What is the impact of blogging on aesthetic production?
A long phone conversation with Joyce in Stuttgart – a dear friend who has her own vlog, and is engaged in theoretical/practical work on digital culture – led to some of the following:
(a) A significant part of the blogsphere is admittedly sophisticated and self-regarding, with a great deal of theory – but most of that is, for me, not terribly interesting and sort of beside the point, as it focuses on the cultural status of technical information, news, politics – essentially 'transparent' writing, i.e. writing where factual information (along with responses to factual information) is regarded as the significant focus.
(b) However, it seems pretty evident that 'writing' as a genre – everything from story-writing, poetry-writing, etc. to what used to be letter-writing, belles-lettres, etc. – can be transformed by the blogsphere. (Obviously, the other arts can also be transformed by the blogsphere, especially as technology becomes better at managing large chunks of data (mp3s, youtube, etc.); but I'll focus on writing here.) This, for me, is the important stuff.
(c) For instance: the model of blogging that I, and several friends, took from our colleague spurious – one where the writer is anonymous, but the anonymity is not heavily protected; and one where the personal and the professional are freely intertwined – actually has immense potential repercussions in the humanities (as opposed to the sciences or journalism, which are more impacted as in (a)). Not a journal, but like a journal; not a letter, but like a letter; not quite like a newspaper column (who's your editor, who decides what goes out that day?); and unlike anything published, although it is sort of published.
(d) More exactly: I am perfectly happy to put my poems and short stories on my blog. This is intermediate, and thereby very different, in regard to channels that were formerly available: in the past I could let them sit (Sylvia Plath: "nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing"); I could give them to friends (rather narcissistic, demands a response that might be hard for anyone to produce); I could read them in a workshop (this is in fact one of the major social functions of the writing workshop, which ties it to therapy/identity/self-fulfillment, and which keeps many workshops alive); or I could try to get them published (and thereby be dumped into a complicated world of frustration, negotiation, competition, judgment, and reviews – not to mention editors messing with your work, which is something I especially hate).
(e) This is truly something else: the poem is 'out there', and it can be read; I'd kind of like my name to be attached to it in some way, but that is difficult because I want to be free to say whatever I want in my blog, and I am unfortunately part of an institutional hierarchy which has its own rules of disclosure. But the truth is I'm actually quite comfortable, quite satisfied, that my poem can be read by anyone who wishes to do so – and yet is not published in a context that invites consumption (is it what people want?) or criticism (do the right people like it?).
(f) This has already (in just five months!) transformed my attitude towards my poems, stories, writing, productivity, identity – this is easily having as large an impact on my life as have writing workshops, significant friendships, even analysis. It feels, in fact, as though the blog is pulling me out of a dull inertia that has been in the background of my life since the early 1980s – and doing a more significant job of that than private journaling ever did, though that has been prescribed for writers as a universal panacea since Dorothea Brande in 1934.
(g) Blogging can also transform writing itself: couldn't stories, poems, essays become quite different in this universe? No longer either private (i.e. unsuccessful) or published (i.e. consumer products). Something else, something free to take a variety of forms and levels of status. (This would resemble research that my former student John did in the late 1990s; we agreed that rather than bother with the impact of the Internet on such trashy and ephemeral topics as copyright laws and ownership, that we would both be much more interested in its impact on music itself.)
(h) This could be, in fact, the answer to Adorno and other Marxist and neo-Marxist aesthetic critiques: that if the channels of distribution/dissemination are no longer physical or cultural, but are essentially transformed into channels that are technological and thereby vastly faster than our ability to control them, control vanishes: and a new kind of freedom emerges. Adorno himself wouldn't have liked it (too democratic for him, I think), but I do.
(i) I'm not, by the way, talking about artistic production on the Internet which merely reproduces traditional patterns and channels of production, dissemination, etc. in electronic form: I'm talking about a feedback loop from the technology to the writing which would actually change that writing (and music, and art, and, and, and).
(j) Joyce is particularly interested in this as it impacts canon formation: a recent, and frequently pathetically clueless, discussion on the e-mail list of the American Musicological Society included masses of criticism of the Wikipedia. Joyce felt that that criticism was merely covering up a panic on the part of people who became academics in order to exercise a sort of Foucauldian power over knowledge, who planned to be 'gatekeepers' (her word). If the gatekeepers don't get to control all the gates, who decides what's important? And, as we have already seen on the Internet, the answer to that question is: not merely market forces. Instead, the space involves a network that is much bigger, and which does happen to include hierarchies of control and market forces, but which is not limited by either of them.
(k) She also told me that this is, in a way, a resurgence of the eighteenth-century letter: that letters were written at the time to be read aloud in a salon (!) – which is clearly a kind of 'gated' blog. The vast and sophisticated world of letter-writing, which disintegrated so badly in the twentieth century, may be returning to life – which I think would make me very happy indeed. This also suggests that different major stages of cultural communication – preliterate, written, printed, mass-produced – and their influences, and the drama of the changes between each, should be compared to what is happening now – and not only in the frequently discussed realms of technology, image, and music, but even in terms of writing itself.
(l) That means that communications, aesthetic objects, identity, will all be subject to enormous – and, in my optimistic view, liberating – changes through blogging (and the larger technical and cultural worlds that will clearly grow out of blogging in coming years and decades). This is, in fact, the 'real' Internet.
(m) Although I'm particularly interested in writing here, the impact on history/historiography, culture, philosophy, in fact all the humanities, must be just as great. Imagine it....
(n) And the wider implications: the impact on identity and personas, if individuals have access to the communicative power of the accomplished novelist, poet, or scholar, without the pressures and judgments that make writers neurotic and graduate students nervous wrecks. (Obviously the problem of 'quality control', which was naturally the central concern of the AMS list mentioned above, remains unanswered; but our historical versions of quality control have merely resulted in monolithic cultural structures fissured through with rebellion, or even more often tedium and ideologically contrived revisionism.)
(o) And, and, and: the art form as a gift (
Lewis Hyde) that is truly a gift; the redefinition of genres, art objects, and media; the carnivalesque made virtually unnecessary because rebellion becomes exactly as available as the dominant culture (in fact, defining their difference becomes increasingly impossible); and the entire interface between individuals and their cultures, or Culture, becomes flexible and entirely reconfigurable – not just for isolated genius artists, but for everyone, at least potentially. (This could make gender reassignment look, by contrast, piddling: as much a limited, dated foreshadowing of the future as Debussy's imitations of gamelan foreshadow postmodern cultural hybrids.)
(p) A final musical tangent: this links up with what I've been teaching my first year students at the end of my introduction to experimentation in twentieth century music, where I tell them that, since about 1997, the Internet and mp3 processing has made something entirely new: musicians don't need traditional skills (fingering, physical abilities to play an instrument, knowledge of orchestration and notation) in order to make remarkably sophisticated music (although the technology for that has been available for decades, it is only now widely available and amazingly user-friendly). In fact, much of the musical world to come will clearly be created by people who haven't studied music the way we want to teach it – we are no longer entitled to be gatekeepers.
For me, this is all exciting: and not threatening....
