It's going better now; several hours of successful work last night, the end is in sight.
Some blogs keep returning to the subject of blogging as though they need to justify it: I have certainly spent time trying to get it exactly right, but justifying it seems unnecessary – why should any kind of writing, communicating, articulating, artistry, artisanship, need justifying?
In the interstices of working and not-working, I pick up the Borges Selected Non-Fictions. Borges was clearly a blogger – brief, fascinating pieces on a variety of topics, each of which defines a world. (It's actually amazing that his substantial reputation is based, on the most part, on such short pieces of writing.) There is a 1934 piece, 'I, A Jew', where he responds to a Fascist news sheet that claimed that he was Jewish – he says he wishes he was; the piece is brief, poetic, speculative, fun, and would make an ideal blog entry.
Hesse wrote critically against 'feuilletonistes', against the tendency for newspapers to fragment into little bits of prose; but I think he was wrong or, at least, as Adorno was about popular culture, ultimately unfair. Feuilletons have their own place in writing, and certainly in newspapers. Brief, personalized fragments of writing are valuable. Speculative tours-de-force are wonderful.
Blogging is good....
Are bloggers as feuilletonistes, or akin to them? For myself, I'm interested in thinking about what is specific to this new medium we share, and perhaps even contributing to a poetics or a philosophy of blogging.
As such, I don't think of myself as justifying blogging, or needing to - that, I think, might very quickly come to fall under what Nietzsche criticises as ressentiment.
A poetics, a philosophy: perhaps neither of these terms will do. Here, the work of the German Romantics around Schlegel is particularly interesting: an attempt to join thinking to a specific practice of writing. The Romantics and their legacy - Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, then the later Heidegger, Bataille, Blanchot, many others. Derrida, Cixous ...
I read [other blogs] as reflecting on the politics of blogging rather than attempting to justify the practice itself.
Posted by: Lars | January 31, 2007 at 09:11 AM