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.

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

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.

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”).

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

…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.