There are things
We live among ‘and to see them
Is to know ourselves.’
George Oppen, in “Of Being Numerous: Sections 1-22,” quoted by William Ball in his wonderful essay on and review of Robin Sloan’s Fish. We all know something is amiss with the state of our media; there is too much flux, perhaps, or at least too much for the time we have. It is a dilemma for both readers and writers, and a formal solution is inevitable, if hard to anticipate. As Joshua Heineman once put it:
Creating a good blog is like writing a good book that no one reads past the first page. Creating a good blog is like hiding your treasure under piles of new treasure. Creating a bad blog is like burying your trash under piles of new trash.
Ball discusses David Cole’s cultivation of a personal canon: a collection of deeply-valued texts which are valuable in themselves, in their static composition; these are not “personalities” to follow or sites which update and are “always interesting” in some entertaining sense; instead, they are works, essays, presentations: the finished instantiation of ideas and explorations.
We leave a wake of text and data behind us now. Our boredom becomes accidental artifacts, little messages or clicked icons; our enthusiasms, where monetizable, are turned into product features and fed into streams designed to attract your attention. Much of this wake is nearly meaningless, although this data often seems very close to meaning, isomorphic to it somehow; nevertheless, one is confounded by a sense of emptiness at the core of even the most complete digital representation of selfhood.
There are things we live among and to see them is to know ourselves. Facebook is not such a thing. If for no other reason than its punishing obsession with currency, with now, the social Internet cannot be a library or a ruin; such spaces lack the giddy futurity that advertising requires, the orientation towards a time of easy fulfillment just beyond this moment of inadequacy (which advertisers work to ensure will never end).
Of course, a canon partializes in its own ways. Ball quotes Sloan’s distinction of “stock” and “flow” in media:
“Stock” and “flow” are terms from economics (static quantities like inventory and dynamic quantities like payroll, respectively) and are, to Sloan, “the master metaphor for media today… Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets… Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today.”
[O]n the internet, stock is swept away by flow. Not that the flow isn’t sustaining. Not that there is any more or less stock than there has ever been. Only that we have trouble holding on to things we cherish on the internet. Why?
A canon is a kind of stock, and I’d make one myself were it not already embedded in these words. I worry, however, that the development of types of stock isn’t enough, because the answer to Ball’s question —why do have trouble holding onto the things we cherish?— is that we don’t. Instead, we have trouble cherishing what makes us enduringly happier, better, more present; we have trouble knowing what to cherish; we know only the happiness of escape, submersion into flows that flow into other flows. We are sediment carried along by rivers, half-perceiving the landscapes along the passing banks. Perhaps this is what we want, this ecstasy of dissolving, merging, giving over our agency to the currents. Nikki Giovanni wrote that
a river would stop
its flow if only
a stream were there
to receive it
Otherwise, it must make its own way to its end, cutting earth, jumping banks, slowing and spreading itself across a delta. A flow solves the problem of where to go, what to be: just dissolve and enjoy yourself. There is something aristocratic about the cultivation of a canon, in part because there is something aristocratic about self-creation. The standard assortment of roles and identities isn’t enough; one wants to make one’s own way. A canon is a rejection of “Most Emailed,” of what websites believe you’re influential about, of all the automated or aggregating presentations of culture as a mechanically-reproduced consumable, a burger or a vitamin. A canon asserts that one’s individual self-hood is real, that one’s past is meaningful, that one’s choices are significant (if only for oneself), and that one’s future will not be the result of accidental flows but of purposive decisions made within a context of ideas and discourse. And it restores to their rightful place these ideas and discourse, by separating them from the flows of which they may have once been part and taking them seriously as works in themselves.
But it cannot address our preference for flows over stock. There have always been “things we live among ‘and to see them is to know ourselves’”; now, we are transformed into things like “profiles” and “avatars,” and we truly do live among them, but to see them is an unmemorable distraction, gives us little useful knowledge or experience, is somehow the opposite of knowing ourselves. And if people detect this —subtly or overtly— most seem not to mind.
