Other kinds of internet history

To become insomniac, love-struck or bulimic is to enter into another everydayness – Henri Lefebvre

On Saturday June 14 I’m going to “Internet Histories 2: Australia and Asia-Pacific” at the State Library of Western Australia. It’s part of a two day workshop organised by Gerard Goggin, Mark McLelland and the Cultural Research Network (the program and abstracts are here). I’ll be presenting part of a chapter from the book I’ve been writing with Catherine Driscoll in which we try to highlight the benefits of cultural theory in writing internet histories.

Our main source is Michel Foucault, and the title of our book chapter ‘The Order of Pixels’ is indebted to the project of The Order of Things, particularly its effort to analyse the systems by which things are ordered and known - and therefore counted as history. From our abstract:

…despite its evident availability to spatial conceptions and linear historical narratives about technology and capital, online culture is manifestly disorderly. Thus we might think of historicising online culture along such lines as Foucault calls heteroclite – where “things are ‘laid’, ‘placed’, ‘arranged’ in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all”. Our paper considers what it would mean for internet histories to see their sites of study as heterotopic rather than utopic.

For the book publication coming out of the day I’ve also been exploring some further theoretical resources that, if they don’t exactly have Asia-Pacific origins, at least point to some of the biases of Western historical analysis. Indeed the very idea that an Asia-Pacific ‘perspective’ can easily correct the modes of representation currently dominant in internet studies seems to us just one of the conceptual difficulties involved in approaching these questions.

Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis is an underutilised reference in many fields, including cultural studies, which would be very different without his influence (see some of Ben Highmore’s recent publications–particularly the book Cityscapes–for the most outstanding exceptions to this wider trend). Applied to internet studies, Lefebvre’s work has some fundamental methodological implications.

As Stuart Elden writes in his introduction to the English Continuum edition, Lefebvre tried ‘to get us both to think space and time differently, and to think them together… His understanding of history is not the linear, teleological progression of Hegel or Marx, but closer to a Nietzschean sense of change and cycles’.

Lefebvre acknowledges that ‘the cyclical is perceived rather favourably: it originates in the cosmos, in the worldly, in nature. We can all picture the waves of the sea — a nice image, full of meaning — or sound waves, or circadian or monthly cycles. The linear, though, is depicted only as monotonous, tiring and even intolerable’ (76).

In terms of historiography, the contribution the rhythmanalyst has to make is to reunite the quantitative aspects of experience, ‘which mark time and distinguish moments in it — and qualitative aspects and elements, which link them together, found the unities and result from them’ (8-9). It is to distinguish between ‘repetition and difference; mechanical and organic; discovery and creation; continuous and discontinuous’ in the process of identifying the cyclical and linear, the quantitative and qualitative (Foucauldians and even Deleuzians may see some resonances here).

Lefebvre claims that ‘the majority of analysts of time (or rather of such and such a temporality: physical, social, historical, etc.) have utilised only an often minimal part of the above-listed categories’. Meanwhile non-specialists understand time only by regulating the various competing and discrete rhythms that exist simultaneously at an individual and social level. ‘We contain ourselves by concealing the diversity of our rhythms: to ourselves, body and flesh, we are almost objects.’ (10)

To counter this, the rhythmanalyst must listen:

and first to his body; he learns rhythm from it, in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms. His body serves him as a metronome. A difficult task and situation: to perceive distinct rhythms distinctly, without disrupting them, without dislocating time (19-20).

I take this quote to be a tiny definition of ethnography, one that helps me imagine how I’d like to study online culture: being able to remain conscious of my own body’s position in the context of what I’m studying, but in such a way as to not let it affect what is going on, with or without my ‘presence’; at the same time learning to perceive the rhythms my own body enacts and indeed ignores in order to stay online at certain times and for certain durations.* (In fact, ‘arrhythmia’ seems to be the most useful concept I’ve yet encountered to make sense of the feelings of overload, anxiety and urgency many of the workers in my study express in relation to email and other online communication obligations.)

Lefebvre is the often unacknowledged precursor to Michel de Certeau in elaborating the significance of ‘the everyday’ or le quotidian in cultural studies. Elden explains the term as conveying both ‘the mundane, the everyday, but also the repetitive, what happens every day’ (ix). Of course, for many of us, internet use is defined by this precise tension, as well as the more pleasurable and even extraordinary encounters it makes possible. It is the quotidian accompaniment to a range of ‘rhythms in interaction’ that Lefebvre lists as ‘need and desire, sleep and wake, work and repose’ (26).

In time, I hope his writing will inspire others to develop a more critical cultural analysis fitting the present and its imminent pasts; to escape the commercial relations of capitalism, and ‘to catch unaware (to grasp) need, desire, reflections and passions in others’ (26).

* Elden’s introduction explains that Lefebvre was greatly influenced by Bachelard’s Dialectic of Duration, which introduces a concept of rhythmanalysis to critique Bergson’s notion of duration (xiii)