| thoughts from a cunning linguist | |
For the last number of days, I've been working on this paper I mentioned earlier in my blog--the one about women, warblogging, and feminist strategy. Blogs have been on my mind, in other words, even though I've neglected my own. Scholars of digitial culture, like Katherine Hayles in _How We Became Posthuman_, have suggested that we tend to treat digital sources as "information," content that is detached (or can be detached) from the bodies that produce it. She cites compelling examples, like scientists who hypothesize about downloading the human brain into a computer (as if the brain were itself simply a system of downloadable information). The history that Hayles presents seems to bear out her assertions (though, why wouldn't it? She gets to choose her own examples, of course). Nonetheless, I'm not inclined to disagree with her. For many centuries, thinking itself has been a disembodied activity (that old philosophical mind/body split). Why would it not be the case with digitized technology? The liberal humanist subject that we have inherited from philosophy has typically been an abstract, and, many have argued, white, middle class male--the ideal citizen, the image of whom has undergone rampant and, in many cases, well-deserved deconstruction. This deconstruction has often been of the mind/body binary opposition.
Now, being a Bush Whacker and all, I'm all for bodies and I'm all for discussing the significance of bodies to minds. However, I'm also very wary of the argument that simply restoring bodies (or a discussion of bodies) to discussions of the mind (digital or not) is an inherently good solution. I think many theorists have come to believe that human beings can be more diversely accounted for if we only acknowledge their bodies as being male/female/white/black, etc. I think that strategy is, at worst, misguided and and, at best, is misfiring. And I think discussions of the war in blogs bear this out.
Warblogging, it seems to be acknowledged in the meta discourse of warblogs themselves (see peaceblogs.org), was initially more dominantly an activity of the right. And in blogs of all political stripe, one can see the way the bodies of "women and children" are deployed, rhetorically, as propaganda. In any event, those who base their rationales for or against the war in feminist principles find themselves arguing not about feminism itself or even, I would say, about women. In short, left-wing feminists, in my opinion need to be able to utilize the rhetoric of the typical, abstract liberal humanist in order to argue effectively against right-wing justificiations for political and especially military action. They need not buy into it, but they need to inhabit it. The master's tools may not dismantle the master's house, but we may need to know the architecture of that house so that it can be renovated. Deconstruction in this sense has its limitations. To say that the citizens and people who will be affected by, vicitimized by, or "freed" by war are abstractions is no argument agains the war. It is a rhetorical analysis, not a pursuasion against policy.
What I'm arguing here is that even feminists still have a need for that abstraction called the liberal humanist subject--a need to use that subject as a rhetorical device.
One might say, well why are blogs any different from any other genre of critique? Why use blogs to make this point? Well, I think blogs are different because, to be circular about it, people believe there is a difference between online culture and print culture. There is the sense that people don't just use technology; rather, they append it to their bodies, making themselves cyborgs. In effect, the technology often uses them, so the argument goes. Whether we belive this to be true, this conceptualization of digital culture suggests that, in our imaginations at least, the body seems to be isolated from the mind in an extreme way. Further, a blog is (usually, but not always) the work of an individual. The blog is the lyric voice online, the most clear representation of "the individual" (in some cases, the liberal humanist subject) on the web. An online identity may be no less detached from one's body than a print author's pseudonym, in fact. But in our imaginations, the split seems more radical.
The emergence of "warblogs" themselves as a phenomenon also suggests that there is something about this genre of writing that enables people to express an opinion or provide an analysis in a forum that is both semi-public and semi-private. The blog makes a particular form of individual expression possible: even if that form is not a new genre, it does borrow interestingly from many conventional genres (the diary, the editorial, the daily log, etc). The blog constitutes a peculiar kind of speech act. Blogs therefore seem to be the voice of the disembodied subject that people associate with the internet and they also make the disembodied the subject the figure in whose name they speak in advancing the war.
Okay, I'm going to stop there, even though there's not final summary point. The body writing these disembodied blog thoughts is tired and needs some sleep before it can think through its argument to its logical end.
Tomorrow that the mind associated with that body might also learn to stop speaking inthe third-person.
Good night.
I am swayed more in the other direction, as it happens: intellectualization of blogging itself notwithstanding, it is in my opinion quite a good example of the adaptation of a more traditional outlet (journaling, diaries, etc.) to the online world, and no more or less personal than those forms of expression would be, because it is specifically designed to be personal in most cases. While I would agree that blogging is generally an individual effort, I would also suggest that there is a community-type existence in blogland as well, and typically a commonality of opinion within that community (large or small), demonstrated in the simplest form by the linklists that most people keep on their sites.
Posted by: Annette on May 21, 2003 04:54 AMI agree here, Annette. Perhaps I overstated the idea of the "individual" at the heart of the blog. Perhaps blogs even reveal something about how "individuals" are more generally "linked" to a wider variety of communiities. Blogs just make this explicit in their linklists, where in everday life, our links are not written into the selves we are in the world.
The most remarkable thing about blogging, in my mind, is not its "political capabilities," but the way communities are formed through reflective (and sometimes just frivolous) interactions. Blogs breed such interesting subcultures that often defy our conventional ideas about what counts as a "strangers" and communities themselves.
Posted by: Bush Whacker on May 21, 2003 11:49 AMSo, I suppose you had to read a lot of warblogs as research for this? Did it make you go almost nuts? :-)
I think it's remarkable how through someone's blog one body can feel connected to another body and begin to care about and think of that body as a friend. All by just reading the few thoughts and parts of their lives that they care to share with the world. But I guess that probably doesn't have anything to with what you wrote.
Yes, the warblogs have been making me nuts--they still are, as I go back through the archives of some people's blogs. It's quite amazing, to see the disputes not over positions, but over what counts as evidence for a given position to be seen as valid. I think the right and left just have different standards for evidence.
I think your other comment is very much in line with what I wrote, at least the part of my response to Annette about the way blogs enable us to conceive of relationships to "strangers" differently. Having friends via blogs is awesome!
Posted by: Bush Whacker on May 21, 2003 11:28 PM