JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

Yesterday I wrote briefly about Julia Kristiva, and her idea of shared codes through which a text is connected to other texts, and on which any reading depends for meaning.

Considering that from the point of view of an author (blog or otherwise), one would assume that the codes she speaks of are the subconcious clues that bind together a corpus of texts into a coherent system of signs that is also itself a sign. As an example, no one mistakes a Charles Bukowski poem for anyone else’s work. It is uniquely his, and the reader can easily recognise it immediately, if that reader has been exposed to enough of Bukowski’s work previously to have absorbed the unique codes present in all of his work.

However, those are not the codes that blog writers should concern themselves with, because they are predicated on a naive conception of what it is that a writer, especially a blogger, does. This misconception is where Dave Winer, or more specifically, a piece he wrote in 2001, comes in. Now, I don’t have any problem with what he wrote, other than it is illustrative of the misconception of what a blogger does.

The common idea is that bloggers, like other writers such as novelists, create narrative arcs for the reader to experience. In the case of blogging these may be completely within a long posting, spread over a series of posts or a function of the corpus of that bloggers posts. However, the fragmented nature of blogging changes that in ways that are both subtle and huge. See, all that mess about bricolage wasn’t just a huge digression…

It turns out, the blogger is not the bricoleur, the reader is. Blog readers go about plumbing the depths of the blogosphere, picking up bits and pieces here and there, and assembling them into a coherent, internally consistent narrative arc. That is why I said that link bloggers are bricoleurs. They are publishing their narrative arc for all to see, though none will understand it, it being such a personal syntagmatic system.

By way of analogy, if bloggers were manufacturing goods instead of writing, there would be no finished products rolling off the assembly line; no iPods, no Pontiacs, no ThinkPads. No, bloggers would be producing Lego blocks. A functionally limitless variety of Lego block, to be sure, but Lego blocks none the less. You see, our job as bloggers is not to tell stories, but to give our readers a set of tools that they can take and combine with other tools from elsewhere in order to assemble their own story.