the intemperate, the unconsidered, the undigested

My kiddo only naps in the car. Despite the fact that it's negative sumthin sumthin out there (wind chill adjusted), my wife and I take turns sitting in the driveway while she snores away. No fun. Except for the fact it's good pleasure reading time. No computer to take notes, etc etc. So today it was the newly arrived n+1 for me.

I'm going to write another post soon about a few individual articles, but first of all, I am wondering about how LS fits into their "Intellectual Situation" piece on "The Blog Reflex":

The accident waiting to happen to bloggers was most visible when they turned their attention to literature and ideas. The hope had been to democratize the intellectual sphere. Freedom of the press is for those who own one. But now all you needed was a laptop and some time on your hands. The idea was especially attractive in light of the consolidation of media holdings and the destruction of intellectual life in the '80s and '90s, when people began to work longer and harder for less, available public spaces and quiet cafes dried up, and argument in the academies gave way to 'respect'.

The blogs salved this ennui and created nourishing microcommunities. Yet criticism as an art didn't survive. People might have used their blogs to post the best they could think and say. The could have posted 5,000-word critiques of their favorite books and records. Some polymath might even have shown, on-line, how an acute and well-stocked sensibility responds to the streaming world in real time. But those things didn't happen, at least not often enough. In practice, blogs reveal how much we are unwitting stenographers of hip talk and marketing speak, and how secondhand and often ugly our unconscious impulses still are. The need for speed encourages, as a willed style, the intemperate, the unconsidered, the undigested. (Not for nothing is the word blog evocative of vomit.) "So hot right now," the bloggers say. Or: "Jumped the shark." The language is supposed to mimic the way people speak on the street or the college quad, the phatic emotive growl and purr of exhibitionistic consumer satisfaction - "The Divine Comedy is SOOO GOOOD!" - or displeasure - "I shit on Dante!" So man hands on information to man.

By the end of the second paragraph, it seems clearer that the writer's not talking about us and our circle, exactly... But what do others think? (n+1 affiliated lurkers, if you still come by, encouraged to come out of the woodwork etc...)

(UPDATE: After reading Scott Kaufman's new post on all this at the Valve, and having clicked through to his links to actual "litblogs," I now can totally see n+1's point... I guess I was thinking that we are a litblog. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case....)

Comments

[Marco]

OKay, maybe I'll take up blogging full time after all...I can go on food stamps once something punctures the bubble I now half survive on...one wonders really where you find the time to so dedicate yourselves in the absence of reward, but then I've just revealed myself to be one of the culture mercenaries I despise. Nothing wrong with a little self-hatred. Of course, CR and others do have actual academic jobs or "apprenticeship bonuses", no matter how precarious. Perhaps a question for a follow-up piece or an LS symposium is whether blogging of this kind and the "two-hits" variety Jasper mentioned in his post isn't itself perceived by those who do it as a kind of masochistic middle finger aimed at the discipline of the market so seemingly inescapable elsewhere.

Also wanted to agree with what I take to be Matt's last point and expand on "detection of cant gone wild." In this space, I suppose I'm safe in assuming that readers of this site are familiar with deMan's claim that, on the level of narrative and critical practice, we're still living in a long post-romanticism that often relapses into some half-life form of romanticism (this is an extrapolated, hurried paraphrase of several essays, none of which are before me or even in the near vicinity as I type (My estranged post-orals brain believes the claim occurs explicitly in the essay introducing the "Rhetoric of Romanticism."). So, to get it over with: are the worst kinds of culture and celebrity blogging what happens when we've all become formal ironists like Schlegel but refuse to relinquish our more culturally determined distrust of the absolute? Or, put more simply, is the detection of cant for its own sake or even say, in the name of an illusory "freedom" from bullshit and pretension bound to create a climate of pervasive anti-intellectualism in which ignorance is strength?

[Matt]

Must say that strikes me as a bit defeatist, Marco, however broadly accurate. As with everything, I suppose, some of the middle fingers are more earned, some more habitual, romantic and theatrically clichéd than others. It probably goes without saying that there's a certain mythology to/of the blog (esp. one that plays on other, particularly American mythologies, bootstraps and hero/outlaw/pajama romanticism). After all we live in an age when researchers for The Colbert Report get paid to read your son's spontaneous journal vent/post and steal it's angle overnight, and the next day he wakes up as an unacknowledged author of punchlines for forgetful millions...Plagiarism, indeed! (assuming, btw, since his name's come up a few times now, that you've seen the recent Lethem artice, though itself hardly original(!), on "The Ecstacy of Influence" in Harpers, or, from a related angle in same issue on "The Rights of Molotov Man..."). In any case, to risk stating the more or less obvious, I think it's more accurate to describe that relation to mythology and to the infinite trivialization/spectaclism/parasite-making of relations (in the Greek sense, even) as not entirely un-self-conscious, or at least not always. Recalling, again, that blogs are often remarkably distended yet tightly-knit communities of quasi-ideal readers who invest major (leisure!) time in responding seriously (even if tangentially) to others, often quasi-anonymous others, often others whom they've never met (and maybe wouldn't even like to meet!).

Dismissing these "micro-communities" with an aside, along–as Ray notes–with the good that occured (as if once, and already in the all-pronouncing journalistic past) "not often enough" definitely disregards all chance for the something better suggested regularly, three times a week (for half a decade now) by the many modest sites dedicated to writing, as their primary raison d'être, about what really, deeply matters, whether in their relation (however enigmatic) to literature, to self-expression, or to philosophy, etc. Because on a very basic level if it's not deeply meaningful, then aside from reasons already available in mainstream 'rerundancy,' why write (much less read or perform tricks with one's peacock quill) at all? There being plenty of other, equally addictive social/gossip/drama saturating the display already, and frankly, it is just plain sad when that sort of thing is more rewarding for someone jerking off on a machine each night, as opposed to walking down the block, or meating out. Therefore I propose: this seriousness is what a blog must be, or it is not a blog at all, but just another stupid, however vainly clever noise.

But, certainly you pose an apt description, at least in part, of the more self-conscious, though at times uncomfortable theatre on the part of the political (including gossip) blogs, simply because they remain parasitic on the hyper-pace, celebrity-commodity, sensational one-story fixation, etc (not to mention gated-community culture) that now passes for "political discourse." However dignified (by the market or otherwise), blogs remain, at least this year, akin to graffiti on (at least as yet) virtual property. Which is to say, only, that I'm not sure whether I agree with those who suggest that becoming some more dignified form of real-estate, a piece of (virtual) space "that mattered" would be a positive development, or not. Perhaps it depends on the kind of world in which they might exist.

[Matt Christie]

Just to say, a follow-up comment posted over here, for those sleeping through the tempest.

http://www.bookchronicle.com/2007/03/litty-awards-litblogger-recognition.html (just to point out, not all "lit-blogs" are jejune as some)