shakey ground
Friday, July 29, 2005
3.~~~~~~~~~~~~
(cont. from 2.)
The form of the blog teases us with the notion that there is no true beginning point of what we do. It is also apparently endless—as we might like to imagine our lives and our selves--for what lacks a beginning has no end. The form itself sets our being in medias res. The notion of the author, whose works succeed each other as a story of personal and artistic development, has already been critiqued in post-structuralism and avant-garde literature. That critique has proven its claim to being ahead of the crowd in the appearance of the widespread popular form of the blog.
The “last shall come first” order of the blog considerably contradicts all other forms available to Western author-created writing, including the diary. Its closest parallel is to the book of aphorisms, or a collection of essays that could be read in any order; but even here such writing is gathered into a book, a single entity that is eventually finished and succeeded by another. At least since the 18th century, the order of a writer’s books has been understood as continuity and discontinuity over time, the changing and development of thought. The book itself is a microcosm of how history has been viewed. We of Western culture assume that the first we read will lead into what comes in later pages just as surely as it is scanned left to right. The traditional book is a linear unfolding, a narrative, for which the writer presumes a responsibility to the reader to build the complex thought out of the simple, following the development of comprehension, just as fictional characters are introduced before they are developed. In a blog, on the other hand, the origin is buried in the archive, to be sought out by those with an archeological curiosity. In fact the blog is an archeological dig rather than a genesis-to-apocalypse progression, one in which the surface layer has pride of place.
Latest thought, best thought, is the implication of the blog; present prevails over past and buries it. What better example of postmodern culture? Our beginnings are increasingly buried; what matters is now, this morning‘s evanescent thought, the one presumably effective in our lives today. At least in this respect the postmodern is not simply an elaboration of the modern. Cultural modernism was in part defined by its faith that human effort could create a better world, a future. It was continually aware of the past and its painful rupture with it, the modernist state as well as culture was outlined against a recalcitrant background of what was still largely believed and lived by. Some branch of modernism coined itself as the avant-garde because it saw itself as forging into a future that was feared by the guardians of culture, the bourgeoisie. In its rebellion it was troubled by the past, plagued by it, as the parental superego. Here is where Freud and the phenomenon of widespread Freudianism fits so nicely with the age, defining and defined by it. Modernist art may have presented itself as totally fresh, but its eye was on how far it had leaped from the cultural parents, the family past. It was not to honor them but to betray the father and destroy the family by abducting the mother, the source of life. It sought to rescue life from the crushing domination of father culture. Freud may have thought to heal this to the extent of normalizing the neurotic, but by presenting the oedipal myth as the reality of the family he was fully modern and disruptive.
Marxism too--among other things, a grand historical schema, a grand narrative. It has been defeated not on the battlefield of parties, organization, correct lines, nor by the critique of grand narratives, nor even by the revelations about the Stalinist version, but by the loss of enthusiasm for becoming actors on such a stage and achieving the historical victory. The branch of Marxism represented by Engels, an adoptive Protestant Englishman, was looking to re-create the spirit of an original communism, imagined out of then-current anthropological findings and projected onto prehistory. Just as Christianity blessed Eden as the original perfection gone awry, the new communist Eden was to have evolved through stages of development making possible a true and permanent paradise. Marxist utopianism sustained the earlier, even medieval meaning of revolution as cycle--to revolve back to an origin as its buried goal. Marxism begins as the analysis of history, the sequential and consequential story that grounds all stories ever told or that could be told. World history then is the ultimate groundless ground. It is a linear book, starting with innocence, progressing through various falls, yet surprise!—all’s well that ends well.
Modernist Marxian as well as Freudian monism has been replaced by a pluralism of subjective viewpoints, individual tales and interpretations, the vast congeries of blogs and sound bites that make up our culture, which in its view has no beginning or end. If history is any kind of story we would expect this culture of endless beginning to have a sequel, but in our enthusiasm for the present we have abandoned the possibility that such could exist. ¶ 10:29 AM 0 comments
(cont. from 2.)
The form of the blog teases us with the notion that there is no true beginning point of what we do. It is also apparently endless—as we might like to imagine our lives and our selves--for what lacks a beginning has no end. The form itself sets our being in medias res. The notion of the author, whose works succeed each other as a story of personal and artistic development, has already been critiqued in post-structuralism and avant-garde literature. That critique has proven its claim to being ahead of the crowd in the appearance of the widespread popular form of the blog.
The “last shall come first” order of the blog considerably contradicts all other forms available to Western author-created writing, including the diary. Its closest parallel is to the book of aphorisms, or a collection of essays that could be read in any order; but even here such writing is gathered into a book, a single entity that is eventually finished and succeeded by another. At least since the 18th century, the order of a writer’s books has been understood as continuity and discontinuity over time, the changing and development of thought. The book itself is a microcosm of how history has been viewed. We of Western culture assume that the first we read will lead into what comes in later pages just as surely as it is scanned left to right. The traditional book is a linear unfolding, a narrative, for which the writer presumes a responsibility to the reader to build the complex thought out of the simple, following the development of comprehension, just as fictional characters are introduced before they are developed. In a blog, on the other hand, the origin is buried in the archive, to be sought out by those with an archeological curiosity. In fact the blog is an archeological dig rather than a genesis-to-apocalypse progression, one in which the surface layer has pride of place.
Latest thought, best thought, is the implication of the blog; present prevails over past and buries it. What better example of postmodern culture? Our beginnings are increasingly buried; what matters is now, this morning‘s evanescent thought, the one presumably effective in our lives today. At least in this respect the postmodern is not simply an elaboration of the modern. Cultural modernism was in part defined by its faith that human effort could create a better world, a future. It was continually aware of the past and its painful rupture with it, the modernist state as well as culture was outlined against a recalcitrant background of what was still largely believed and lived by. Some branch of modernism coined itself as the avant-garde because it saw itself as forging into a future that was feared by the guardians of culture, the bourgeoisie. In its rebellion it was troubled by the past, plagued by it, as the parental superego. Here is where Freud and the phenomenon of widespread Freudianism fits so nicely with the age, defining and defined by it. Modernist art may have presented itself as totally fresh, but its eye was on how far it had leaped from the cultural parents, the family past. It was not to honor them but to betray the father and destroy the family by abducting the mother, the source of life. It sought to rescue life from the crushing domination of father culture. Freud may have thought to heal this to the extent of normalizing the neurotic, but by presenting the oedipal myth as the reality of the family he was fully modern and disruptive.
Marxism too--among other things, a grand historical schema, a grand narrative. It has been defeated not on the battlefield of parties, organization, correct lines, nor by the critique of grand narratives, nor even by the revelations about the Stalinist version, but by the loss of enthusiasm for becoming actors on such a stage and achieving the historical victory. The branch of Marxism represented by Engels, an adoptive Protestant Englishman, was looking to re-create the spirit of an original communism, imagined out of then-current anthropological findings and projected onto prehistory. Just as Christianity blessed Eden as the original perfection gone awry, the new communist Eden was to have evolved through stages of development making possible a true and permanent paradise. Marxist utopianism sustained the earlier, even medieval meaning of revolution as cycle--to revolve back to an origin as its buried goal. Marxism begins as the analysis of history, the sequential and consequential story that grounds all stories ever told or that could be told. World history then is the ultimate groundless ground. It is a linear book, starting with innocence, progressing through various falls, yet surprise!—all’s well that ends well.
Modernist Marxian as well as Freudian monism has been replaced by a pluralism of subjective viewpoints, individual tales and interpretations, the vast congeries of blogs and sound bites that make up our culture, which in its view has no beginning or end. If history is any kind of story we would expect this culture of endless beginning to have a sequel, but in our enthusiasm for the present we have abandoned the possibility that such could exist. ¶ 10:29 AM 0 comments
Thursday, July 28, 2005
2.~~~~~~~~~~
The blog as a literary form is a unique novelty, a log that would be difficult or at least awkward for a text written on paper. Each day’s entry indeed follows the norm of all writing, continuous within itself; what is written first is followed by what comes minutes later. But then as you scroll further there’s a leap to what came earlier, and so on. The result is segments, a collection of beginnings rather than one beginning. Like a newscast of sound bites, each blog is a growing library not of books but of observations that do not have to be understood in a context of what preceded. It escapes critical grasp, since it is continually evolving, and yet never reaches the point where it is finished and can be judged as an integrated whole. Each entry in a blog is an aside, followed by an elipse…All judgment awaits further development, and each day begins unburdened by the past.
Like the postmodern in general, the blog is a pastiche of segments related not vertically but horizontally; a rhizome rather than a root, as Deleuze would say; grass rather than a tree. There might be an origin that can be located and its evolution pieced together, but that project is not only irrelevant but seems to be artificial, a construct post facto. Everything is on the same “plane of consistency” (Deleuze again), connected to everything else. Deep structure, the genetic model, is itself a thing of the past, but a past not asking to be traced.
Book writers re-write until they have achieved what they want, and the whole is released at once, to stand criticism. They may correct their flaws in the next book, but still that earlier one must stand on its own, it is the writers’ tradition. Blog writing, however, by shifting the focus onto the present moment of thought, does not encourage correcting and rewriting, except in the limits of an hour’s comments. Rather it is a matter of covering one page with a newer one. Temporally past writing is preserved as information because the technology for doing so not only exists but tends to demand it. But it is simply information, no longer effective as communication. ¶ 10:08 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
1.~~~~~~~~
In medias res, in the middle of things, I jump into this journal-book already bothered with a question of its beginning. Each project, like each new day, has some irreducible continuity with past projects, from which we receive the basic assurance that we know what we are doing. We are continuous beings; nothing emanates from us completely differentiated from all else we have done. We are always in the middle of our life, and need to feel this connectedness with ourselves, all the more so in a world that continually tempts us into dispersal and multiplicity. But some projects, again like some days, are defined by some finite moment when we choose to risk the continuity of life activity and venture out of the safety of our haven. We have some sense that we can continue what we are doing only by projecting it into a new form.
There is a certain energy we get only from approaching something as fresh at that particular starting point, a sense that we are free of the rules we had earlier felt necessary. We have dumped the clutter on the table and pieces fall broken on the floor; we are free to construct anew. This is our necessary myth; we can know it is only a story yet still feel its power. After a time we might see how we are doing much the same as before, and the power of the story can‘t hold us up. We risk becoming self-conscious, false, and therefore stymied. We experience what is fresh turning quickly stale as we face it alone on the page, the canvas, or in the recording. We are not convinced of what we do.
Most of us have a memory of the futility of beginning things with an energy that then somehow dissipates, it seems inevitably. In writing, it’s as if words were little toy soldiers we trot out, easily overwhelmed when they are few in number, preferring not to stick out their necks but to be swallowed in the mass. We would like to hide our beginnings in the web of continuity and understanding, support from outside the project. But to begin something with a truly fresh spirit we must admit that we don’t know what is to follow, we don’t know what will happen, even that we will continue. We have a plan in mind, but plans are subject to change the very next moment, and so even with the full ardor of innocence we must accept a surrender to change from the very outset.
We are dealing with our personal nature here, giving ourselves a chance to create that nature--observe it, know it and in some measure change it. Yes, in retrospect we are always in the middle of things, but there is the vulnerability of each point of starting, of opening new lines of flight and trusting them--and of trusting failure as well.
In improvising freely, which is my intention in music, there is this beginning moment when I often wish I could bludgeon my way into the music, just close my eyes and force it into being, in hopes to reach the point where I become lost in its midst and simply follow what is going on. I would like to have something external to the running mechanism, as a car has a starter, to get myself moving out of inertia, from the ordinary world where I am dealing realistically with things created by others to the extra-ordinary world where I am nothing but my activity of creating. For improvisers at the moment of initial playing nothing can, or should be able to convince us that we truly know we can play music--that is a specific thrill of this kind of music. We can find reasons to trust our ability to improvise well, if that’s what it is, but we must distrust these reasons in order not to be false in our playing. In fact there is no easy mechanism for starting; there is only a gap, a lack of connection, a risk of leaping. We enter into the middle of things not with a battering of the door or any external aid but with a kind of homage to the threshold that exists between being outside the music and inside--each foot on a different side, caught in mid-stride. An apology…for pretending to be strong enough to resist the temptations of inertia, or the temptation to lie about our situation--and a peculiar kind of energy that comes from such humility.
One often finds as a tendency of the avant-garde the wish to disturb or at least create an effect, to appear original, discontinuous with one’s past or with others, and this wish precedes and frames the content. The avant-garde likes to announce itself; after all it is at the forefront of the battle, the entering wedge, the disrupter of the cultural peace. It is a stance of self-assuredness, confidence in one‘s rightness and ability to communicate, to create war as to create art. Its vision of art is that it needs an opponent (a paper tiger will do as well). On the contrary, my intention is to slip into the water without creating a ripple, as if to improvise-- to start each moment afresh, time after time--were fully in harmony with what came before. In fact there is a violence to beginnings, and a fear of many things--most profoundly, self-betrayal. Beginning requires strength rather than power in order to handle this. It is the strength of full, conscious vulnerability, at each point almost failing; only then is it something that might be called mastery.
