late modern blog, melissa hardie

Upload: maria-da-luz-correia

Post on 04-Apr-2018

216 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    1/14

    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

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    2/14

    What is the New Rhetoric? 141

    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)

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    3/14

    Chapter Ten142

    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

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    4/14

    What is the New Rhetoric? 143

    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

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    5/14

    Chapter Ten144

    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.

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    6/14

    What is the New Rhetoric? 145

    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.

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    7/14

    Chapter Ten146

    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

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    8/14

    What is the New Rhetoric? 147

    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

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    9/14

    Chapter Ten148

    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

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    10/14

    What is the New Rhetoric? 149

    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

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    11/14

    Chapter Ten150

    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

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    12/14

    What is the New Rhetoric? 151

    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)

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    13/14

    Chapter Ten152

    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?

    Works Cited

    Anonymous. Blogitis. .

    Anonymous. Blogitis: The Sickness.

    .

    Anonymous. Frenetic Mind: Politics Archives.

    .

    Anonymous. Word Salad..

    Bender, John and David E. Wellbery. The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory,

    Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

  • 7/30/2019 Late Modern Blog, Melissa Hardie

    14/14

    What is the New Rhetoric? 153

    Benjamin, Walter.A Berlin Chronicle. Selected WritingsVol. 2 1927-1934. TheBelknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London, 1999.

    595-637.

    . One Way Street. Selected Writings Vol. 1 1913-1926. The Belknap Press of

    Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London, 1996. 444-487.

    Burton, Gideon. Silvae Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric.

    .

    Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business,

    and Society. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

    Edelman, Lee.Homographesis. New York: Routledge, 1994.

    Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. New York: Little, Brown and Company,

    2000.

    Godin, Seth. Unleashing the Ideavirus.

    .

    Hafner, Katie. For Some, the Blogging Never Stops. The New York Times 27

    May 2004.Knauss, Greg. The Devils Dictionary, 2.0.

    .

    Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the

    Arts. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

    Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation.

    Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.Parker, Patricia. Metaphor and Catachresis. Bender and Wellbery 60-73.

    Perelman, Cham. The Realm of Rhetoric. Trans. William Kluback. Notre

    Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1982.

    Shenk, David.Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. (New York: Harper

    Collins, 1998).

    Rubush, Matt. Frobies House.

    .

    Siegert, Bernhard. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Trans.

    Kevin Repp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.Staff, Frank. The Picture Postcard & Its Origins. London: Lutterworth Press,

    1979.

    Vincent, David. The Progress of Literacy. Victorian Studies 45:3 (2003): 405-

    431.

    Wong, Yoke Sum. Beyond (And Below) Incommensurability. Common

    Knowledge 8.2 (2002): 333-356.

    Zenari, Vivian Folio: Postcard Fever. Folio 37:14, March 17, 2000.

    .