Time to briefly engage with, or at least jump sideways from, the bubbling effervescent musings of my friend Mark. (You can tell he’s hanging out in Hawaii because the writing is all so abrupt and volcanic. The writing that happens when you live where it is all edge – water, beach, mountain, rock, lava, the ‘real’ U.S. is over there elsewhere.) So, he found a really interesting post elsewhere about RSS poetics which leads him to wonder
Is this indicative of a reverse-writerly theory that turns Barthes on his head or is it more like a theory-play where remixology meets pleasure of the text?
Perhaps it is neither? One of the places we seem to have found ourselves within (and which Mark’s own practice probably exemplifies) is the dissolution of what at the end of the day are increasingly quaint dualisms. The distinctions that so much of theory relies upon, well at least even the inimitable Roland with his post structuralist pedigree, relies upon that academic privileging of this or that, a dialectic dressed up whichever way to keep feigning altereity so that every idea always must have its reverse, obverse, or perverse other. But, to paraphrase de Certeau, it is now all tactics. Local doing which is never now local since as I sit here in Alphington looking out over the street I am a vector within I have no idea how many flows (keyboard, links in this post, in this blog, to this post, to this blog, the chatter going on invisibly between my mobile and the local towers, radio and tv waves, the power coming into the house, the heat leaving it, the music passing through my headphones and the nerves blood and muscles doing their unbidden things) which seep and move all over. At what point is what I am doing an art practice? Scholarly? Personal? When I talk to my wife on my mobile on the train why do we even want to hang on to the public and the private as a way to theorise this?
The distinctions that grounded practice – that is art and that is, what? entertainment? commerce? knowledge? – were reified because knowledge and expertise (how to do, styles of doing) was scarce. Now the conversation moves to perhaps poetics, aesthetics, styles. There are better, cooler, ways of doing, but it is now all remix, only mix, self as transitory locus. (And I don’t think this is a post about identity, those who move in the network as the site of practice and not just publication or distribution – I guess those who think Web 2 and its avatars has always been what the networks been about – long ago recognised that binary distinctions no longer hold. In a world of only muliplicity, why insist on only two?)
Tags: Lifes Little Pieces, Network Literacy, practice
