thoughts before we meet

I don't have time to fully flesh out what I've been thinking before we meet later today, but here are some things, just to get them out there--better formulation is needed to go forward, possibly to understand things in the first place.

I've been thinking about fan 'slash' fiction and the way it interacts with some things Hayles has written on the materiality of electronic writing and the body/computer relationship, as well as some writing on blogs by Geert Lovink (great name).

The early analysis of both blogs and 'slash' fiction cast both as examples of subversive discourse in critical dialogue with the mainstream. Since then, there's been considerable evidence that this is not exactly true. Blogging, observes Lovink, failed to arise out of a particular movement or social event. It seems that the increasing popularity of a uniform format for content implied the mobilization of a cohesive social force. The popularity of the specific software used for blogging, Lovink argues, does not imply a cohesive ideological position or political function. I think it's interesting that the volume of blogs "out there" both secured their presence from a critical mass standpoint (Lovink points out that blogs "exist" because of all the ones that never get any hits), as well as implying the cohesiveness of their content and its subversive intent as a form. A similar, uncritical casting of 'slash' as subversive has also been overturned by recent scholars (ex. Woledge) in favor of terms of analysis that arise out of slashers' own attitude towards what they write and why. To me, the fact that the large number of people using a specific internet medium for self-expression implies a viable presence which is read as a politically or ideologically-bound community, yet in actuality fails to capture a movement, indicates a specific and emerging practice of online networking. Blog culture seems to be a community in which the individuality of specific blogs and their disconnectedness from others is confirmed and legitimized by the fact of their ubiquity.

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I’ve also been thinking/reading about the relationship between critical (deconstructive) theory and hypertext. The focus on the internet as a re-mediation of print technology and writing practice means that the deconstructive theorists (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, among others) who “eerily” anticipated hypertext with their theories of language are the funnel through which many hypertext authors and theorists (usually the same people) conceive of the re-mediation of print by computer technology. This means that sometimes, although not always and not completely, hypertext writers/theorists (I’m thinking of Jenkins, Bolter, and Landow) imagine hypertext as presenting the opportunity for an unproblematic, embodied practice of signification. It’s as if the entrance of computers as a medium is a linear evolutionary move by which the limitations of print as pointed out by deconstructive theorists are now becoming the basis for a new type of reading through which the passivity of traditional readership is replaced by reading as a practice—as Bolter puts it, the computer is “not a metaphor for but a technology of signification” (Bolter, 177). It seems like the activity and interaction inherent to experiencing hypertext is conflated with a consciousness of its mode of existence.

A lot of focus is placed on text/work as distinguished by Barthes, and on the "author function" as elaborated by Foucault. To collapse and summarize the two, work is defined as the part that correlates with the author function (which is the concept of the author as distinct from referential individual, associated with origin, root of meaning, or conversely with lack or absence--both, points out Foucault, construct him as essential and central to the work). The text, on the other hand, is supposedly distinct from the boundary defined by the limits of the author function as it influences and borders the work, a formless and borderless play of signs and meanings. With someone like Bolter, it seems that he believes that the medium of the internet makes all previously-bounded "works" into "texts." But by privileging the idea of sequence, the experience of reading, the idea of exit and entry point, the text as a cohesive body (if only made cohesive by various readings), hypertext theorists are identifying the physicalization of a series of metaphors about and guiding principles of print form without necessarily changing the "mode of existence" of a hermeneutic text.

And a question: Can writing as a practice be imagined without conceptions of the work, of the author function? Aren't things posted on message boards, etc., more like utterances than compositions, if we're going by Foucault's definitions?

Also: is there really any forum on the web for the kind of generative content I'm hoping to work with??