contexts and settings which relate frames of meaning that we can work from. But Lovink is arguing precisely that bloggers have lost faith in their communities’ transcendental meaning. Truth is not to be found, and that's the point. Especially not in places where it can't be found. Text is culture talking to itself. And the truthiness is just not to be found:

A cynic, so Sloterdijk says, is someone who is part of an institution or group whose existence and values he himself can no longer see as absolute, necessary, and unconditional, and who is miserable due to this enlightenment, because he or she sticks to principles he or she does not believe in.

But this is precisely where my brand of postmodernism parts way with Baudrillard and Lovink (and is why, I suspect, that Baudrillard is the opposite of a postmodern thinker. Is in fact a conservative pre-modernist trapped in a postmodern time). I think that the act of blogging could be or is a confirmation of community. Or rather that it is an action which is partially constitutive of a community. By throwing communication out there, with trust, one creates conversations which do not orientate, as Michael Bérubé has argued in his book Rhetorical Occasions, towards consensus, but which create meaning and political will.

No, I’m more in the camp of the pragmatists on this one. The philosopher Richard Rorty calls such a person as the one Sloterdijk describes above an ironist, not a cynic, and constructs a positive position out of the ironist self-description. He shows, in my opinion quite well, how the act of constructive redescription is the generating force in postmodern, “nihilist” society (Simon Critchley has described Rorty as a “passive”, accepting nihilist, but I think on the contrary that Rorty has demonstrated precisely an active will towards the pragmatic, political constructivism which I hold to be a goal of philosophy, and hold his project, on a whole, to be a constructive, political one).

In conclusion, though, I see this article as a very precise statement of the principles of cultural pessimism. Lovink writes,

What's declining is the Belief in the Message. That is the nihilist moment, and blogs facilitate this culture as no platform has ever done before. Sold by the positivists as citizen media commentary, blogs assist users in their crossing from Truth to Nothingness.

Cultural pessimism’s mode of operation is to attack tools of great possibility on a weak basis. The focus is on the destruction of tools, rather than inventing positive ways of using them to create meaningful cultural constructs. Why doesn’t Geert Lovink just get a blog and try to change the subject instead of spouting negative commentary from the sidelines? It doesn’t make sense. Instead, this brand of pessimism undermines a nuanced, rigorous critique of media (or, I suspect, whatever it happens to be attacking: globalisation, humanism, etc.), by eliminating all positive positions from which a new vision of its object of attack can be created. Instead of constructive, pragmatic redescription of faulty or flawed concepts, we get pessimist destruction of options. It simply does no one any good. If the blogosphere has problems (and it does, it's a product of a flawed culture), then the critique needs to be more rigorously constructive than Lovink.