was more lucid because he had his formetout sienne, sealed off from the supposedmeans of the tools in his era.On blogs everything looks better than itreally is, and it shows how things ought tolook all the time, and how they seem likethey are just about to look, but cannot, andwill not ever, it seems. They are rhetorical,even as they approach the practical wishlist.Photo blogs show the individual cloaked inthe stuff of the world, which looks like theentire universe printed pell-mell on a clothin which the individual is swaddled. Theindividual has not yet extricated itself fromthe breast of the natural world, whichit suckles like a child that does not yetrealize it is distinct from a nature which isantagonistic to it by being indifferent to it(second nature). But the impression thatthe entire universe is presented beforethe babeʼs eyes is impression, though notmerely impression.It is perhaps true that the homogenizationof social work and socialized non-workwork renders individuals indistinct fromone another, which breeds both empathywith anyone and also impotence andgenericness. I think of Megan Boyleʼsstatement that she could tag on …from aMexican Panda Express employee to theend of her own blog post book because herindistinctness renders any perspectivepossible and immediately available, asif one could swap skins as if they aremasks. There is also a horrific side toperspectivism, which ought not be valuedin itself but as a means.Literature today ubiquitously approachesthe confessional, a form once tied toChristianity, e.g. St. Augustine andlater Rousseau, who sought to clear hisreputation, and accidentally created afreer literary form than had hithertoexisted. Rousseauʼs Confessions is thefather of all blog writing and recentliterature influenced thereby, bringingthe mundane particularity of oneʼs ownarbitrary individuality before a troopof absent judges, a truant jury. Why dopeople want to confess today? To whom?For what?The ‘confessionalʼ is not merely ‘informalʼwriting, but an integral mode of writinghistory, in the manner of a Cellini orRousseau. The indignant attitude through10which Cellini relates to everyone he comesin contact with is not an artifact of the age,but is the crux of historical detail. Celliniʼsbraggart, almost poor writing style, whichhas a naive lack of tact and self-editing,captures the spirit of the age betterthan any scientific or historical address,specifically because his subjectivity isripened to the point where it becomesan object of the era—Celliniʼs free andunedited passion penetrates the opacity ofthe moment, despite the fact that he sayshimself that he is not writing history. IfCellini—or Rousseau—was a ‘good’ writer,by the common mannerisms of omittinginessential details, weʼd have no image ofthe intimate relations that appear random,but contribute to the consciousness ofthe moment—e.g. the insults and casualviolence crudely flung around in everydirection which indicates a raw and stillquibbling set of tribal relations whichwere are beginning to transform—orCelliniʼs attention to how much he got paidfor each artwork, who owned it when,the work conditions of his shops, and soforth, that are all essential anchors tounderstand the complex social relationsof the moment. Form needs to be free andexperimental in order to articulate thenewness of each moment—in a negativesocial situation, the inessential to us isperhaps the truly essential.There is also something more or differentthan the confession form happeningin new writing, because it is obligatedto confess everything, to confess everystray thought that is not in the leastincriminating. This is an accelerationof absolute transparency—the mindsof humans become more and more likethe modernist glass building, in whicheverything is shown, everything isrefracted, everything is rendered vulgarlynaked.Now that a mollified fine art is shownto irreversibly coexist with soft porn,Greenbergʼs ‘avant-garde and kitschʼ ismade undoubtedly relevant, aestheticantagonisms cannot be ignored anylonger, even as they are.That blogs are experienced in a rapid scrollindicates that the world is best appreciatedwhen it is not seen, when it is incapable ofbeing seen.So many blogs gravitate around imageryof architecture not because they are
superficial or nostalgic, or because theyare shallow formal modernists etc., butbecause they show how the world shouldbe architected but cannot be…yet. Currentsocial conditions restrict the realizationof an aesthetic world—that Trotsky oncesaid that the average person in a freesociety would be an Aristotle, can alsobe that the average building in a freeworld would be a challenging pleasure tostroll through to live in, an atmospherethat is not oppressive. Such blogs are thepreservation of a dream in a time of vulgarreality principles.Photo blogs turn real things into realimagined things.As sanctions, blogs take on the characterof the library in the baroque period,whose contemplative character Benjaminemarcated as distinct from renaissanceexternal activity. Like the baroque library,the blog is concealed from all the detritusof history, immune to decay. While thephoto blog mandates that the entire worldis cloaked in itself, and implies somethingpublic, that publicness is always aprojection/ideal.11
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