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
(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
