"There is Nothing Outside the Net": Internet Affirmations in the Twenty-First Century
Western society is sick for a sense of affirmation of any kind in 2012. Conditions of life, in America in particular, constitute a formidable denial— of rights, of substance, and (most importantly) of a sense of duration. Many of us cannot imagine our lives extending into an indefinite future— too much around us has come unhinged. What the Internet affirms is, to be simple, that a dynamic, available world still exists. In America, the Internet prospers at odd angles to an overwhelming societal stasis. Among other things, the Internet is a realm of self-generated contexts— a frontier for the pursuit of self-development. The emergence of a certain amount of naïve egotism among participants is unavoidable. But the dichotomy between imperatives— to consolidate and fulfill a naïve ego or to level things off on a dynamic transcendentalism— inhered in a different form in Europe two centuries ago. It was later dubbed Romanticism. The English Romantics, through periodical culture, were dealing with a new class of reader— middle-class, status-conscious, but (importantly) mindful that strength of thought could amplify and broaden status. Do thoughts in America in 2012 confer status? In the American Academy, form does seem to be preponderant over substance— academics advertise not what they think but what they’ve done.
It is arguable that the Net is creating a new class (a “Net class”) of reader, who affix intellectual curiosity to the pursuit of information on the Net. Regency periodical readers might suffice as a rough equivalent. The difference splits downward on two levels— people who use the Internet for base reasons; and the facticity of class, as it applies here; that Net readers are heterogeneous, class-wise. The Internet might not be, as Wordsworth pictured Nature on Snowdon, “the perfect image of a mighty mind” (XIII, 69), but it may be the closest Western man has in 2012. Western intellectuals must choose— the Internet or the past. Timelessness in any direction is not an option— the Net drains vivacity away from the cult of sacrosanct textuality. Romanticism’s vision-quest to soar above and beyond history and culture (and, as an adjunct, Modernity’s vendetta against mass culture) is too quixotic, at this juncture, to be taken seriously. So, there is an unlikely chiasmus with moribund post-modernity— but it is a present-mindedness against banality. The Internet is not made to be a “lonely mountain” (XIII, 67) or to “feed upon infinity” (XIII, 70). It is a social and intellectual obligation, the Romanticism of which may be embraced or disregarded. If the Internet “moulds, and endows, abstracts, combines” (XIV, 79), and if the contexts thus created are new, we have manifested a median space between Romanticism, Modernism, and post-modernism— individuality, fragmentation, and egalitarianism.
To the extent that experiential peaks on the Net manifest as Baudelaire’s “ineffable orgy” (20), intellectuals will have to get used to crowds. Even scholars may come to feel like artists; as “enjoying a crowd is an art” (20), and genuine Net communion has the potentiality to manifest at least part of the 1790s (for example) on a monitor. Because the Net affirms the present, it also affirms the future. Books go out of print; web-pages have no immediate necessary obsolescence. Everything on the Net is always waiting to be retrieved and recuperated. It is more than a gimmick to paraphrase Derrida’s commonplace— “there is nothing outside the Net.” Because the Net is an expanding universe (and there is no denying a reversal of fortune could change this), because it both affirms and hastens engagements (and because antidotes in the West are scarce), it must be embraced. It’s an embrace against corporate interests— a subversion of codes that affirm compliance with corporate ethos. Corporate interests favor mainstream media outlets— the dissemination of selected information. Some Internet franchises, like Yahoo, do fit this mold. But the generalized mold of the Net (to the extent that one exists) involves liberated dissemination (not only of information but of opinions, attitudes, ethos), and Yahoo now looks more like an outsider than a trenchant bellwether.
The Internet could wind up being the destruction of the “demographic”— the eclipse of target marketing. It is organic chaos trumping calculated entrepreneurship. Net entrepreneurship, like Mark Zuckerberg’s achievement with Facebook, configures a vehicle for organic chaos that fulfills (also) a capitalistic function. Amalgamation of spiritual and material imperatives has been rare in America (at least outside the hypocritical hovels of the “Red”) always. In a society already verging on chaos, the Internet fulfills some of the duties that party politics should— a force (in its size and scope) “over” the general public, yet accessible to it. Party politics in America in 2012 presents and represents an illusion of accessibility and serviceability, yet the corporate wheels that drive it are outside the parameters of public view. The Internet is our daily companion; party politicians are not. The “stasis model” of America that Washington has reified can only be broken by steady application. Where but online can this happen? And, for most of us, Net labor is seldom alienated— a termination of exchange values enhances use values. The American government’s labor is alienated two times over— because direct control of specific contexts is usually left to others; and because, where general alienation is concerned, party politicians are all MacHeaths to most of us. The Internet counters governmental stasis with an “unpredictability model.” The Internet may prove to be one of the most unpredictable contexts in the history of literature.
Literary minds are sharpening their impulses in response. It is a response to the imposition of speed. Reception Velocity— speed of literary exchanges— has hastened heretofore sluggish processes so drastically that patience with old-school literary methodologies is falling away. There was no corresponding development in Romanticism except, possibly, the system of dissemination that was developed by Lord Byron and his publishers. The sense of “push” that is familiar to us, living as we do in a society that favors force over finesse, was inaugurated, where literature is concerned, by the Byronic enterprise. If it is outré to dub the Internet itself Byronic, it has the potentiality to take literature and endow it with the excitement and urgency of Byron’s best poetry. Stretch and strain would also accrue to an attempt to juxtapose Romantic conceptions of Nature with our present conceptions of the Internet; yet the chiasmus is compelling enough to take a brief look at. The force of Shelley’s West Wind, its impetuosity and strength, is in the Net, not only in Reception Velocity but in language, as it has been imported (whether in literary contexts or not) online. If the Internet has a tie to Modernism and post-modernism, the most accurate signification around the Internet is its relationship to the Romantic endeavor. “Net Nature” has already become second nature to millions of people, many of whom do not realize that their collective consciousness has been transformed. As literature on the Net develops, it will leave behind an aura of passion, ecstasy (both in the modern and the medieval sense of the word), pathos, and portent— everything that inheres in Lord Byron’s poetry to begin with.
A more practical angle (and one developed against the manifesto impulse) is that America was designed to conform to democratic ideals, and so is the Internet. As beleaguered as America is, life on the Net offers a sense that American life (even when is abstracted and projected into the world through the Net) is moving forward. It is affirmative, even when it destabilizes contexts like literature, which were meant to be affirmative to begin with. If it is not a consistently high-minded collective enterprise, it is our duty as intellectuals to shape and hone it until at least part of it is. Those repelled by the Romanticism of the endeavor can choose to engage the brighter side of post-modernism’s rubric— an endless horizontal, site to site, page to page. What the Internet ultimately affirms is that horizontals and verticals can be put into place, shown, and decided upon individually as ideas move out into collective space at lightning speed. The autonomy of the individual is the ultimate goal.
Adam Fieled
Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. Paris Spleen. New York: New Directions, 1970.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. England: Penguin Books, 1995.
Well, for me, since Facebook I have found the Internet constraining and stultifying. So I prefer to consider what lies beyond the Net. What amazes me is that people somehow believe that the Internet is essentially different to the telephone, the letter, the television, etc. Different superficially, but not in actuality.
Pretty much every thing you can say about the TV you can say about the Internet. There appeared to be more autonomy and democracy throughout the early, Internet years. However, this now seems subsumed by Capitalism, censorship, etc., etc.
Many fell into the solipsistic trap of poetry reporting on Internet experience as a new, experimental form of poetry (or Internet Art). It wasn't! Experimental poetry, etc. wasn't dependent on the Internet, but the Internet made its communication easier.
Sure, the Internet and Post Modernity have changed literature and the arts, but no electronic device is a literary, intellectual or cultural panacea!
You don't understand where I'm coming from, so what you are saying is utterly ridiculous. Interesting that I gave you a chance to explain your views, but you resort to childish, personal attacks! Do you call everyone who you don't agree with or don't understand, an idiot?
Oh dear! I hoped "As-Is" would allow for intelligent comment - this is obviously beyond you!
What amazes me is that people somehow believe that the Internet is essentially different to the telephone, the letter, the television, etc. Different superficially, but not in actuality.
Pretty much every thing you can say about the TV you can say about the Internet. There appeared to be more autonomy and democracy throughout the early, Internet years. However, this now seems subsumed by Capitalism, censorship, etc., etc.
Many fell into the solipsistic trap of poetry reporting on Internet experience as a new, experimental form of poetry (or Internet Art). It wasn't! Experimental poetry, etc. wasn't dependent on the Internet, but the Internet made its communication easier.
Sure, the Internet and Post Modernity have changed literature and the arts, but no electronic device is a literary, intellectual or cultural panacea!
:-)
Oh dear! I hoped "As-Is" would allow for intelligent comment - this is obviously beyond you!
Therefore, it is you who is the idiot....
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