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
