Butterfly Hunt

“For reading in trains and buses”, or, one of the most notable projects of modern times

‘The paper is rubbish,’ remarked Jasper, ‘and the kind of rubbish—oddly enough—which doesn’t attract people.’

‘Precisely, but the rubbish is capable of being made a very valuable article, if it were only handled properly. I have talked to the people about it again and again, but I can’t get them to believe what I say. Now just listen to my notion. In the first place, I should slightly alter the name; only slightly, but that little alteration would in itself have an enormous effect. Instead of Chat I should call it Chit-Chat!’

Jasper exploded with mirth.

‘That’s brilliant!’ he cried. ‘A stroke of genius!’

‘Are you serious? Or are you making fun of me? I believe it is a stroke of genius. Chat doesn’t attract anyone, but Chit-Chat would sell like hot cakes, as they say in America. I know I am right; laugh as you will.’

‘On the same principle,’ cried Jasper, ‘if The Tatler were changed to Tittle-Tattle, its circulation would be trebled.’

Whelpdale smote his knee in delight.

‘An admirable idea! Many a true word uttered in joke, and this is an instance! Tittle-Tattle—a magnificent title; the very thing to catch the multitude.’

Dora was joining in the merriment, and for a minute or two nothing but bursts of laughter could be heard.

‘Now do let me go on,’ implored the man of projects, when the noise subsided. ‘That’s only one change, though a most important one. What I next propose is this:—I know you will laugh again, but I will demonstrate to you that I am right. No article in the paper is to measure more than two inches in length, and every inch must be broken into at least two paragraphs.’

‘Superb!’

‘But you are joking, Mr Whelpdale!’ exclaimed Dora.

‘No, I am perfectly serious. Let me explain my principle. I would have the paper address itself to the quarter-educated; that is to say, the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy them in trains and on ‘buses and trams. As a rule they care for no newspapers except the Sunday ones; what they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information—bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them: they want chit-chat.’

Jasper had begun to listen seriously.

‘There’s something in this, Whelpdale,’ he remarked.

‘Ha! I have caught you?’ cried the other delightedly. ‘Of course there’s something in it?’

‘But—’ began Dora, and checked herself.

‘You were going to say—’ Whelpdale bent towards her with deference.

‘Surely these poor, silly people oughtn’t to be encouraged in their weakness.’

Whelpdale’s countenance fell. He looked ashamed of himself. But Jasper came speedily to the rescue.

‘That’s twaddle, Dora. Fools will be fools to the world’s end. Answer a fool according to his folly; supply a simpleton with the reading he craves, if it will put money in your pocket. You have discouraged poor Whelpdale in one of the most notable projects of modern times.’

‘I shall think no more of it,’ said Whelpdale, gravely. ‘You are right, Miss Dora.’

Again Jasper burst into merriment. His sister reddened, and looked uncomfortable. She began to speak timidly:

‘You said this was for reading in trains and ‘buses?’

Whelpdale caught at hope.

‘Yes. And really, you know, it may be better at such times to read chit-chat than to be altogether vacant, or to talk unprofitably. I am not sure; I bow to your opinion unreservedly.’

‘So long as they only read the paper at such times,’ said Dora, still hesitating. ‘One knows by experience that one really can’t fix one’s attention in travelling; even an article in a newspaper is often too long.’

‘Exactly! And if you find it so, what must be the case with the mass of untaught people, the quarter-educated? It might encourage in some of them a taste for reading—don’t you think?’

‘It might,’ assented Dora, musingly. ‘And in that case you would be doing good!’

‘Distinct good!’

They smiled joyfully at each other. Then Whelpdale turned to Jasper:

‘You are convinced that there is something in this?’

‘Seriously, I think there is. It would all depend on the skill of the fellows who put the thing together every week. There ought always to be one strongly sensational item—we won’t call it article. For instance, you might display on a placard: “What the Queen eats!” or “How Gladstone’s collars are made!”—things of that kind.’

George Gissing, New Grubb Street (1891)

Primary Passions: January 11, 2004 [On Blogging]

Today’s Ian Bogost’s post about the self-referentiality of blogging (and the humanities) made me remember this brief post of mine, published originally 8 years ago today on my now-deleted blog, Never Neutral. I wrote it when I was revising to defend my MA dissertation on Art Spiegelman and graphic narrative as a work of mourning, and at a time in which many colleagues and professors insisted blogging would damage my academic prospects. At that time I had been reading Derrida’s Résistances- de la psychanalyse (1996) and Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (1997) which had originally informed the last chapter of my MA thesis, “Postponing Suicide: A Means to an End”.

 I have reposted it below. 

[The strength of self-reflexivity] always stand in proportion to the capacity for communication of a human being (or animal), capacity for communication in turn in proportion to need for communication… Consciousness evolved at all only under the pressure of need for communication.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1974: 354). 

One could always say: this is pure repetition. Blogging, a form of narcissistic acting out. The blogger as the analysand who comes back to the analyst’s office, to say whatever comes into his/her mind, most of the times not looking at the listener’s (here, reader’s) face. What unconscious, repressed thoughts, behavior, are expressed through blogging as a form of acting out? Nowadays it is a common-place amongst bloggers to discuss the experience of reading one’s blog in retrospect.  Who dares to do that? Who, driven by what forces, could stand it? What common-places, what tropes, what topoi would we find, what traces, what shadows, what reappearing ghosts are we afraid of locating if we dared to read our past archives?

The immediacy, the real-time condition of electronic publishing implies a strange temporality, an “always-present” that allows almost unmediated utterance. The narcissistic nature of the blogger, then, poses interesting and highly complex questions in relation to writing, the subjectivation process through discourse production, the poetics of time and space, literature and art, autobiography and testimony, and, why not, trauma and pain and the role of language in processes of mourning and working-through. Blogging, as a form of meta-fiction, implies self-consciousness. Not unlike psychoanalysis and some forms of so-called postmodern fiction and art, blogging works within a double-bind: in the end, blogs may not be speaking about anything else but themselves. In other words, the only space to discuss the possibilities and consequences of blogging may be the blogs themselves. One should not forget the theoretical, political dangers this would imply.

So, a resistance to blogging would be called for. Not unlike a resistance, or shoud we say resistances to psychoanalysis. Has psychoanalysis, as a social practice, for instance, been able to exceed its own narcissism, its own self-narrative? Has its own self-consciousness been able to escape its own self-imposed limits to interact with a world, with a society trapped by injustice, lack of love, violence, intellectual and material poverty?

How will blogging (or has blogging even considered to) interact with a world that does not exist around the Internet, not even around computers? And, how will the writing and reading individual, the one who aspires to self-consciousness through communication –in this case blogging– will change? Will authors just leave behind a paralytic, handicapped form of self-reflexive, egotistical narcissism, or will it be something else?