Notes on blogs and the new media revolution

by liza
(14 November 2006 - personal blog
on culturekitchen's site)

NOTE: CPE will be adding the main page link to the blog culturekitchen on our blogroll list in the right-hand sidebar.

We were struck by an interesting piece found at CK. If there is consistent interest shown by my readers (if people use the link), I will keep looking for stuff to blog over from the site.

Opening her post she wrote: "Tonight I have the opportunity to talk about blogs, feminism and the Web 2.0 revolution at Barnard University's Center for Research on Women."---------------------------------------------

. . . the idea of feminism as a politics of the "personal turned public". The main idea of "Las tretas del debil" is that Power is not about fixed dialectical opositions : Strong vs. Weak. Power is a process of making spaces for expression. When Ludmer writes how, this explains women writer's preference for smaller literary genres like letters, autobiographies and diaries. Styles on the margins of literary and non-literary writing, called also reality-based writing, you can see how blogs would fit nicely into the category of minor litertures where personal realities are used as power machines.

Ludmer's article owes a huge debt to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 30). Compared to amount of pages these guys produced for their magnus opus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Kafka would seem like a piddling of a little book. I believe though it is perfect for our discussion of blogs because it synthesizes the theory and praxis of becoming minor they developed in their mammoth collaboration. In turn, the concept of becoming minor explains the current upheaval created by bloggers and it points to their possibility as power machines.

A ‘minor literature’ is political, collective, revolutionary, and even spatial —deterritorializing one terrain as it maps another.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘minor literature’ maps the passage of this deterritorialization; as such, it is a literature of the people; as such, it is also thoroughly political. “The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern”.

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