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Meanland Blog Winner — Ali Alizadeh

Ali Alizadeh June 29

This the second of four winning blogs from the Meanland blogging competition. You can find two of the other winning entries over at the Overland blog. This entry is by Ali Alizadeh, writing on the topic ‘Digital writing, which uses linking, video and commentary, is a return to oral storytelling traditions’. Ali already has a fantastic blog entry up at Overland.

‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, the essay by the early 20th century thinker Walter Benjamin, is one of the most important explorations of the impact of technology on culture. Coming in the aftermath of the disputes regarding the artistic merits of photography against painting, and amid the debates pitting cinema against theatre, Benjamin argues that modern electronic mediums have a ‘progressive’, even liberating effect on society: “ Mechanical production of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterised by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.”

Is the impact of the contemporary digital revolution on publishing a similar phenomenon? And, if so, is our ‘reactionary attitude’ toward print writing being replaced by a ‘progressive reaction’ toward digital texts? According to Benjamin, modern technology ‘emancipates the work of art from a parasitical dependence’ on organised institutions, and by so doing, allows for a ‘simultaneous collective experience as was possible […] for the epic poem in the past’. Is online writing having a similar effect? Does it emancipate literature from a dependence on publishing hierarchies, by facilitating communal, participatory experiences similar to ‘epic’, that is, oral storytelling?

As a writer who began his career as a performance poet, I agree with Benjamin’s view regarding the simultaneity and collectivity of oral literature. A performance poem can be distinguished from a page poem in the former’s choice of common concerns, common words and conversational structures. Such choices do not, however, necessarily signal a desire for populism, but indicate that an oral poem as such must produce a common meaning that can be simultaneously shared by all or at least most members of a given audience. In oral literature the presence of an audience is not an external, secondary factor but an innate and crucial element of the way in which the work functions.

It is precisely such an active presence of an audience or a community of readers that most dramatically distinguishes digital writing from print writing. And the most obvious form of, to use Benjamin’s terms, a ‘progressive reaction’ to a writer’s (digital) work by her readers takes the form of online comments, perhaps the digital version of an audience’s cheers, boos, laughs and heckles at a live reading. Alongside other features that enhance the interactivity and connectivity of online texts, such as hyperlinks, videos and sound, comment threads are key in providing a ‘fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment.’

While in the earlier days of the Internet, online comments were more or less reserved for pieces likely to attract strong responses from very large numbers of users – such as opinion pieces on contentious political and social issues appearing on the websites of major news organisations – online comments are now increasingly a feature of a great deal of all forms and genres of digital writing and publishing. As the American poet Shanna Compton has observed, online poetry journals as well as the websites of print poetry journals are ‘using blogs and comment features to fill in the gaps between issues, keep content fresher, and encourage reader feedback’; and such features are ‘changing the focus of aesthetic debates.’

An example of such an impact on ‘aesthetic debates’ instigated by the comments posted to an online piece of writing is the (now deleted) discussion following a post on Australian poet Pam Brown’s blog the deletions regarding the re-emergence of traditional lyric poetry as a reaction against avant-garde poetry. The particular points and arguments raised in this discussion have since been cited by critics in print (e.g., by Brownyn Lea in an essay in Westerly) and online (by Michael Brennan on Poetry International Web). This specific literary debate was reignited when I wrote a book review for the website HEAT Poetry Online, resulting in some of the contributors to the earlier discussion posting equally forceful comments. Based on the personal correspondence I have since had with quite a number of poets who followed this comments thread, I believe the comments posted in response to my review have somewhat contributed to furthering discussions of contemporary Australian poetry.

There are, of course, limits to such a ‘progressive’, interactive engagement with a community of readers. A major negative outcome has been the ability by many to post unacceptably hostile and offensive comments. This, in fact, was the very reason for the first of the abovementioned debates regarding the aesthetics of contemporary Australian poetry being removed from the Internet. According to media commentator Matt Zoller Seitz writing in Salon, due to the extraordinary quantities of ‘bile, profanity and wanton viciousness’ found in comments threads of many digital publications, some media outlets have had to either adopt ‘stricter moderation policies’ or identify and ban commenters who have posted inappropriate, defamatory statements.

One may question the illiberal tendencies of such censorious measures, or the efficacy of attempts by many media organisations (as reported in The New York Times) to have commenters register and provide information about themselves prior to posting comments, information that in most cases cannot be verified. Either way, it is clear that the ‘collective experience’ provided by digital outlets that use commentary is not always infused with, to again quote Benjamin’s enthusiastic evolution of earlier electronic mediums, an ‘emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert’. For many writers, editors and publishers, enduring, moderating and censoring countless vitriolic, hateful, non-expert comments is far from ‘emotionally enjoyable’.

Benjamin’s mostly celebratory account of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ ends with reservations regarding the inattentiveness and ‘absent-mindedness’ of moviegoers, before a sobering and ominous epilogue that warns the reader about Fascism’s cunning exploitation of technological reproduction. (Benjamin himself would eventually fall victim to the Holocaust.) It is quite possible that, by breaking with the detached and non-mutual process of reading a print text, multimodal digital writing has indeed evoked the participatory, organic spirit of communal mediums such as oral storytelling or perhaps even the carnival; but there is no guarantee that this spirit will be used solely as a means for a positive, progressive end.

Ali Alizadeh is an editor with the online journal Cordite Poetry Review and with the print journal VLAK: Poetics and the Arts. He’s the author of six books, the latest of which is Ashes in the Air (UQP, 2011). He holds a PhD in Professional Writing from Deakin University and has a website.


 

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