Wednesday, November 10, 2004
(1:02 PM) | The Young Hegelian:
The Weblog: Collective, Individual or Masquerade?
[Adam was asking for guest bloggers so I thought I’d jump in – Adrian @ The Young Hegelian]One reason why The Weblog has such a large readership is due surely not just to the quality of the writing that appears there but also the variety of perspectives we encounter under one heading. It is, on the face of it, a collective effort whose prototype is the newspaper or journal. Yet this is not the only or indeed the most typical form of the weblog. More common are blogs by individuals. I wonder if anyone has paused to reflect on what is at stake in these two different approaches to weblog writing.
The collective weblog may have its origin in journalism but it also reflects something older – the division of labour in which ‘many hands would make light work’. Yet the division of labour has certain social implications which are rarely explored when it comes to the creative process of writing. As Adam Smith showed in The Wealth of Nations, the productivity of a pin manufactory could be increased dramatically by breaking down a pin’s production into minute tasks. But along with this ‘technical division of labour’ which increased productivity grew up a ‘social division of labour’ – one person had as their sole job the hammering of the head of the pin, another the twisting of the pin-end into a sharp point. These became ‘vocations’, replacing the multi-skilled work of the artisan or cottage-industry craftsman. Smith’s examples come from the early historical moment of a trend which would soon accelerate both technically and socially beyond anything he could have imagined. And as the social division of labour became consolidated it spread to the sciences and to the academy; specialisation vastly increased the amount of collective knowledge, but at a high cost – individuals and their grasp of the world became mere fragments of something increasingly beyond their ken. This was already seen in Smith where he notes the poor education which the young worker in a manufactory receives. A few decades letter Schiller lamented it more poetically in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. But it was perhaps most thoroughly explored by Durkheim at the turn of the 20th Century: Durkheim argued that the advance of capitalism paradoxically increased both the extent of individualism but also the extent of co-operation and interdependence ('solidarity'), even when this co-operation remained typically implicit, unknown to the fragmented, isolated individual.
It may be no coincidence that both the newspaper and the journal rise to prominence at the time Smith was writing. The journal as intellectual product, as object of work (the word labour is inappropriate as it implies the wage and compulsion whereas writing here is something that is not fully commodified) reflects this Durkheimian co-operation in which individuality is preserved and even enhanced. Durkheim of course thought that this dual process was perfectly realisable within a liberal economy (augmented by a State to offset the ‘anomic’ excesses of the division of labour). Today we can’t be so optimistic; the division of labour and its excesses are endemic; conversely, co-operation which is not for profit happens only at the interstices of, and in spite of the best efforts of, capitalism which tries to incorporate such work within the cycle of accumulation and commodification and to atomise individuals even as it socialises them.
Something of the social division of labour, the assumption of vocations or ‘roles’, identities, remains in a form of writing which is a collective effort. Writers on a collective project are to an extent forced into playing a part in something which is greater than them, and with respect to which they contribute merely as a fragment, as a writer with specific traits, a specific personality who can be relied upon to contribute in a certain manner on specific topics of his or her expertise. Collective expertise emerges as the sum (or as more than the sum) of individual expertises. This is not always the case but is surely a tendency.
The writer of an individual weblog on the contrary has to spread his or her expertise around if they are to give any authority to their writings. The problem encountered by the individual writer (whose prototype is not so much the journal or the newspaper as the pamphlet) is how to write on a range of different topics that might appeal to a wide audience. And how to emulate the different styles which are one virtue of the collective weblog? The results are often unhappy. The individual blogger seems ‘eclectic’; each change of writing style or delving into other fields of expertise comes across as inconsistency, as promiscuity, as schizophrenia, as evidence that he is ‘a jack of all trades and a master of none’ – a phrase of almost Smithian condescension.
A third alternative exists (and doubtless I could think of more than three if I put my mind to it – writing in trinities won’t dispel the illusions you have about Hegelianism!), namely to combine the individual and the collective and to adopt the social division of labour within yourself; as it were, to ironise this division in the form of a set of masks. This is achieved to impressive degree in some contemporary weblogs, Wealth Bondage for example. The prototypes for this form are many, though one in particular springs to mind: Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms which always distance the text as product from the ‘author’ in ways which make thematic the link between individuality and the social division of labour, which play with the modern notion of ‘personality’ bequeathed to us by bourgeois law and Kantian moral philosophy; they acknowledge too that Kierkegaardian ‘anxiety’ each of us has at revealing our ‘true selves’.
Why do I choose the individual weblog at the cost of seeming eclectic, a jack of all trades, and of missing the Kierkegaardian problematic? Because I feel that we should all be jacks of all trades and masters of them as well (insert ‘Jill’ and ‘mistress’ where appropriate). Because I admire Schillerian all-roundedness, which was never simply the naïve Enlightenment ideal it is made out to be (if anything division and diremption characterise the Enlightenment; Schiller and Hegel after him are counter-Enlightenment thinkers to this extent). It is the same aspiration which is still present in some of our ostensibly ‘post-modern’ thinkers: Negri talks of human ‘multivalency’, the fact that we can connect to others in a myriad of different ways if only we would try, if only the social division of labour were not so entrenched, if only we ceased to enjoy being just one thing yet good at it, if only we didn’t have just one area of expertise, just one writing style, one personality.
A final thought: The recent development of politically linked blog-rings (such as the Progressive Blog Alliance) is to be welcomed, and certainly they seemed to galvanise bloggers before the election. But if one looks at it in the light of the above it is a development which links something individual with the collective only in a direct and immediate way. Each weblog gains the good conscience that it is part of a wider political project but doesn’t question the politics of its own form. What may be needed in the wake of political failure is an exploration of such form, which include inquiry into the nature of weblog writing as work rather than labour, as pre-figurative of a world beyond capital – Marx’s evening critic, or the ‘collective intelligence’ that is spoken of today – what form should these phenomena which are coming into being take? The need not just to link individual projects of liberation together but to get each individual to explore what they understand by liberation. A certain introspection as well as our familiar looking outward may paradoxically be needed if the individuality of our writing is to be mediated by the collective in a truly radical way.
