I Write Because I Don't Want to Die

What would I do if the doctor gave me six months to live? I'd type faster.

(Isaac Asimov)

Some of you – possibly as many as none – might have noticed that I missed my regular posting deadline last week. This was occasioned by personal circumstances that I’m not going to discuss here quite yet, although my partner and I felt comfortable with sharing them on another forum. At any rate, my failure to update the blog didn’t prevent it from attracting its largest weekly reader numbers ever, and by quite some margin. So I’m going to start from that this week, and what it says about where and to whom these writings belong.

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With the wisdom imparted by nearly three years of blogging, I have largely given up trying to anticipate what will prove popular and what won’t, as I am more frequently wrong than I am right. But even so the success of the post in question – on Richard Scarry’s book What Do People Do All Day? – has really surprised me: especially since it expanded on a recurring topic, I vaguely anticipated that it might interest some of my regular readers and be over in the course of its allotted week. Not so. On week one, it did the rounds mainly on Twitter: concentric ripples that you could almost trace in graphical form, followed by more intricate lines zig-zagging across the Atlantic and occasionally leaping back to this part of the world. Then came James Bridle's booktwo. Then Bobulate and, a week or so later, Kottke and the Ideas section of The Boston Globe. I confess I had never heard of the middle two, but to put them in perspective, Bobulate has two and a half times as many subscribers of the most widely subscribed New Zealand blog [1]; Kottke, nearly fifty times as many. That would be over 57,000 people through Google Reader alone.

I couldn’t begin to credibly extrapolate how many actual regular readers that translates into, except I have a very precise idea of what happens when the blog owner is kind enough to point to something you’ve written. More ripples, but vastly amplified this time, via dozens of tweets and retweets and hundreds of Facebook ‘shares’. Yet nothing that leaves a trace, unlike in the old media: no print runs that get sold out, no physical displacement of resources or tangible, material effect on the physical world. Since the traffic produced very few comments, were it not for the fact that I keep site statistics I wouldn’t even know about it. But always these events affect the writing space, changing the makeup of its readership and therefore the sense of what belongs in it.

In my case, it used to be that the majority of this blog’s regulars came from New Zealand. Now it’s the US first, followed by Britain. I have no control over this, although I suppose that if I were perverse enough I could attempt to put off those overseas readers by writing more local content unlikely to be understood without the appropriate keys. But then I am not from here either, so I would likely alienate New Zealanders even more with my clumsy overreaching. Conversely, I have more readers from France and Germany than my native Italy, a situation I would dearly love to reverse – if only I knew how. Locally accented content alone doesn’t do it, although I’d probably do well to ask myself why I never blog in Italian and see where that takes me. But so long as one persists in writing in the lingua franca, there will always be a pull towards the old imperial centres, where the networks are denser and the blogs and Twitter feeds have a following that easily dwarfs the most popular of our own.

And so it strikes me that the liking and the sharing are also a form of appropriation; that what is being selected by a handful of Great Aggregators or Super Readers are the posts most likely to appeal to the largest and most seamlessly connected cultural networks; and that when it happens to be a fragment of the arguments I am trying to develop on these pages that gets promoted via this highly sophisticated process of selection, by then it’s too late, not to mention churlish, for me to worry about how it could be perceived in isolation. It was mine, briefly, but now it’s gone. Voiceless, anonymised, anthologised along with the many other thousands of fragments that are liked or shared every minute of every day, it will mean what the great text that is the internet in its Anglo-American inflection allows it to mean.

***

Or so goes the argument that I’m more or less conditioned to make. But the reverse is also true, if not in fact truer: that even to the extent that liking and sharing are a form of appropriation, the author of a blog maintains a high degree of control over his or her writing space; and that in the act of returning, a fraction of the new readers accept to enter into a conversation on topics that don’t lend themselves so readily to global or even cross-cultural consumption, such as the history of social welfare in New Zealand. Furthermore – and this to my mind is a key point – those connections run both ways. And so it’s not just that we can read Iranian bloggers, but also that they can read us, and that we all write each other. This worldwide para-space occupied by people who more and more frequently are at the same time readers and writers is a genuinely new thing, and sometimes the only sane response to its staggering capacity to promote and disseminate texts is simply to marvel at it, as we do when we come across somebody who sits comfortably at the crossroads of culture.

I will return to some of these ideas when I deal with Jaron Lanier’s critique of the social web, but if I may I’d like to interrogate my own place in all of this today, at the cost of indulging in one of those ghastly ‘why I blog’ posts roundly and rightly mocked some time ago by Paul Litterick. Because I don’t mind telling you, in spite of some of the foregoing, that I’m most of all pleased whenever somebody bothers to share something I’ve written. And it’s not just that I have an ego or that I want to be liked, nor that I still find this gig so utterly unlikely, my being allowed to write every week to an actual audience, that ultimately I need to be reassured that it’s okay because look, somebody actually reads the stuff. It’s also that all of these acts map networks of shared interest that in themselves give meaning to the writing, in a process that is rendered more valuable by its being visible and concrete. (And the names on blog rolls operate in a similar way, making visible a more permanent set of connections.)

Without these, without the possibility of making and reading into such connections, I couldn’t really conceive of keeping a blog, and without blogging I’m not sure I could have pursued writing, in this or any other medium. Owen Hatherley alluded to this in one of the most generous write ups ever received by this blog, when he suggested that a certain kind of columnist has been ‘pushed online by the vagaries of wordcounts and networks both technological and institutional’. This is probably true, but the flip side is that I doubt I could in fact have become that columnist in print – not without the apprenticeship.

And so we come to the part that suspiciously resembles a ‘why I blog’ statement. How the hell did I get myself into this? Well, it’s too late now.

For some reason I think quite often about this one sentence from a book by Guido Almansi called La ragion comica, The Comic Reason: Rido soprattutto perché non voglio morire. 'I laugh mostly because I don’t want to die.' I don’t have the book to hand and have since forgotten whether it was a quotation from somebody else, or what Almansi’s general argument even was at that point. It just sits there. Then I go back to a line that I never developed, about how writing doesn’t take time, it makes time. I have come to believe that this is probably true. And the other part, too: that writing can be both a strategy for deferral and a source of pleasure. Joy, even.

I write mostly because I don’t want to die. I’m not even sure what that means, except that I thought of that line while I was preoccupied with something far more important than writing, and while this other thing that I wrote briefly got a life of its own.

[1] A note on the method is probably in order here. There is one piece of public information that can give a rough idea of the relative regular readership of two or more blogs, and it's the number of Google Reader subscribers. It's a far from perfect piece of data - it tends for instance to penalise blogs that don't syndicate the full feed or push particular alternative forms of subscriptions, such as mailing lists or livejournal or blogger following. Public Address for instance is certainly underrepresented by this statistic, which is why when I say 'the most widely subscribed New Zealand blog' (ie Kiwiblog), you shouldn't quote me on it. But that's likely the order of magnitude anyhow.

Found Objects

I am very pleased that Studiolum took the time to respond to my review of Poemas del río Wang, and that he considered some of my suggestions on how to read his blog fitting to its design. Learning that one of the conscious models behind Río Wang is Alberto Savinio’s Nuova enciclopedia was a source of particular delight: there is so much that one could write about the digital form based on that stated affinity – a Master’s thesis’ worth perhaps. But in good time. So long as I have started to explore blogs as native digital forms, and speculate on which particular exemplars may be better suited to improving our media ecology, I want to turn my attention this week to a blog that is in several respects the opposite of Río Wang, at least on the surface.

From the Phase IV (1974) series, posted by Dolly Dolly at Found Objects

The idea for Found Objects came earlier this year to Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism and the blog k-punk. In both the book and the blog – the latter, just the other day – Mark makes the point that ‘screen culture is connective, not reflective’, and that one of the consequences of our wired lifestyles is a ‘twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus’. Sadly this is a debate that is framed more often by the likes of Nicholas Carr, author of the infamous ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ and more recently of The Shallows, which – along with every other human in possession of a keyboard – I intend at some point to review. At any rate, without addressing either version of that viewpoint explicitly, I offered Río Wang to my readers last week as a model for a vision of cyberspace that is predicated precisely on creating the space and time for reflection, without repudiating any of the key aspects of digital textuality, but rather embracing them fully.

Río Wang stands out from the majority of blogs in a couple of respects that matter especially to what I want to discuss today: it rarely indulges in the quick, throwaway post, choosing a slow and very deliberate, considered approach, as if following a larger design (I don’t want to call it slow blogging without attempting to define what it means, which is not for today); and, in spite of its formidable armoury of images, it very rarely dumps them on the reader without exposition or analysis. You may wish to compare this with the very popular and in many respects admirable Bibliodyssey, of which I have, sadly, tired: there are only so many beautiful sets of pictures from rare and exquisitely illustrated sixteenth century tracts that I can gaze admiringly at before a jaded weariness sets in. Bibliodyssey strives generally to give basic information and context about all of these found treasures, but without an analytical and critical framework it’s just another one of those wonderful places on the Web – Strange Maps and How to Be a Retronaut seem to have become everyone’s favourites these days – that makes you go ‘Oh, cool!’ every single time. But more and more often these days I just click away. The twitch is setting in.

From The Three Ages of Briton, posted by Unmann-Wittering.

Having premised all this, you may think I would shudder at Found Objects’ tagline: 'hauntological dumping ground'. So I need to explain why it is that I don’t.

First things first: The term hauntology has its origins in Spectres of Marx, where Jacques Derrida used it to describe how Marxism survived as a ghostly, haunting presence after its death at the hand of history, but Fisher has given it a rather different remit, built over time in his writings at k-punk. Quite appropriately, you won't find a textbook definition there, but rather a series of analyses in which the fundamental traits of hauntology are gradually teased out (I'd commend to you in particular this masterful post on Kubrick's The Shining and this one on the Ghost Box label). As a result of this indeterminacy, you'll probably find that there are as many notions of hauntology as there are contributors to Found Objects (that is to say forty-five, and counting).

A fascio from the Identity Card of my great-grandmother, issued in 1938. Not posted at Found Objects.

While I realise that it is probably more literally-minded than most, my personal take on what an hauntological object is goes something like this.

There are no photographs of my maternal grandfather at a Fascist rally, nor did he preserve a copy of his Party membership card. However I know for a fact that both of them would have existed and it's quite easy to imagine what they looked like. Indeed looking at any one image of a public gathering in that area and from that period I could make a mental substitution, or even locate a stand-in that looks sufficiently like him, and put my grandfather in the scene without doing a major disservice to truth. Equally I could take his regular identity card from that era, scan somebody else’s Party card, transfer his photo from the former into the latter and create an artefact that, whilst forged, recreates a moment in the historical past whose documentary traces my family has erased. False memories of actual pasts, or real memories of pasts that failed to eventuate – like a letter that never reached its destination, or the promotional materials for a film that never got distributed – are hauntological, in that we can sense and sometimes even measure the gap between their truth and their untruth. They are not quite there, but they are not quite not-there either. Furthermore, and crucially for my understanding of all of this, the precisely shaped space left empty by my grandfather's Fascist Party membership card is also hauntological, a space defined by a concrete and meaningful absence. (To put it more simply: I know exactly where it is that we would keep it, but it’s not there, and its not being there is a presence of sorts.)

I'm sure you can see how this critical term would be essential to a proper understanding of mediated memory, and I will talk soon about the lamentable under-development of this dimension in memory studies. But hauntology does not refer simply to the past: we are also haunted by the futures that we no longer imagine. It is chiefly in this respect that Derrida's lesson in the otherwise largely dated Spectres of Marx remains most valuable, for Socialism is one such future. But so are the past futures of science fiction, of Futurism, of architecture and design, of science proper. John Ptak's brilliant blog Science Books is an acute and at times seemingly near-exhaustive catalogue of many of these branches of hauntology. At Found Objects thus far the main reservoir has been popular culture: music, film, television, comics, publishing, narrative fiction, advertising, a gallery of the self-explanatory mixed with the truly eclectic and surprising. And not all of the objects are found, either, some are original creations or remixes, such as this musical piece care of Unmann-Wittering or this short film by Dolly Dolly.

A frame from Dolly Dolly’s Ether. Reminiscent of Decasia but decidedly more haunting.

True to the dumping ground label, the posts on Found Objects to date are rarely accompanied by explanations. It is the objects, the ghosts themselves that enter into a conversation. For my only contribution thus far, for instance, I was rather uncannily led by a sign for Scarab Close to the place where I wrote last year about lost objects, and Found Magazine. All that remained to do was post (dump) the image and cover my tracks by not linking to where my scarab came from. I saw, for once, no place for reasoned argument, and besides that argument was, again, far too literally-minded to account for the spectral conversation, and too laden for the speed at which this conversation takes place.

That is something else: last Friday alone there were eighteen posts on Found Objects. There really is no time for saying ‘Oh, cool!’, or to get twitchy. It is a thing that moves, that buzzes. It reminds me a little of the road in Falling Out of Cars, except I am not sure if meaning is being lost or found. But it is the road itself, or if you prefer the track, that is becoming densely symbolic, a thing to think with: about cyberspace, about textuality and materiality, about history, culture, memory, time.

From Cop This, You Crooks!, posted by ekolad

And then there are the contributors, for whom I might just have to dust off again the idea of authoriety. Whose blog is Found Objects? Is ours a research unit of sorts, or does it aspire to be? Could the project evolve along the lines of Hacking the Academy, with a book or in performance? Does Found Objects need a hashtag, and if it found one, could it cease to be a blog and just be out there, germinating in places that we cannot foresee, speaking other languages? If in fact the project has a limitation at this moment it is what I’d otherwise think of as a virtue: its being so predominantly (although not quite exclusively) of one place – for let’s face it, you’re not always going to feel terribly haunted unless you are British. But that too could change, and quickly.

There is a sense then in which Found Objects is a spectral double to Poemas del río Wang – as fast as the other is slow, proceeding by free association instead of studious reflection, speaking in a melange of voices instead of few carefully inflected and highly distinctive ones. But they both work, and do the work of mapping for us cyberspace not as it is, but as it could be. We need to value that.

Future Alarm. Posted by Mark.

Authoriety

I'm not nearly as pessimistic as you seem to be. I reckon we'll continue generating fresh content for millennia to come. Ideas are plentiful, and new combinations thereof even more so. Leave them alone, and they will come home, wagging their footnotes behind them.

Jolisa Gracewood


Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.

Wilson Mizner

The French poet and critic Pierre Menard (d. 1939) has left us a small and largely unremarkable body of works, save for one that is of peculiar but enduring interest - a contemporary critic called it in fact ‘perhaps the most significant writing of our time’: his fragments from Don Quixote. In this undertaking, Menard set out not to update or revise Cervantes’ source, that is to say write a contemporary Quixote, but rather compose the Quixote itself, and not simply by copying it, either, but rather by producing a number of pages which coincided word for word and line for line with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

Initially, Menard's method was to be relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or the Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 onwards - in other words be Miguel de Cervantes, but he discarded it as too easy. Being somehow Cervantes and arriving thereby at the Quixote: that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.

The result, while verbally identical to the Cervantes text, is almost infinitely richer. Cervantes, for instance, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counsellor.

Written in the seventeenth century by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, this strikes us as a merely rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes the following:

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counsellor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is exceptional. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very foundation of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened. The final phrases - exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counsellor - are brazenly pragmatic, and yet so richly suggestive for those who seek to understand what came after, the postmodern and our most troubled dealings with history and the past.




But Menard’s example says a thing or two about authorship, as well. The news media and a fair chunk of the blogosphere in New Zealand have been preoccupied over the last ten days or so by the discovery by Jolisa Gracewood of a number of unacknowledged quotations from various sources in Witi Ihimaera’s latest novel, The Trowenna Sea. When put in front of the list of correspondences found by Dr. Gracewood, Ihimaera swiftly apologised and volunteered to submit himself to arbitration with his employer, the University of Auckland. Yet he was adamant in his contention to the New Zealand Listener that he hadn’t committed plagiarism, but merely a series of ‘oversights’, and the University quickly reached the same conclusion, as did his publisher. We look forward to the second edition - which will no doubt rectify these lapses - and move on, for there is nothing to see here.

Or is there?

The discussion at Public Address following Jolisa’s two successive blog posts on the subject (here and here) was decidedly and in some respects surprisingly lively, as were the interjections of some who wished to reflect more broadly on contemporary notions of authorship and originality across different media. More particularly, David Cauchi made a case for painting and Philip Matthews another for film, inviting the rest of the commenters to ponder the following question: are the domains of literature, criticism and journalism clinging to antiquated notions of what constitutes creativity, and how originality should be measured and understood?

Consider what my alma mater has to say on the subject of plagiarism:

Plagiarism undermines academic integrity simply because it is a form of lying, stealing and mistreating others. Plagiarism involves stealing other people’s intellectual property and lying about whose work it is. This is why plagiarism is prohibited at Victoria.

Intellectual property, that is to say the private ownership of words and ideas: it doesn’t sound like the kind of relationship with knowledge that a place of higher learning ought to foster, does it? Besides, how do you even steal words, or ideas? They are hardly gone after you have taken them. How about ‘lying about whose work it is,’ then? Perhaps that’s the crux of the matter. Producing knowledge requires an effort, is work. If anybody could simply claim the credit for the work of anybody else then the knowledge industry - which is regulated by market relations that monetise this credit in various ways - would cease to function. But surely the social good lies in the knowledge itself, not in its attribution, and besides the example of the anonymous authors of so much oral poetry, traditional music and contemporary street art, it is quite possible to imagine a utopian socialist knowledge industry where ideas circulate freely, thus facilitating and accelerating the production of more knowledge.

Because in truth, how can you locate the point of origin of an idea or a certain sequence of words except in the culture itself? Roland Barthes, circa 1968, in 'The Death of the Author':

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. […] [T]he writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.

The following year, Michel Foucault began his essay 'What is an author?' by posing a question originally formulated by Samuel Beckett: 'What does it matter who is speaking?' to which Barthes had replied in advance:

writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

Now I don't want to reduce these two essays and their peculiar conversation to a couple of easy-to-digest snippets, nor ignore the specific historical and cultural conditions in which they were produced, at a time when what Foucault dubbed 'the-man-and-his-work-criticism' held full sway. But one could legitimately ask: if an understanding of intertextuality and the ideas of the death of the author and the author-function have been around for so long, why haven't they changed the way the publishing industry operates, or forced a rethinking of what constitutes plagiarism in publishing and academia? Is it simply a case of those critics and those ideas having been cast aside?

I would say yes, and no. On the one hand, yes, the publishing industry has changed its ways not a jot, nor did Barthes or Foucault themselves to my knowledge ever renounce their name on the cover or the customary protections and moral rights afforded to a published author. Ditto Ihimaera. Hell, even Bansky has claimed these, albeit 'against his better judgment'. But I think more profoundly the idea that authorship and its integrity matter has proved equally as resilient. Pierre Menard himself tell us that we can’t quite dispense completely with it - even as he goes about turning it upside down - by showing how differently we would have to read Don Quixote if we knew it to have been written by a 20th century Frenchman as opposed to a 17th century Spaniard.

Of course, you say? Well, yes. But consider how electronic writing and the Internet were meant to change all this, further unsettling traditional ideas concerning just who it is who does the writing and possibly killing the author all over again by circulating near-infinite variations on a near-infinite number of texts without a discernible point of origin, or a shred of attribution. This remains a source of anxiety, but I would argue it really hasn't happened yet. If anything, people who write on the Web have developed a whole new and highly sophisticated sensitivity towards issues of textual attribution and historicity. I've touched in the past by way of example upon the edit history of Wikipedia entries, which shows an attention to intricate philological issues on the part of a writing community that consists largely - and I mean this in the most non-derogatory way possible - of amateurs.

The vast majority of bloggers are also very careful to credit their sources, and the manner in which they do so is interesting, for the hyperlinks provided often point to the pages where each discovery took place. It’s only by means of further jumps, following an Ariadne’s thread of sorts, that one is likely to get to the source proper, the location where that particular text came to be. Or not, of course, there’s always the possibility that one or more of the pages might have expired by then, but that for once doesn’t matter: it’s in that pattern of connections, however provisional and unstable, that one can glimpse a new way of mapping the space where authorship and readership come to coexist.

I want to talk about this again, and to discuss what the author-function of a blogger, amongst others, might be. I suspect we’ll find it is highly plastic and I’ll go as far as to reserve a word to describe this, authoriety, an empty and extremely-unlikely-to-be-of-any-use-to-anybody term that perhaps some of you might help me fill - I have but vaguest of ideas at present, save for the fact that I think it would be an interesting question to explore.

But in the meantime, what of Ihimaera’s indiscretions? Would it even matter that he neglected to credit those sources, were it not for the legal framework within which the publishing industry operates, or the possibly antiquated notions of originality and individuality that we choose to entertain in this particular medium? I think that even under those conditions it does, it would. For crediting a source, the site where some particular words came together in the way that they did, means also preserving a trace of the text’s place within the culture that produced it, of its genealogy.

Consider a remote and fanciful future where Menard’s Quixote survived while Cervantes’ didn’t, and furthermore there was no knowledge that the earlier of the two books had even been written. This is the kind of loss - of metadata, of history, of memory - that you would be measuring every day.










Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, tr. Andrew Hurley. In Collected Fictions (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 88-95. I hardly need to point out that the contents of the post until the cover of Ihimaera’s novel are heavily plagiar… oh shut up it’s a mash up, okay? Anyhow, it’s all from Borges’ story, and it’s only seven pages long, so it’s not hard to figure out which words are mine and which are his (the good ones are his). Go read it. The young man in the picture at the top is JLB in 1921. He wrote Pierre Menard in 1939.

Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday, 1977), pp. 142-148. The text is available online here.

Michel Foucault, ‘What is An Author?’, tr. Josué V. Harari. In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 101-120). Both quotations in the post are from p. 101.

Jolisa Gracewood, ‘Keeping It Real’, in The New Zealand Listener of November 14-20, 2009, pp. 18-19.

Guy Somerset, ‘The Incredible Likeness of Being’, in The New Zealand Listener of November 14-20, 2009, pp. 15-19.


Service announcement: I have uploaded on YouTube a video of the ending of The Truce covered in last week's post, followed by the lines that were left out in the film. But more importantly, you really should read the poem that Harvest Bird contributed last night.