From Word To Word

In Dave Humphrey’s comment on Depth, Frequency, and Promiscuity, he suggests that the idea of rigour is often related to a certain professionalism, and he opposes to this professional rigour a kind of amateur irresponsibility in the use of “texts, and theories, and ingredients.” I am in substantial agreement with this idea, though I would suggest that there are responsibilities that I owe even and especially as an amateur in the sense that he is describing.

To the extent that an amateur irresponsibility is one that refuses to make itself responsible to an institution, or a discipline, or mode of publication, or an editor, or an anonymous reading public, to this extent, I affirm the amateurism that Dave is advocating. What I want, and what the web permits, is a writing and a publishing that escapes precisely these responsibilities. Irresponsibility of this kind comes at a cost to me, certainly, but the cost purchases a freedom to be responsible in other ways, in ways that are far more significant to me.

These other responsibilities arise, not in connection to an institution or a profession, but in relation to people and to the texts they share. I want always to have done what I can to make myself responsible to the friends with whom I am in conversation, to the authors and texts that I am reading, and to the texts that I am writing. I want always to have been rigorous in these relations, not out of a professionalism, but out of a sincere respect. I want always to have done what is proper in these relations, not out of a social expectation, but out of a sincere love. This kind of responsibility is the only reason that I write at all, and I want never to have been irresponsible in this sense, not to any extent, though I will always have failed in this responsibility to one extent or another, even now.

Commenting on my recent post, Some Reflections on the Medium, Dave Humphrey suggests that perhaps writing for the web has caused me to trade depth for frequency, though I think and hope that he does not intend this as a criticism. He describes this less deep and more frequent writing as promiscuous, an adjective I often use to describe the way that I read many kinds of text at once without any predetermined program, merely pulling books from my shelf as they surprise my interest. I am interested in these three adjectives, one implied, two explicit: shallow, or at least less deep; frequent; and promiscuous.

I have tended to avoid the metaphor of depth in describing my own writing, mostly because it entails for me an ideal that I do not find appropriate to every situation. Instead, I most often speak of rigour, which implies a metaphor of labour, where the rigorous one is the one who does the work that is required or expected of the job, or I speak of propriety, which implies a metaphor of social relation, where the proper one is the one who does what is required or expected of the relationship. Both of these metaphors appeal to me more because they recognize that depth is not always what is required, that at certain times it fulfils the demands of rigour and propriety to be relatively shallow. By returning me to the metaphor of depth, however, with which I am still uncomfortable, Dave makes unavoidable the fact that writing for the web, at least in this particular mode, has indeed forced me into a relative shallowness. It has limited the number of subjects that I can take up with propriety and rigour. It has forced me to take up improperly and unrigorously subjects that required a depth that I was unable to give them. To this extent, I accept and am troubled by Dave’s use of this word.

I accept with much less reservation his idea of frequency. Not only does it describe accurately how the web enables a much more frequent and therefore open mode of publishing than does the traditional publishing industry, but it bears connotations of the sound or energy wave, which I think are particularly apt. In order for a sound wave to be sent and received, it must be modulated to the proper frequency, and it here that the idea of propriety returns. What the web offers in return for an impropriety of depth, it returns here as a propriety of frequency. I am able to write at the proper speed and with the proper rhythm, with the proper frequency, so that I can hear and be heard. I am intrigued by this idea, and I may return to it as I have more opportunity to reflect on its implications.

Dave’s last suggestion, that my writing for the web is promiscuous in the way that my reading is promiscuous, relates to this idea of frequency also. If what I read is not programmatic, though at times it has this element, and if the films that I watch and the conversations that I conduct and the activities that I perform are similarly without curriculum, if they are promiscuous in this sense, then it is perhaps only proper that my writing be promiscuous also. Perhaps it is precisely in this respect that the web offers me a frequency that is proper to me. Perhaps the rhythm of my reading and my thinking and my life can be best described by this idea of promiscuity. I may need to return to this possibility also.

I know that it has only been a few weeks since I began writing this thing that bears some resemblance to a blog, but the experience has been so singular for me that already I feel the need to reflect on what I have been learning. It is not so much that I have been surprised in my expectations, but that I had no real expectations to surprise and have found that perhaps I should have expected more.

As I have already indicated in a previous post on Writing for the Web, I have found the most difficult aspect of writing for the internet to be the demand for speed and brevity, and I have been experiencing this pressure as an intensification of the anxiety that I described in On What I do not Write, the anxiety that what I write will be inadequate because of insufficient introduction, contextualization, and rigour. I always feel that I am doing an injustice to the authors and texts and ideas that I am discussing, because I do not give them the time and the space that I feel them to deserve.

In my recent post on Ivan Illich, for example, I would have liked to give whole pages to the life that he chose to live, on the death that he chose to die, on each of the books that he wrote, on the places he worked, on the people he influenced, and these pages would have been what were proper to him. He required volumes to do him justice, where I could give him only paragraphs, or only sentences, or nothing at all. Even more troubling is the way that the demand for brevity forced me to be entirely reductive in my explanation of his ideas and their influence on me. What I found myself able to write was not even a just summary, not even a just recapitulation. This is the position in which this medium seems always to place on me, the effect that it seems always to have on me.

I do not have a solution for this position and this effect. Even my current length and style stretch the conventions for the medium of the blog. Anything longer or more rigorous would quickly become entirely unwieldy. It might be possible to push conventions even further with the sort of serial writing that I have been attempting through the posts on Other Things, but it would not be nearly sufficient to do justice to many of the subjects I would like to discuss. To some degree at least, I must be content with this inadequacy, even as I feel that I must continually draw attention to it.

I am finding, however, that what writing for the web offers me in return is not just the openness to response and to sharing that Dave Humphrey and Chris Land have noted, but a mode of publication that accommodates the rhythm of a lived life. It would not be possible for me to write in the sustained ways that the traditional publishing industry requires, even in the unlikely event that it would publish the sorts of things that I would write, because writing, for me, takes place in the cracks and the crevices of other things. I write words between marking papers and feeding bottles to babies, sentences between stirring pots on the stove and digging stumps in the yard, paragraphs between reading stories to children and conversing with visitors. The web allows me to write even despite the fact that I do not have, and do not want, the space to be a writer in the traditional sense.

This is not to say that I do not value the media through which writers have traditionally published themselves. My appreciation for the book in my hand and the pages on my fingers approaches the quality of a fetish. Even so, I recognize the fact that many people, even some who might have useful things to say and useful ways to say them, may find the traditional press unsuited to the ways that they want or need or are forced to write. My duties as a father, and a husband, and a friend, and a teacher, and a student, and a cook, and a gardener, and a reader, all make the avenue of the publishing industry an absurdity for me, and I am unwilling to sacrifice any of these things to any degree whatsoever in order to make that avenue less absurd. The rhythm of my life and of my writing are not compatible with the traditional press.

The internet, however, accommodates not only my rhythm, but many rhythms. Though its natural movement is celerity and brevity, it can be made to open itself to other ways of writing than that of the expert and the professional. It allows me to be a writer who takes the practice of writing seriously without needing this practice to be a profession or even a professionalism. It allows me to write as an amateur, not in the sense that I take writing and thinking lightly, but in the sense that I do not make these things my profession or depend upon them for my livelihood. It allows me the freedom to write in ways that would otherwise not be available to me.

It seems to me, then, that the task laid for the writer of the web, or at least for this writer of the web, is to find ways to both resist and welcome the web. The task is to reject the impulse to write hastily and thoughtlessly for the sake of being current, but yet to embrace the impulse to write according to a personal and idiosyncratic pace. It is to write with a rigour and a slowness and a lengthiness that challenges the web’s demand for currency, and yet to write with a singularity, an intimacy, and a personality that is made possible by the openness of the web to the amateur and the nonprofessional. It is this balance that I am trying to find.

I appreciated Chris Land’s response to my post on Currency and Incompletion, not only because it raises several interesting questions about writing on the web, which it does, but also because I am glad to have his measured and reflective voice among those contributing to the discussion. I am hopeful that he will agree to contribute on a more regular basis and in a more formal role.

Chris’s comments are particularly relevant to what I have been thinking myself since I met with Don Moore on Wednesday for our weekly discussion of Jacques Derrida’s Echographies of Television. Our Wednesday conversations seem only to perch on the text for brief moments between long migrations elsewhere, so I never had the opportunity to ask Don about a section of the text that relates to his recently completed thesis. Don’s thesis, which explores some of the ethical issues surrounding the rhetoric of 9/11, employs the idea of hauntology that Derrida introduces in Spectres of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994). I am by no means confident in writing about this text or about the idea of hauntology, but I was interested, given my conversations with Don, to see that Derrida employs a similar language of ghosts and haunting in his analysis of the media.

In Echographies of Television, Derrida talks about how the “live” image is actually not living at all but a dead image that nevertheless lives on, appearing like a ghost or an apparition, like a spectre that can be summoned, that can be made to appear with the proper incantations. This “simulacrum of life”, as he calls it, is captured by machines that function like “a kind of undertaker”, dividing the present between “its life and its afterlife,” producing images of images that are like spectres, phantasms, and ghosts. While Derrida makes these remarks primarily in regard to visual media, and while he utters them at a time when the internet was little more than an afterthought to media like television, radio, and film, he does assert that this structure of haunting has always accompanied any technical means of inscription, which is to say every means of inscription, including even the most traditional modes of writing. The implication, then, is clearly that the kinds of inscriptions enabled by the internet will be productive of ghosts and spectres also.

For this reason, it was particularly interesting to me when Chris’s comment included a similar concern with issues of media spectrality when he says that he “cannot escape the haunting feeling that there are ghosts encircling our little chat; people whose faces I cannot see, and whose presence I may never truly acknowledge.” Here, Chris seems to be recognizing a kind of ghostliness, not in the dead but still living inscriptions of our conversation, but in the possibility that there are others who do not inscribe themselves but only read anonymously, ghosts who cannot or will not be summoned. This recognition interests me, because it makes explicit a preference for the ghosts who can be summoned, who can be made to speak in one way or another, who can speak for themselves or, perhaps, somehow, for those living ones whose ghosts they are. The preference is for those who are willing to write themselves, despite the spectrality that this involves, rather than for those who are willing to be readers only. The concern is that the ghosts who will not be summoned, who will not speak for themselves, who will not be writers but readers only, may in fact be malevolent, may be haunting us.

I would like to suggest that Chris’s discomfort is not with ghostliness per se, but with something different enough to need a distinct term of reference, something that I might call monstrosity, the possibility that the ghosts who hover invisibly about us as we converse might be monstrous. This rhetoric of monstrosity, of course, already circulates frequently in relation to the internet, found in the fear that the ones I encounter there may be other than what they appear to be, may be pedophiles or terrorists or something worse and always unnameable. This risk of monstrosity is always operative, of course, even when the invisible ghosts allow themselves to be summoned and interrogated, but it is infinitely intensified when they refuse to appear, refuse to speak for themselves.

In these ideas of the ghostly and the monstrous are perhaps also contained the possibilities and risks of the internet more generally. In a sense, my willingness to inscribe myself spectrally in the medium is an invocation, a summoning that calls for the ghosts who circle about me to come forth, to consent to appear and speak to me. This is the fundamental hospitality of the internet, the willingness to summon whomever will come, whomever will consent to come. Even so, in every case, this openness is also an openness to the possibility that this coming will be the coming of the monstrous. My every inscription is a hospitality that risks the possibility that the ghosts it summons may appear as monsters.

Dave Humphrey has recently posted an interesting and thoughtful response to my discussion of Writing for the Web and Echographies of Television, arguing that what I perceive to be the speed and brevity of writing for the web is actually a kind of incompletion that is itself a request for others to join the discussion. I do not like to disagree with Dave, so I am glad that in this case I am in agreement with him. I would affirm that what is best about teletechnologies is their capacity to invite and accommodate the response of others. They enable dialogue and interactivity in ways that traditional media does not, and this is the very reason why I do choose to write through the medium, even though I write in ways that sometimes run counter to some of its tendencies.

When I argue that writing for the web is characterized by speed, brevity, and utility, I am not precluding the possibility that it is also characterized by openness and invitation, and Dave does well to make me recall these aspects of the medium. I am only suggesting that good writing on the web must find ways to disrupt the medium’s obsession with speed and currency, must affirm its possibilities for hospitality, because it is these possibilities, as Dave argues, that enable the web to be such an effective disruption of traditional print media, putting in question traditional ideas of authorship, scholarship, ownership, disciplinarity, etcetera.

The possibility that the web enables, and that Dave rightly affirms, is that we might write and think differently in a public space, without the restrictions of the academic institution or the publishing industry or the physical page. The danger is that the loss of these restrictions will encourage us to stop writing and thinking at all in disciplined ways, in ways that take whatever time and space is required to do their subjects justice.

This afternoon I met with a friend of mine, Don Moore, who has just defended his PhD in English Literature and has just completed his teaching for the semester so is now available to come and entertain me. In preparation for a course he will be teaching in the fall, we have decided to read Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler’s Echographies of Television (Malden: Polity Press, 2002), which means that I may well be writing on this text off and on over the next few months.

Our conversation today only brushed on the text itself, focusing more on the course that Don is preparing, but we did discuss briefly one of the ideas in the first section of the volume, “Artifactualities”, which is an interview with Derrida. The idea relates to one of my recent posts, “Writing for the Web“, where I suggest that writing for the web is driven primarily by the need for speed and currency. Derrida, speaking more broadly of technological media, which he calls teletechnologies, makes a similar suggestion. He says, “The least acceptable thing on television, on the radio, or in the newspapers today is for intellectuals to take their time, or to waste other people’s time there.” This demand for haste, he argues, “can reduce certain intellectuals to silence,” as they “refuse to adapt the complexity of things to the conditions imposed on their discussion.” In other words, the choice before the intellectual is to simplify the complexities of thought to the speed, the brevity, and the utility that teletechnologies require, or to be silent.

I would affirm Derrida’s analysis here, and also his solution, which involves, in part, a decision not to be of this present time, to be anachronistic, untimely, and disadjusted, in order to “not necessarily miss what is most present today.” This mode of writing and thinking in ways that are out of their time and place in order to reveal the question’s that their time and place conceal is exactly what I want to accomplish in this space that is not a blog. I want to write in ways that, while certainly not escaping the teletechnologies that structure and enable it, call attention precisely to the question of how these technologies impose a certain structure and rhythm on public discourse. I want to write slowly and lengthily, so that what I write requests that you read slowly and lengthily, so that perhaps together we can begin to ask what we have lost by acceding to the demand that writing be always in haste, in brief, and in utility.

I was at my friend Dave Humphrey’s house on Saturday night, sitting on his screened porch, drinking coffee, and listening to a nearby tractor drown out the sound of the wildlife: a lovely evening. In the course of the conversation, Dave mentioned the way that I use email to send letters rather than messages and use this blog to write essays rather than posts. “Luke,” he said, “you need to learn to write for the web,” though he knows that this cause is lost. Because our conversation was not focused on this topic directly, and because our wives put up with too much pseudo-intellectual discussion from the two of us already, I did not respond much to Dave’s remark, but I was struck by the indefinition, at least for me, of what it means “to write for the web.” What characteristics distinguish this mode of writing from other modes? What is gained and lost by this kind of writing?

I have no intention of trying to address these questions fully in this format. A book would probably be required, and I have neither the degree of interest required to finish it nor any degree of hope that someone would publish it. However, several ideas have occurred to me since our conversation, and perhaps they may serve as the basis for a more serious thinking of the topic.

1. Writing for the web seems to imply first of all speed. It is written quickly, published immediately, received by its readers almost instantly. Its value is in its currency. The email’s advantage over the letter is that it can be sent immediately from where I sit at my desk and be received instantly by its intended audience. The advantage of the blog over the newspaper column is that I can update it, edit it, and syndicate it in real time. The characteristic of speed is so central to writing for the web that it is almost definitive of the mode.

2. Because writing for the web finds its value in its currency, it also tends to be characterized by brevity. Emails are generally shorter than letters. Messaging is shorter yet. Twitter even shorter. All of this, of course, is to facilitate speed. Writing for the web must be brief in order that it be current.

3. Because writing for the web is driven by both speed and brevity, it is also characterized by functionality. It is hardly writing in this respect. It is communication. It tends toward the shortform, the acronym, the image, the list, and the phrase. It values functionality over literary interest. This is not always bad, of course. There are times when speed and clarity of communication are to be valued over literary style, but functionality in writing for the web has almost entirely displaced the literary.

4. Because writing for the web is concerned with speed, and therefore brevity, and therefore functionality, it is also concerned mostly with the present, rarely with the future or the past, with preservation and archivization. While the web is certainly used to archive many things, and while certain functions of the web are focused exclusively on archiving knowledge, writing that is for the web is not often preserved, is not often intended to be preserved. It is possible but not likely that a famous figure’s collected emails will ever be published in the way that collected letters were published in the past. Not only would the contents of these emails probably be of much lesser literary interest because they have lost their currency, but there is every chance that they would not even exist, having been deleted as soon as they were written and received. Messaging and twittering would never even be of interest to posterity at all, dealing entirely with the trivial and the transitory. In this respect, blogs are perhaps different, because one of their central functions is to archive, but there still remains the question of how much of this sort of writing will be worth reading once it has lost its currency.

In any case, it is for these reasons and othes that I choose to write the web differently. I choose to write letters as well as messages, to archive the letters I send, and to archive the letters that people actually write me in return. I choose to write essays rather than posts, to be as concerned with the words that I use as I am with the ideas that I communicate. I choose to write slowly in a medium that demands speed. I choose to write lengthily in a medium that demands brevity. I do so, not only because it pleases me to do so, but because I want to raise for others the question of how writing for the web has perhaps prevented us from being writers at all.

This is not a blog. After all, there is really no need for any more blogs. There are already substantially more than 100 million blogs on the internet, and almost all of them are saying things that are far more interesting than what I will say.

This is a place where I can think publically and where others can think with me if they care to do so. It is an amalgam of writings that is concerned, not with entertaining a public audience or with occupying a space within the sphere of the web, but with enabling a different way for me to think together with others, about literature and philosophy, about edible gardens and preserving fruit, about documentary film and open source software, about the many things that I find worth thinking and writing.

It is also a place where I can write, not just as an act of communication, as most public forums increasingly demand of the writer, but as an act of desire for words and for language. The title of this blog that is not a blog testifies particularly to the literary aspect of what I want to do through it. It is from Roland Barthe’s The Lover’s Discourse (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), and the full quotation reads, “From word to word, I struggle to put into other words the selfness of my image, to express improperly the propriety of my desire.” To me, this space is a chance to perform the struggle that Barthe describes, to write myself, to write my desire for writing.

Of course, it is a blog also, whether I want it to be or not. It uses a popular blog software package, is indexed by technorati, and falls within the distressingly wide and imprecise definition that popularly pertains to a blog. Even so, it’s concern is elsewhere.

I would like to thank both Mike Shaver for hosting this thing and Dave Humphrey for badgering him until he did.