The Agonist’s Seven Vials of the Wrath of Blog
Last week, the Internet was destroyed in an apocalyptic inferno, only to be reborn again on Monday.
I have this theory: every week the world of the Internet finds it’s ultimate expression in a blossoming eschaton, and then after an odd purgatory of a weekend, begins again in genesis; or less abstractly, just as it ended, and as if nothing had happened. Only to destroy itself again at the end of the coming week. A constant cycle of continuous birth and death that becomes an extensive, planar, existence of fire.
After all, eschatology is always (at least until the world really DOES end) an existential thing. The end of the world, just like the beginning, is a diagrammatic cosmology of the world as we know it. In birth and death, we discover the meaning of everyday life, and vice versa. Every day is another boring slog away from birth and toward death, and in this way it is both being born more and dying more, all the time. Until it isn’t. In the manner in which we exist, so we see the world, until such time as we stop existing.
Or maybe not. But regardless, the blogging world poured out its own seven terrible vials of the wrath of Blog last week. A mini-apocalypse, but yet the end of a certain world, all the same. Because there really are seven vials here and too many to analyze in detail even for me, I will outline them for you in abstract, if not poetic John of Patmos form.
JOEL JOHNSON lashes out at jerk commenters attempting to tell him how to write on his gadget blog.
Hail, fire, and blood in the fountain! You’d think the hallowed institution of blogging media wasn’t going to surpass the epoch set by print media, or something. This rickety tower of babel keeps plummeting down, no matter how many times I quickly lash it together! One semiotician just can’t keep it standing up by himself!
And yet, blogging is a defined world, even if its cosmology is loose at the seams. Let’s look at what we learn about this world-view from this particular seven-headed apocalypse.
Let’s start with the author-function. I like the author-function. For a long time, I made it my mission to write entirely without the author-function. Inspired by the likes of Foucault and Derrida, whom each in their own ways identified and confronted the fragmentary and shifting nature of the author-function, I explored the philosophical and literary possibilities of writing without a position of authority. But in the end, I discovered it was impossible. And not just from a lack of success in actually doing it. I believe it is theoretically impossible, from a semiotic perspective. To create a link of signs together that transmits meaning, a narrative must be constructed. A narrative necessarily links the act of expression and reception of that expression–a link between two entities. The primal network connection, if you will. Two entities necessitate a single authorial combination, a method of getting from A to B, even if that conjunction is not a person. It could be a noun and verb, a single publication, a set cultural beliefs, a history, a unified physical plane, a logic, a common language, or an actual author and reader. If there are two points, there must be a distance between them. The act of signification requires a “narrator”–an ego assumed by the very construction of meaning itself. Freud, in describing the forces that embody the very roots of memory in the unconscious, identifies a Word-representation and an Sense-representation. These exist as separate areas of “charge” in the mind, but the minute they begin to inform each other–the Word to express what the Sense received and vice versa–there is a positive existential entity embodied in this feedback loop. The word and the sense are the first network connection. Freud calls it the ego, this “first” symbolic entity, that not only exists but seeks to express the “being” of that existence in reflexive self-definition. Whether there is or is not a Freudian ego isn’t the point. There must be a thing that is capable of both describing its existence and existing as described. A thing must have “thingness”, if you like. And accordingly, a thing with thingness must be constantly exhibiting that thingness, or else cease to be that thing.
I wrote a master’s thesis about this, but with much more bigger words.
But the point is, if you are going to write even without using a single damn pronoun and with infinitive verbs only, you are still going to have an author-function. I like the example of a loaded pistol. A pistol can always be a killing weapon, even if it is put away and not pointed at anything. And even if it is accidentally fired, a bullet will always go exactly where it is aimed, even if the aiming is not intended. Like they say in Law and Order, “intention follows the bullet”. If you fire a weapon in the air and the bullet somehow kills someone, it is still your fault. It is impossible for a bullet to not shoot, just as it is impossible for a word not to authoritatively mean. There is a nice Schrodingerian fatalism in this. The bullet is always already fired/not-fired simply by nature of being a bullet. Otherwise, it would just be metal. In the long term, every one is dead. Even to say, “no no no, let’s just look at the short term” admits the same, because in order to have a short term, you must presuppose a long term, and ignore it. If you want words to mean something, they will always say something about something. Words shouted abstractly still mean something, the shouter just chooses to use that meaning abstractly. Nonsense words don’t have a dictionary meaning, but they still mean within a certain category of non-sense. If it is a word, it could be used to mean. Ignoring meaning is a positive act, not an absent negation.
I think that Marc Ambinder desperately wants to ignore a certain meaning of things that is becoming more common as times change, and as we get used to writing and reading blogs. And in this way he seeks to negate (at for himself) certain functions of blogging through a refusal. He seems to be nostalgic, and perhaps rightly so, for a time when the meaning of reporting was channeled through an institution that held the author-function rather than the individual writer. He writes about a pure method of merely seeking to inform the reader. And who knows–perhaps this purity still exists somewhere. But it is becoming obscured in this world. For a variety of different reasons, people are informed from a number of sources, and in different ways, and at different speeds. There may indeed by a bedrock anchor of informing institutions, but above that, lies the obscuring clouds we all see. Negotiating these layers of clouds is a different problem, depending on exactly what sort of role you want to play. But it seems like the pure role of an informing institution is over. To attempt to negate that there are clouds obscuring your vision is silly. To dislike blogs and seek something else does not take away the reasons that blogs have become “a thing”.
If anything proves that the field of meaning is changing significantly from that nostalgic “cloud-free” blue sky of intentional informing, it is the number of bloggers out there that do not necessarily seek to inform, and are bloggers, nonetheless. And yet we can identify them as part of the same blogging world–that continent of the damned, always on some corner sliding into the sea. Bloggers can be journalists, they can be curmudgeonly semioticians, or they can be performing whatever pseudo-academic off-brand of awesome Geoff Manaugh perpetrates on BLDGBLOG. Or they can… LiveJournal. And yet, we realize they are all bloggers.
There are some technical elements that we use to identify the form, of course. The single column of holy fire, lighting up our RSS readers on a regularly basis. The small trace elements of repetitive form that Blogspot, Tumblr, and WordPress characteristically provide, like the subtle clues at authorial provenance scattered through the chapters of sacred scrolls. The timeliness, or lackthereof, after the fact. The nature of search engine optimization, and the pace of decay in a feed.
Most importantly, there is the technical achievement that it is no technical achievement to have a blog. The great leveling effect is also a great multiplying effect, and also a great divisor effect. Among all of this worldly chatter, is becomes difficult to have any narrative at all–or, I should say, a narrative distinct from all other narratives that one might want to, you know, say, read. It is easy to copy and Like and link and RT, but it is much more difficult to compose anything with a thingness that is unique. We do the best we can, but more often than not we go scattering to the niches.
The Persona is a big and comfortable niche. Furthermore, a well-deployed author-function in the form of an attractive Persona is one way of bringing a niche to the mainstream. It is personifying the niche, making it more friendly, and giving it, as we might say, Character. The author is really a character in this sort of writing, and that character has to be likable to the readership. The character-function is a powerful function in modern literature, often yoked with its twin ox, the author-function. Notice how many books these days are written in the first-person. Did we lose our taste for the omniscient narrator? Or is it just easier to demote the narrator, and promote the ever-present character that always and foremost is the author to a common-man character? Not so much a death of grand narratives, as a forced equity of narratives. Another leveling. The author has so many component flaws in today’s writing ecology that it is just easier if we excuse him/her as another one of the characters–possibly non-fictional, but as non-serious as a wallpaper pattern when it comes to critical assessment.
Not to say that there isn’t a lot of pressure put on the author-functions, and accordingly, the actual writers who wield these foam swords and masks. When the lines become thin, and the light grows dark, you can easily end up on the wrong side of whatever metaphor-function you are currently attempting to employ. How true to real life must a non-fiction story be? How falsified must a fictional story be? Did Joel Johnson overshare real life in his blogging Persona? Undershare? Is he a jerk? Or justified? Where is the moral compass to help us determine these questions? There isn’t one. Not just because blogging is new, but because the idea of a moral compass that would actual solve such problems is idiotic. These things are solved in the streets, or, in these sorts of literary cases, in the letters to the editor section, and in the comment threads. Hate ‘em or love ‘em, that’s where you find out what is the lowest, basest truth. Just feel lucky to have enough readers that you even get to know one way or the other.
The number of functions that we, as one-person teams of author/publisher/illustrator/editor/characters, have to shuffle and fold together is almost mind boggling. Syndication-function, Twitter-function, Trollslaying-function. What about factchecking-function? Do we still do that? Wikipedilink-function, maybe. SEO-function, obviously. Snark-function? Topical-function? Response-by-way-of-starting-dialogue-function? What is it you want your blogging to be able to do, and what sort of functions should you assemble to make that happen? Cover-page-function? Is it more important that your cover page denote the content inside, sell news stand copies, or not offend elements of your vocal readership? At what point do your readers become editors-by-mob? When do you throw open the gates, straighten your tie, and march to the guillotine, or order the troops to fire? What if the troops won’t shoot? Funny how my analysis of modern technology always comes back around to the socio-politico-problems-of-the-19th-century-function. Well, works for me.
If we’re having problems understanding and organizing our functions, it is because they are important. We know that these are powerful forces, we’re just not sure how to make them work. It is the history of invention–you know something is going on here, but you just haven’t got quite the right mixture yet. Sometimes you go back to the drawing board, like Ambinder. Other times you have to hold your ground against detractors, like Manaugh. Or you could join the mob, like Royal, and maybe even find yourself as the head of the Public Safety Committee (this is just a continuation of my metaphor, not a direct analogy to what Royal was doing).
I think there is a certain segment of the blogger cosmology that doesn’t shy away from the evolving and becoming-visible feedback loops. Call them the prophetic texts, if you will. A certain conservatism of prophets is taken for granted–things change, and that is always dangerous. But there is also an atemporal futurism to every pseudographic apocalypse. The evocation of relevant names. The careful summoning of particular symbolisms. The overblown condemnation, and the ecstatically insane affirmation. The effort to portray oneself as a thing of ancient history, but also as an accurate prognosticator of the shape and sense things to come. Not of pure continuity, but of cyclical presence through change. “I have seen this feedback loop before, and I believe I will indeed see it again.” The effort to find meaning in dreams. To see chimerical beasts in real life. To drink that strange drink, to eat that odd leaf, and live-Tweet your revelations back to the lay folk. We unabashedly analyze our lists of followers. We are always on the lookout for new soapboxes, mounts, and other cliffs on which we can speak, and tempt… what? What is it we are warning against, or rejoicing in the glory of? Is it any such thing? Take a cue from Zarathustra. You can celebrate the negation, but you cannot negate the celebration.
Some people like the institutions, the academies, the fair and balanced, the definite and clear. Luckily, all of this hierarchical control is leaking out into the chaos as much as the chaos floods back into these towers and citadels. Bloggers are having to start figuring out what ad marketing is, as much as they journalists are having to assemble and defend some sort of counter-cultural persona. I say counter-cultural, because it’s all counter-cultural now. No more sub, no more main. Taxonomies are metastasizing. This is an agonist-culture. Not antagonist, not difference for the pleasure of opposition, or what other gains such an attitude might provide. Agonism is the every day state of difference. The positive presence of opposition, and the only means by which anything has a unified number of traits. After all, what is the difference between SEO-function, Twitter-function, and author-function? Only what is no longer treated as the same. We are back to that original differentiation between two things–the primal network connection. Only that connection is everywhere, between every two things you might name, identify as, or write about between two given posts, or between the beginning of a post and its end. Agonism is that vibration, humming out of the vials. Destroying the world, and making it again.
Categories: Ballast
Tags: eschatology, semiotics, words
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