Notes on blogs and the new media revolution

Tonight I have the opportunity to talk about blogs, feminism and the Web 2.0 revolution at Barnard University's Center for Research on Women, and frankly, I'm quite excited.

You see, I've been in panel after panel where "blog experts" throw around platitudes about how blogs are revolutionary, yet nobody seems to be able to explain why. I can't even remember hearing someone like Joe Trippi explain it ... and he's written a whole book about it! (The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything)

So the question that hangs always in conferences like Blogging and Feminism : (Web)sites of resistance is, what are we calling a revolution and what is it exactly about blogs that made the revolution happen in the first place.

I have been thinking about this long and hard for a while. Actually, a few years. And every time I look at the actual structure of blog software, I end up going back to the ideas of "tricks of the weak" or Tretas del debil described by Josefina Ludmer's seminal analysis of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. In that article she describes how Sor Juana Ines uses her spaces of weakness --whether they be the nunnery, the kitchen or even the imposition of silence-- to defy the social, political and religious order that demanded of her not to have knowledge, not to express knowledge and, in the process, not to gain Power.

It is always possible to take on a space from which to practice what's barred by others. It is always possible to appropriate other fields and insert other territorialities.

That practice of transference and transformation reorganizes the mainstream social and cultural structure : the combination of observance and confrontation can establish another rationality, another scientificity and an other Reason.

The article takes one step further the idea of feminism as a politics of the "personal turned public". The main idea of "Las tretas del debil" is that Power is not about fixed dialectical opositions : Strong vs. Weak. Power is a process of making spaces for expression. When Ludmer writes how, this explains women writer's preference for smaller literary genres like letters, autobiographies and diaries. Styles on the margins of literary and non-literary writing, called also reality-based writing, you can see how blogs would fit nicely into the category of minor litertures where personal realities are used as power machines.

Ludmer's article owes a huge debt to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 30). Compared to amount of pages these guys produced for their magnus opus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Kafka would seem like a piddling of a little book. I believe though it is perfect for our discussion of blogs because it synthesizes the theory and praxis of becoming minor they developed in their mammoth collaboration. In turn, the concept of becoming minor explains the current upheaval created by bloggers and it points to their possibility as power machines.

• A ‘minor literature’ is political, collective, revolutionary, and even spatial —deterritorializing one terrain as it maps another.
  According to Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘minor literature’ maps the passage of this deterritorialization; as such, it is a literature of the people; as such, it is also thoroughly political. “The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern” .

• As a ‘minor literature’ it refers to no subject. “There isn’t a subject”), Deleuze and Guattari write, “there are only collective assemblages of enunciation”.
  As an asubjective assemblage, the “minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature”. Thus, a ‘minor literature’ is a “revolutionary force for all literature” which proceeds through “dryness and sobriety” and “willed poverty, pushing deterritorialization to such an extreme that nothing remains but intensities”.

• A ‘minor literature’ is not only asubjective, it is also non-representative, deterritorializing sound “irrevocably, absolutely”; in this way, a “language of sense is traversed by a line of escape” . This ‘line of flight’ escapes figuration, metaphor, the proper name— “Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification” .
• Language in a ‘minor literature’ is no longer designatory. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits”. A ‘minor literature’, then, escapes signification and representation: a ‘minor literature’ resists resemblance and mimetic representation, much in the way that abstract art resists figuration, representation or imitation of real life. Language then enters ‘becoming’ through a non-significatory, non-representational ‘line of flight’ in which words and things are ‘intensities’ in which sounds vibrate.

  Source : Notes by Jana Evans Braziel's Notes on "What is a Minor Literature?"

To understand new media within the context of D&G, it's to reckon with new media as an aggregate of soft meaning machines that create a crisis of abundance and thus effect power. FoxNews may want to cater to the Bush Administration and not show any images of dead Iraqis or caskets of dead American soldiers; yet all it takes is for anybody to get to a computer, do a search on dead soldier and hit the treasure trove of information indexed by Google. Or you can know about YouTube and hit the thousands of clips uploaded by US soldiers and Iraqis citizens. Clips, by the way, created with digital cameras or even web-enabled cellular camera phones that allow soldiers to post to a blog in a matter of minutes a hello to their mothers or images of Abu Ghraib.

The crisis of abundance has destabilized Big Media because they cannot depend on a model based on scarcity anymore. Just as minor literature, the disruptive force of small media is not in being facsimilies or second-class creation or Big Media.

The power of being small resides in the aggregate, the collective. Which is why D&G are not asking for a rejection of power for Power's sake. They are asking to rethink power outside of the matrix of force, imperialism and domination.

Becoming-minor is not about becoming weak. Becoming minor is about choosing to be a minority, chosing "becoming woman" in order to build spaces of influence, sustainability, creativity and replicability. Power in becoming minor is then about building desire and possibility machines, not structures of dominion, scarcity and control.

If you look at the structure of blogs, they are right now, the perfect becoming small soft machines --because that's what they were created for.

When blogs were reckoned to be a new form of writing, one of the principal aspects of the software design was to make it not just easy to publish online --I mean, people like me were easily publishing online with the aid of Dreamweaver.

MovableType became the industry's standard because they went a step ahead of Blogger's "easy and often". They realized that making the content in blogs searchable, indexable, commentable and portable was necessary for an ecology of blogs to develop --and a business model to thrive.

The blogging revolution is not predicated on what you write and how often you write it. If the blogging revolution where only about having the noise of a billion people publishing online, you and I wouldn't be here in this room having this conversation. The blogging revolution is predicated on the fact that there's an information war. This war is about access and exchange. Blogs take on the metaphor of the Cluetrain Manifesto's markets are conversations, and turns it into a material realiaty.

In blogs, D&G's territorialized or vernacular language is the page produced dynamically with HTML by the blog software along with the url identifier for the post. The permalink not only establishes a post as part of a domain but it makes it for others to refer to it. Not only that, a post with a comments section creates a social space --a space where other people can participate in the conversation and where these interactions can eventually grow into communities.

This takes us to the idea of vehicular or deterrorialized language in D&G. What is better than RSS or real simple syndication. RSS is the foundation of syndication, of making the content of a site portable and broadcastable and not beholden to a web browser. It makes it possible for the site to exist beyond its URL and beyond the reader's browser.

This leads to the idea of referential language or the reterritorialization of meaning. Taxonomies, categories, tags : They all allow for blog posts to be recontextualized through the islands, plazas or commons of meanings. A blog like culturekitchen, even though it is primarily known as a feminist blog, has hundreds of categories. Instead of being just a feminist blog, our categories turn each post into a collection of conversations waiting to be discovered outside of feminist discussions.

Who is going to discover them? Of course you and anybody searching for information on the web; but first and foremost the most important reader of a blog is the Googlebot, which is Google's web crawler, a collection of programs that browses the databases of blogs, forums, wikis, open mailing lists, static webpages, online photo albums, and all manner of folders residing in servers in search of everything and anything it can index in a methodical, automated manner.

Which takes us to the last concept in D&G's minor literature, mythic language. It is described as another language of reterritorialization, but instead of a place it reterritorializes spiritual or religious meaning. I could spend the whole night discussing this last one, but right now I am going to touch upon it from the point of view of memes.

Through wikipedia we venture a short definition of a meme: A meme is a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another. It does so in a way very much like genes, propagating itself as a unit of cultural evolution and diffusion.

My personal experience with memes has been very much one of complete lack of control. I wrote once a post called, "Condoleeza Rice; A Sally Hemmings for the 21st century". That post is the most read post at culturekitchen, one that rises in hits like the Phoenix rises from its ashes. It's amazing how without any imput whatsoever from me, that post has been read and discussed all around the world.

How is this possible? Once on the web, a post can theoretically live for ever. Even after taking down the site, even after scrubbing Archive.org's Wayback Machine, you can have someone take a post, put it on an email or repost it in their site and the words, the ideas, the inspiration, will live forever online.

The future of small media, minor media, feminist media depends on understanding the practical applications of these subversive and revolutionary tactics. Blogs can be more than meaning-mahcines, they can be revolution-machines. But until we build systems that can sustain hundreds if not thousands of independent bloggers in non-dominion relationships of power, we will be muscled out through monopolistic tactics that threaten net neutrality and digital rights.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | |