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1. •  
     CommentAuthorDanieru
   • CommentTimeOct 24th 2006 edited

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   Submit to the blog!

   
   Here be endless streams of symbols given birth in waves. As the seahorse father issues forth his young - disseminating, in the process, the patterns of parenthood - so shear activity in language breaks the corollary of meaning; necessarily bolting into the wilderness of heterogeneous abstraction:

   The act of writing is itself transgressive, ... in that the epistemological and linguistic foundations upon which the discrete disciplines are based are constantly put into question, and this is as true for the putatively scientific discourses of linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, or psychoanalysis as for the meditative and speculative discourses of philosophy or literature and criticism. ^[1]

   In acting to signify the world through writing one is forced into participating in that world, and by definition, changing its fundamental textures. The mimesis of the amoeba annihilates the act of mimesis itself, for where was one unified whole, now belong at least three: two 'newly' formed amoeba and one 'historical' amoeba. Of course this assumes that the amoeba can be ascribed identity in the first place. Are not such assumptions prone to a Mu response?:

   ...Contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can). ^[2]

   The world is you, the act of being in the world reappropriates the world as being defined by you. Writing, blogging, is not mere intellectual masturbation. It is the theft of identity back from the selfish hands of ideology. In maintaining the world we destroy its boundaries. This heterogeneous-all, this 'other', is ours to destroy:

   An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows and social flows, simultaneously (independently of any recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus). There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). ^[2]

   
   
   Mini-Bibliography:
   
   1 - 'Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard' by Julian Pefanis
   2 - 'A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia' by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Brian Massumi
   
   
   

   (Mirrored on The Huge Entity main site)
2. • CommentAuthorwhat?
   • CommentTimeOct 25th 2006

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   I love French thinking, to make any sense of it you need to smoke a pack wonderfully foul cigarettes and drink five litres of vin tres ordinaire...
3. • CommentAuthorjennyology
   • CommentTimeOct 30th 2006

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   I remember reading an ethnography in college about the Western Apaches which described some reservations of their culture regarding reading: many saw it as a self-segregating act and thus incompatable with the strong values held on social interaction. I would have to agree in a very literal way and think that what you speak of also applies to reading in the
   'synthesizing a new reality that breaks down reality barriers' sense.
   
   Perhaps any active, individual pursuit of knowledge or creativity (curiousity, ne?) could be considered in this light.
   
   However, I have to disagree with what seems to be your underlying assumption that writing necessarily produces a creation that deviates from ideology. Even in creative writing, we are relying on shared ideas just to facilitate a proper base of readers. Communication in this basic sense requires a universal-type perception of the world. Writing as an extension of self-preservation lends to a shaky argument for true liberation from the 'selfish' world of organized assumptions. The question I suppose I am proposing is: even in our greatest, most obtruse moments of literary innovation, are we not merely reactionary, egotistical, masturbatory beings? What is really more selfish than the arrogant belief that one person might hold the key to ideological dissemination? Or worse, is the hidden prerogative to form a novel imagined community based on the shared understanding of some new reality? Is this not the very basis of ideology itself? This seems, in fact, to be a natural extension of the ideology to which we Westerners easily subscribe, that which teaches us that individuality is the only route to self-realization.
4. •  
     CommentAuthorDanieru
   • CommentTimeOct 31st 2006

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   I reckon it's hard to move away from ideologies, but not most especially in fiction. I reckon that our ideological view of reality itself is more fleeting than of fiction. In a sense fiction is more real because it does not deny its hyperreality.
   
   If the world as understood by modern human culture is simulacra in structure, then how do we claim the real? By writing, by transgression.
   
   George Orwell wrote 1984 as a speculation of a possible world, not necessarily a future he saw occuring, but one he wanted to moralise against. Having read 1984, and living in a culture which has the ideologies of this book engrained within it I find it hard to determine whether its fiction makes its power any less real. Surely the cliche of 'Big Brother' or the tabloid's favourite warning call : 'Orwellian Society' symbolises 1984's inherent reality far more than an examination of its separation from 'the real'?
   
   1984, and so many other fictions, are just as crucial to our perception of reality as any true, occuring event. Yes, they have become a part of our shared ideologies, but is that not where their power lies? All is simulacra, so is not fiction in a sense more able to allow us to transcend the 'otherness' of being? Fiction deals in ideologies because that's all there is, but it manages in its inherent separation from our perceptions of 'the real' to actually strike chords no truly real entity could.
   
   The writer, the blogger, whatever, has a power far beyond the politician, the cultural commentator, the mere spectator of culture, of society. The writer moulds the underlying archetypes of culture. The writer, through fiction, enables us to know the real as fundamentally non-simulacra.
   
   That's one way to see the writer's role anyway. I kind of like it.