blogs I've seen and things

I feel kind of bad because I haven't really kept a running tally of the blogs I've seen around, meaning mostly I haven't kept track of the links. At some point I'd really like to start keeping a list of bookmarks or something, even if I don't read the blogs again, but so I can at least remember the links for the ones that are interesting. But I want to start to read some on a regular basis... like I read the new york times. Like I check my email. If this is going to be something I want to continue I want it to become a bit more of a habit, and I really should learn more about how to have things on a blogroll and make the page not look quite so barren. I'm still thinking about what I'd actually want to write about on here...

which takes me back to all these blogs I've seen, but hadn't really thought about as relevant, but really they are all important to looking at how this whole text thing works. I guess any blog can be a personal blog, because there is something about the person in all that writing somewhere, but the diary ones are still my main interest, even if they are all really dead or teenagers are the only ones who write on them and I have to move on to another genre soon. The ones I like the most are the ones that have a little bit of everything — I read one by this professor at Claremont who writes about conferences she's going to, her research and papers, grading things, pop culture and movies she's seen, and her every day life (which is kind of weird even though she's not my professor... what? Professors have lives?)... anyway, her whole blog is pretty interesting, because it isn't really about any one thing. But there are definitely blogs that are interesting because of what they say about music, or politics, or moustaches (seriously... I saw this one that was basically a virtual moustache growing contest. Woah).

And for all of them, my interest in their content is definitely dependent on the way they are written, or at least the personality that comes through people's writing. Which is personal... even if none of it necessarily shows me anything about what/ who they are as a person. I don't really know where that leaves me in terms of thinking blogs are cool in general as a textual problem, but I kind of am thinking that's always going to be there and I need to move on, but just not get overwhelmed.

I'm kind of liking this twisty-turny writing where I sit down to say something and sort of just go instead of planning things out, or knowing what I'm going to say. I mean, I like that I wanted to sit down and say something about the moustache blog and the other blog, but I wasn't sure what and its interesting for me turn around and look at where I went. Like wandering around somewhere without a map and then figuring out later if your route made sense. Architecture analogies are really nice for me in this context, I think.

Journaling in general

It has still been really funny to me when people ask me if I'm done yet. my token response so far has been to just say, "Basically."

I read some of my old blog. It's kind of funny... I don't know if I write that way in my paper journal also, and that its less annoying for me to read over that way because I know I'm the only one who's been able to read it, or if I was just really irritating as a teenager. In an effort to not be self-depricating, I'll venture that perhaps it has something to do with the way I was compelled to write, in what seems an almost loud, boasting, way because of the public publishing aspect of it. Sometimes when I read my paper journals from middle school and high school (and even, if I'm honest, from the first half of college)- I get so embarassed by them that I have to cover my face and hide the book under the covers in shame, until I recover. I don't read them all that often, but I did last semester for this art project I did, and it was really interesting how intense a reaction I had: pure, red-faced embarassment, and no one else was even reading them... but I ended up using some things for the project and they weren't embarassing. I wonder why that was my reaction. The on-line one is also a little embarassing, but the more I read it the more I find myself being more irritated. Like I'm embarassed compounded by that I am embarassing myself in front of a lot of people. Humiliating things are always worse when they happen in front of other people. Does danah boyd get embarassed by her posts from college? Will I, even with this copious amount of self-consciously trying to NOT be embarrassed, be embarassed/ irritated by this by this when I am 25? Or when I go to grad school, if I ever end up going?

I wonder if there ever becomes a time when I don't have to work anymore to not be self-conscious. I feel like that really defeats the purpose of it.

(In)completeness and academic mumbo jumbo

I got an academic incomplete for this project, in order to have more time to post a little more before I graduate. It was more than a little symbolic for me, because I've never taken an academic incomplete (because I've always just wanted to get the shit done, no matter what tax it may have on my mental or physical health, it wouldn't be worth it for finals to continue any more than they had to and I probably still wouldn't work on it until the last minute anyway) and I didn't really need to take one for this... I mean, if I really had wanted to I could have written a shitty paper. But since I am not writing a shitty paper, and instead I am bringing this blog under control, (or rather, attempting to let the blog/myself rear out of control) I decided that an incomplete would be a really good way to give myself into that feeling: that I'm not done, that I haven't said all that I wanted to say, that I haven't even begun to say anything or nothing and that for once, I want to be done when I'm actually DONE, instead of being done at some arbitrary point when my paper/ project/ whatever is due. Because really, this thing is different. What I've done is different, what I'm doing is different, and what I will do will be different than what I've done before in school: you can't really edit a paper after you turn it in. I mean, you can I guess, but who does that? It's not like anyone is going to read it again after that, and honestly I cannot imagine going back to any of the stuff I've written during college and revising it. (Woah. Now that would be some senior project... revising every other English paper you'd ever written. What a horrible thought.) I mean, why do it when you were theoretically done with it? But this medium is a little different. my professor will come on-line, read it, and then it will still sit there, on the internet, for whoever wants to look at it, and for me, whenever I decide I want to write on it again. That's the thing with the immediacy of this kind of publishing... it is happening as I write, as I think, which makes it different than a paper or a book. It has infinite potential.

Today is the first day of finals, and I finished my documentary last night an hour before the screening. That was really the thing that became my culminating triumph of college, the thing that became my huge senior achievement, and this has become something else. Naturally, the first day of finals, all anyone wants to know about anyone is when they're "done." Everyone is walking around tweaked out and crazy, just wanting to get over those last huge hurdles standing between them and the summer, and for me, what seems like a huge black hole of uncertainty — the rest of my life stretches before me, and I've jumped the hugest hurdle. This isn't so much a hurdle as I wanted to have a little more content and contemplative space. But when people have been asking me if I'm done, I've said, "Sorta," and shrugged. It's hard to explain that at this point it looks like I might not ever be done. I don't know if the nature of this medium will allow for that. It is infintitely current and will be on the internet for a long time. Anyway... so how it goes. Even though I said this project turned into something not very academic, I still think it can become something for my intellectual space. I worry that after college I won't have a rich intellectual life, and I'll stop reading and just watch shitty reality TV all day. This way, even if I do end up watching shitty reality tv all day, I can go to the blog and talk about the meaning of reality tv and identity in pop culture, and what it means for a text to identify as real and blah blah blah.

Or not. Or at least, not exactly like that. I'd like for this to be a place where I can talk about things and why they are interesting, but I don't know if I really want to talk about intertextuality, or theory, or any of that mumbo jumbo. One of the reasons I cited to my professor yesterday for having such a hard time getting this thing moving at all is my incredible self-conciousness with academic writing, and how it takes me a really long time to write papers, and that its really hard for me to turn that jargon on and off. It doesn't seem to be that way for a lot of people... judging by the inane but smart-sounding things people often say in class, but its hard for me. I always need analogies I can hold on to, or to equate things with things I know. There's the old self-doubt: feeling like my writing should be better after four years at such a prestegious school. Whatever. I don't want to give up on things entirely, but I'm tired of worrying about seeming stupid. So I'm not going to anymore (even though up to now, I think I haven't been writing about anything particularly well or insightfully). I'm not apologizing. That's the beauty of the blog: even though this is all a public venture, it's still not really something public cause you still have to search for it. And who wants to read mini academic papers every day? Not me. And who wants to write them? Also not me. I will write it how I see it and I will write what I want in whatever way I want and be in play.

Play. Playing is supposed to be fun. So I'm going to make it fun.

Dimensions

I don't know if this medium will ever reach its full potential until it becomes 3-D and I can walk around inside the internet. It already feels as though sometimes there are ways that it feels 3-D because I can go deeper and deeper in, and get lost, and not know how I got somewhere. But there is always the back button to get you out, and the little x or apple q to get rid of the window. So the interface is not 3-D, while it seems as though the text is.

being a blogger

I wonder how much being a blogger means in the context of people's identities. Do people think of themselves as "bloggers"? Am I a blogger? The reason I'm thinking about this is because I've read several people's blogs of late where they too, comment about being a 'bad' blogger because they haven't been posting a lot, or their posts have been really short. Granted these are people who have Blogs with a capital 'B'... with things on the side like blogrolls and hit counts, and really cool graphics on their page, where a lot of people comment, and they have their own domain name. Like casey.com. I don't know how to do any of those things... does that make me a bad blogger? I don't really think so, but the most impressive blogs I've seen and bothered to read more than the first few entries or so, are much more graphically involved than mine. Does that just reflect a certain DIY computer savviness that I don't posess, or does it mean something more about how those people (rather than say, the average blog or livejournal user who is content with the templates and posting mechanisms given) incorporate their blogs as part of who they are? I guess I'm wondering because I've heard of people talking about their blogs like a house... is the graphical interface part of the outside or the inside of the house? What part is the text?

Also, as I've read more 'critical' essays, or people's writing about blogs (because it can be done, contrary to my own experience) I've noticed that the people who write about it get defensive about what 'normal people' like mainstream journalist people, say about blogs and blogging because they don't know anything about it because they've never done it. I don't know how well that holds up... just because you haven't ever made a film doesn't mean that you can't say anything intelligent about movies. But I also kind of get the point because I don't think I really could have known what my project could/would be about before I started actively reading blogs, reading about blogs AND blogging at once. Are filmmakers better film critics? I guess criticism and being a critic aren't really the same thing, but you know what I mean.

Derrida Paper

for reference to yesterday's post, the Derrida paper I wrote for pat day's lit crit class (once I figure out how to host attachments, I'll put it there, but for now... at least it takes up space.

Facing the Infinite Abyss

It’s 4:00 in the morning and I’m writing a paper. I have been in A-level of Mudd library for 20 hours, not including breaks for meals and cigarettes, yet I can still barely remember what the world is like outside my carrel. I have to hand it up in five hours — five measly hours to hone my little argument, so that it can be a drop in the sea of criticism. I am a critic.

This paper is not merely the culmination of my work in this particular course throughout the semester, or the pinnacle of my college career, but the singular action that all other actions of my life have led to. Everything up to this point, everything I’ve ever been, everything I’ve ever done, everything that has ever happened to me, has been such that at this moment, I would be writing this paper. I can’t remember what there was before — at this moment, being is encompassed in A-level, existence in my paper. It has taken over the vastness of the universe and become all that there is. Writing this paper is the only thing that I will ever do.
However, I am somehow vaguely aware that the deadline is imminent. I work steadily until 8:30 a.m., at which an invisible force wills me to stop. I give it one more read-through, print it out, and gather my things. I hurriedly leave the library for Rice, and presently I reach my professor’s office. I take this document, these pieces of paper that I have poured over for weeks, this text that is all that I ever was or ever will be, and I slip it under the door. I’m done; it’s over. And yet… life goes on. I walk outside and am reborn, having glimpsed into the infinite abyss of the process of reading.

Is this the best that can be done in the face of the infinite? Jacques Derrida, post-structuralist and the father of deconstructionism, posits his methodology for the way we ought to read, and for the way to garner meaning from text, as a project embedded in the infinity of the text. “There is too much, more than one can say.” (Derrida, Structure 12) The process of deconstruction — of reading, taking the book apart, writing, re-reading, and deconstructing again — is never-ending. But this isn’t how I’ve been taught to read, or have understood reading, because this is not how I understand the state of my existence. There is only so much time in the day to do the reading, to write the paper, to revise it, to take the courses, to be in college, to be alive. How are we, as finite beings, to interact with Derrida’s infinite project if we know that at some point it will be over and we’ll have to turn in the paper?

The process by which I can begin to engage with this question starts with processing and entering into the realm of Derrida’s methodology concerning the infinite text. Derrida’s conclusion of infinite reading begins after the project of structuralism reveals its own absence of a ‘center.’ The center has always been thought to be unique, because while it governs and dictates the form of the structure (thus being at it’s center) it exists outside it, and cannot be governed by the structure. (Derrida Structure 3) Additionally, in the evolution of a structuralist way of interpreting text, the center has always been thought to be “the determination of Being as presence in all senses of the word.” (4) In my understanding of Derrida’s procedure, this harks back to the question of finding truth in literature that has plagued humanity since Plato’s day. The center is where the truth of literature lies. Since there is no center, everything said about text, or structures in general, is participating in discourse: “a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified is never absolutely present outside a system of difference.” (4) Without a central signifier to dictate the rest of the structure, other significations are offered up as the crux by which a structure can be maintained, as substitutions for the center. (13) As such, many significations can be substituted, or supplemented, as the center for any structure, making them mobile in their construction of meaning.

At this point, the project of deconstruction — of questioning and tearing down structures by reading — becomes all the more vast because of the increase of structures, before the examination of the pretense of the possibility of the totality of text is even introduced. This is where all hope of finite deconstruction is lost. In Derrida’s project, totalization— the idea of the total, complete analysis; that there is a point at which there wouldn’t be any more to say — does not happen precisely because the absence of the a grounding point (the center) in the construction of language (as it is a structure) causes the nature of it as a finite thing to “exclude totalization” (12) thereby making it irrelevant if a text does in fact, have a finite empirical value in terms of words in it, because each word in every text is an unplottable signifier with an infinite proliferation of meaning. So, even if the production of texts were to cease right now, the process of deconstructing just one would still be an infinite task. The text is infinite.
If deconstruction is a process of infinite reading, and the point of deconstruction is to bring forth the possibility of meaning, it follows that deconstruction leads to the infinite proliferation of meaning. In the short story, ‘The Library of Babel’ by Borges, such an infinitely textual world is conceived, although the leap from this state to one of infinite meaning seems to fall short, because all of the people in this world are still trying to pin it down to one meaning, so to speak. (Except for the ones who claim “the books signify nothing in themselves,” and oppose the possibility of finding meaning in them at all.) The idea of totality is introduced as well: numerically, if there are only so many figures of which a book may consist in a closed form, and there are no two identical books, it follows that there are only so many combinations that can exist: thus arriving at a vast, yet finite number. However, the Narrator follows the route of Derrida’s infinitude in claiming that the vast library is infinite, though the books in it are finite: the library is actually a cyclical structure, and this discovery might be made by an “eternal traveler.”

How would our process of reading be different if there were no due dates? When would the paper, in its capacity as a reading of a text, be finished? There does not seem to be an answer for this question from Derrida, which is the point: one would never be finished. Derrida talks about this in his assertion that, “the idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing.” (Grammatology 605) Writing is not meant to happen in a closed form, as in books or essays. Writing is naturally meant to be an encounter with “the divine inscription” (Grammatology 604), which will encounter the presence of the inevitably absent origin, and result in the break with any need for truth in order to revel in the “joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault.” (Structure 15). This play must then be inherently infinite, which then calls the act of writing itself into this never-ending process, before looking at it as a form of textual response is even part of the equation, stretching the parameters of the process even more. Any textual engagement, either in creation of new texts or response to existing ones, enters into the dimension of the infinite.

But how are we, as admittedly and in fact finite beings to comprehend the scope of this project? Derrida does not completely ignore this factor of time insofar as the past nature of the action of reading and comprehension up to now is important in the way in which his new methodology of reading has developed. He examines how we have thought about the relations between signs and signification, being and presence, meaning and truth, throughout the collective past of humanity in the whole first part of Structure, Sign and Play, which I touched on earlier. Every historical step of the ideological structure of reading is accounted for in order to explain where we are in the process now. In Of Grammatology, the gradual movement from language to writing is examined in terms of its inevitability, rather than in terms of historical contingency. “Their movement was absolutely necessary, with a necessity which cannot be judged by any other tribunal.” (593) So while the movement of these concepts has happened, thereby affecting our understanding of them, they have not moved one way or the other because of our influence on them. No matter what we think about the sign, it will continue to move toward meaninglessness. It is the evolution of thought without the necessary condition of cause and effect. This is how the idea of the future presents itself in Derrida’s project, in that the evolution continues. There is a way that things were, which is different than how they are now, which is different than how they will be. “It is therefore as if what we call language could have been in its origin and in its end only a moment…an aspect, a species of writing…[T]his death of the book undoubtedly announces… nothing but a death of speech…and a new mutation in the history of writing.” (Grammatology 594) We are on the verge of a new moment, catching mere “glimpses” of the thing to come for our understanding of interpretation, reading, and writing. The coming moment when there will be no more due dates, and the infinite project will begin, in terms of the way that we interact with literature and texts. The moment when we will get to the place where we don’t know where we are going.

But what do I do right now? It seems absurd to attempt to answer this question if I want to be in the place where I don’t know where I’m going. I cannot even conceive of what the coming of the new moment would bring. What would the new writing look like without pages and books binding it? It seems as though nobody else does either, and that we are all at an impasse. Derrida’s writings were published 50 years ago, and there has been no systematic educational revolution to abolish the notion of being “done” with a book — there is still the progression, the reading list, due dates, semesters. His own essays are read, pondered, talked about, commented on, and eventually cleared away to make room for something new to read. What else can we do other than keep going with what we’ve been doing?

My only hope, as I attempt to grapple with these inconceivable formations of infinity in the context of reading, is to attempt to remain in play, though I still want to be able to live in the world. I am not sure if this is possible. I will try to play, to allow malleability, to let myself feel overwhelmed by a text, to get swept up by it and be in it while it deconstructs, and let myself be deconstructed. To that affect, I will keep thinking about this new reading, even though we have “finished the tour de France and are moving on to the Americans,” in class, and I will try to keep writing this paper, even though right now it’s done.

Mechanical Production

I told my class about how I don't know what to do about this class, or my final project. They said that I should just think of something and go for it... and quit thinking about it. Some suggested writing an epilogue for the blog, and then it would be the end. Then I worked on the documentary project all week and didn't think about it at all, really, except the usual guilt about not knowing what to write about, or what to say...

In terms of a "final product," I was thinking it might be good to write an epilogue, but that I still feel like saying that I'm done with it, especially in the form of the blog, would be really weird, and not seem quite right to do in the grand scheme of blogging. Two alternatives presented themselves:

1. I write an epilogue, wait a few days, print out the thing (?) to give to my professor, and delete the blog from the internet OR

2. Write some sort of langish something to go on here, about... things, and then not delete it and it would become my blog. Or at least it wouldn't be disguised as being "finished". Who knows, maybe it would become my forever blog/ intellectual engagement forum forthwith considering my impending graduation from college.

I wouldn't want option #2 to become a cop-out for not doing something to at least mark the end of the semester and how far I got with it up to that point. It still seems somehow counterintuitive and wrong to not have something more. I somehow doubt that the last thing I do would be the only part of this whole business that would guaranteed be read by my professor. On the other hand, I do not want to write a formal paper because:
a. I still don't know what such a paper would look like or how it would be possible for me to figure that out and write it by the time it would have to be due.
b. This whole experience has been somewhat less than "academic" for me in the traditional paper-writing sense as it has been an experience and an experiment in the modes of academic thinking, and what happens when it becomes really hard to read something in the academic way that I am used to with the things that I already know about text.

This project isn't particularly academically rigorous. I want to own that, and not pretend like it was by writing a paper that would basically end up looking like all the other papers I've ever written, like a paper factory.

So I will write something on my blog, and my blog will have been my project, and maybe, if I take the leap will continue to be my project... it will be my foray into Derrida's infinite writing project. Like in the paper I wrote last semester, for Literary theory.