February 05, 2006: Minima Moralia
Adorno's strikingly beautiful work Minima Moralia could be one type of model for the "theory blogging" we're exploring here with Trouble-Tickets.
Minima Moralia is a literary masterpiece, one of the great works of the last century. It's a collection of aphorisms, vignettes, and very short essays written in high literary prose. It's a work of art, self-consciously so. Yet it's informed by a very strict philosophical rigor. I guess you could say, it's literary art which depends on philosophical-theoretical-political protocols. In Minima Moralia Adorno developed a unique form, by using literary language to make philosophical-theoretical-political interventions.
Our "theory blogs" aren't so grand. Yet IMO it's worth exploring their formal logic. Remember that the Web is an emerging medium: its rules, forms, and characteristic idioms are not yet solidified. This is fun, but, I think, it could also be valuable.
From what we've learned so far, I think it's reasonable to say that "theory blogs" are:
- Short. Where traditional "interventions" in essay form would require, if not whole books, at least long articles, blogs by nature need to be held down to just a few paragraphs. People don't like to read on computer screens.
- Focused. They seem to be at their best when they express one thought.
- Mutable. As self-publishers, blog writers are free to revise as they like. Please note how revolutionary this is. There's no longer any concept of completion, or of perfection. The 19th Century notion of "the canonical text" is exploded. Good riddance!
- Collaborative. The blog poster can be thought of, perhaps, as a kind of facilitator. But, doesn't the "blog" include the comments posted by readers? There's no longer a "text" in the sense we're used to, determined I think by limitations of our technology of distribution. Instead of a text there's an interactive space for discussion.
Let's see what we say about this next year, after we've figured-out more about what we're doing!
