nettime: essaying the net

[McKenzie Wark <mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>]

I've been reading a book called _Best American
Essays 1996. Its the 10th anniversary issue --
and not a bad one. There's a guest editor every
year, so the aesthetics of it changes every time.
My favourite is the one Susan Sontag edited in
'93 -- much looser -- very free with the idea of
what the essay is.

To essay is to attempt. Montaigne coined the word,
invented the genre, with his Essais. They are
remarkable for the way Montaigne is not afraid
to write in his own voice, and to seek after a
truth about his owne experience that he is sceptical
enough to always put in question, as he writes.

I mention all this by way of getting around to talking
about writing on the net. When i read _Best American
Essays I'm aware of how much the genre of the essay
has got itself stuck in the categories forced on it
by the magazine market on the one hand, and the grad
school on the other. _Best American almost always
has all the flaws of the former. Writing that circles
around commonplace ideas with thick description. Writing
that no longer questions that distinctively American
notion that the confessional voice, the anecdote, the
descritpive narrative -- are somehow unquestionably
roads to sincerity. I'm reminded of Harold Bloom's
remark that all bad art is sincere.

Mostly, i'm bored with a certain uniform *speed* at
which the essay now travels. We are enjoined by the
writing to look at things, imagine things, contemplate
things, for just so long. Nothing is quite quick enough
-- or slow enough.

Also, the mode of address assumes a reader who is a 
consumer. The essay has become captured by the writing
market. Writing is for readers. Or else its 'opinion'
writing, meant to spark off a brush fire, attract
attention, controversy, etc. I know all about these
styles of writing. I do it for a living. 

But what i hope for, here on the net, is for something
else. A writing that might have other speeds. That might
engage its readers with another mode of address. That
might return to the original meaning of the essay -- the
attempt. And what it implies about writing -- a certain
liberty in writing, but one that goes hand in hand with
a certain modesty. Each essay is only an attempt. It
reveals a flaw, a crack in its author. Its not a theatrical
revealing, in the mode of a confession (always based on
the somewhat comic notion that a write can *choose* what
to reveal or conceal). Rather, an aesthetics that honours
a certain flawed beauty in the improvised attempt to
become textual, to make oneself a process of writing. "I
am myself the substance of this text" as Montaigne
says.

I'm not sure there's enough of the tradition of the essay
left (in English at least) to be able to make up an
aesthetic for it out of writing alone. So the nearest
thing i can think of to it comes from elsewhere, from the
music of jazz. On the one hand, jazz is slow. It requires
a long process of practice, practice, practice. John 
Coltrane alone with his scales. Bird playing old records
by Prez over and over, learning and relearning. On the
other hand, jazz is fast. Get up on the stand. Someone
counts in, there's a tune, and then -- everybody blows.
Only the tune and tempo are given -- a plane upon which
to throw the dice. What one hears, listening to, say
Coltrane and Miles Davis playing together in the 'first
quintet' of the early 50s, is this combination of absolute
slowness and speed. What one hears is the attempt to
become music. What one hears, even at the best of times, 
are the flaws, the little particularities, the singular
grain of a player's finitude. Jazz is to essay the self
 as sound in time. Writing can be to essay the self as
writing in time. In *real* time. Live, with no corrections,
a first take. 

Jazz is also a collaborative art. Listen to the way
Elvin Jones and Coltrane play together. Or Miles and
Walkin' Paul Chambers. I think writing can have an 
analogous quality, on the net. Not simulataneous, like
jazz, but a kind of serial aesthetic quality, in the way
an essaying is continued from one post to the next. Not like
a 'tennis match' or as a textual 'crossfire'. Nothing
comes from 'debate', other than otherness. Debate is
always about the flaw,the limit of the other. The essay
is about particularities, singuar qualities of textual
attempt. Debate is attempted negation. The essay is 
an addition. Oh, that, i see, well to that i add this.
Or perhaps: oh, i go so far with that, but then i chose
another path, and here's where that tune can become this
one.

Essaying, as a quality of net writing, happens, i think
when there's a particular meshing of individual desires
and drives with some kind of collective assent to a certain
plane of action, a certain style and mode of discourse.
A certain tempo, perhaps, an agreed popular tune, some
notion of what sounds good next to what. But other than
than that, the paths multiply.

Duchamp used to say of certain works, the Large Glass
for example, that it was 'finally unfinished'. This
unfinished quality is important. In the _Live at the
Blackhawk recordings, Miles edited and re-edited the
tapes, including only his best solos. The results sound
a bit silly. The bits don't match. A certain quality
of time is sacrificed to the glory of the artist, wishing
to bask in an image of perfection. Much better are the
complete Plugged Nickel recordings -- real snap frozen
time. Better still is being there, at a great concert,
or writing, in real time, going with the speed of one's
first thought. Taking time on writing improves everything
*except* the time of writing itself. 

Writing live has its limitations. Its particularities
aren't always charming. But that's why there are different
*technologies* of netwriting -- so that they might
offer the potential of different genres of netwriting.
The genres are yet to be invented. The technology of the
net no more *determines* the form of netwriting than
the saxophone determines John Coltrane. One is caught up 
in the potential of the other. The potential, not the
determination. 

But anyway, to go back up the path a bit -- the listserver
and the majordomo list seem to me to offer the potential
for a kind of essaying, a certain relation to speed, to
collaboration. The web site is something else. A stillness.
A distillation. The book is something else again. The
will to absolute slowness. Every well made book is a dice
roll that wills itself to eternity.

But that's enough on that tune. 

McKenzie Wark
Netletter #6
7th January 1997
written 'live' between 11.10 and 11.33 Sydney time

__________________________________________
"We no longer have roots, we have aerials."
http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark
 -- McKenzie Wark 

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