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CHAPTERTEN
LATE MODERN BLOG:AFFECT,CONTAGION
AND FLOW FROM THE PICTURE POSTCARD
TO THE BLOGOSPHERE
MELISSA JANE HARDIE
Nobody need fear that there is any spot on the earth which is not depicted on this
wonderful oblong.
James Douglas, 1907
Precipitated by increasingly urgent literacies in the West; facilitated by the
proliferating forms of cheap lithographic reproduction; mandated by the postal
system's expansion from parochial reach to World Wide Postage: although the
possibility of the postcard preceded its adoption as a means of democratic and
decentralised interaction and reportage, these particular proximities of
technology, aesthetics and rhetorical franchise allowed the craze to bloom until
the end of the First World War, when the vicissitudes of international conflict
enervated the form1. And so it is with the blogosphere. Although the
possibility of such a revolution in online publishing has existed for nearly a
decade, a number of factors enabled the formation of blogging as a distinct,
and distinctly familiar activity.
How do we gauge propinquity in the formerly undiscursive space of theblogosphere, now that it approaches a plenum? One way, I argue, is to find an
appropriately informal analogue for blogging in the mania of postcarding acloseness of acts rather than in time. In particular, I am interested in what I am
calling the late modern blog, a recapitulation of modernity's fascination with
the unidirectional and performative act of one-way communication. Picture
postcards may bear the image of their point of origin, but unlike letters or other
mail they have no return address. Their contents, sent out into the world on their
wonderful oblong, are persistently public:
The postcard spread the news everywhere that subjectivity, as a product of the
letters confidentiality, had been addressed to a public audience, and it did so
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precisely for the reason that it lacked the confidentiality of the letter. (Siegert
147)
This lack of confidentiality, the dissolution of a private subject, offers aremarkable forecast of the blog, particularly in its more intimate formations, and
this chapter is concerned with blogging not as an adjunct or ancillary version of
journalism but as a form of public personal expression.
I. This Wonderful Oblong
The postcard as we know it originated in Austria in 1869, as a result of concern
over the burden letter writing placed on the postal system (Staff 46, 83), and to
provide a venue for short comments, greetings, and other brief messages. The
postcard obviated the need to write prolix messages in favour of short ones
guided by the inherent limits of its shape and size, and modifications of its
design saw the different elements of the communication address, message,decoration disposed on the two sides of the card in various ways. It wasnt
until 1903 that postcard standards were revised to authorise the use of the back
of the postcard to bear a message, as well as the address, leading to the so-called
divided back with which we are all familiar (Staff 36). This determination
lead to the blossoming of pictorial art on the front of the postcard and the
dominance of the picture postcard over other forms of postal card, a dominancethat re-asserted itself in the field of collection. Not surprisingly the art most
usually displayed on the postcard was photographic and lithographic,
technologies of reproduction, which married well with the postcards seriality
and ubiquity.
The ubiquity of the postcard can be gauged by the ways in which it came to
represent a portal onto the variety of landscapes it depicted. Writing in 1907,
James Douglas described the picture postcard as a candid revelation of our
pursuits and pastimes, our customs and costumes, our morals and manners
(Staff 79). Nobody need fear, he continued:
that there is any spot on the earth which is not depicted on this wonderful oblong.
The photographer has photographed everything between the poles. He has snap-
shotted the earth. No mountain and no wave has evaded his omnipresent lens.
The click of his shutter has been heard on every Alp and in every desert . . . .
Every pimple on the earths skin has been photographed, and wherever the
human eye roves or roams it detects the self-conscious air of the reproduced.
(Staff 79)
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Ironically, though the postcard was introduced to ease the burden of postaldelivery, the exchange of postcards and the collection of postcards became
popular practices:
In the cafs and open-air restaurants and other public places, it was common to
see a postman with a mailing box strapped to his back, going from one table to
the next, selling picture postcards and postage stamps. Then and there, people
could write their messages and mail their postcards while the postman was
waiting. (Staff 59)
Prolific exchanges of postcards were sufficiently common that an affliction,
postcarditis, came to be named. In 1913, for example, five billion postcards
were circulated in Europe alone (Vincent 425). Staff quotes an 1899 article fromThe Standard that describes the rise of interest in postcards through an
assortment of pathologising metaphors:
The illustrated postcard craze, like the influenza, has spread to these islands from
the Continent, where it has been raging with considerable severity. Sporadic
cases have occurred in Britain. Young ladies who have escaped the philatelic
infection or wearied of collecting Christmas cards, have been known to fill
albums with missives of this kind received from friends abroad . . . (60)
The passage parodies international congress as a form of contagion, one thatfollows the tracks of the postcards itself as harbinger of the foreign:
Hindu temples, pyramids, medieval castles, wild game, rattan baskets, and
scantily clad peoples lay alongside the tea cozies in Victorian or Edwardian front
rooms and parlors and were displayed and passed around, pasted randomly or
categorically in a scrapbook or by themselves, evoking myriad responses from
gasps to sighs, from giggles to outrage, from a brief comment to a less brief
discussion and, often enough, a complete lack of interest. (Wong 356)
A craze for postcards is aligned with other afflictions, and occupies their place
because alternative afflictions have been either avoided or exhausted; inherent
in the notion of a craze is the notion of its exhaustion. Postcards, like stamps
and Christmas cards, are the carriers of a metaphorical illness whose
contagiousness is revealed in the behaviour of young ladies in particular, and
particularly in young ladies who have friends abroad. The passage implies
that the contagion is pronounced among those who are relatively well off, and
one might assume that the acquisition, display, and appreciation of postcardswere activities consonant with middle-class leisure. However, the distribution of
this craze was certainly far wider than among the middle classes, young
women, and far beyond the continent; by the time of this article it had certainly
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spread to the United States and Colonial Europes far reaches. The articlesdescription of its afflicted disguises one crucial aspect of the postcard, which
was that it enfranchised readers, writers, and collectors across social classes,
generations, and fixed geographical locations. Writing of his Berlin childhood
the philosopher critic Walter Benjamin paused to remember the passion he felt
for the postcards he received from his grandmother:
There are people who think they find the key to their destinies in heredity, others
in horoscopes, others again in education. For my part, I believe that I would gain
numerous insights into my later life from my collection of picture postcards, if I
were able to leaf through it again today. . . . [N]one of my boys adventure books
kindled my love of travel as did the postcards. . . (Benjamin 620-21)
For the young boy the postcards offer simultaneously a forecast and
retrospection, pivoted around the contemplation of the collection. The postcard
collection, bequeathed to the child by his grandmother not through an act of
inheritance but through the mail, offers insight distinct from heredity,
horoscopes, or education; it offer indices of affective connection and contagion,
the incitement of feeling between generations and across geography. The love oftravel incited by the postcards metaphorises the love between the two as a form
of transport, and the transportation of affect, sentiment and engagement became
the prime purpose of the postcard in its circumscribed contours and prolificproduction. The postcard heralded the phatic in serial, mediated and published
enunciations, the exchange of postcards resembling the everydayness of speech
acts. The movement of words between people came to travel the same groove,
so to speak, as the movement of the artefacts themselves. That the messages
carried on postcards were to be conventional and formulaic, as the phatic
commonly is, only served to highlight the importance of their being conveyed.
A 1906 commentary on Postal Carditis and Some Allied Manias in
American Illustrated Magazine asserted that the microbe postale universelle
caused faddy degeneration of the brain (Zenari). The breeding ground forsuch manic dissemination is commonly calculated as an account of these novel
and progressive shifts in the structure of postal delivery in Europe and
elsewhere, of an assortment of technological innovations in printing, and in the
newly near-ubiquitous phenomenon of literacy. The sale of postcards was both
for dispersal and collection postcards were purchased either or both to be
retained in private (the album) and to be sent forward into publication (the
postal system). The affliction postcarditis could be understood as a euphoric
response to the proliferation of communicative possibilities signaled by the
sturdy simplicity of the picture postcard: a condition of contagious
communicativeness, akin to graphomania. It represented, equally and
contradictorily, the desire to write and send postcards and the desire to
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accumulate these miniature canvases in private archives, sometimes after theirpostal use, sometimes before they were ever published within the postal
network. Picture postcards, which articulate and address, may be sent to
distinctly dissimilar places: the collection, the archive, and the lost letter offices.
Perhaps this accounts for the particular form the mania assumed; postcarditis,
then, was a contagion which propelled itself in two apparently contradictory
channels, toward and against communication, a token for contact and exchange
or dead-lettered and unrealized artefacts withheld from the system.
The first condition of possibility for the postcard craze was the
internationalisation of the postal system. What modern sense we have of an
international postal system was formally constituted when the Universal Postal
Union was established in 1874 (Vincent 405). An integrated postal
community in place of a jumble of postal treaties (ibid), its establishment
was heralded by the Times as the most practical realization which human
ingenuity has yet achieved of those floating aspirations towards universal
brotherhood, regarded generally as of the nature of dreams, however decorativeof the pages of poetic literature (ibid). As Vincent notes, the Universal Postal
Union [facilitated] the use of reading and writing (ibid) creating a world-wide
information system in which, at least in theory, all parties and all places were
implicated as potential interlocutors and potential sites within a newly devised
written sphere of sociable interaction: the peoples of the civilised world could
now connect by means of their shared command of the written word (ibid 405-6).2
The Times comment offers an elaborate analogy to describe the postal
community, understood as a practical realization of floating aspirations, that
is, as a technical and physical instatement of a poetic or figurative possibility.
Aspirations float on the back of the post; the postal system offers a vehicle for
the metaphorisation of communicative instruments as affective, objects which
elicit affective response (movement) through their own circulation. The
quotation leaves unexamined precisely what the shared command of the
written word might be the postal system united those whose command ofthe written word was in important ways asymmetrical: postal objects negotiated
not only different languages but even different writing systems. In fact, one
might say that the streamlining implied by the universal system of postal
exchange served precisely to adumbrate just how various and distinct were those
precincts which it traversed; the civilisation it proposed (in the guise ofrepresenting) was constitutively colonial and Eurocentric. In other words, this
universal and civilised system of communication served to create a
membrane that would ideally contain, as well as communicate, the wide variety
of potential communication it boded.
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These floating aspirations metaphorise the postal system as an updraft.Conceptualising the circulation as horizontal, paratactic, would limit the
function of this membrane to encircling and containing communicative
possibilities in a fashion that produced depth as a quality along with the
distances covered by circulation. In distinctly Aeolian style, an aesthetic
animation of the postal system draws it into currents that may approach
toward the goal of communal integration among correspondents. Their nature
is both dreamlike and poetic, and as such its decorative of the pages of
poetic literature, with decoration not gesturing to specific ornaments but to
the way in which the affective and aspirational both haunt the domain of the
poetic, and in so doing display texture and dimensionality on the otherwise flat
pages of poetry. In such a way the postal system creates a supplementary
dimensionality of the realm of that which merely decorates the page; the
flatness of writing is contrasted with the depth words attain once subject to the
effects of post. This curious and striking set of analogies suggest that the very
media of word transmission are subject to chance once the possibility of theirautomatic and global commerce is systematised.
The delivery of letters, books, and other written artifacts of course far
predated the establishment of universal postal service, but the notion of a
systematic, universal post created the sense of a new formation of these familiar
elements, one for which the Times writers metaphoric reach symptomatically
moves the figurative into the territory of exploration, the finding of new spacesor dimensions for the written word released from the two-dimensional written
page. The Times writer moves quickly to the decorative as a way of deepening
the metaphors of circulation; what goes into circulation is not just a set of words
but also floating decoration. Such a metaphor supplements the written with a
visual artefact, understanding the decorative as supplementary to writings
communicative exchanges. Its probably no surprise, then, that a key
development of this sphere was the picture postcard (Vincent 425). As an
image with address affixed, the picture postcard was an emblematic floating
realisation of the aspiration to universalism implied by the codification ofstandard postage; its images formed a kind of decoration consonant with those
aspirations non-literal but decorative alignment with this new sphere of
communication. This new sphere was equally engaged with, and by, images and
text. The postcard allied the two in a fashion that anticipates by several years the
association of words and images in film, that key new technology of thetwentieth century. But while the experience of film inaugurated a century of
public and mass mediation, the postcard deployed these same ingredients in a
medium both less and more ephemeral.
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II. Diagnosis Blogitis
A rhetorical prehistory exists for the weblog through an analogical rephrasing of
the picture postcard's waxing and waning. While weblogs are certainly readable
in terms of Manuel Castell's notion of the dynamic networking that structures
21st century sociality, an understanding of the blogosphere which speaks only
of that dynamism, and only of those weblogs which function essentially as
forms of informational media misses an opportunity to understand solitary,
unidirectional, publicly enunciated but privately phrased intimacies and giftswithin its discourse. It is no doubt clear from my description of the Universal
Postal Union that I'm suggesting that it functioned for the late nineteenth
century rather as the World Wide Web functioned for the late twentieth century
as an unfamiliar new space of communication. A connection between the
postcard and the blog, however, can be more specific. Whereas letters generally
fold their communications in a protective envelope, postcards publish their
messages. A postcard's message always exists, in some sense, in a public,
open space. The postcard opened a public space for a constituency of readers
and writers who had little prior access to any mode of publication, let alone one
that potentially crossed continents. It's in that respect that the postcard can be
considered as a late modern blog, a technology which arose as a consequence
of, firstly, the general environment of cross-national, global innovations like the
Universal Postal Union, and secondly through the creation of formal templatesfor writing entries on the surface of their wonderful oblong. These generic and
formal constraints, as well as the global re-orientation of postage, permitted the
rise of the postcard just as the progress of the web through the nineteen nineties,
and the development of templates and publishing options such as those provided
by blogger, moveable type, livejournal, and so on were the precipitating factors
in the rise of the blog.
It's something either more, or less, than a coincidence, then, that onehundred years after the diagnosis of postcarditis was made, a similarly-named
condition emerges on the world-wide web: blogitis. Blogitis is variouslydefined as
as a bloggers sickness: [f]or those overtaken by Blogging. So much...it's making you sick. Journals, blogs, diaries, rants, raves and original
writers welcome. (Blogitis Webring);
as a condition which afflicts a blog: blogitis - (blog.itis) 1. Inflimation[sic] or irritation of the blog (Blogitis);
as ennui: I like spouting off, I like using it as a venue to put mythoughts into words, but I was getting that 'blogitis' where you wonderwhat the hell are you doing this for (Frenetic Minds: Politics
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Archives);
as a catch-all-phrase that means whatever you want it to mean inregards to so called web logs (Word Salad);
as a failure to blog: a poster writes I have been suffering from a tragiccondition known as blogitis. I haven't updated my blog in a while and I
need some medicine. Please help me pay for this with the honor
system. Thank you. (Rubush);
as a failure of the system: [by blogitis] I usually mean that theblogger software/site has sent my post somewhere into the ether or else
I had too much last night (Word Salad).
Blogitis, in other words, can mean either or both too much blogging or toolittle; a surfeit or a deficit of communication; an irrational exuberance
(Greenspans phrase for the internet-fueled stock market of the late nineties) as
well as a deadening compulsion; it can refer both to communicative fervour and
dead ends. One way to rephrase might be to call blogitis modernity, with its
attendant states of euphoria and exhaustion, the death drives compulsion to
repeat, repetitious action as internalised Taylorism; lassitude, hyperactivity,
pathology and prosperity, all tangled in that loose conglomerate experience of
the industrial revolutions of mechanical reproduction (in the postcards time) or
the industrial revolution prompted by information culture (in the blogs time).
This curious concatenation of diverse experiences indicate above all else that the
registration of bloggings effects is made through an alteration of affective state,
and of conscious, one reminiscent of Douglass description of landscape, afterthe postcard, and its self-conscious air of the reproduced.
While the effect of blogging is consummately public, its excesses are
relegated to the private sphere somewhat as the pathology of postcarditis did
to the postcard when it joined the serried ranks in collectors albums; in a 2004
New York Times story about the pernicious ubiquity of blogs, Katie Hafner
draws a startling picture of blogitis as sequestration:
To celebrate four years of marriage, Richard Wiggins and his wife, Judy
Matthews, recently spent a week in Key West, Fla. Early on the morning of their
anniversary, Ms. Matthews heard her husband get up and go into the bathroom.
He stayed there for a long time.
I didn't hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on, Ms.
Matthews said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with his
laptop balanced on his knees, typing into his Web log, a collection of
observations about the technical world, over a wireless link.
Hafners description of the errant spouse-blogger features a familiar topos for
the sequestrated indulgence of bloggings compulsive pull; this epistemology
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of the water closet (after Edelman) offers a disconcerting coalition betweenblogger and other forms of evacuation.3 Whatever it is that Wiggins is doing in
there, its to the detriment of his real-time and real-space relations. His blogging
body note how the passage draws attention to the balance of his laptop on his
knees is at once stationary and withheld, mobilised not by life but by the
affective discharge between blogger, blog, and the blogosphere. The use of the
Wiggins as an example of the blog author at work (use made by both me and
Hafner) requires him to attain the status of exemplar; Massumi writes that:
[l]ogically, the example is an odd beast. . . . An example is neither general (as is a
system of concepts) nor particular (as is the material to which a system is
applied). It is singular. It is defined by a disjunctive self-inclusion: a belonging
to itself that is simultaneously an extendibility to everything else with which itmight be connected (one for all, and all in itself) (17-18)
This kind of exemplarity, like the definitions of blogitis, which adumbrated the
diagnosis, has the quality of offering unlikely or disjunctive possibilities of
connection. The example is an odd beast, rather like the odd beast blogger
locked in the bathroom exemplifying singularity. Encapsulated within thisimage of quintessential solitude is also an account of connectivity fostered by,
and structured around, the blogs capacity to form connections: the story leaves
unclear (as no doubt it is unclear) whether the connection felt by the lonely,long-distance blogger is to the blog per se or its potential to amplify and
diversify the bloggers audience; this distinction, in fact, hardly exists.
The emergent properties of the blogging system, like the emergencies of war
that effectively ended the postcard craze, remind us of the rhetorical
complexities all open systems adduce, of the unpredictability of discursive
spaces. As written blogs become either increasingly embedded in networks (as
quasi-journalism), or else unidirectionally stagnant and ultimately incorporated
into a virtual archive resembling the albums of postcards stockpiled by
collectors, it remains to be seen how effectively this medium can contour orenunciate geopolitical formations and the effects of globalisation. Though the
terms were coined a century apart, and, as far as I can tell, with no deliberate
sense of repetition or resemblance, both blogitis and postcarditis are used in
uncannily similar ways to describe these wild vacillations between a writer's
sense of impassioned agency and of exhaustion, as if in both instances the
potential for communication is either outstripped by the facilities of technology,
or else outstrips technology itself, and as if there remains a distinct ambiguity
over where this infectious incitement to discourse resides; in the writer or the
sphere in which texts circulate. This uncanny echo across divergent
technologies, societies, and agents is activated, in the first instance, by the
homologous coinages postcarditis and blogitis. It suggests that there are
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ways in which the formation of each followed a similar logic, something to dowith the experience of a new sphere in which to manifest and motivate a writing
subject, one which offers a pivoting perspective on public and private spheres. It
also suggests that the analogical movement between the two terms has an
irresistible quality rather like the irresistible or compulsive activity of the
blogger and postcard aficionado, a contagious property registered rhetorically as
well as experientially. This slide into the contagious nature of resemblance,
naming, and invention will re-orient the late modern blog as a textual artifact.
III. Exemplary, Catachrestic, Contagious
A model of stickiness is implicit in both diagnoses, postcarditis andblogitis. Those who fall under the spell of these miniature communicative
technologies become adherents and liable to transfer their affliction to others.
This stickiness can be given both positive and negative valences: positive
when what is precipitated is a desirable trend of assimilation participation in
an emancipatory new rhetorical sphere (or realm, Perelmans term); negative
when fear of certain consequences of this emancipation (distraction,
compulsion) precipitates a moral panic. As such it seems less micro biotic than
viral, recalling the now near ubiquitous metaphor of the virus as a form of
social interaction: viral metaphors reach both destructive intrusion (TheMelissa Virus) and emancipatory social congress as good marketing
(Unleashing the Ideavirus). In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell charts
this epidemiological fashion, drawing from discourses of contagion a model of
social interactivity that has strong resonance for internet and virtual
communities. Gladwells influential figure symbolises the dominance of
epidemiological metaphors in a description of the growth of internet
community, the porting of off-screen subjectivity into on-screen identity, the
fashionable adoption of virtual templates to orient an expressive subjectivity
online. Above all else connectivity is the diacritical aspect of these accounts.
Similar kinds of figurative drift characterise the naming and plotting of these
new technologies of self. Metaphors of contagion are one way in which to put
into discourse the question of connectivity; catachresis connects from the past to
the present in the reuse of a word. In the seventies and eighties the naming of
new information technologies relied substantially on the rhetorical figure of
catachresis, or abusio. Catachresis is a form of extravagant metaphor, one that
reaches well beyond literal meaning to create a proper name for something,
which lacks a proper name4. A simulated workspace on a video screen becomes
a desktop, for example. Silvae Rhetoricae tells us: [t]his figure is generally
considered a vice; however, Quintilian defends its use as a way by which one
adapts existing terms to applications where a proper term does not exist. In
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short order from the figurative pioneers of Xerox Park and Apple came not onlydesktop, but window, cut and paste, mouse, and so on: familiar
words for wholly unfamiliar properties, protocols, or practices of interface and
interaction. This muddle of metaphoric license located spatial relations on-
screen and biological motors to one side: the mouse, whose heretofore
unremarkable career in technological servitude was less signal than its passing
resemblance to a small and moving boxy item with a whip-thin tail to its rear.
Catachrestic usage, and metaphor more generally, only works when there is
a certain contagious appropriateness to their adoption: however outlandish
catachreses may seem, they becomes quickly incorporated into a public lexicon
if they work, both aesthetically and pragmatically. Such is the case with
blog. Fashioned from the longer term weblog, blog quickly caught on, not
least because, I suggest, it echoes another set of relations: blog, bog, fog, smog.
One definition of the blogosphere speaks of it as a poisonous environment
of methane, self-satisfaction and other hot gasses. The only creatures that can
survive in the blogosphere are low-order molds, able to feed off the waste ofothers (Knauss).5 Smog, of course, is a word that was coined at the the turn of
last century, a neologism formed around 1905 to describe the smoky fog of
London, another environment of unpredictable modernity. Smog has been
more recently employed by David Schenk to describe a purported information
glut, as data smog.
The soupy, saturated realm satirised by Douglas in his 1907 description ofthe postcard engulfing the world returns in the figure of data smog and
particularly in the epidemic diagnosed as blogitis. A fear of discourse can be
attributed to the same fear as Douglas expressed of the postcard, that it would
imbue the non-physical world which represented itself in the blogosphere with
the self-conscious air of the reproduced.
In One-Way StreetWalter Benjamin wrote:
[o]pinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines:
one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a littleto hidden spindles and joints that one has to know. (444)
These hidden spindles and joints are the places where inconspicuous forms
are fostered; for Benjamin, in One-Way Street, faced with an environment of
data smog, prolific prompt language is the only one equal to the moment
of modernity:
Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation
between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its
influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal
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gesture of the book in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this
prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment. (444)
My argument might be seen as a prelude to the observation that the blog offersan opportunity to contribute effectively in this facilitation of movement. This
contribution would come from the blogs capacity to offer prompt language,
opinion-as-action in the face of a lifestyle otherwise stilled by the proliferation
of fact. The blog, after all, facilitates the expression of opinion above all, and its
migration toward journalism and other forms of information delivery represents
ultimately a drift against the nature of the medium. The movement offered by
blogs I want to characterise as not merely the provision of opinion, but more
particularly as the circulation of affect, which is sometimes prompted by, and
sometimes prompts, the expressive energy of the blog. Prompt language, inthis context, is language which moves: relations of motion and rest: affect
(Massumi 20).The postcard was important for literacy not merely because it was easily
accessible, easily used and easily delivered, but because it associated literacy
with affective exchange. As effectively a stamp that could be written on, the
postcard reduced the materiality of communication to its bare economy: the
postcards journey celebrated the elimination of the world because the distance
it effectively had covered in circling the globe added up to exactly zero
(Siergert 154). Surprisingly, then, what worldwide postage offered was thediminution of physical distance and the substitution of relations of motion andrest in the form of bare, phatic messages. The blogs work within the networks
of the world wide web has the same effect, one hundred years later, when the
earlier technology has lost its immediacy and capacity to move. Where these
prolific exchanges might lodge, and how they might find themselves in the way
of hidden spindles and joints depends upon a recognition of the particular
affective registers of blogging, and recognising that on some fundamental level
the blogs template and overdetermined format is, in fact, a fundamental aspect
of its rhetorical potential.Devising blogging as the prompt language of postmodernity redeploys the
concepts of late modernity to new ends. By severing the postcards provision
from its usual context and adumbrating it here as a late modern blog Ive
hoped to do the kind of creative violence Massumi speaks of when he writes
of the re-use of concepts:
A concept could be severed from the system of connections from which it is
drawn and ploppped into a new and open environment where it suffers an
exemplary kind of creative violence. . . . When you uproot a concept from its
network of systemic connections with other concepts, you still have its
connectibility. (30)
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This severed concept plopped into a new and open environment analogies theunpredicable movement of prompt language into its spindles and joints, and
offers a way to understand linking as a final form of contagious expression in
the informational flow described by blogs. Thinking through the blog as a late
formation of the postcard posits the blog within a contemporary moment
strategically connectedto the late modernity betoken by the postcard. Thinking
through the blog in terms of concepts severed from one system and yet still
bearing the character of connectibility brings us to the metaphor of the link as
a form of neutral metaphor quite distinct from the contagions and smogs which
have otherwise preoccupied theories of connectivity. Links materialise, perhaps
memorialise the affective incursions represented by the system of blogs; their
presence gives a new framework for the analysis of flows in the blogosphere, an
analysis which benefits from a consideration of its precusor technology, the
postcard.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Fergus Armstrong, Kate Lilley, and Susan Thomas for the ways
in which they facilitated and enlivened my work on postcards and blogs.
2. Wongs marvelous analysis of the postcards negotiation of incommensurabilities and
of the fragmentation of the colonial world pursues these implications.
3. Hafners description of the cloistered bathroom blogger evokes Edelmans explorationof urinary segregation, and particularly Edelmans discussion of the scene from Laura
where Clifton Webb types in the bathtub, his typewriter lying on a tray that obscures his
groin. This image is conveniently used on the cover of Edelmans book.
4. For a properly complex account of the violent intrusions (72) of catachresis, see
Parker.
5. Is it merely coincidental that Knauss dictionary parodies Ambrose Bierces 1911
Devils Dictionary, a satirical encyclopedia written during the period of postcard mania?
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