The speed with which people write on the net, on their blogs. David Berlind writing yesterday while listening to Sun Systems' Jonathan Schwartz speaking with Doc Searls.
The confidence with which people write on their blogs.
The way in which this confidence has an ease and excitement about it, as if a new tone were being added to personality - to human being - in the writing, an up, confident, speeding-along, tone. Does this - what I am writing here - have that tone? By osmosis, a degree of it, I think.
"To find one's own speed and own slowness, one's slow-speed, in an accelerating world". Gilles Deleuze must have written something like this somewhere. His face pops into my mind, centred on that large non-Parisian nose, rural. (Sorry, but I haven't read the Wikipedia entry on him to which I've just linked. My guess is it would not be that good. This is meant as a comment on Deleuze, not on Wikipedia. For some reason, he breeds in the main poor interpreters).
Is there something in this new human tone with its web origin that is careless and superfical? Yes and no, I think. It is defining the 'yes' that interests me.
The 'no' is pretty clear. There is an intimate, internal relation between the new human tone and the development and expansive creativity of the new medium. Software people - I.T. people generally -write like this, work together with one another like this, write the new code together. Language is being altered in tandem with the computer. Much of economy and society are being pulled along in the movement. The new human tone is neither careless nor superficial. It is the tone of the time, and now is moving, creatively, rapidly.
So what is it that is about the new tone that is careless and superficial? Is it not arrogant, ignorant, to even suggest this? Am I perhaps simply showing my old world humanist colours or the nostalgia that seems to come with being in one's forties?
That dimension of writing having to do with choosing one's words with a certain slowness and to do with interiority, the writer withdrawn in that gap of time between him or her and the reader, is it not disappearing? Clearly, such writing can go on - Faber & Faber (the pull of the local, I live in London) will go on publishing well-made poems - but as the world moves another way, what can good writing be about, can it have the object it would most often have, the human world?
Is this - what I am writing here - superficial, careless, written at speed? Yes and No, I hope. My interest is to try to think in the internet (born as a mass phenonenon about 1998) in the time of its growth, a moment that we are now in, of technological and cultural transformation. The moment before, in this epochal sense of 'moment', was probably that of photography and film, their invention and impact.
Is Walter Benjamin not trying to write about this earlier moment of transformation within the moment itself, as it is happening, in his essay 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit' (1936) and in an earlier essay 'Die kleine Geschichte der Photographie' (1931), both the fruit of many things including of a largely forgotten newspaper article by Siegfried Kracauer 'Die Photographie' (1927) reproduced in the book of essays Das Ornament der Masse. (My friend Philippe Despoix insists on this link, pointing to it in his Ethiques du désenchantement: Essais sur la modernité allemande au début du siècle.)
The invention of the printing-press was such a moment, the Industrial Revolution was such a moment.
To start to find one's way in this moment (1988- ) by writing well-badly, simply-complicatedly.
It is time to go to bed, so here is my post. To leave it, to leave go, to write not very well, to write in this moment. I am a minnow in his wake but Deleuze never wrote as badly as this. He could not - it was not a historical option - for he died a few years before 1998. A late pre-internet philosopher.
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