Wednesday, August 17, 2005
(2:29 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Paradigm-Shattering Post of World-Historical Significance
To begin, let me define one of my favorite prefixes: "meta." When an activity is designated as "meta," it indicates a level of reflexivity. For instance, meta-blogging would be blogging about blogging, meta-thinking would be thinking about thinking, etc. I know that people have been confused by that usage before, so I felt it was important to clarify (and this sentence is arguably a meta-clarification, clarifying why I was clarifying).Scott McLemee writes in reference to my previous post:
This would be something else again: meta-meta-blogging.This raises an interesting question that faces us in our contemporary postmodern context: how many levels of reflexivity are possible? To take Scott's example, if I were to write a post about the genesis and structure of my previous post, would that be meta-meta-blogging? Could this theoretically continue for infinite levels of reflexivity, with "meta-meta-meta-meta..." extending up through all of eternity, the epitome of the Hegelian "bad infinity"?
It is possible to get even more reflexive than that -- but then you run the risk of disappearing up your own asshole. I heard it happened to John Barth at one point in the 1970s. It was really hard on the students in his creative-writing workshop.
Ben Wolfson's comment in that same thread indicates the direction any answer to this question must take:
Since meta-blogging is a form of blogging, blogging about meta-blogging can be assimilated to meta-blogging—a specialized form, perhaps.My post, Scott avered, was an example of meta-meta-blogging. As we recall, the definition of meta-activity is "activity about activity," and so to meta-meta-blog, I would have to "meta-blog about meta-blogging." To expand this out for the two meta-terms, we would have "blogging about blogging about blogging about blogging."
Now, I'm going to contend that blogging, like thinking, always has an object -- it is always implicitly "blogging [about X]." In most cases of meta-blogging, the implied "X" of the second "blogging" is very general, for instance, "blogging about politics" or "blogging about life in general," and meta-blogging is a reflection on what it is like to blog about such topics: "blogging about blogging [about X]." In the case of the supposed "meta-meta-blogging," we get an X of "blogging about blogging." We can say that meta-meta-blogging is reducible to meta-blogging.
There is no theoretical maximum of the number of levels of abstraction that a particular instance of meta-blogging could be denoted as representing (i.e., "meta-meta-meta..." on to infinity), but this infinity can still always be reduced to the single level of reflexivity indicated by the term "meta-blogging." Meta-blogging is therefore an example (perhaps the example) of the true Hegelian infinite.
Meta-blogging, blogging about blogging, is "pure" blogging. And yet the indivisible remainder, the "about X," persists as an irreducible stain in all supposedly pure blogging. No matter how many levels of abstraction one tries to put between a blog post and this material occasion and goal of blogging, it is always equally close, and always irreducibly distant. This is because, as Ben also points out, "each post—no matter the content—will also be a meta-blogging post"--not, as Ben contends, because every post says, "this is how blog posts ought to be," but because every post says, "I am blogging." That is, the irreducibility of meta-blogging is not simply an accidental feature, a result of the fact that every particular post takes place in the context of other posts and is at least implicitly commenting on and assessing those other posts. No, the phenomenon that I am describing is in fact what allows every blogger to blog, including the first blogger who ever blogged back when there were no other blog posts.
Blogging blogs blogging. Blogging blogs blogging--about X. Every blogging is the first blogging, the advent of blogging, and yet every blogging is always already too late to be the first blogging, is always already meta-blogging. Meta-blogging slips always into blogging; blogging slips always into meta-blogging. The irreducible gap between the impossible blogging and the impossible meta-blogging is the inert material X, the stain on the sheets of pure blogging--simultaneously the subject of blogging and the excrimental remainder.
Meta-blogging is blogging about blogging about myself as blogger, or alternately, blogging about blogging about shit.