Writing that hurts

Posted on | May 18, 2005 |

Ben Hoh has written something scarily good for Blogtalk. It may have started out as a reflection on the Storybox project he ran with refugee bloggers, but by assiduously noting their very different encounters with and uses of the technologies, the paper turns into an incredibly sophisticated discussion - of the unstated assumptions behind ‘our’ interaction with media; of dominant diagnoses of blogs’ political potential; of the subjectivities at the heart of theories of resistance and radicality in cultural theory. This is the bit that nailed it for me:

So it is not really a matter of what these new vernaculars “actually mean” in a representational sense, but what they enable: a reconception of what used to be the spheres of everyday life and the political, into something else — into whatever space that can be apprehended with such a vocabulary. Call it “the neveryday” — an alternative platform upon which de Certeau’s model of “textual poaching” (de Certeau 1984) can be modified; in de Certeau’s model, the poacher is forever destined to be guerilla-as-loyal-opposition to “the writer”, but a “neveryday” mode of enunciation is more waywardly “queer” and less heroic, and yet also seems necessarily based on a transgressive, sometimes incomprehensibly extreme platform of an underwriting trauma, a crack in subjectivity. And while the embodied specificities of the refugee experience are irreducible, this crack is not — the coherent subject is an impossibility, and that this inevitably involves trauma; I would therefore suggest that the Storyboxers’ “neveryday”, with its underwriting trauma, could be a useful model for how both casual mundanity and affectual extremities are often modulated through each other in the blogging of the self.

For anyone who’s been wondering why I keep harping on about the significance of affect and writerly voice, Ben’s paper documents what it helps us see in practice and where it matters.

Category: Reading

Comments

4 Responses to “Writing that hurts”

  1. jebni
    May 18th, 2005 @ 10:23 pm

    {Blushes.} But there’s a damn grammatical error in the bit you quoted — sheesh, even more embarassing. I really was *that* out of it by that stage of the game, feeling like a Bad Student handing something in after the examiners’ meeting (ah, memories). Perhaps I should take a leaf out of your “if you don’t want to listen you can just check me out” school of conference presentation and just tell everybody I was on drugs when I wrote it. Yeah. While I wear one of my Fuckr t-shirts. Yeah.

  2. melgregg
    May 19th, 2005 @ 9:03 am

    Really, that line of mine should never be repeated! Or only in the last session of a conference, when everyone is so strung out on bad coffee that they can seriously question whether they heard what they think they heard.
    I still don’t quite believe I said that; I only have you to believe that I did.

    I’m sure Christian can explain this better, but there’s something about the velocity and difficulty of what you were trying to do in that paper that comes out clearly in your writing. That’s what makes us follow you with the allegories, it’s what makes grammar beside the point. Fittingly, the paper contains indices of your own ‘cracked’ subjectivity. It’s not quite together, the concepts deserve more elaboration some time in the future, but that’s what a breakthrough paper should sound like. This is my favourite moment in creative work. It’s what Stuart Hall once said he liked about some of his favourite writers - the book before they get to the point of their fully developed theory is usually the more compelling because it still contains the tensions and complexities that the final theory will try to smooth over and forget. It still contains the quirks of the writer’s ‘charm’. For me, it’s similar to seeing a band on the tour just before they ‘make it’. They’re still challenged by the process, they’re having a lot of fun while they can, but there’s still a sense of drive for something more. Once you’ve perfected what you’re trying to do, there’s less risk, less danger. The affect is less immediate, so the ideas are less contagious.

  3. glen
    May 19th, 2005 @ 12:03 pm

    oi, dr gregg, have you got a reference for that hall thing? :)

  4. melgregg
    May 28th, 2005 @ 6:08 pm

    Hmm… remind me to look for this - have to search the files at work. I think it was an interview. I think he was talking about Althusser.

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