Why Blogs Trample on Leftist Traditions

Arianna Huffington recently appeared at a Yale Political Union debate centered around whether blogs are good for democracy. Several Yale students gave speeches at the debate, and we have highlighted some of them on the Huffington Post. Read all of the published speeches by clicking here.

Surely everyone has had the experience of getting up from a theater seat or shutting a back cover of a book with their chest stirred or warmed. But a few months ago I had a strange experience as I was walking out of a theater with a couple of friends. As I dwelled on the soaring landscapes and intricate plot, they picked apart and intellectualized the beauty in the movie until the gestalt that could please the eye or tug at the heartstrings or stir one to action completely disintegrated.

Blogs are much the same way. It's not that blogs are driven by sensationalism like the mainstream media, but uniquely by a need for originality. In a universe of millions of blogs - in this free marketplace of ideas - one is noticed for saying something new; demand is for new answers and new questions like: What's the take or interpretation that no one else has thought of? What's the real motive? What's lurking behind the surface?

This necessarily involves picking apart - de-spinning if you will - the stories told to us.

Now, the Left has a long tradition of taking part in a similar exercise in deconstruction - in fact we call it deconstructionism - of the symbology and narratives in our world. Foucault on sexuality, Barthes on wine, and Derrida on just about everything expose the way seemingly innocuous facets of our culture buttress power, and insodoing sweep out the rug from underneath power's feet.

By revealing prevailing narratives and divesting them of sanctity, we seek to deprive them of their power.

And it works. Blogs help us see the political world for what it really is.

But, I do not believe information and opinion completely capture what politics is. Politics is also theater. And like my fellow moviegoers, bloggers are ruining the theater.

I hate to consider what the blog posts would have looked like the day after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Rosa Parks was trained at the Highlander Folk School in social leadership. Her decision to stay in her seat was calculated. But did that make it any less significant?

More recently, John Edwards had an affair and said some moving words about what it's like to balance being a person with being a person with power - the blogosphere again wanted to consider everything but what it is he was trying to say.

Not every narrative is engineered by the powerful nor towards sinister ends, and so we should be wary of a medium that so relentlessly robs narrative of its power, no matter how instinctual that impulse is for the Left.

We've convinced ourselves that the right course of action is to consider how Rosa Parks came to stay in her seat, allowing us to sidestep with great cowardice the nagging questions like what one woman's courage means for the way we live our lives.

But it strikes me that some myths will always persist - and so I ask the body to consider, which narratives are blogs best at scuttling?

Those that have been embedded the deepest in our consciousness by the most entrenched interests - the patriarchy, the church, and the state - don't seem like the likeliest targets, even though they are the most deserving. The narratives constructed by individuals and activists like Rosa Parks are the most vulnerable, and blogs seek to vivisect them at their birth. Blogs thus aren't about empowering activists - they make it more difficult for new narratives to take hold.

It's not that meta-narrative "distracts us from the issues". It's that as it insists that the important thing is to find the hidden side of everything, it ensures that instead of letting politics stir something in our chests, we create a culture that cackles at conviction and calls passion puerile - it insists that politics be solely a sport of the mind and that belief and inspiration - the prerequisites to participation - are naïve and intellectually immature. Bloggers are ruining the movie.

Some may say the alternative isn't much better. Without quoting Churchill on democracy, I am confident that I would rather live in a society stirred by rhetoric towards the occasional ill-advised cause than one paralyzed by disbelief, sapped of passion, and thus left prostrate.

If we are to truly follow in the traditions of the Left, let us also ask what interests blogs' institutionalization of knee-jerk cynicism in our civil society serves. Calling people to action is the one mechanism leaders have always retained - and with blogging, power has finally found a way to cripple even that.

Rosa Parks wrote, "People say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Those words were essentially a lie. But they were good theater, and they changed the world.

So may we have the courage to be moved.

Comments

[Skua]

Well, I confess to being the kind of ancient old leftist who never thought primarily about "deconstructing narratives", but:

Why is this an argument against BLOGS per se? Isn't this an argument against all social science, genuine journalism, and social and artistic criticism?

Aren't blogs a tool of the resource-poor?

Aren't the power elites trying to "deconstruct OUR narratives" all the time? So wouldn't our narratives get just as deconstructed in a world without blogs?

For that matter, aren't there a huge number of blogs that support and restate "narratives" all the time? Can't I go out right now and find about 1000 right-wing blogs that are trying to buttress Sarah Palin's "narrative"?

If you don't like blogs that "pick apart" Rosa Parks, why not put up a blog that extols Rosa Parks? Or read different blogs, or go out to the theater with different friends?

And for that matter why take the position that when you take a hard look at how activism really happens it will lose its taste? This seems to be like an argument that people who study fine wine (baseball, activism, film) can never enjoy fine wine (etc.). Is this empirically so?

How does this differ from Ayn Rand's argument that Realism is inherently bad and Romanticism is inherently good?

I suppose I should apologize for attempting to deconstruct David's narrative now :-(

[RobinSeattle]

"Aren't blogs a tool of the resource-poor?

Aren't the power elites trying to "deconstruct OUR narratives" all the time? So wouldn't our narratives get just as deconstructed in a world without blogs?"

Dude, you belted that one over the freeway behind the ballpark because you put it right on the intellectual sweet spot.

[RobinSeattle]

Don't you see an inherent contradiction here?

"Leftist traditions"? As progressives, we seek to break tradition to keep the human race moving forward, not get bogged down in the quicksand of easy sentiment and misguided atavistic echoes. So that term I just put in quotes strikes me as an oxymoron.

"They make it more difficult for new narratives to take hold."

And that is a bad thing because, well, why exactly? Communism has a nice little narrative. The cant of the neocons leading up to the Iraq War was an interesting tale. The Columbus story about sailing west to prove the world wasn't flat that was taught to those of us of a certain age as gospel truth, all three of those things are demonstrably delusional. What seeking to poke holes in seemingly neat narratives does is keep people from riding a misguided wave to their possible destruction or at least obtaining a clearer vision of the truth.

That you miss the tv show aspects of history is just inane. This was the same complaint I heard from certain segments of sports fans when Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" came out: TMI, they whined. So now we are going to sink to the level of sports fandom, in which we need heroes to the point of ignoring details of social and other history? There's a word for that and it's myopic.

[RumiSouth]

I'd have to disagree with the statement: "(Narratives) that have been embedded the deepest in our consciousness by the most entrenched interests - the patriarchy, the church, and the state - don't seem like the likeliest targets, even though they are the most deserving."

On the contrary. My experience in the blogosphere, particularly among social networks, has been a profusion of narratives to compete with established ones. We're not simply talking about kooky reinterpretations of Abraham Lincoln, either. I can find a thousand points of view on any given subject, controversy promoted on any topic.

[DickTater]

I think the author of this article is missing the point of the meta-narrative.

We have had meta-narratives beaten into us by TV and RightWingRadio, not the church, or the state, but by corporations who are only interested in confusing us, hiding their role, and pushing corporate goals like consumerism and mindless consumption. (if he had said oligarchy instead of patriarchy, he would have at least hit the nail partly on the head)

And it is not knee-jerk leftism to want to reveal the TRUTH vs the blow-dried confusion sown by the all powerful, omnipresent, 24/7 corporate drumbeat.

In a sea of misinformation and deliberate deflection, the only way to avoid this Orwellian nightmare we face, is to somehow compete with the corporate media's 24/7 indoctrination of low-info voters.

I believe the Corporate Media has done a very good job of marginalizing the web and blogosphere.....and a goodly portion of the electorate does NOT get their news from the web....or if they do they go to the abc/cbs/fox websites.....where they get a double-dose of brainwashing.
So the inroads the blogosphere might have made have been minimized.
The biggest mentions that TV&RWRadio give the blogosphere is to call them raving lunatics and warn constantly about not believing what you read there. Well, what else is a lying, spinning, misleading, shell game of a CorpMedia gonna say about the one medium which is out there exposing their lies?

[Emerald1943]

Point well taken...but cynicism aside, the blogs can bring so many into the conversation with those new ideas, one of which may just stir the passions and begin a new movement that will make the world better for all.

I am a new blogger, and I am so enthusiastic! I can't wait to read what others have said. It's so much better than sitting here in "quiet desperation", frustrated by what I see happening around me.

Thank you, Ms.A, for the most thought-provoking articles!

[boophus]

So much better than passively sitting in front of a TV being spoon fed what those in power want us to know, think , feel , value or profess. I understand what the author is saying and there is a kernel there, a smidgeon, a nibble, a soupcon, ah ... Burp. Got it.