List lessons

16 Responses to “List lessons”

1. Greg
   November 27th, 2004 @ 12:13 am

   Melissa … great. I rarely think about the nature of list-culture and its post-ers (though I’ve been known to post often and longwindedly), but you’ve captured it well. take care, Greg

2. danny
   November 27th, 2004 @ 7:50 am

   Kia ora Melissa – this is the best post I’ve seen on list culture in a long time, and I think that it’s not on a list kind of proves your point

   Re: waiting for “interdependence, equal exchange, and mutual respect”… well I don’t think you’re waiting, you’re doing it! RSS/blogs I think foster the discursive openness and fluidity of readership that lists initiated, only better.

3. mc gregg
   November 27th, 2004 @ 10:44 am

   Thanks Greg. And can I beg you to continue to post longwindedly? Your name is always a wonderful and welcome exception in my Inbox.

   And Danny – coming from you, listserv maestro, that’s a pretty big compliment!

4. Glen
   November 27th, 2004 @ 3:24 pm

   Yeah, nice one Dr Gregg!

   I have been reading the recent posts to the fc list wondering whether they should lurk on a car enthusiast list for a while. I may sound like a one track mp3 player sometimes with all my car bullshit, but one some lists there is a clear sense of passion to maitain the usefulness and sense of ‘belonging’ to the list.

   I have been getting stuck into N&H’s Multitude of late and their stuff on the ‘common’ is really resonating with how I am conceiving of belonging to an enthusiasm.

   Remember my short talk at the “Night With the Boys” thing organised by Clif and you asked that really long question . Anyway, I was talking about a crisis of the masculine body and I got a few laughs in the right places and stuff, but then I sort of stopped when it got interesting. I couldn’t figure out what ‘body’ the body of enthusiast belongs to. I knew it was not individual as car enthusiasm has some collective dimensions, like those perported to be on the fc list. Yet, it was singular, because not everyone was into V8’s, but everyone (almost, at least in AUstralia!!) could recognise some sort of ‘V8ness’ of a V8 so the difference extended beyond the arbitrary discursive boundaries constructed around what ‘mattered’ to enthusiasts. So this non-individual singularity of the body had me bloody confounded… until I read the brief passage in Multitude on ‘the flesh of the common’. It is a social body constructed through communication within communication. As flesh, it is a biopolitical problem. Here was my body that belonged to the V8 enthusiast, the one that was in crisis due to the rise of the turbo powered imports.

   I think there is a similar body constructed through the communication on email lists. All the little variations introduce style (as Massumi calls it) or charm (as Deleuze calls it in your quote below from Dialogues), but all the little variations add to the social flesh of the list. Like little offshoots on the surface that add more surface.

   There is more to say about the role of the media transmission and modulation of the event-space in the facilitation of a social flesh… but I need to go change the dastardly air-con belt in my Falcon!!!!!

   Ciao,

   Glen.

5. Gil
   November 28th, 2004 @ 4:09 am

   Hmmm… Interesting ideas (as always)…though I might have to quibble a bit on some of the details. After all, a general claim about when “lists work best” depends on a relatively fixed notion of what constitutes a “working” list in the first place. Besides the fact that different lists tend to have different missions/agendas (enough so that what counts as “working” for one list can be an abysmal failure on another), even within the community (or what passes for one) of a specific list, members are likely to disagree strongly about when the list is working and when it’s run off its rails. A highly active list, for instance, is going to be one person’s idea of conversational heaven (even if they may only lurk), and another person’s idea of an annoying spam-machine.

   Put another way, “list culture” is broad and varied enough that I’m not sure I’d want to try and sum it up in any singular fashion. Sure, some lists are dominated (and not always in a bad way) by the confident and the assured … but others are ruled (again, not always in a bad way) by the querulous (”Can someone help me with…”) and the impersonal (”Please circulate widely. Apologies for cross-posting”).

6. mc gregg
   November 28th, 2004 @ 9:09 am

   Thanks Gil for important clarifications. Of course you’re right, my aim to summarise list culture in many ways echoes the very discourse of mastery of which I’m most suspicious and critical. That’s why I kept it brief and a bit whimsical as an admittedly fanciful countermeasure. The querulous and the impersonal gestures you mention are what I meant by ’sharing information’ – although I wouldn’t want that to mean they are neutral forms of communication or that they are uninteresting. I think they are key measures of the value of networks. But I think both of us are still talking about an economy of investment that is largely driven by academics, and which reproduces modes of performance that have traditionally secured the legitimacy of that identity. To get outside *that* mode would mean talking about different lists like the kind Glen mentions, lists that may share strains of the authority and mastery I wish to critique but are also much more comfortable in a register that is variegated in its passion. I’m not sure the chances of survival for a feminist cultural theorist would be any better there however! (Unless I’m Zoe Soufoulis!)

7. Esther Milne
   November 28th, 2004 @ 11:11 am

   thanks Melissa, for initiating such a insightful discussion. The, not altogether unusual, irony is that this discussion is taking place ‘off list’. I would argue that this is a defining feature of list culture – the ways in which list formations rehearse private/public dichotomies. There seems always to be a supplementary sphere, (a moderator list, private one-to-one, or blogs) in which & through which ‘main’ lists are also constituted. The traffic between these two spaces is often what produces affect: emotion, anger, hurt, intimacy & humour.

   I would also add that fibreculture, unlike say, cultstud, takes as its object of ’study’ list culture itself. Perhaps the degree of self reflexivity needs to be factored in to any discussions of list dynamics?

   Melissa, what about posting your ‘list lessons’ piece to fibreculture? It would certainly add productively to our conference themes!

   cheers,

   Esther

8. Gil
   November 28th, 2004 @ 11:35 am

   It’s interesting to me that folks keep pointing to *this* conversation as somehow distinct because it’s happening “offlist”…

   …but if there’s any truth to Melissa’s initial comments (and, in spite of my quibbles, I think there is), I don’t think it’s endemic to listservs, per se. It’s just as characteristic of other asynchronous online forums, be they Usenet groups or blog comments. To me anyway, the back-and-forth we’re engaging in now doesn’t feel appreciably different from the back-and-forth that might take place on cultstud or csaa-forum (or some such). It just started with Melissa posting an entry to her blog, rather than to a listserv.

9. Esther Milne
   November 28th, 2004 @ 12:10 pm

   but blogs *are* different from listervs. Just as we can’t collapse all lists under some ‘master’ category of list culture (as Glen notes above) we can’t ignore the different technologies, audiences, socio-technical interfaces, modes of engagement, authorial voices & linguistic codes encountered in blogs, webpages or lists.

10. Gil
    November 28th, 2004 @ 12:23 pm

    Yes, of course blogs are different from listservs. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the forms of communication Melissa originally referred to are exclusive to lists. That’s all I was getting at.

11. mc gregg
    November 28th, 2004 @ 1:29 pm

    Yes Gil and it’s what I was getting at by linking the trends to wider scriptural economies which arise in academia and are symptomatic of the modes of performance and language use preferred by the managerial/bourgeois class… something I take from Certeau.

    Thanks for being more precise than I could manage Esther! I’ve now posted it to fibreculture because I really support what you’re trying to do with the panel. I think I viewed the blog as a safer space to begin thinking about these issues because I assume the audience is small enough to have sympathy for the training and background I mention. But I won’t change much by staying safe, will I?

12. danny
    November 28th, 2004 @ 1:35 pm

    While I agree with Gil that Melissa’s characterisations are not solely about listservs, I think there is something about the form of the list that generates a group identity in a different way than blogs or academic journals.

    To have the discussion here, on Melissa’s turf, is a very different space than the list. People will I guess come and go here but overall blogs have “regulars” who read frequently and then the blow-in who has followed a link from somewhere else. The list on the other hand, requires you to sign up to a “community” and receive *all* the posts of that group. One’s audience on a list can be fairly assured even if no-one particularly likes your work or your post has no particularly strong attraction. You also get all the stuff whether you’re looking for it or not (yes, i know people don’t read everything, but one still sees their names in your inbox!) Competition for dominance in front of the audience definitely takes place, and while I might be misreading melissa here I think that’s a big part of the ‘affective economy’ that makes lists masculine spaces.

    I think the move by a number of livejournal authors (mostly women from what i could tell) to go into “private” blogs readable by invitation only is also an interesting dynamic to factor in…

13. Esther Milne
    November 28th, 2004 @ 1:44 pm

    ok sorry, i misunderstood. Still, i do think there is significance in the distinction b/ween off and on list.

    anyhoo – melissa do you feel like posting to Fibreculture?

    cheers,

    esther

14. Gil
    November 28th, 2004 @ 1:54 pm

    I think I’m still going to push here a bit — even if maybe by now I’m doing so as much to play devil’s advocate as anything else.

    Listservs don’t necessarily require one to receive anything at all, after all. I know of at least one person on cultstud — someone who’s not shy about posting when he’s got something to say — who has his subscription set to “nomail,” and who only reads the list in its web-archived form. The list still has a different overall character than a blog, of course, but his interactions with it are comparably selective and opt-in in nature.

    Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, heavily visited blogs (I’m thinking of Michael Berube’s, though there are certainly others) can have audiences that are visibly large enough (and even active enough when it comes to comments) to be just as much (or less) a “community” as an ostensibly self-contained listserv might be.

    Mind you, it’s NOT that I don’t see or believe in the distinctions that Esther and Danny and co. are pointing to — quite the contrary — just that I’m not quite so ready to see them as sharply drawn dividing lines between “listservs” and other forms of online discussion. If Melissa’s original post describes something we want to call “listserv culture,” I’d simply suggest that there are plenty of non-listserv forums that fit her description pretty well … and plenty of listservs that don’t. The distinctions here may be real, but I dunno if they break down neatly around specific forms of distribution and dissemination.

15. Glen
    November 28th, 2004 @ 2:47 pm

    Related sidenote

    The spoon’s listserve is closing up shop and it would be kind of cool to do some sort of research on the 10 year history of spoon’s. Surely it is one of the longer lasting listserve’s around. I am on a number of the lists and it is very interesting that each list has it’s own *feel*.

    The D&G list has schizo poetics and polemics every now and then. Already shifted to driftline.org

    The Foucault list as a pretty good circulation of esoteric knowledges. This one is shifting to be hosted by a Foucault resource website.

    The Bourdieu list is one of the “What did [famous theorist/researcher] think about [issue] in [a given book/paper] and does it compare to this other [famous theorist/researcher]??” sort of list. No plans to keep this one going.

    The Lyotard list seems to discuss everything besides Lyotard most of the time, there is an awesome discussion of Multitude on there atm which I have not had time to participate in. We are trying to shift it to a listserve at Cambridge.

    I am on the PoCo list after my ex-g/f was embroiled in some retarded spamming furore. It is with some irony that the PoCo list is the only list I am on out of about 20 that is moderated so completely. So I will not be sad to see that one go. As far as I know it has no plans to be saved.

    And to buy into the listserv vs other online communication mini-debate between Gil, Esther and Danny… A think a distinction needs to be made between the relative positioning of any given list in relation to broader networks of practice.

    I was not joking in my original reply about the car enthusiast thing. For what I understand FC is involved in a number of ‘projects’ that are enabled by discussion on a list or two (or maybe not? I dunno). So the location of the fc list in relation to networks of practice that constitute the ‘offlist’ projects is relatively similar to what car dudes do when discussing their ‘offlist projects’ on the list. One big difference, as Mel G notes with more eloquence than I can muster, is that car dudes do not give a shit who are the dominant contributors to a list. Power performed as post count dominance in itself means nothing. What _matters_ are their ‘offlist projects’, the list is merely an enabling tool that necessarily requires some sort of ‘common’ to facilitate discussion. Perhaps this is what is wrong with FC list if community has become an enabling tool? You know, like ‘networking’ I think they call it…

    In general though academic lists certainly have a different tone when there is no common ‘offlist project’ amongst members (unless you include REVOLUTION!!! ha!). The best example of this is the Lyotard list where there have been some passionate arguments forwarded sometimes, but all the while it has never turned completely nasty. Except when that Richard Koenigsberg posts… I love Koenigsberg so much. There has been a strong sense of energising the list into posting something, sometimes totally irrelevant to the list’s actual OFFICIAL subject matter, but posts that add to a sense of belonging. What should you call this? Spam-of-the-common? The flesh of the common is spam… ho ho ho…

    Ciao,

    Glen.

16. Christian McCrea
    November 28th, 2004 @ 9:41 pm

    This post has a great central gesture, sometimes it takes someone to hit the nail on the head to find out you’re supposed to be repairing something.

    “Lists work best in similar time zones. They struggle to accommodate the undecided, the long-winded or the ponderer. Lists fail both muser and muse.”

    I think I actually gave out a ‘woo’ at that point. Your ‘belligerent hope that writing aims to create new types of conversation’ is why list culture should be attractive but so often isn’t. I feel that my style of writing and my sometimes naive positioning aren’t welcomed by experienced writers, so I’ve learnt that somewhat horrid ‘earn your stripes’ backbenching mentality I promised myself I would never adopt. I love adapting to someone else’s idea, and developing a shared language on one topic, but it feels as if instead of rising up to a plateau, there’s a reduction to the previously agreed upon. The gesture is often retreat.

    I’m so fascinated by rich developed work emerging using the conception of lists as open networks, as economies of affect as open barter markets.. because they are very rarely so for me.

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