The blog, and how the poet can save it from cynical communists

Jodi Dean, communist, political theorist & blogger, has written an interesting work entitled Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive  in which she critiques the dynamics of the blog as both a technology and, unfortunately, also a tool that's being unscrupulously used by techno-capitalists for the exploitation of unsuspecting Internet users. A view that's (in my view) too alarmist and too closely tied to the specialized terminology of both Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan to be of interest to the average, even computer-savvy reader. A far more convincing media theorist with roots in academe, Henry Jenkins, can be straightforward enough to claim in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture that he's trying to import his "ideas into new spaces beyond the university bookstore ghetto". (2) Dean has badly politicized a topic that deserves a more fair-minded & broader treatment, especially as it impacts on language and poetry. But it's a book worth reading and replying to. Its strengths lie in its delineation of the politics of technology and description of the concept, design and limitations of this one very prevalent type of networked media: the blog.

It's her conclusion of the techno-mastery of the owners of a digitalized means of production (Microsoft, Google, etc.) that makes it decidedly communistic; and it's the disparagement of language and authorial integrity in the age of Web 2.0 that makes it cynical. So gloomy is her prognosis for the media future that her only solution at the end is an overthrow of the means of Internet media: taking aim particularly at the neoliberal politics that brought it about in the first place, and even going so far as to encourage both "street-level activism" or a system of "communist hackers" to destroy exploitive technologies like the blog from within. (126) The argument that leads to this violent overthrow runs as follows.The potential for manipulation stems from both the nature of the technology and the way it plays on people's desires & drives. The blog becomes the occasion for a kind of psychoanalysis of the blogger him/herself, with blogger-activity as such read as symptoms of a deep-seated anxiety about self and self's relation to the world. Internet use in general, and blogging in particular, is of interest to Dean in terms of its propensity to reveal a psychoanalytic dynamics of technology and user: one in which the notion of 'self'' itself is deeply problematized, almost to the extent of a complete absorption of user in the black hole of computer networks.

The blogger (as her argument goes) is impelled to search primarily for a sense of an Other, other bloggers, gamers, friends, an audience of technical support groups ready to assist, subject-specialists with whom to converse on equal terms, etc., but only to be thwarted, of course, by the realization that the Other is an illusion. What's thought of as a stable "symbolic order" personified as an audience & the stability of a writerly persona on which the blogger relies turn out to be a "gap or excess", a sense of the blog's providing too little or too much, with the big Other (the ultimate ego ideal to which the blogger in search of an audience & sense of meaningful communication appeals) reduced to an objet petit a, terminology Dean takes entirely from Lacan. And having been punched down to size in this way and released into a cyberworld of endless identities, and modes of expression, the blogger is vulnerable to entrapment, manipulation & control by the purveyors of computer media. The Real becomes the imaginary (more Lacanese) and freedom from the big Other now means living in a world of radical instability, uncertainty and exposure to what Dean's termed the snares of "communicative capitalism":

In the terms of Lacanian theory, the decline of symbolic efficiency is accompanied by a convergence between the imaginary and the Real. Imaginary identities sustained by the promise and provision of enjoyment replace symbolic identities. The global information and financial networks of communicative capitalism offer new ways for us to imagine ourselves, immense varieties of lifestyles with which we can experiment. Each can and must be creative, different, unique. Each must develop a distinctive personal style. These unique identities, though, are extremely vulnerable. The frames of reference that give them meaning and value are constantly shifting...So while it may seem that the decline of symbolic efficiency ushers in a new era of freedom from rigid norms and expectations, the fluidity and adaptability of imaginary identities are accompanied by fragility and insecurity. (56) 

That initial "desire" to search for authorial integrity and a stable audience base for our writings (or artistic productions), a symbolic efficiency that gave us destabilizing "gaps or excesses" now becomes a repetitive "drive" to reenact an original desire for the fake wholeness of identity and acceptance. Except that the promise of communication technologies, through the proliferation of blogs & social networks, has been reduced to fragments among which the blogger's condemned to experience repeatedly the loss of those original desires from which a "techno-utopian" dream of self-expressivity began. What starts as need to communicate degenerates into a very real entrapment in the "circuit of drives" that is now the essence of blogging. In this radically fragmented 'space' the blogosphere (the "blogipelago", as Dean names it) can never be seen as a community where members are visible to themselves: the blog is a place of radical multiplicity, of "ever-accelerating circuits of images, impulses, fragments, and feelings" (73).

Encountering the endless possibilities of contemporary reflexivity, post-disciplinary subjects [in the age of globalization and communicative capitalism] are propelled to move through a variety of imaginary identities. We imagine ourselves one way, then another, never sure of how we appear because we don't know before whom we appear. (77)

 In this maelstrom of "imaginary identities" loosed into a world of endless sources of recreation, pleasure and play, the blog has been usurped as a profitable instrument of control. And with this last stage of her analysis, the overhaul & capture of desire in blogging, Dean's Marxist critique comes to a close.I'd like to suggest that language alone, and poetry in particular as language's most powerful form of "contemporary reflexivity", is a clear exception to Dean's cynical Marxist thesis. There's nothing she's said about "communicative capitalism" that can pose a real threat to a real communicative drive and the ways in which writers (in blogs or elsewhere) keep its circuits alive through meaningful exchange. There's no greater obstacle to this sort of cynical discourse than the figure of the poet him/herself: the word-dreamer.

I'd like to return to the "loss is drive" presupposition, restoring to the discussion of the nature of writing a vital Bachelardian insight into the nature of imaginative (primarily poetic) activity. Reading Giorgio Agamben into her own theory, Dean makes the point that in the age of communicative capitalism language has undergone a kind of transformation itself: the prevalent contemporary world of "Networked whatever beings" (111) has gutted language, stripping it of significant content, and given primacy to the speech-act only. "Insofar as whatever beings experience their own linguistic being, they turn their attention from the content of language, from trying to communicate something, back to themselves as speaking." (85) A conclusion that follows, of course, from her characterization of blogging (Internet writing in general) as a repetitive drive grounded in the loss of the big Other that initiates communicative activity in the first place. It's as though (again, borrowing from Lacan) the writer were without a subjective personality, a soulless head-less freak in search of the impossible object of writing: the object petit a or the loss that is now the act of writing itself.

objet petit a

How different things are for the Bachelardian imagination and the poet where le rêve is the indispensable condition of writing. One victim of this "desubjectivization of the subject" is "fantasy" or dreams or poetic rêve: as Dean says, "There is also no space for fantasy (the formula for fantasy does not appear). " (88) I will only highlight the main tenets of my Bachelard discussion as I've described them in a previous post. The point I was trying to make (and that I'll repeat here) is that Bachelardian language anticipates that of cyberspace and introduces a view of  digital solipsism that's a convenient way to foreground the nature of online writing. Bachelard refers to the poetic immensity that resides in the poet working alone as a "quiet daydreaming":

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man [sic]. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming. (184)

The word-dreamer (Bachelard's term for the poet compelled to "give back to us the situations of our dreams") is then a term for a lost imaginative ego- ideal that is fully actualizable in cyberspace. Far from the "stuckness and movement, rupture and creativity"(119) in Dean's account, the word-dreamer is all creativity, seeing in life the same dizzying multiplicities, frustrations and repetitive drives as the philosophers of the post-critical age but drawing out of them the very frameworks for artistic vision and form. It won't ever come as a shock to the word-dreamer that the world's been without a "sufficiency of the symbolic" for quite some time now: it's precisely in this very abyss (as French novelist, dramatist & essayist Jean Genet put it in his famous essay on Giacometti) that the very greatest artworks have always come into being.

Of the term 'word-dreamer', and its applications to an actual poetic practice, the following things may be said:

• the digital solipsism decried by Žižek as a form of harmful political escapism and, by extension, Dean's notion of "circuits of drive" are rather (in my view) a retreat into a pure imaginative freedom;
• cyberspace can be taken to be not a substitute for but rather the very condition of the essential daydream quality of artistic creation in general;
• despite its oneirc properties, the work of the poet as word-dreamer is to be seen as the creation of new organic wholes gathered from the fragments of the "old harmonies";
• a new sublime ("immensity") opens to the imagination, magnificently imaged in the poet's essential aloneness in cyberspace. The word-dreamer sees (or rather feels) the angst of repetitive drives as the condition of artistic work in general. Terms like 'blog', 'web' and 'cloud' are its true horizons;
• to write the dream is a continual search for the image of the poet's restful self-absorption: poetry and the poet subserve the Image.