Theorising on the Run: An Impulsive Account of Online Writing

In any case, so there I am sitting in front of an electronic document pasted with sentences and words I collected on my way. Each one of the moments captured in the little passages was beautiful,or at least interesting, in its own way.As I was trying to turn this bundle of realities into a story, I realised that trying to consolidate all the bits and pieces into a coherent mass would, in fact, mean killing each and every one of them.

We live in the age of overarching narratives. The story is what matters, not what happens in between, or around; lack of depth; tsk tsk tsk. With public attention spans reaching record lows, processes are just not interesting any more. What matters is the bottom line or – depending on the format - the headline. Many people no longer look at actual scenes, situations, and compositions, only at outcomes. In a way, once you place a scene within a sequence you kill it.

I concluded that seaming those writings together necessarily meant imposing an interpretation. True, if anyone should impose himself on my literature it may as well be me, but I felt that would miss the whole point. Placed next to each other, the events and sentences are not deprived of context, but they are still on the spotlight on their own.
By framing these moments as standalone happenings, I turn my writing (back) into something, dare I say, artless. Something that uses what is available in front of it to convey a feeling, without pre or postproduction. If narrative writing is comparable with cinema, then this must be the verbal incarnation of photography - Verbography.
But, enough about me for now. Let us go off on a tangent.

Volatile volitions
Milan Kundera opens his Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a tale of Communist Prague. In 1948, the communist leader Klement Gottwald addressed several hundred thousand citizens from a palace balcony. As it often is in February on that part of the world, it was cold, snowing. Clementis, one of the comrades sharing the balcony with the leader, took off his fur hat and placed it on Gottwald’s bald head.

Hundreds of thousands of copies were made of the famous photo, showing Gottwald standing on a balcony with a fur hat, surrounded by his supportive companions. When a few years later Clementis was charged with treason and hanged, the propaganda section made sure he vanished from history, and he was erased from all photographs. ‘Where Clementis stood [in the photograph], there is only the bare palace wall’, Kundera tells us. The only thing that remains of Clementis is the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.

The next chapter takes us forward, to 1971. Mirek, a recalcitrant intellectual who uses an unexpected leave of absence to try to recover a bundle of letters he wrote to a certain Zdena, with which he has been briefly involved 20 years earlier. Unlike comrade Clementis, Mirek’s life does not depend on the letters; they contain no inflammatory political statements. Mirek wants the letters back because Zdena is ugly. More accurately, he is unable to live with the thought that somewhere in the world an ugly woman- that he dislikes – possesses evidence of an intimate relationship with him. As he drives towards recuperating his lost letters, Mirek thinks to himself ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’.

Photography
Roland Barthes distinguishes photography from its preceding mediums. [As I have noted elsewhere] A photograph is not only a representation, but also a testament that the depicted object existed in reality. As Jean Luc Goddard said, ‘Photography is truth (and Cinema is truth 24 frames a second).’ The photograph captures a real existence and brings it to the spectators’ time and space. The photograph confirms the existence of the object but also destabilizes it at the same time. In Barthes’ words ‘it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred.’

Once we know we are being photographed we necessarily alter our stance; we want the camera to capture our real self, which Barthes calls our ‘Air’. This reflexive posturing means what we see in the photograph is ‘neither subject nor object, but a subject who feels he is becoming an object.’

Getting Technical on Me
Now that I have decided to leave my bits of writing on their own, I had to find a home for them. In one of my various expeditions on the World Wide Web, I came across a platform for writing online journals, or web-logs. I decided to start my own Blog. That gave me the option to host all those words and sentences in one place, each on its own, but in close proximity to each other.

I began by typing in some of the ones that I have already collected. Once that collection was exhausted, I began adding new pieces as they surfaced. Then, I learned about a new option. It was possible for me to email my Verbographs from my mobile phone straight to the Blog itself - to publish from my mobile phone (!). ‘Finally’, I thought, ‘I have found a medium that offers me the estrangement I need to really write; typing from my mobile phone to a platform accessible to (potentially) millions, far beyond my control’.
The new medium seemed to offer me the estrangement necessary for really writing. It was not only Verbal Photography, or Verbography anymore- it was live Verbography.

Originality
Photography, unlike preceding plastic art forms, is much easier to duplicate. In the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin claims that upon reproduction, a work of art losses its ‘Aura’. A reproduction is devoid of a uniqueness that gives the original a ‘mysterious power’.
Online Verbography is unique because it is at once an original and a replica. An ‘electronic’ author writes a piece and audiences are able to access it from their living rooms or desktops. What they see is not a copy, not even a transmission of an original (like in television or radio) but it is the original, where and how its author has conceived it. It is at once singular and mass produced.

The Tyrant Emerges
We tend to focus on the effect(s) technology will have on our lives once the present expires, in the future. Alas, No one seems to worry about the impact technology will have on our past.
According to Trevor Barr, we live in a society in which information is fast becoming the leading commodity. This means that in the not so distant future most of our possessions will be bits of information. However, that we have access to information, or even that we own it, does not necessarily mean we have physical possession of it. Increasingly, we are allocated our share of information from centrally located databases: banks, government organisations, universities, and other content or information providers. Content management applications, active on every Windows ™ powered computer, have the capacity to update local information in accord with changes to the original, online version.

In addition, as mobile devices become common, there is a growing need for clients (citizens…) to store their information centrally for easier access. People use different workstations (Work, Home, Mobile Phone, and PDA) and store their information on remote access drives that are accessible from various platforms. Not only we consume network-based information, but also the information we produce ourselves is progressively being stored on remote networks and databases.

Therefore, he who has the power to alter those databases has the power to change the information possessed by the constituents of the network society. More than ever before, the struggle of man against power, as Mirek told us back in 1971, is the struggle of memory against forgetting. This may be an alarming realisation (please, calm down), but we are not here to discuss the future of humanity. We are here to talk about literature.

With all due respect to tyrants of the communist or any other political persuasion, one kind of tyranny has been raging long before modernist totalitarianism has been conceived. Let us look at Mirek’s maker, the Czech author Milan Kundera. One critic described the characters in Kundera’s work as living under two tyrannies - the tyranny of occupied Czechoslovakia and the tyranny of Mr. Kundera's despair.

The Tyrant, or What about Me?
Our lives are a work of art. By noticing nuances and gestures, words and situations, one gradually shifts from becoming an observer of his own story to an active, imposing, director. We know that we are being watched, or that we will be, or that we want to be, by ourselves and by the ones that we will tell about it later. Therefore, we try to pose as best we can. We want the story of our life to capture our ‘Air’.

While this may be an intrinsic human- or western- obsession, nowhere is it more acute than among artists. Some call this the ‘Anticipation of Retrospection’, the way in which the existence of the acts the author experiences is affected by the imminence of his writing about them. In a way, the author’s present is already experienced in retrospect. This not only includes personal memoirs, but everything. The celebrated American photographer, Richard Avedon, once said ‘The portraits [I shoot] are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.’ Everything an artist describes or does is about him. The gist of the artist is not in what he tells us, it is in the gaze, the angle, he (she!) takes on anything and everything.

Back to mine. You will recall that I have been publishing from my mobile phone to the computer. I thought it could not get any better, until I learned about one more option. The electronic platform enabled me to edit my previous posts. Now, that may seem like nothing special. After all, any author is able to review his work. In print, they call it editions. Nevertheless, this case is different. I was not only reviewing, and changing, the original. I was changing all the copies as well. The changes I made on my desktop were immediately visible (or better still – invisible) on all of my readers’ computers as well.

I was not really writing as spontaneously as I planned, or, more accurately, I have been writing more spontaneously that I have ever imagined I would be able to. I had the power to incessantly review my work and change it in line with the view I had of my own ‘Air’. If what I wrote did not appeal to me anymore, if I have expressed an emotion that, in retrospect, seemed inappropriate or false, I would go back and change it, smoothen things out.

And so, what began as an exercise in electronic writing, ended up as an exercise in absolute authority.

But, Really, What about me?
Not before long, I found myself playing a lead role in a twisted, post-industrial (p)remake of Back to the Future meets Being John Malkovich inside my head.

This new medium was my curse. It seems that the tyranny of the author over his own reflection, over his own image, is insatiable. Powerful online authors are no longer mere casualties of the anticipation of retrospection, the desire to see the present as a reflection in past tense. They are prone to be victims of the anticipation of retroaction, the constant desire to change past texts in the light of a present context, to reflect on the present by changing the past.

As Lacan would tell you, Identity does not stem from fragmentation, identity stems from consolidation. The structural constraints (or possibilities) of the new medium puff life into what would have otherwise been a stable, invariable text.

The author’s technologically enhanced lack of a stable image of himself- even if only in past tense- is a torment of biblical magnitude. The author is sentenced to an eternity of adapting, in retrospect, the images of his own, necessarily elusive, ‘Air’. Like a postmodern Frankenstein, the hypertext comes into life to hound its master.

And so, through incessant amendments and revisions, not even a trace remains of a real, cohesive, author. Not even a fur hat.

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October 16, 2004 10:44 PM