This post is about écriture. Carles discusses a new mass media product aimed at disseminating the logocentric paradigm to a generation of media consumers socialized in visual communication media. Carles writes: "The show seems to try to let teens know that ‘blogging’ is the same as ‘being a writer.’" But is it? Isn't the absence of presence inscribed in the letter, in text as text, partially reversed if not obliterated by the connectivity implied by the "social media" that Carles laments having been deprived of in his philosophical nascence? "I remember when I was a tween, there wasn’t much 2 do," he confesses. "We didn’t really have ’social media’, so I couldn’t connect with other tweens on facebook, myspace, twitter, and chat roulette."
In Carles's interpretation, this desperate ploy by Disney, co-opting blogging as the scene/seen of writing, is the effort of a culture-industry conglomerate to maintain its monopoly on the means of entertainment, administered by its death-like grip on the very lineaments of subjectivity, as it is elaborated and articulated in language which heretofore has been hegemonically controlled by the oligarchical powers. Blogging represents the evolution of writing just as writing was the evolution of speech, serving as its dialectical opposite and its supplement simultaneously, always already subsuming writing in a complicitous evocation of the perpetually hidden origins of the speech act, the transcendental signifier. Carles is concerned that inversion of blogging as a superior form of writing perpetuates and reiterates the sterile ideology of presence that writing had effaced: "It seems to portray bloggers as people who ‘go out and get a scoop’ as opposed to the traditional blogger who ’sits on his ass’ and ‘blurbs about content in a tired voice, like a robot who is enslaved by a large group of readers.’" That is blogging is the dehumanization of the dehumanized, the absence of the absence. The robotic as not nonhuman but sheer negativity, fatigue, the weariness of the ages. The text speaks through the blogger and the writer alike, but only the blogger is "enslaved" by his méconnaissance of the scene of writing, whereas the possibility for free play always existed for the writer consumed by his own identity destroying acts of inscription. Carles notes grimly: "Blogging is serious. A lot of people get hurt. A lot of peoples’ lives’ are ruined because of blogs." Indeed. The ontological conundrum of a dispersed subjectivity conveyed in a networked presence is an epistemological vortex sufficient to trouble the most complacent phenomenologist. To speak is to be spoken. To blog is to be metablogged. The archive is not that which stores any longer but that which breathes the delicate hint of stored-ness. The pain of existential nausea.
As Derrida writes in Of Grammatology: "To speak before knowing how to speak, not to be able either to be silent or to speak, this limit of origin is indeed that of a pure presence, present enough to be living, to be felt in jouissance but pure enough to have remained unblemished in the work of difference..." Clearly Carles has this passage in mind in investigating the transitive character of "‘glorifying’ blogs to tweens," who could in some very real ways be arguably considered to be innocent of language, to be speaking avant le lettre. Yet clearly in a pre-genital stage of personality organization and development, the tween remains closer to jouissance without the mediation of abjection or excess; he or she is "unblemished" in the sense of the pure abject locus of generation, the birth in all sense of the word of the Imaginary: As Carles puts the phenomenon in his own idiom: the tween is a "lil cunt with an imagination," birthing the idea of subjectivity itself in the possibility of wholly mediated fantasy. Paraphrasing Kristeva, Carles asks, "Is it ‘fucking garbage’?" but the phrase is overdetermined, with many simultaneous interpretations demanding hermaneutical priority. To "fuck" garbage, to be on intimate terms with it or to destroy it. Is that what Carles thinks of the medium of blogging? Both and? He asks, "Have u ever been in a blog war?" But the answer is plain; he is the schizophrenic product of the process of blogging itself.
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