Monday, September 09, 2013

Einbahnstrasse as a Lost Paradigm for Blogging

So I'm re-reading Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street and it occurs to me, as I suspect it occurs to nearly everyone, just how bloggy it is. The discrete sections, seemingly unrelated, yet which nonetheless amount to a whole - could there be a better description of the experience of reading a blog? (It should come as no surprise that there is a One-Way Street blog)

There is a difference between the average blog and Benjamin's Einbahnstrasse - Benjamin intended his bits and pieces to come together, he slaved over their order of presentation (He reminds one of Wittgenstein in this respect).

Wasn't this the great, yet unrealized promise of blogging? That at the end (or along the way) many of them should be turned into a book? Blogging now feels less writing creating a book on the side, and more like maintaining the cork board at a Student Centre, so that the advertising of piano lessons and the selling of bicycles remains a satisfying experience for the student consumer. That being said, I suppose it is some badge of honour that the most regular visitors to my blog are people who come to crib materials for their undergraduate essays on Aristotle. Welcome cheaters! Bask in the illusory authority of the Internet, where what I write looks good, but could be entirely wrong, and all my citations made up just like in Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive.

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