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Behold! Everything New is Old (again!)
Some of us in these parts have encountered a little blog fatigue. The same affliction is, well, afflicting some of those over at faucets and pipes. Are we tired and, if so, of what? Are people simply defending turf? Can we already predict what everyone will say?
These possibilities are particularly frightening in the blogosphere. After all, this (whatever "this" could possibly designate) is not a marriage. It's not like we are Ma and Pa after 40 years (or, I'm reminded about the joke about geezers on a porch mentioning numbers of jokes and laughing without having to tell the actual joke; the numerical referent is enough, to get those who know what it refers to laughing).
Perhaps the sense of familiarity is worrisome because at some level we believe the hype. Perhaps we really thought that "new media" (the very term seems quaint) would remain new, be infused with newness. Perhaps we believed that novelty would reign on its own accord, like some every newly remastered ipod.
Even if the explanation from the standpoint of the cult of the new is too harsh, it may point to one of the limits of blogging, particularly for the theoretically minded--the different temporality. We need time to read and to think. To read and think well takes more than an hour a day. Those who think that academic work and blogging are interchangeable are thus mistaken--there is a fundamental different temporality at work.
And this is good: there should be sites in our worlds that are not already coopted and driven by the dynamics of communicative capitalism.
By Jodi | January 11, 2007 in Blogs | Permalink
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Comments
Thanks for posting this! First of all, the fact you are asking the question already puts you (for this moment at least) out of the range of blog fatigue.
I think we might take Spurious as an instructive example of how one does not fatigue. Spurious refuses to allow comments, which means that he's never tempted to throw his readers a bone by writing a comment-friendly entry. I firmly support commenting on my site, but I recognize how easily it can lead to idiocy.
Second, Spurious has found an epistemology that makes him, as it were, permanently hungry: he is always asking questions about the world, always refusing the answers that present themselves, always looking wryly through the grey light of an afternoon. He shares with writers like Beckett the bone-dry aesthetic that enables a writer to last for decades. In pop music one is used to recognizing when edge and ambition have deserted a performer -- think of the difference between Rod Stewart's "Maggie May," and "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?". Or the more recent example of Jay-Z. It is not about the limits of pop music; it is about the ridiculousness of pop music, and the will required to embrace what is ridiculous.
Which Spurious nearly says in his new discussion of Zarathustra, whom he almost nominates as his Blogger of The Coming Noon.
Posted by: Joseph Kugelmass | Jan 11, 2007 2:59:24 PM
"Can we already predict what everyone will say?"
Yes. But you knew I'd say that.
Posted by: Anthony Paul Smith | Jan 11, 2007 7:01:09 PM
Spurious refuses to allow comments, which means that he's never tempted to throw his readers a bone by writing a comment-friendly entry. I firmly support commenting on my site, but I recognize how easily it can lead to idiocy.
This is an interesting point. I hadn't ever thought of it this way.
Posted by: CR | Jan 11, 2007 9:59:13 PM
Kuglemas--interesting comments, particularly your characterization of Spurious. I wonder, though, if they apply to a group blog. Of course, they could apply 10 times over.
Posted by: Jodi | Jan 12, 2007 10:51:55 AM
Sadly, "The Daily Sunday" would only work against us as blog title. So the answer must lie elsewhere.
The point on no comments recalls, for me, a passage from Blanchot (of all people), namely from the opening of "Literature and the Right to Death:"
...In this experiment, the writer's real goal is no longer the ephemeral work, but something beyond that work: the truth of the work, where the individual who writes - a for of creative negation - seems to join with the work in motion through which this force of negation and surpassing asserts itself. This new notion, which Hegel calls the Thing Itself, plays a vital role in the literary undertaking. No matter that it has so many different meanings: it is the art which is above the work, the ideal that the work seeks to represent, the World as it is sketched out in the work, the values at stake in the creative effort, the authenticity of this effort; it is everything which, above the work that is constantly being disolved in things, maintains the model, the essence and the spiritual truth of that work just as the writer's freedowm wanted to manifest it and can recognized it as its own. The goal is not what the writer makes, but the truth of what he makes. As far as this goes, he deserves to be call an honest, disinterested conscience-l'honnete homme. Bt here we run into trouble: as soon as honesty comes into play in literature, imposture is already present. Here bad faith is truth, and the greater the pretension to morality and seriousness, the more surely will mystification and deceit triumph. Yes, literature is undoubtedly the world of values, since above the mediocrity of the finished works everything they lack keeps appearing as their own truth. But what is the result of this? A perpetual enticement, an extraordinary game of hide-and-seek in which the writer claims as an excuse that what he has in mind is not the ephemeral work but the spirit of that work and of every work - no matter what he does, no matter what he has not been able to do, he adapts himself to it, and his honest conscience derives knowledge and glory from it. Let us listen to that honest conscience; we are familiar with it because it is working in all of us. When the work has failed, this conscience is not troubled: it says to itself, "Not it has been fully completed, for failure is its essence; its disappearance constitutes its realization," and the conscience is happy with this; lack of success delights it. But what if th ebook does not even manage to be born, what if it remains a pure nothing? Well, this is still better: silence and nothingness are the essence of literature, "the Thing itself." It is true: the writer is willing to put the highest value on the meaning his work has for him alone. Then it does not matter whether the work is good or bad, famous or forgotten. If circumstances neglect it, he congratulates himself, since he only wrote it to negate circumstances. But when a book that comes into being by chance, produced in a moment of idleness and lassitude, without value or significance, is suddenly made into a masterpiece by circumstantial events, what author is not going to take credit for the glory himself, in his heart of hearts, what author is not going to see his own worth in that glory, and his own work in that gift of fortune, the working of his mind in providential harmony with his time?A writer is his own first dupe, and at the very moment he fools other people he is also fooling himself. Listen to him again: now he states that his function is to write for others, that as he writes he has nothing in mind but the reader's interest. He says this and he believes it. BUt it is not true at all. Because if he were not attentive first and foremost to what he is doing, if he were not concerned with literature as his own action, he could not even write: he would not be the one who was writing - the one writing would be no one. This is why it is futile to take the seriousness of an ideal as his guarantee, futile for him to claim to have stable values: this seriousness is not his own seriousness and can never settle definitively where he thinks it is...
Posted by: Matt | Jan 12, 2007 11:03:19 PM
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