‘We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in the anonimity of a murmur.’ How Agamben quotes Michel Foucault, ‘ What is an Author’ in the english translation Remnants of Auschwitz, 2002. (Text states: ‘translation emended).

‘Although since the eightteenth century, the author has played the role of the regulator of the fictive, a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property, still, given the historical modifications that are taking place, it does not seem necessary that the author function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence. I think that, as our society changes at the very moment when it is in the proces of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint (…). All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonimity of a murmur.’ Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author’, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954 – 1984, vol 2, Aesthetics, p. 222

James Joyce Ulysses, in the first Dutch translation by John Vandenbergh, published 1969, hardcover, in cassette, together with Aantekeningen bij James Joyce’s Ulysses by the same John Vandenbergh. This is the edition that I first encountered Joyce in, around 1980 — maybe even earlier –, at the house of my grandparents, where my uncle H., (who was then about 20 years old) showed me the big blue book, telling me this was sort of a 20th century Odyssee, set in Dublin. I was intrigued of course. Became even more intrigued after seeing a page from Finnegans Wake in the Spectrum Encyclopedie.

I read Ulysses for the first time in this Dutch translation (a few years later). (I remember at that time any book translated by either John Vandenbergh or Gerardine Franken was a recommendation, like for instance Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, of which, I remember, I did not understand a word, but finished reading to the last page nonetheless).

‘Statig kwam de vlezige Buck Mulligan van het trapgat, in de handen een bekken vol schuim waarop kruiselings een spiegel en een scheermes.’

This afternoon I came across a copy of just this book at a second hand bookstore. (For the non-Dutch, this translation is not available anymore, since the Paul Claes & Mon Nys translation came on the market). Complete, in cassette, perfect condition. I bought it. (37,50). It even has the smell of the library books through which I first encountered literature. It’s as if I’ve always had a copy of this book.

This is what I call culture. ;-) http://www.oldskooltrack.com/.

First spent time revisiting blog-theory anno 2002 (like Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook: http://www.rebeccablood.net/handbook/). I made some notes on yellow post-its.

Then went through folders on my harddisk in which I have stored webpages and pdfs ‘to read’; re-ordered the contents (I now have 4 different research folders), deleted some, printed the papers I really want/have to read this week.

After that I made an old-fashioned links-page, and visited (quickly) about 100 (?), 200 (?) blogs to see if I want to include them on this page (for further reference, to remember). I worked through VoodooPad-documents in which I had saved links, went though the linkslist of my ‘old’ blog, followed links on blogs that I was happy to revisit or rediscover, and, most importantly, used my own memory. I still have to go through the bookmark-files of both Firefox and Safari — I only bookmarks when I’m too lazy to do more than hit ‘command-D’ (so the bookmark-lists tends to be long and totally unorganized).

Will this compulsion to order lead anywhere?

I never really go to use delicious/ariealt. Although I do use the delicious-accounts of others, often to good result. What one uses or not, has a lot to do with, well, preferences. (What you like, what you’re good at, what fits your use if time and working methodology, how important design is, how important good writing, etc.).

I also don’t use RSS. (My blog does RSS though, and I know some people appreciate that). I used RSS for a while when I spent much time on trains. Before catching a train I would boot my RSS-reader, let the feeds stream onto my harddisk, to browse through on the train. RSS was / is a way to have online content when there’s no connection. (I hated blogs that only put a headline plus a lead in the RSS, or worse, only a headline). What I miss in RSS is the personality of the design, the typography, all that (subtle? — hopefully) visual stuff that adds to the ‘voice’ of the site.

Wrt design: there is a strange attraction to making all texts look the same: have it shown in the stylesheet / template of your choice. (But basically RSS-readers and services like Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) do not really look attractive).

I am put-off by really bad design. (That’s what I learned from visiting 100 blogs tonight, and quickly closing those which looked really ugly). But I’m not put off by generic Blogger/Wordpress/MoveableType-templates, as long as they are (a bit) clear.

Links-page and notes to come…

Here’s some of what I printed to read:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/.

Listening to the concert of The Same Girl at the Jan van Eyck, I was thinking that probably the only two things about Amsterdam that I am really missing are the weekly rehearsals with Oorbeek and the monday nights at Kraakgeluiden. (Well and of course F. — but that goes without saying).

The Same Girl is Nicolas Field (percussion — also member of PHO) and Gilles Aubry (electronics). They play tonight in Amsterdam at Kraakgeluiden in OT301 and tomorrow evening, 21.00 at the Jan van Eyck in Maastricht. I’ll be there — (= in Maastricht).

http://www.kraakgeluiden.com.
http://www.janvaneyck.nl/0_2_1_events/events_current.html.

3 hours in a train (Maastricht – Amsterdam + delay) gave me the opportunity to — finally — work through the passages in Flusser’s writing that I had indicated by sticking a small yellow post-it on pages. So that’s why there are so many Flusser-posts all of a sudden.

I wonder if i should go about this in another way — like putting the quotations in ‘pages’ instead of making them part of the blog. (And keeping the blog really as a more or less daily record of what I’m up to…)

Probably the right answer to this, from the perspective of ‘how-to-make-a-well-edited-blog’, is “yes, if you dump so much stuff at once, use ‘write page’, not ‘write post’.” (Although, technically speaking there’s no difference between pages and posts).

Hmm, wouldn’t it be much more fun to put up some quotes from Consider the Lobster? Almost finished it & it’s such fun to read DFW’s (yeah, again I use the word fun) essays. Also a very nuanced analysis of the state of the United States, in the period 1995 – 2005. The wikipedia entry is a stub, but it has an overview of the content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_the_Lobster.

‘The traditional historical potentialities — poetry, religion, philosophy — which (…) kept the historico-political destiny of peoples awake have long since been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences,and have lost all historical efficacy. Faced with this eclipse, the only task that still seem to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden — and the total management — of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. (…) It is not easy to say whether the humanity that has taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality is still human, in the sense of that humanitas which the anthropological machine produced by deciding every time between man and animal; nor is it clear whether the well-being of a life that can no longer be recognized as either human or animal can be felt as fulfilling. (…) The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man.’

Giorgio Agamben, The Open, Stanford UP, 2004 (2002), p. 77.

‘In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics.’

Giorgio Agamben, The Open, Stanford UP, 2004 (2002), p. 80.

‘Here the etymology of the word studium becomes clear. It goes back to a st- or sp- root indicating a crash, the shock of impact. Studying and stupefying are in this sense akin: those who study are in the situation of people who have received a shock and are stupefied by what has struck them, unable to grasp it and at the same time powerless to leave hold. The scholar, that is, is always “stupid”.’

Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, SUNY Press, 1995 (1985), p. 64.

‘Only on the day when the original infantile openness is truly, dizzingly taken up as such, when time has come to fullness and the child Aion has wakened from and to his game, will men be able finally to construct a history and language which are universal and no longer deferrable, and stop their wandering through traditions. This authentic recalling of humanity to the infantile soma is called thought — that is, politics.’

Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, SUNY Press, 1995 (1985), p. 98.

(That’s your Agamben: out of the blue referring to some very obscure mythological character (Aion, apparently a son of Kore/Persephone). Question: does the meaning of this sentence change, when you leave Aion out of it? I’d say the (poetic) network of references becomes less dense, yes. But skipping Aion, one can still get at Agamben’s ‘point’. And his messianistic (?) idea of a coming community).

‘But if quotation marks are a summons against language, citing it before the tribunal of thought, the proceedings of this trial cannot remain indefinitely adjourned. Every completed act of thought, to be such — to be able, that is, to refer to something standing outside of language — must work itself out entirely within lanuage. A humanity able to talk only within quotation marks would be an unhappy humanity that, by dint (= the effort, AA) of thinking, had lost the capacity to carry thought through to a conclusion.

Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose, SUNY Press, 1995 (1985), p. 104.