26 January 2011: "Episode 5 - Blogxistentialism: Why Do Blogs Blog?"

This post is about lalangue. What is language? Carles adds a markedly multimedia dimension to his philosophical pursuits by incorporating a voice recording. putatively of his own voice, into his weblog. Writing of the voice, French poststructuralist critic Roland Barthes wrote famously about "the grain of the voice" -- "the very precise space (genre) of the encounter between a language and a voice ... at the level of which, I believe, the temptation of ethos can be liquidated." That is, the tension between the speaker and what he speaks bears a audible material trace. I would like to propose that it is that paradoxically diachronic "space," and not the specific content of Carles's ruminations, that he wishes to convey in his audio recordings, of which a mere five-second fragment is sufficient to convey the entirely of their incalculable import.

In the inscribed text supplied to supplement/supplant the audio text, readers are told of Carles's intention to "explore blogxistentialism," a portmanteau word formed from combining weblog and existentialism, the Heideggerian-derived philosophy of being espoused most prominently by Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism, in its vulgar form, was preoccupied with the absurdity of existence in the face of radical freedom, a critique that Carles extends to communication in the emerging techno-informational sphere. "Why does HIPSTER RUNOFF even exist?" he asks searchingly, leaving unmentioned the corollary question of in what sense Hipster Runoff can be said to exist -- that is, how best to describe the ontological status of indeterminate expression, the irony of the intertextuality of all texts, even those which manifest themselves as a mockery of speech. Is a blog both being-for-itself and being-in-itself, or rather is its immanence imbued with fatal contingencies?

As Heidegger himself declared, "In the present context of an existential analytic of factical Da-sein, the question arises whether the way of the giving of the I which we mentioned discloses Da-sein in its everydayness, if it discloses it at all." The same could be asked of Carles, if, in fact, Carles is not always already posing this interrogatory to himself whenever he attempts textual inscription or speech acts or the simultaneous balance of the two, as in this post with its admixture of media. Can blogs even be said to have lived, let alone die? What is the nature of the subject disclosed in positing such existence to mercurial text? Heidegger states that "Initially the who of Da-sein is not only a problem ontologically, it also remains concealed ontically" — a critical and too frequently overlooked distinction. "Why do blogs keep blogging?" Carles asks, similarly masking the agency of a subjective consciousness through a distinction with a difference, and attributing creation to the medium itself. This posits the deeper question, why do we all continue existing? What makes being keep being?

Carles implies an answer in the image he has selected, that of a newborn human child in the arms of its mother, an apt metaphor for the "body of text" Carles intends to convey. Is it an intimate scene of bonding, or a depiction of the traumatic wrenching of the (brain)child from the womb? Of course, it is both. It evinces the life process as a modality of the reproduction of existing conditions of reality, as process of biological communication between generations not unlike the conceptual heredity experienced by successive generations of artists, poets, writers, thinkers, etc. Carles asks, "Why do humans start blogs?" Well, why do humans have children. "Why does HIPSTER RUNOFF even exist, and what do u even want from blogs?" It is simply the reproduction of society by different means, through the flesh and the word, or the word made digital flesh. "Are blogs dying?" Yes, but everything then dies; there is no cure for mortality.

This should not discourage us from the effort to communicate, or prompt a fatal return to nonsemantic communication, to seek refuge (refuse?) in the gurgling baby talk of the lalangue, as Carles's photo selection warns us against. In that route of seeking an authentic means of presence in pure lingual language itself lies only a deeper awareness of our intrinsic connection not to the mother in her pangs of birthing but to the grim reaper who will lay waste to all our words, recorded or spoken, written or blogged.