McKenzie Wark on Tue, 7 Jan 97 14:04 MET |
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nettime: essaying the net |
I've been reading a book called _Best American Essays 1996. Its the 10th anniversary issue -- and not a bad one. There's a guest editor every year, so the aesthetics of it changes every time. My favourite is the one Susan Sontag edited in '93 -- much looser -- very free with the idea of what the essay is. To essay is to attempt. Montaigne coined the word, invented the genre, with his Essais. They are remarkable for the way Montaigne is not afraid to write in his own voice, and to seek after a truth about his owne experience that he is sceptical enough to always put in question, as he writes. I mention all this by way of getting around to talking about writing on the net. When i read _Best American Essays I'm aware of how much the genre of the essay has got itself stuck in the categories forced on it by the magazine market on the one hand, and the grad school on the other. _Best American almost always has all the flaws of the former. Writing that circles around commonplace ideas with thick description. Writing that no longer questions that distinctively American notion that the confessional voice, the anecdote, the descritpive narrative -- are somehow unquestionably roads to sincerity. I'm reminded of Harold Bloom's remark that all bad art is sincere. Mostly, i'm bored with a certain uniform *speed* at which the essay now travels. We are enjoined by the writing to look at things, imagine things, contemplate things, for just so long. Nothing is quite quick enough -- or slow enough. Also, the mode of address assumes a reader who is a consumer. The essay has become captured by the writing market. Writing is for readers. Or else its 'opinion' writing, meant to spark off a brush fire, attract attention, controversy, etc. I know all about these styles of writing. I do it for a living. But what i hope for, here on the net, is for something else. A writing that might have other speeds. That might engage its readers with another mode of address. That might return to the original meaning of the essay -- the attempt. And what it implies about writing -- a certain liberty in writing, but one that goes hand in hand with a certain modesty. Each essay is only an attempt. It reveals a flaw, a crack in its author. Its not a theatrical revealing, in the mode of a confession (always based on the somewhat comic notion that a write can *choose* what to reveal or conceal). Rather, an aesthetics that honours a certain flawed beauty in the improvised attempt to become textual, to make oneself a process of writing. "I am myself the substance of this text" as Montaigne says. I'm not sure there's enough of the tradition of the essay left (in English at least) to be able to make up an aesthetic for it out of writing alone. So the nearest thing i can think of to it comes from elsewhere, from the music of jazz. On the one hand, jazz is slow. It requires a long process of practice, practice, practice. John Coltrane alone with his scales. Bird playing old records by Prez over and over, learning and relearning. On the other hand, jazz is fast. Get up on the stand. Someone counts in, there's a tune, and then -- everybody blows. Only the tune and tempo are given -- a plane upon which to throw the dice. What one hears, listening to, say Coltrane and Miles Davis playing together in the 'first quintet' of the early 50s, is this combination of absolute slowness and speed. What one hears is the attempt to become music. What one hears, even at the best of times, are the flaws, the little particularities, the singular grain of a player's finitude. Jazz is to essay the self as sound in time. Writing can be to essay the self as writing in time. In *real* time. Live, with no corrections, a first take. Jazz is also a collaborative art. Listen to the way Elvin Jones and Coltrane play together. Or Miles and Walkin' Paul Chambers. I think writing can have an analogous quality, on the net. Not simulataneous, like jazz, but a kind of serial aesthetic quality, in the way an essaying is continued from one post to the next. Not like a 'tennis match' or as a textual 'crossfire'. Nothing comes from 'debate', other than otherness. Debate is always about the flaw,the limit of the other. The essay is about particularities, singuar qualities of textual attempt. Debate is attempted negation. The essay is an addition. Oh, that, i see, well to that i add this. Or perhaps: oh, i go so far with that, but then i chose another path, and here's where that tune can become this one. Essaying, as a quality of net writing, happens, i think when there's a particular meshing of individual desires and drives with some kind of collective assent to a certain plane of action, a certain style and mode of discourse. A certain tempo, perhaps, an agreed popular tune, some notion of what sounds good next to what. But other than than that, the paths multiply. Duchamp used to say of certain works, the Large Glass for example, that it was 'finally unfinished'. This unfinished quality is important. In the _Live at the Blackhawk recordings, Miles edited and re-edited the tapes, including only his best solos. The results sound a bit silly. The bits don't match. A certain quality of time is sacrificed to the glory of the artist, wishing to bask in an image of perfection. Much better are the complete Plugged Nickel recordings -- real snap frozen time. Better still is being there, at a great concert, or writing, in real time, going with the speed of one's first thought. Taking time on writing improves everything *except* the time of writing itself. Writing live has its limitations. Its particularities aren't always charming. But that's why there are different *technologies* of netwriting -- so that they might offer the potential of different genres of netwriting. The genres are yet to be invented. The technology of the net no more *determines* the form of netwriting than the saxophone determines John Coltrane. One is caught up in the potential of the other. The potential, not the determination. But anyway, to go back up the path a bit -- the listserver and the majordomo list seem to me to offer the potential for a kind of essaying, a certain relation to speed, to collaboration. The web site is something else. A stillness. A distillation. The book is something else again. The will to absolute slowness. Every well made book is a dice roll that wills itself to eternity. But that's enough on that tune. McKenzie Wark Netletter #6 7th January 1997 written 'live' between 11.10 and 11.33 Sydney time __________________________________________ "We no longer have roots, we have aerials." http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark -- McKenzie Wark -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de