Glen blogs at event mechanics.
“As a micro-heroic, Nietzschean act of the pyjama people, blogging grows out of a nihilism of strength, not out of the weakness of pessimism.�
Geert Lovink’s recent piece on blogs is clearly meant to be provocative. Blogs are at once (hold on to your hats!) irrelevant, a “special effect of software, constituted especially by the automation of links, a not-overly-complex technical interface design issue,� “a digital extension of oral traditions more than a new form of writing,� a hype, evidence of the techno-social condition of cynicism, an amateur project of truth, a product of an online commodity with a clear use-by-date, they are perfect projection fields of the obligation to be empowered by exhibition, apparently they can not be blamed for shutting down thought, they “offer a never-ending stream of confessions, a cosmos of micro-opinions attempting to interpret events beyond the well-known twentieth-century categories,� they “express personal fear, insecurity, and disillusionment, anxieties looking for partners in crime�, and they “bring on decay.�
The piece was given as a lecture in Berlin (March 2006), then more recently in Sydney (December 2006), and has finally appeared in translated form at Eurozine. Bruce Sterling (Wired magazine) has said:
“This has got to be the single most interesting essay on blogging that I’ve ever read. I think every blogger should read this again and again and again until their brain stops exploding.”
There is much to agree with in Lovink’s pithy assessment of blogging, but I can’t quite shake the feeling of being annoyed that the tone of the piece betrays equal measures of poke-it-with-a-stick reflection and call-them-all-losers criticism. The discursive stick is a measure of objective distance (not an objective perspective) and a weapon of provocation, and we (bloggers) are all losers with too much to say about nothing in particular. Where does that leave people who talk about us? Pessimistic about our nihilism(?).
I saw Lovink speak in Sydney and I have written about the presentation here. Over the fold is an extended engagement with the text version of his talk based on this initial reaction. In addition, some of it is based on the paper I presented to the Blogtalk Downunder conference (originally a blog post). While adding a few more critical perspectives into the mix, I shall largely draw on much the same theory references as Lovink, just to be a cheeky bastard. I have two main problems with Lovink’s argument. The first is that I think he does not engage properly with the event-based nature of blogging. The more serious problem is that Lovink misrecognises the topology of interest that defines the ‘new media’ landscape as a relation of cynical engagement with the structurations of ‘old media’. This misconstrues the affirmative multiplicity of interests of ‘new media’ as the negative in a dialectic with the hegemonic interests of ‘old media’. (Jodi Dean makes some similar comments here.) Also in part, this should be read as an implicit attack on the assumption (voiced clearly here, as another response to Lovink’s talk) that there “is a fatal trajectory from post-structuralism to identity politics to dot.com Deleuzeanism to blogging.” At the minimum, blogging should be gauged by its own (immanent, event-based) measure.
Lovink is caught up in the received binary of relevance or importance. Accordingly then, blogging is merely the “triviality that forms the drama of media freedom.” The importance-binary is received from what in Lovink’s terminology would be called ‘old media’, but it extends beyond the media apparatus. When talking about ‘importance’ I am more interested in the function of importance, and not necessarily in its content. What does this mean?
Everyday in newspapers and on television, the radio and the internet the events of the day are distributed into various categories of importance: ‘world politics’ is more ‘important’ than ‘local politics’, or the ‘front page’ is more ‘important’ than the fifth page. Cutting across these divisions of importance are divisions of interest; for example, for whom is the ‘front page’ or the ‘back page’ more important? The positioning of news on the front page of a newspaper or at the start of a news broadcast or the top of a webpage generally means that the news is important, or, more importantly (lol), that it is meant to be more important. Basically, the architectural or proximal distribution of information as news into different times (start of broadcast) and spaces (top of page) of a given medium allows us quickly to recognise how important or not it is.
On a different scale however, ‘importance’ or rather the terrain of importance has been shifting in the media apparatus. The shifting terrain of importance has been duly recognised by Baudrillard, where he describes it in terms of the declining efficacy of the symbolic, or what Lovink echoes as the ‘decay of old media.’ (Some would question this assumption of some sort of ‘golden era’.) However, one of the first critics to recognise the shifting terrain of importance in the media was Daniel Boorstin. Boorstin’s notion of the pseudo-event largely influenced Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘media event’ and ’simulation’. (Essentially below ’simulation’ is recast through Boorstin’s notion of ‘pseudo-events’ in a more poststructuralist way than Baudrillard’s postmodernist antics.) Boorstin’s pseudo-event is derived from the observation that with the development of the modern media apparatus and associated increase in the frequency of news distribution, there was a great need for news content. Therefore, Boorstin argued, this changed the nature of news from ‘events of God’ or accidents of happenstance and the like to a whole range of other events. There was a shift from news gathering to news making. You can read the first chapter of his influential book here. These other events became newsworthy because of the compulsion to produce enough content for advertising regimes. As we are very familiar now, sometimes no news was itself news. But what is a pseudo-event?
Boorstin defined it in terms of form and content. Content was defined working from a mimetic transmission model of media and judging it in terms of an ambiguous relation to reality (’what did he really mean?’) and more traditional social concerns. Its form had to be planned, and easily reportable and digestible. However, there is another way to talk about pseudo-events in terms of their function as part of a media apparatus to continually individuate audiences. Simply put: If the media and other social institutions can inculcate the expectation of a particular set of ‘importances’ in the viewing habits of an audience, then these sociologically measured expectations can be sold to advertisers as a demographically stratified population.
For example, the tabloid media is the epitome of this contemporary biopolitical art. Tabloids can be defined not in terms of the stupidity or non-factual basis of its content, but in terms of the efficacy of the non-events broadcast or distributed to individuate a given population of consumers and their thresholds of attention. (Did anyone ever think that maybe the new generations aren’t actually attention deficient they are just sick and tired of the obvious stupidity of previous generations’ relations of attention?) The screaming headlines and controversial images of comprised celebrities found in the tabloid media are an aesthetic tool used in the performative artwork of population management. Another example is found in the massive investment of media companies into sporting codes. The good example here is the one day ‘world series’ cricket that was literally invented for the purposes of being a broadcast spectator spot. Fans ‘need’ to find out who won or not, etc. There is an expectation that the media will provide for such ‘needs’. The media apparatus sells this expectation to advertisers.
One might ask how this part of the biopolitical order. It is not on the opposite end of a dialectical continuum with Agamben’s bare-life (although it may be represented as being on a dialectical continuum in a limited case); rather, bare-life is on the fringe of a distribution at which these massive population blocs serve as an often rhetorical, but always virtual, central locus. The media is what Foucault in a different context called an ‘operator of domination’, which reduces multiplicities by actualising them into the great binary rifts that transverses society. The political function of the media is to continually reproduce a population individuated by a few repeated triggers, these are identifiable as moral panics about social issues, results of sporting interests, inflammations of social bigotries, reassuring testaments of normality, and other such monuments to the ‘mainstream life’. There is a concrete crossover between the biopolitical function distributed across the broadcast of Today Tonight and the propaganda of a political pitch mixed up in the daily news. The media intervenes at the level of interest (from Foucault’s governmentality lecture):
“Interest at the level of the consciousness of each individual who goes to make up the population, and interest considered as the interest of the population regardless of what the particular interests and aspirations may be of the individuals who compose it, this is the new target and the fundamental instrument of the government of the population: the birth of a new art, or at any rate of a range of absolutely new tactics and techniques.�
There are other ways to talk about this shifting terrain of importance in terms of trans-local proximity, where, for example, local news in New York becomes global news (experienced on a local level) everywhere else. Brian Massumi has written about some elements of this. However, I am not going to bother with the trans-local proximity argument here. The point is that I agree with Lovink when he asks the rhetorical question and then answers:
“Where does the Hegelian certainty come from that the old-media paradigm will be overthrown? There is little factual evidence of this. And it is this state of ongoing affairs that causes nihilism, and not revolutions, to occur.�
However, the old-media paradigm of an assemblage of populations individuated by media technologies broadcasting pseudo-events will not be overthrown, because there is no returning to a Boorstinian pre-pseudo-event media. (No matter how much Fox News would like you to believe that this is exactly what it provides, and no matter the extent to which its viewers mistake the efficacy of their conservative expectations for truth!!!) But why does Lovink apparently dismay over this inability to effect a false return? Because media theorists in general want to maintain the regime of importance inherited from the ‘old media’ because they can then supplant themselves as mediators between ‘old media’ and consumer? Who knows?
Bloggers in their infinite wisdom (distributed across many minds) have largely called, “Bullshit!!â€? on the ‘old media’ and its biopolitics of the image. The blogosphere represents a shifting topology of importance, the extension of which is immanent to the performative act of blogging. Cats aren’t allegedly important, but they are the number one blogging topic, and this fact is allegedly ’important’ for ‘old media’. The topology of importance in the blogosphere is an expression of a multiplicity of interests, not the Spectacular expression of a Hegelian dialectic of importance versus non-importance. In other words, saying the functional thresholds of importance have changed is more than a simple inverse to the pessimistic hand-wringing exclamations about the alleged rising nihilism of postmodern cynics. We need to engage with these new thresholds of importance and multiplicity of interests on their own terms, not from the measures inherited from the ‘old media’ apparatus and their distribution of ‘pseudo-events’.
For some reason many media theorists seem to think it is bad that ‘little people’ produce media that is organised around their shared interests rather than the old situation of having their interests dictated or at least cultivated in the broadcast model of media. The classic example is that people are more interested in their cats than the ‘politically important’ Israel-Palestinian affair. A general injunction is sounded out to become more political (that is, to recognise the importance of political interests), without properly understanding what is going on when the terrain of interest has shifted away from the received categories. There is a disconnection here, not of the media apparatus but of empathy. To put it in such a way that may anger a few people, but I think captures precisely the problem: Maybe more Palestinians need to blog about cats? There is a poverty of interest, but can this poverty be aligned with the capacity to cluster such interests either through dialectical top-down mechanisms or through more fluid performative trivialities of the blogosphere?
This leads to my second point about blogs from Lovink’s talk. What does it mean to call blogs an event-based media? As I have argued above, ‘old media’ is not actually event based, but pseudo-event based. The rhythmic production of pseudo-events must match the expected circulation of news commodities as individuating triggers of audience production for advertising (or politically as citizenry constituencies, etc). Newspapers must fill the front page of their daily newspaper and so on, but what if no ‘newsworthy’ events have occurred? That is, the newspaper was only actually published when something properly newsworthy happened in the world. (Wouldn’t that be the stuff of a Ballard short story? “The no news day“? lol) To a certain extent this is what we have in the situation of blogging. The cadence of blogging is something different to the forced production of pseudo-event news of old media. Rather than the cyclical material rhythm of the media industry, the temporality of blogging belongs to that of the event.
Now by ‘event’ I am following in the footsteps of Alfred North Whitehead and others including Gilles Deleuze. My original blogging paper was written using the only resource on events at that time available to me (i.e. that I had read), Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. Since then I have read a fair bit more. 
According to Whitehead an event is something that happens. Due to the deficiencies of language and our inheritance of Aristotelian logic into common sense we often mistake an object that is ‘ingressed’ into the extension of event for the event itself. Deleuze extended Whitehead’s ruminations on this atomistic conception of events in his book The Fold into a conception of the event as a continual fold of reality into actuality from virtuality. Basically, Deleuze added the virtual dimension to Whitehead’s argument. (As a nerd aside: The residual Platonicisms identified by Badiou as allegedly found in The Logic of Sense (ideal events) are a direct result of Deleuze’s Whitehead influence (Whitehead calls them eternal objects).)
Anyway, forget about all this philosophy of the event, for our purposes Foucault is actually more useful. Specifically I am referring to Foucault’s inaugural lecture to the College de France where he talks about “commentary� because he stakes out a peculiar relation of scholastic commentary to books as the object of commentary. According to Whitehead, an object is the recognition of something repeated as part of an event. A book is an event and elements of which are found by commentators and repeated in commentary. If I remember correctly, Foucault makes some snide remark about acolytes who find elements of a book that were meant to be found. The object of the book remains on the shelf, but the event of the book is now distributed across all the commentaries. (For example, Eric Alliez in his book Signature of the World rethinks commentary with a Deleuzian spin arguing that the differential repetition of philosophical thought, so it is repeated in new ways, is the appropriate mode of philosophical commentary, exemplified in Deleuze’s works.) Blogging is best thought of in a similar relation between event of the world and its extension and distribution across the blogosphere as the event of the world is written up as part of the network medium (link to my blog and a related quote from Pierre Levy). As Lovink writes:
“Blogs offer a […] cosmos of micro-opinions attempting to interpret events beyond the well-known twentieth-century categories.�
Something happens and bloggers comment in particular ways. The event shifts from that which has happened to incorporating the elements of the event now distributed across the blogosphere. Lovink is spot on when he suggests: “the network is the alternative [to 'old media'].� That is, the synergistic concrescence of all these differentially repeated elements of events (what Whitehead calls prehensions) across blogs produces and modulates events on different scales. As Deleuze intimated in The Fold, the structure of events forms a nomadic baroque architecture, and the models and images of inter-blog citations and networking that I have seen are thoroughly ‘baroque’.
The complexity of blogging becomes apparent when the two points outlined above are brought together – the topology of interest and the event-based nature of blogging. The scale of blogging as an event is determined by the shared interest distributed across the network of bloggers. This is different to ‘old media’. In the ‘old media’ apparatus what was important was largely disconnected, or connected in a very roundabout way, to the actual interests of an audience. The ‘old media’ have attempted to correct this through 1) mechanisms of ‘choice’ and quasi-sociological audience research, 2) more recently the saturation of interest through an inundation of ‘choice’ (or its inverse when the commodity is distinction, etc) and 3) pitiful astro-turf campaigns that attempt to mimic the bottom-up manifestation of interest.
Of course, this is a simplified representation. The reality is that the supple baroque event-based structure of the blogosphere is insinuated in the more rigid hierarchical mode of media distribution of ‘old media’ and other stratified social institutions. Two examples:
When a new movie or some other media commodity is to be released the blogosphere is driven by genuine interest in the impending release. The release has a date, something is going to happen, it happens, and it this ‘happening’ is rendered unto blogs. As I have personally found, media companies will contact bloggers to try to sway your opinion by offering inducements (free DVDs in my case) and so on. The interesting questions that come from this do not end up with a lament about disaffected cynics, but with how the powerful media apparatus has been forced to respond to this shifting topology of interest manifest as an event-based ‘buzz’. How do media companies attempt to harness and mine the ‘buzz’ in the blogosphere?
The second example is not really an example but an observation regarding the condition of politics. People blog when they are compelled to. Blogging in itself is an effort, one that often requires a lot of courage. There is a line drawn between the world (of some happening) and oneself across a blog. This existential dimension of blogging is completely absent from most of ‘old media’. The only exception here are the relatively new television shows powered by audience voting. The challenge is firstly how to cultivate this exceptionally personal presence online and second how to enrich it by opening it up further in relation to the world. Traditional politics no longer cultivates anything other than anti-charismatic machine men and women whose sole purpose is to maintain the status quo. How to help people help each other democratically cultivate interests? Blogs in some humble way might be able to help, and I think they have already started to do this. (You are reading this, aren’t you?)
Getting on my extra-high soap box: We should be trying to assemble the social from these relations of interest, involving what Bruno Latour has recently called “matters of concern,” rather than attempting to operate within an economy of expectation received from the commercial interests of ‘old media’. A good example is the work Lovink is doing through his Institute of Networked Cultures.
What a bold post.
Sorry.
I think FDB is referring to the fact that I initially forgot to close a bold tag when I put the post up.
As you were…
Heh.
Spot on.
A lot of good points made in this piece, Glen.
Yes, having made an inane contribution, I’d like to echo Mark’s comments.
“How do media companies attempt to harness and mine the ‘buzz’ in the blogosphere?”
As Glen says, they’re trying already, but interestingly they don’t seem to have anything new up their sleeves. Freebies are a standard tactic both at the consumer and business level – advance merch for movies at fast food joints, free interviews with big stars of an upcoming movie (normally you’d pay through the nose to get them on, and they MUST be allowed to discuss the new release for a minimum of n minutes) payola-but-not-really-we-promise on the radio etc etc. Are bloggers really going to be influenced in the same way? Will it actually be easier and cheaper than making a buzz through conventional channels (viz Serpents on a Shippe)?
Questions, questions, questions. Modern Man has three questions.
I think what’s missing from this post is some thoughts about distribution, not just the baroque nature of bloggy event/buzz compared to old media events and content driven denominations [supported by the state or advertising, both one-to-many thingos]. (And what makes it get really baroque is cocomment.com. Never been a better gothic line than this now.)
Distribution! Digital distribution. Particularly i am thinking about my peer to peer (p2p) filesharing experience, where I learned, to snowclone the phrase The medium is the message, that:-
The advert is the product. and vice-versa The product is the advert.
[some p2p search bring up songs you never heard of you download and listen to them and keep or discard them, do you go on to buy a premium digital copy of them??? maybe, maybe not]
Which means that the gift economy, however baroque, is where history actually ends.
Products, all of them, except maybe bulk commodities, will become indistinguishable from adverts, that is, trying before you buy will become mandatory. The more likely a product is of being digitised, the more likely that this will be true.
The big news is that, supposedly, all products tend towards becoming commodities, the only escape for the seller/maker from this is by added some value to a product such that it will be worth a premium to the customer, but if the only premium of any interest to the consumer is how-free-is-it? (costwise, as well as DRMless, license-less) everything not a commodity will tend to be as expensive as advertising or specifically, spam. The gift economy is going to be completely insane.
I am producing a book, but before its official ISBN ( mostly through amazon.com) release as a publication date pseudo-event (28 FEb 2007), it has been downloaded nearly 8000 times, so I ask you, is the PDF ‘preview copy’ an advert for the hardcopy with an ISBN, or is the ISBN a pseudo-event (advert) for the PDF?
Answer:- the product is the advert and the hardcopy is history. Because it was all just given away!
How will it affect power I wonder?
i am interested in similar concerns, mieka, but I am not sure if it should be necessarily connected with blogging.
I have discussed similar ideas regarding the status of the commodity here and here. Mostly derived from this Lazzarato essay.
As Lazzarato indicates the real commodity is now one that creates a difference in the ‘worlds’ (relations between subjects and objects) through a difference in the expectations of consumers inculcated in such worlds. Not the commodity as event so much as the event as the only commodity. But what are all these other things that people are buying and paying for? Pffft, who knows! Upkeep? The old commodity has become outdated. The ‘enterprise’ (in Lazzarato speak) needs to catch up.
Soooooooooo? I can still blog right?
So…can somebody translate this into English please?
Thank you Phil and Robert. I thought it was only me. And I know lawyers can be dreadfully opaque…
Do responses have an independent meaning ?
8. No ,sorry, 9.
Let’s see.
One further point Glen is why do you keep referring to , oh , I guess everyone else ( the general public ) in your posts as being stupid ?
You bring this up each occasion you write.
Why bother casting your pearls before such a herd of porcine self indulgers?
“”(Did anyone ever think that maybe the new generations aren’t actually attention deficient they are just sick and tired of the obvious stupidity of previous generations’ relations of attention?)”"
All of the prevoius generations ?
“”Traditional politics no longer cultivates anything other than anti-charismatic machine men and women whose sole purpose is to maintain the status quo.”" Tony Abbott ? Tanya Plibersek? Bob Brown ?
Crap ,10.
No ,11.
For what it’s worth, I think glen could have made the same points in somewhat more accessible prose without losing any of the theoretical underpinnings. But it’s fairly clear what he’s saying – even if you have to do a bit of thinking and reading work to see it in parts. Please try to do that and comment on the substance of the post.
I’ve only skimmed through this as i find the language a bit tedious. Also I don’t like much to read analysts trying to work out what i’m doing as a blogger and why – makes me feel too much like a bug on a slide. I do like the description of the blogosphere as baroque though. There’s a lot of great stuff out there, but sometimes it’s too much, too overwhelming. Both in terms of ideas and the personal.
I’ve been writing a blog for months, one that nobody ever visits, after years of keeping a journal that nobody ever read. The difference with the blogosphere is that you discover so many others writing alongside you. It’s humbling to realise how rich and diverse others’ inner lives are, and it can help you to see other people differently, more richly. I find also that the blogosphere has changed my writing – not so much in style but in subject matter. I engage more with the world, and am less self-indulgent I think.
As to where it’s all heading, I see no reason for pessimism or nihilism – probably because i’m starting with the lowest of expectations. To me, it’s about self-development, as a social being. There’s at least a possibility of interaction, and that’s a step forward.
Sorry, Mark, but “Deleuze extended Whitehead’s ruminations on this atomistic conception of events in his book The Fold into a conception of the event as a continual fold of reality into actuality from virtuality.”, to pick one sentence of many such, is just making my life unnecessarily hard.
Let’s say I started writing posts about the question P=NP not being amenable to natural proofs, such as the classic techniques of induction or diagonalization, and thus the most obvious target of attack being the construction of polynomial-time deterministic algorithms for NP-complete decision problems such as 3-SAT and CLIQUE. I would fully expect to be told that such material was unnecessarily obtuse for a general readership.
Well, guess what, if people start discussing things in the specialised language of the cultural studies postgrad, the rest of us get a bit confused too.
Let’s see if I can summarise:
* This Lovink dude thinks that bloggers are narcissistic amateurs blathering nonsensical piffle just about to go the way of CB radio.
* But what is “important” and what is “piffle” is a value judgement.
* bloggers interpret events through the medium of the network, which is kind of nifty.
* blogging about politics reveals a personal, public commitment to dialogue.
* therefore blogging might reinvigorate the increasingly stale world of politics.
* therefore Lovink is being a sad sack, and blogging is good.
But my problem here is that a) my head hurts after trying to read this, and b) I suspect I still might be missing the point, and c) I’m not sure whether a hurt head was either necessary or desirable in getting Glen’s points across (at least some of which I think I agree with).
Bits of it are clear, Mark – like the passage you quoted. It is no longer possible to define what is newsworthy from the top down. The hierarchy of which Glen speaks still persists to a degree in the blogosphere, though. Darlene has a couple of good posts over at her place about the perception that women are not interested in political blogging. She explodes this myth rather nicely, I think.
That said, if someone writes unclear prose, it is legitimate to point it out. This is particularly the case when some of the authors cited, like Foucault, write clearly enough – even if they are not great stylists. Unlike Jason, I do not think all postmodern theory should be peremptorily written off because much of it is badly expressed. However, the insights it does have to offer will be ignored or mocked unless its proponents learn to write with clarity and economy.
polluted skies,
“Do responses have independent meaning?” I am not sure what you mean by this?
I guess you make your first proper point without irony. You assume that I am describing an attribute (stupidity) of a group of people, when I am actually trying to describe something else. My constant use of ’stupidity’ is derived from a very specific meaning of the word used in translation of a book review by Foucault (larger quote here):
Deleuze talked about the domain of philosophy as the operative outside of thought and so on. It is in this sense I talk about stupidity. If you search my blog I often talk about being ‘intimate with my stupidities’ or something to that effect for this exact reason. Stupidity is a movement across the social body at war with thought. However, if as Foucault says philosophers observe and scholars avoid, then I try to be neither. Does this help you appreciate my elite over-education as the cause of some of my stupidity?
Second, yes, the obvious stupidity around which relations of attention are organised for previous generations. I have a feeling we will see more research on the effect of the media apparatus and modern environment on human perception. I mean in terms of genetic variation produced by and with the environment, not some version of genetics as a biological determinism. The human body in genetic dialogue with its environment. Hence, one of the reasons for calling it a biopolitics. The thresholds of attention have changed. For me this is obvious in the context of the first reactions to automobiles and the like compared to nowadays.
Lastly. This is one is slightly more tricky to understand. Whitehead defines the stability of ’societies’ (a technical concept for him, relating to the extension of events, but the precise meaning doesn’t matter in this case) not in terms of how unchanging they are, but in terms of how they incorporate variation into their structure. He talked about various types and levels of societies. On one level a society may not change relative to another. So on one level the political machinery of which I am critical needs people like Bob Brown. He provides some sort of resistance which becomes friction which becomes traction. At first I shook my head at Tony Abbott being mentioned, but then I realised he is a brilliant example. I dislike him so intensely for his complete and utter stupidity. He would be the resistance in my political machinery.
Robert Merkel and skepticlawyer, I wasn’t going to bother with what I thought were mere conservative posturings. However, if you are genuine and you can’t understand something in my post, then describe the limit of your understanding and I will try to find my links online or provide explanations if time permits. Your description of your limit of understanding is essential to help me help you. You could be a little more affable if you need help understanding something in future comments.
Unless of course you have no interest in understanding anything like this and you are quite content to keep on thinking those thoughts already in circulation in the thougt bubbles of your collective minds. In that case, to comprehend such inertia, you might want to read the rest of the Foucault quote in the post linked to above.
phil,
I assume you are making a joke about my minor dig at media theorist gurus, right?
Robert and SL, as I said:
Conversely, it’s worth remembering that parts of the post originated as a conference paper – different audience. But on the other hand, glen, I think it’s pretty clear which are the more theoretical bits that might require a touch of translation.
There’s nothing wrong with writing for an academic audience. But it’s worthwhile remembering on a blog post that you’re writing for a different audience.
No doubt I could link this into Lovink somehow if I tried, but I’m too tired
robert merkel and skeptilawyer, my comment crossed posting-paths with both of your respective comments.
robert merkel,
You have to remember that I am also writing for cultural studies postgrads and professors who know exactly from where I am writing without having to explain too much. I thought I did a good job flagging the theory nerd comments and providing links for when I would mention something that couldn’t be explained by me properly in the limited space of a blog post.
First point, Lovink isn’t describing a group of people, he is saying that a group of people serve as evidence for a much larger techno-social condition. He is trying to use bloggers in this argument about the techno-social condition.
Second, importance and so on are value judgements to a certain degree but they are also built into the materiality of our discursive systems. Think of the rage in American Psycho over the occassion of the similar but different business cards.
Third and fourth, events are filtered through the network by the multiple (I would say multiplicity) perspectives provided through blog commentary. The event as such is now no longer something that happens over there and is talked about over here, it is a movement (like stupidity! well, sometimes) across the language and the bodies of bloggers and the state of affairs being discussed. The whole lot, but there is not a totality within which bloggers insert themselves (that is one of the philosophical points), it is assembled from the interest-commentary generated through the act of blogging.
So I would totally agree that this movment extends between poeple commenting and the world in which they are commenting. There is a line, or a kind of vector, which adds to the movement of the event in question.
Fifthand six, indeed so we need to reach out and connect up these different vectors, but some are congruent and some cancel each other out. I am thinking of standing waves. The weird thing about Lovink is that he does all this, so why does he assume that the rest of the blogosphere doesn’t attempt to do this?
skepticlaywer, that is a good link and I saw that earlier today too. At first glance and in an absolute sense it is not dissimilar to the quandry of second wave feminism. Do we try to dismantle the system and replace it or try to effect change from within? I met people over xmas who work doing PR for charity groups…
For my 2c I don’t like Geerts friends much as they carry on like fascists and liars ( fibreculture list Oct 2003)
I see Geert ’shit-in-silk-stocking’ Lovink overwhelmingly quotes lunar-right wing nut jobs as many FCers do also. The FC style is offputting being deathly obfuscatory and obscurantists.
These technocratic Marxists really think we’re getting out of control!
Well some factoids speak well of us. We started out behind the right-wing American eight-ball but when the number of us outside grew larger a few years ago we are now taking over the narrative of the whole wired world.
‘We’ being overwhelmingly unpretentious democratic and libertarian leftists who enjoy life and a laugh now and then. Oh, and a good conversation.
In our ‘ Newtonian’ economic and political space we are starting to make large waves. Waves that now threaten the bourgeois types masqurading as
‘ knowledge workers.’
We don’ need no steenkin’ authoritarian theory Geert. Our home is girt by INFINITY.
Riff from this post of yours to mine, Glen:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/01/09/to-photoblog-or-not-to-photoblog/
Well, maybe blogs are just bringing to reality what Andy Warhol predicted:
In the future, everyone will be minute for 15 famouses. Or something to that effect.
Actually I thought this was a pretty interesting piece, and not as dense or baffling as some have complained. (Isn’t it simply the case that in this style of writing, some big weird words serve the purpose of placeholders for many-worded concepts — they’re almost like Chinese characters, right? Not that I necessarily approve of the concepts in the first place; but you write what you gots ta write, and there’s gonna be a tradeoff between brevity and clarity in these cases…)
I haven’t thought about any of this stuff anywhere near as hard as Glen, so I’m reluctant to take issue, but I can’t help wondering if what’s happening out there isn’t maybe sort of simpler than these platforms of thought. Aren’t we just living in a period of interface and transition between one technology and another? Presumably, what was understood as “news” before the advent of writing, or of paper, or of printing, or of radio, and so on, was different than after, simply because the new tools revealed new possibilities. And the new tools also have different expenses, and different ways of expressing and amortizing those expenses. You don’t have to retain a herd of scribes in your castle to write things down, if nobody knows how to read or write. But if you have to keep records, then you have to pay for the stylus and the clay tablets and what-not somehow. Maybe the news cycle is (or was) simply an expression of the actual costs of running a newspaper. It doesn’t invalidate Glen’s analysis, but I see no reason why these phenomena should necessarily be anchored to a specific phenomenology, when a more homely explanation may be the case.
As to the binary of “important/non-important” events, one might also as easily shrug and say, some things never change.
“What great ones do, the less will prattle of.”
–Twelfth Night, written about 430 years ago
I suppose that Og the Caveman might have thought a good huntsman or root-digger was a more “great” or “important” personage than Shane Warne or Britney or the Israeli Prime Minister; but then he would, wouldn’t he?
Still and all, very cool post, and lots of interesting things to chew on. Three cheers for Glen!
Whoops, moderated. Was it the Shakespeare or the bad Warhol joke?
A quick reply, I have to go to work
I prepared my book launch with straight old media rules (ress releases, threemonth review copies sent out) with a plan to go blog within two week of the launch date, that’s why I relate the distribution to blogs, I was trying to create a old-style pseudo event and hybridise it with tne bloggy world, but the mongrel is 99% blog now, and yes, Baroque
BTW I love dense sentences, saves times if you’re a reader and not a skim/scanner of text (because it is actually less reading, but more on that another time) (so long as you know some, but not necessarily all of the lingo)
I’d suggest it was ‘Britney’, JPZ.
Glen, I still haven’t digested this piece in its entirety – I would venture to suggest that sleep is a vital requirement for blogging in addition to courage – though I was struck by your conclusion:
By way of a semantic clarification (I hope): When I put my Latour hat on, I’m more interested in fueling serious debate about headlines like this than encouraging this sort of tail-chasing. Though, that’s precisely the point of trans-disciplinary/exoteric discussion if you think critically about any ‘deficit model’ of knowledge within the Western tradition – namely that schools of thought have always swapped properties and always will.
As a pyjama person currently subject to the fluid performative trivialities of my digestive system, I’m jist Lovink it! Indeed, my movements and related pseudo-events as such are no longer happening over there but are definitely being talked about over here – great binary rifts that transverse society; standing waves of nausea and dialectical top-down mechanisms in which friction is not yet traction.
*guffaw*
but, dk.au, I am precisely trying to address the difference between “serious debate” and debate that is serious.
I am at a loss to why you think some esoteric nonsense about the universe is somehow not simply a fanciful bourgeois indulgence that is expressed through the rhetoric of ’seriousness’ (or ‘importance’ as above) compared to the explicit racism of everyday australians and the stupid belligerence of those who condone it? what in the hell are these people thinking and feeling that makes them believe it is ok to make such racist comments to another person? the racism in itself is irrelevant to me, people can believe what they want, it are the enacted power dynamics that I simply can not understand. Right there, in the spaces between bodies. Do people honestly think that someone who is “asian” is somehow less Australian than someone else? Or that “asians” will effect the way that these Australians can be Australian? How do the intellectual and affective expectations that underpin this utter stupidity circulate?
My point about Palestinian cats was aimed at breaking this economy of expectations that seems to pollute the everyday experience of citizens in most western countries at present.
Comments above insinuate that I am a snob looking down on the stupidity of the general population. If this is evidence of the general population, then yes I am a snob. An angry one.
the academic disciplines also have their received set of expectations, ie this is what we should be concerned with, etc. latour is bad example because he is a stuffy frenchman who did research with scientists. in Reassembling the Social where the matters of concern stuff is explored, he tries to drag his sociology of science into the proximity of a sociology of the social, but he has a long way to go yet. cultural studies people have been exploring those aspects missing from concepts like matters of concern for ages (such as the affects of alterity! etc). i think in a footnote in RtS Latour says something like his next project will involve exploring ‘regimes of reference’, which to me reads like a version of the Foucauldian ‘regimes of the sayable’ which will be completely shot through with ‘cultural differences’.
But is that a Palestinian cat, Laura?
Did someone say Palestinian Cats?
What cobblers! Amusing cobblers, but cobblers nevertheless. Recently, I discussed pussies on LP and was castigated for being “sexist.” By our own earnest and angry Cultural Studies commisar I was sentenced to a reading of Deleuze and his sophomoric post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that the language “tits and pussies being aired out” does not “go with the territory” of strip joints.
My observation is the opposite. Blogging elevates the tedium of the “Palestinian issue” way above its actual significance in the world.
More pussies and less Palestinian blogging I say!
John Greenfield, take your pussies elsewhere, there’s the boy. Or go play with your willie.
Oh, whoopsie, you’re doing that already.
Glen:
Lots of food for thought in this post.