A white man with establishment roots comes to view dominant political and media institutions as corrupted by moralistic delusions. He withdraws from mainstream discourse, in order to peddle his own passive-aggressive brand of observations, aphorisms, and pithy deconstructions, jotted down as and when they come to him, with no real idea of who the intended audience is. For ages, nobody pays a blind bit of attention, but over time his reputation spreads internationally and his audience expands.
I speak, of course, of Friedrich Nietzsche. But is this not also the profile of the stereotypical blogger? I'll even tar myself with this rather unpleasant brush if I must. In certain unfortunate cases, one could go even further with the analogy, pointing out the dark misogenistic undertones to those who obsessively attack Polly Toynbee, or in Herr Nietzsche's case, womankind. (For the record, I think so highly of Toynbee that I would like to see her granted emergency 'Nanny' rights, which allow her to invade libertarians' houses and cancel their internet connections, on behalf of the children/government.)
Nietzsche believed that his personality, body, health and routines were inseparable from his philosophy. The attempt to cleanse philosophy of moods, urges, frustrations and artistry was a moralist conspiracy dating back to Socrates. His headaches shaped the way he worked, making it impossible for him to sit indoors and write, instead driving him to take long mountain walks with only a notebook. He was acutely conscious of the body and psyche that produced his thought - Freud later said that nobody ever understood himself as well as Nietzsche did.
Notice how many 'online-only' realms of the internet are Nietzschean. The blogosphere adheres to a Nietzschean account of truth, in which the most attractive or determined version of events rises to the top, thanks to its appearance. Iconoclasm is truthfulness, while orthodoxy and evidence are illusions. It is not, contrary to professional belief, that amateur publishers have no interest in 'the truth', but that they refuse to perform the Socratic-Christian ritual of disentangling 'truthfulness' from their own personalities, contingencies, projects and desires. Elsewhere, the web offers a space for violent, sexual and taboo forms of publishing whose exclusion from establishment media seems to confirm the latter's self-denying, Christian asceticism.
The vision of the 'network society' never gave enough account of this. Media gurus talk about the shift from 'push', broadcast media to 'pull', on-demand or network media, but this shift was always going to throw up some fairly uncomfortable truths about the human condition. I'm fascinated by the BBC's list of 'most read' websites, especially the way animals thrive online, often to the exclusion of supposed 'world events'. Nietzsche, whose own mental breakdown began with his kissing a horse, may not have been so surprised to discover that the human species finds greater intrigue in the domestic lives of pigs than in humanitarian relief. Why does someone link to, forward, click on, bookmark or save a link? The answer is less often epistemological or moral than aesthetic or psychoanalytic. In the age of 'pull media' it is not only the content that is pulled to us by technology, but we who are pulled to it by our psyches and bodies.
But I'm writing my PhD at the moment, which I've realised is the opposite of blogging. It is not only long and factual (up to a point), but more important, it is dependent on something other than itself, its appearance or me for its authority. Where that 'something other' cannot be found, so the claims cannot be made, or are at best greatly tempered. Sentences aspire to be something more than just language, which in Nietzschean terms simply makes them so much less than poetry. There are no prizes for beauty in the cold Platonist tradition I'm contributing to. The tension between academia and blogging is more profound than the presence or otherwise of editors; it is founded on contradictory accounts of the relationship between writing and the self.
Against the backdrop of the web, academia's virtue is to offer a different form of ambivalence, thanks to its reverence to logic. Claims vary in their authority according to how well they can marshall external support, such as evidence, references and data. Yet perhaps the greatest ability of the academic, like the professional journalist, is not the minimisation of ambivalence, but the honest appraisal of it. The question is not whether evidence does or does not exist, but how good it is and how close it comes to supporting a claim. No amount of evidence is logically sufficient to believe something; so what's needed is judgement, clarity and honesty regarding the gaps, uncertainties and moments of ignorance.
By contrast, the online-only spaces of the internet, such as blogs and wikipedia, mostly deal with ambivalence in a crude, binary way. The question is whether the claim is or is not published. Published, and the statement exists as a thing in the world; unpublished, and the statement is not. The binary opposition acquires slightly greater subtly thanks to the 'long tail' separating mass publishing from fragments, but only slightly.
The problem with so much online text is not that it is polluted with rumour, uncertainty and doubt, but its inability to represent itself as such or to highlight its own contingency. Bloggers typically fail to make the crucial Nietzschean step of owning up to the frustrations, hatreds, sicknesses and neuroses that condition the written word. Nietzsche's hatred of women, Christians, academics, the British, the Germans and most of humanity was nothing in comparison to his hatred for himself, and he knew it. So while academic text is littered with references and footnotes (Johnson 2004), perhaps blogging text should be littered with confessions of physio- and psychological weakness (I Will Davies am getting balder, fatter and consequently more irritable).
Excellent post. As for online confessions of weakness, I suggest adopting Bridget Jones' Diary format for future entries ...
Posted by: max | July 07, 2008 at 12:48 PM
4 pints of lager; 0 cigarettes; still haven't been the gym: thanks Max.
Posted by: Will Davies | July 07, 2008 at 04:49 PM