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A Blog's Life: Vintage Whine from Sven Birkerts
July 31, 2007
A little over ten years ago, I went to a university English department's first presentation of "hypertext dissertations." Everyone was so excited -- the linkage! the proliferation! the connections! (The dissertations themselves seem so cute now -- Look Mom, I can have pictures of vintage vitreous china next to my footnotes!)
The possibilities seemed endless in those halcyon days, when academics were new to the Internet and thrilled by its applications.
But academics get older, and grumpier, and the very ones who once championed non-linearity, the ones who bullied us poor graduate students into believing that the signifiers did not need their signifieds -- these folks, like the venerable Sven Birkerts, now write things like about online book reviewing and criticism like this: "A hopscotch through the referential enormity of argument and opinion cannot settle the ground under our feet."
In other words, hypertext is now the enemy.
If I am oversimplifying, it's because I think Birkerts is, too, in this Boston Globe piece. The critic and theorist is worried that the blogosphere has -- brace yourself, Bridget -- changed the very nature of discourse: "Blogs and online journals do not simply transfer old wine into new bottles -- the wine itself is changing."
Isn't that what wine is supposed to do in the bottle -- and doesn't it often (not always, but often) get better and more mature and bigger and richer and deeper as it changes? Hmmmm. Birkerts might respond by saying bloggers and online reviewers are like the garage vintners (of course, there are lots and lots of Robert Parkers out there who love Super-Tuscans).
I would respond by reminding him of the very real excitement I felt in that hypertext dissertation demonstration. If the "very nature of the blogosphere is proliferation and dispersal," representing a fundamental reversal of print culture's norms... might that not be natural? Should criticism forever mean measured, grammatical prose?
You might say yes, you might say no. I just remember that professors in the Birkerts mold encouraged budding academicians to read people who championed printed matter that was nearly impenetrable: Cixous, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, Spivak... Birkerts is quite concerned that "shared discourse" is dying, but did any of these authors worry about that?
I could go on. But then I'd never get this posted, and you'd never get the chance to comment. That's my own definition of "shared discourse."
Posted by Bethanne Patrick on July 31, 2007 | Comments (8)
