We’re back again, sticking with Jodi Dean’s 2010 book Blog Theory. No notes again this week, but I have included a few choice quotations that I pulled out. You can also find links to things we talked about below as well.
This week’s session actually ended up dovetailing with a project I’ve started on this past week… The accelerationism book is on hold right now, as I’ve sort of burnt out on it a bit, but a book on photography and selfies is in the oven. Since it felt relevant to this chapter, maybe I’ll post this first chapter on Patreon next week as a teaser.
Thanks, as ever, to Wassim for the pun.
In a fortnight, we’re sticking with Dean and reading chapter 3 of her book, “Whatever Blogging.” Until then!
Links, etc.
- “Combabe 3 — an interview with Jodi Dean”, Sicko Mode
- Rob Horning, “Google Alert for the Soul”, The New Inquiry
- “Megsuperstarprincess Is Making Blogging Great Again”, Nymphet Alumni
- Aaron Z Lewis, “Being Your Selves: Identity R&D on Alt Twitter”, Ribbonfarm
- DashCon
- Petscop
- Game Theory: Beware Crow 64 c???rO????????W????? 6????4????? c????????????O?w??????? 6???????4??????
- Matt Colquhoun, “Points of View”
- Albrecht Dürer, Self Portrait
- Thomas Patch, Self Portrait as an Ox
Quotations from the text
Social media allows for “friendship without friendship” — one of a “series of objects or practices deprived of their harmful features that Slavoj Zizek associates with contemporary culture: beer without alcohol, sugar-free candy, coffee without caffeine, etc.).”
“The term ‘blogosphere’ tricks us into thinking community when we should be asking about the kinds of links, networks, flows, and solidarities that blogs hinder and encourage. ‘Blogipelago,’ like archipelago, reminds us of separateness, disconnection, and the immense effort it can take to move from one island or network to another.”
“The opposition of the death of the old and vitality of the new, as well as the concomitant cries to condemn the old ways and celebrate the new, is a recurrent theme in technology and media writing that tells us nothing about the technologies and media practices involved. Inserting new actors into old series, the opposition between old and new obscures the practices and settings of technologies, the ways technologies are used (ways that are often diverse, conflicting, and unexpected), and the ways these uses produce different sorts of subjects.””If desire is like the path of an arrow, drive is like the course of a boomerang. What is fundamental at the level of the drive, Lacan teaches, is ‘the movement outwards and back in which it is structured.’ [Four Fundamental Concepts…, 177] Through this repetitive movement outward and back the subject can miss its object but still achieve its aim; the subject can ‘find satisfaction in the very circular movement of repeatedly missing its object.’ [Ticklish Subject, 297] Because failure produces enjoyment, because the subject enjoys via repetition, drive captures the subject.”
“In the Lacanian view, drive as death drive encompasses the way that even a drive for life results in paradoxes wherein saving life entails sacrificing it, pursuing life leads to risking it, and cherishing life looks like a bizarre fixation on morbidity. Turning back in on itself, turning into its opposite, the death drive is reflexive.”
“Blogs and search engines are different approaches to the same problem, different occupations of the same place. They point, though, in different directions. Faced with the challenge of providing a trusted guide through a chaotic, indeterminable, changing field, search engines say ‘trust the algorithm’. In contrast, blogs say, ‘trust doesn’t scale.’ So while the former offers a reliability based in equations and crawl capacities, the latter says, know the knower. It focuses on the person providing the link, offering the searcher the opportunity to know this person and so determine whether she can be trusted. Social network sites refract the problem of truth yet again: if the issue with blogs is the credibility of the guide or writer, the issue for social network sites is trust in the audience, in the others who might be following me.”
I wrote a bit about this one on the blog the other day here.
“Michel Foucault describes some of the early practices of writing the self. In first-and second-century Rome, writing contributed to an ascetic practice of training the self, of changing the character by positing another before whom one would feel a sense of shame. Here writing is not simply a method for recording one’s thoughts or reflecting on one’s actions. It is a way of making present one who is not there, of summoning a companion in the imagination in order to feel the pressure of the other’s gaze. [Narcissus, who does this but then cannot take it.] With the supposition of an other and of shame before this other, first- and second-century Romans, Foucault argues, construe writing as a technique for changing the self, not simply recording its thoughts or for reflecting on these thoughts. Writing is a training with effects on an individual’s character and practice.”
What does it say about the self portrait that it first took off in Italy after the Roman empire’s affair with self-writing?
“Foucault’s technologies of the self rely on the installation of a gaze, of the perspective of another before whom the subject imagines itself. […] It provides the subject with an ego ideal, a point of symbolic identification. Zizek argued that this gaze is a crucial supposition for the subject’s capacity to act. The gaze qua ego ideal is the point from which one sees one’s actions as valuable and worthwhile, as making sense. Absent that gaze, one may feel trapped, passive, or unsure as to the point of doing anything at all. To this extent, identifying with the gaze enables the subject’s activity.
The gaze structures our relation to our practices. For example, instead of experiencing the state as myriad forms and organisations, branches and edicts, presences and regulations, in our daily activities we tend to posit the state as a kind of entity, an Other aware of what we are doing. Similarly, we may posit an enemy assessing our every action. The point is that through symbolic identification the subject posits the very entity it understands itself as responding to. How it imagines this Other will be crucial to the kinds of activities the subject can undertake.
Weirdly, then, the active subject has to posit a kind of passivity: that is, a passive Other before whom the subject appears. The subject has to imagine himself, in other words, as fascinating the Other, as doing something or saying something or even watching something that captivates the Other. As Zizek emphasises, the gaze is thus reflective, doubled insofar as the subject sees itself being seen. The one who is captivated, in other words, is the subject.” [Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]