Does the blogosphere have an unconscious?, asks Blah-Feme, and wonders whether there is a performative contradiction in right-wing blogging: don’t the practices of citing, pointing, referencing and quoting overturn a simple, unilateral notion of agency? Don’t they enact a kind of refusal of the reduction and simplification of the social field?
But I suppose a libertarian right would say this is what various kinds of deregulation have allowed – trade moves more freely; supply and demand are always entering into new dances: there’s more to buy and more to sell, and the new world is a glittering ball room across which we all spin, enraptured.
But this same world depends upon the near invisible mediation of money, which to forget itself, and the measure it provides, as it translates itself so quickly into the acqusition of goods and services. Never, we tell ourselves, do we desire money for its own sake, but only for that to which it would provide access.
But money desires its own increase in our stead: doesn’t our economy depend on those who seek only a return on their investment, one which, now, outstrips what any of us could possibly pay? How many earths would be needed to pay back all debts? Our own earth is wagered, and our lives are pledged by capitalism all the way to death.
Meanwhile, money desires its increase and the whole world writhes like a Chinese dragon. Is it all we have in common: money, and the pledge unto death? Has the general equivalent cleared the ground in advance whereupon we might live in common? Bloggers depend upon another general equivalent: to write is likewise a mortgage; language needs death, if this is allowed to name the way words can function in the absence of their referent.
But isn’t there, too, a kind of writing that looks for what is lost (Lacan: for what precedes castration)? Looks for it, and only as it seeks to wager abstraction, to look for life in the midst of death in the singularity, the specificity of a voice? It matters, certainly, what is said, but there is also the ‘how’ of that saying, the voice that does not efface itself as it mediates what there is to be said.
A thickened voice, a voice congealed: there is a kind of equivalent, I think, that is no longer general. Voice alongside voice, one archipelago of posts alongside another – isn’t this a collective of movements to the singular, of the search for an idiom? An endless search, it is true, and a blog does not need to have one voice, but many.
‘Develop your own legitimate strangeness’: and this may mean the absence of a comment facility, or those long silences in which the idiom regathers itself in the darkness, ready to break forward again. But of course this is not enough. Let a million voices rise: but this, still, is nothing, when it is the same earth that is being wagered.
Then this kind of writing, blogging (mine, perhaps, despite Joseph’s generous remarks), can only be a hobby. The search for the singular, for the idiom sacrifices the philosophical task of shaping concepts like weapons. And it threatens the conventionally political task, too, of redressing injustices, of remembering the earth. Doesn’t the collective risk falling apart into voices narcissistically concerned with themselves – not, now, as they are measured by the ego, by the petty reporting of a life, but as they vanish into themselves, searching for the ‘itself’ that summons a certain kind of writing?
Writing looks into itself, fascinated. Writing flees into itself, all the way to its own voice: but this is not philosophy, nor politics, and if it seems political, this is a measure, perhaps, of how far our sense of this word has fallen. How to defend it, then, this kind of practice, if practice it is, and not its suspension? Is it more than a kind of new-agism, a private pleasure, a retreat from the buying and selling of the world? I think there is a great difference between a collective philosophical, political practice and a sphere of private bloggers.
Perhaps the end of blogging is nothing to fear. This new medium will appear old in turn. How strange the resurgence of writing in the text message, the writerly blogosphere and the way Google is programmed to search! But this is a phase and it is passing. No, the creative writing class will never disappear – and perhaps there are more of them now, and more ‘literary ambition’ than ever before. But isn’t life-writing a great distraction, a fleeing from the world into the hobby-shed?
Perhaps that is nothing of which any of us should be ashamed, especially if it pushes towards the proto-philosophical or the proto-political. The availability of theoretical blogs, and of those that attempt to think and enact a kind of politics is still impressive. But then, as Jodi says, the former depends on a slower kind of work, a different temporality.
Lars Iyer's Blog 