As has been mentioned on several blogs, the TechRhet listserv recently debated the issue of blogging and its impact on community. I have had these exchanges on my mind of late as there was something that continues to nag at me. I think my problem is with the fundamental notion that ties writing to community.

We are all familiar with the concept of a discourse community with its paradigms that establish, in Kuhn’s terms, a “normal science,” in which there are accepted truths, certain questions that are deemed important, and established methods for investigating those questions. While a listserv is not intended to be a “rigorous” intellectual space, any discourse community will accept certain statements without question, reject others out of hand, and expect a certain form of methodlogical proof for others.

Which brings me, unexpectedly, to my personal entry into rhet/comp. I was a grad student at Albany, very interested in “theory” and writing. A friend gave me a copy of a Victor Vitanza essay in a collection Contending with Words. In it, Vitanza writes

Can any one of my (even more open-minded) readers, therefore, imagine the NCTE or the CCCC having as its conference theme the question Should writing be taught

I suppose what I’m getting at is when we ask for writing, or a particular writing technology, to create community, what is it that we are asking for?

Now, I would put forth, as a premise, that humans require connection with other humans. When we call this community or sociality or family or some such, we participate in ideology. Admittedly connection does this as well, but I am working within the limits of language and connection strikes me as less ideologically charged in this context….Anyway, here is this connection and language, symbolic behavior, facillitates this connection. But really, language develops not so much to permit engagement with those we see everyday, but rather with those we only see on occassion, to spread our “community” across a broader landscape.

Or at least, I suppose, that’s (part of) one theory.

The other part is that symbolic behavior serves as an extension of cognition to allow us to engage a more complex material/information environment. That is, symbolic behavior emerges as a cognitive protocol for allowing the brain to interface with other brains and other information records (e.g cave paintings, etc.).

Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus, “Writers are sorecers because they experience the animal as the only population before which they are responsible in principle.” What does this mean? D/G are careful to explain this relationship. This is not animal as pet, nor is it animal as symbol/metaphor (e.g. the “American” eagle). It is animal as pack, as multiplicity, as virus/contagion. This is Derrida as well (pharmakon) and Lyotard (differend). Which is not to say these terms are equivalent but rather that they all touch upon this concept of contagion.

The sorcerer/writer stands as the anomalous interface(?) between the pack and the tribe (c.f. Derrida “the mark of belonging does not belong”). By writing, the sorcerer establishes connections, a point through which a mutative flow passes. Unlike the “discourse community,” however, that flow is not predetermined. Its mutations are multiple and indeterminate.

There is no doubt that state ideology and control are incredibly powerful and intractable foes. Discourse communities and disciplinary paradigms inevitably feel their pull. Perhaps the popular blog might feel that pull as well.

In short, blogs become interesting b/c they are not communities but rather potential anamolous connections between the inside and outside.