When reading turns into writing: or my version of what the blog is

We should change our theory every five thousand miles just like we change oil in our cars. New injections improve performance and keep us from clogging up the system. (Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture)

I am drawn to imagining a cyberdrama of the future by the same fascination that draws me to the Victorian novel. I see glimmers of a medium that is capacious and broadly expressive, a medium capable of capturing both the hairbreadth movements of individual human consciousness and the colossal crosscurrents of global society. (Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace)

Among the many productive uses of the blog is its power to change reading into writing: in fact, the blog resists reading only. This is the only type of problem it can pose for the user (which really isn't one). I don't see any tension between technology (and its software creators) and the many opportunities for creative self-expression it affords. The Internet is no corollary of state power that, as communist Jodi Dean has suggested here, results in a need for a standard Marxist overthrow of media production through "street-level activity"or informed networks of cyber-hacking. This line of thinking seems comically outdated. In the Web 2.0 world workers, who are aware of their role in the new productive forces of the informational age, can no longer be seen as alienated from the fruits of their labour. Italian philosopher Antonio Negri refers to this new technologized worker as the 'cognitariat'. The blog is not just another fetish. It's part of a set of overlapping networks where technologies and new literacy strategies join and change into new cultural goods: where the program text is, in other words, constantly being rewritten by 'cognitariat' workers.

Blogging can also make you a concerned theorist of your own reading practices. Being more than just an 'archival' medium, it invites critical (and anxious) distancing from the act so that bloggers can asses the scope & limits of their practice. The question of whether blogging is or isn't a form of "communicative capitalism" (after Jodi Dean), the prevalence of online literacy in general and the relationship between ewriters and their audiences are all relevant aspects of blog theory. But what about reading? So few talk about the very thing that's being changed beyond recognition. I've always wondered why, while inviting reading and reader-responses, the blogosphere won't tolerate in the end anything but distinctively writerly impulses. Writing is what the internet is primarily for. A screen inlaid only with readable graphics, links, video & other modes of online interconnectivity isn't something with a very long shelf-life. It can't even be considered a page out of a book anymore.

The blog's a participatory subculture that by virtue of its own distinctive appeal to the Other (not as 'peer reviewer' but as a collective reader with a stake in the material) and textual interactivity is consistent with the pluricentric grid of contemporary media. What every type of communication, from plasma TV to iPad, has in common is this marked aversion to stillness. I tried to show, in a post on the relationship between Blake's "Tyger Tyger" and  iPhone technology, how the iPhone served as essential intermediary between text and a virtual plethora of 'apps', browser and sensors features. The latter, in fact, served as conditions for the former and were so pervasive as to make the two seem virtually indistinguishable. It very much looked as if the passage from Blake's "Tyger" resisted the poem and became instead a virtual platform for ways to rewrite itself (perhaps proof of the materiality of code), eager to jump from iPhone text to 'screenshot' to 'App store', etc. "The Tyger", as I concluded, has been reduced to a purely 'contextualized' piece with simultaneous visual, audio and textural properties all competing for the reader's attention.

But reading online can never be a passive sort of viewing. It's as though the senses geared for reading, once technologized in this way, must transgress their own boundaries & release a 'digitized' (liberatory) Other that is the form of Internet literacy. Rather than the illusion Dean says it is, the Other serves as an outlet for a type of differentiated being attuned to a pluricentric world. Reading isn't necessarily just a visual phenomenon: it's rather the creatively amorphous product of touchscreens, apps & competing browsers that can reveal their powers only through use.The Other is a real entity that can read the reader: lately there's even talk about the way Google, through what's termed a "contextualized discovery", can "provide you with content in the browser or on your smartphone based on information you have supplied before, or on information the device 'knows'..."The blog, as part of this communicative constellation, is seen as an expression of an emergent globalized world of socio-cultural expression that is the source of a new wealth (capital). In a reformulated version of Bishop Berkeley's famous dictum, to be is to be perceived indeed but not by god but rather by Internet media: to see yourself as part of a productive freedom that's neither illusionary nor subject to capitalist control.

The blog is the activist medium par excellence. A preoccupation with reading only is almost reactionary, in the sense of hearkening back to an old-school model of literacy that privileges pedagogy, monkish readings and slavish devotion to academic vetting. The framework of scriptoria, silent reading rooms and smoky lecture halls gives way to more privatized centres of resistance. One thinks here of the role of online activism in the case of the Zapatista movement. It marks a shift from Truth to truth in the usual post-humanist fashion: from professorial diktat to the contemporary perturbations and creative chaos of more individualized socio-cultural expression. The idea of higher education itself will have to be reformulated in view of this democratic radicalization of language & writing. Contemporary thinker Jason Rovito even envisages the idea of the university, one worth defending, "as a certain, and certainly political, organization of curiosity. "The inability of the blog to be a read-only medium is a sign of its radical contingency, suited to becoming a tool of the chronically Curious who won't brook interference of any kind.

The blog is a site that resists the tight controls of print literacy, and, in deference to it will even preserve the look of the traditional page until it's actually read, at which point the text undergoes a process of rapid 'contextualizations' that suits matter to such elements as content, links, images, data storage & retrieval, format, etc ( See the recent if:book post for an interesting discussion of the concept of pagination in "the digital era"). A case of 'scriptural being replaced by a decidedly virtual economy' (as media theorists would say).

Essentialists who are in denial about post-humanism & who try foolishly still to separate language from being, might protest, as they oftentimes do, that digitized writing is a tool only, good for problem-solving, application of algorithms to new technical uses, & ever more intrusive marketing strategies. Bloggers, they say, will never have the impact on cultural production they claim to have nor will they ever form any significant literary vanguard: not this glorified crew of chroniclers of diatribe and unedited rants. What detractors don't seem to realize is that use of Internet media equals the power & prestige of which the old 'academic' purveyors of knowledge & publication were once sole owners: that no one cultural medium, in other words, can claim ascendancy over any other just by virtue of an outmoded print technology.

The radically democratizing effect of IT on business practice is instructive. Companies actively encourage employees (in fact, offer them financial incentives) to put laptops to creative marketing & advertising uses, with even social media sites targeted as valid market research and promotion opportunities.As technical writer Mary E. Schacklett says in a recent "Internet Evolution" article, "business users are jumping on Internet social media to conduct business as they continue to face conditions that change so rapidly that they feel compelled to use any tool at their disposal to communicate, collaborate, research, and report." Workers empowered with this sort of control over IT means of production can literally (or virtually) strip CIOs of their top-down hegemony: here is a clear case of technical workers (Negri's cognitariat) who can't be seen as pawns in exploitive productive processes. Why can't a similar sort of language/writing democratization be envisaged for the blogger, one that makes a similar sort of paradigm shift in the means of literary production & distribution?

The blog is (to borrow a film analogy) the auteurist medium sans pareil. The only claim it makes on the blogger is that it be taken as a multimedia site of which the reader is the necessary but never sufficient condition. Every blog post is a text that rather than being viewed only—for the act of reading only "clogs up the system"— begs to be written, edited, linked, archived and integrated (even fed) into other sites. Perhaps the word 'fan' (after the participatory culture theory of Henry Jenkins) is a better term than reader or user to describe the interactivity between bloggers: as Jenkins says in Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, "In many ways, cyberspace is fandom writ large." (138) And in reply to Jodi Dean's rather disparaging treatment of jouissance as preliminary always to a state of "capture and entrapment", Jenkins (after Nancy Baym) offers "epistemaphilia", a kind of invigorating knowing that results from both sharing and exchanging significant content across the Web.

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.