One of Its Old Lines (Or: A New One)

As the ennobling spirit is reclaimed and the spell of ennui is (finally and incontrovertibly) broken, the authors of this blog will undoubtedly issue perspectives that break, however slightly, from the pieces that were left here in cyberspace's ruin. Such is the nature of the two year lacuna that our loyal readers have met, we can only assume, with confusion, distress and many lachrymose afternoons spent wondering when the next section on Wallace's Jest would turn up.

It has never been this author's intention to place any limit on the type of analysis offered in this space. Now, it is this author's express intention to eliminate any long-standing, soft-structural (and thus quasi-social) barrier to the acceptance of any form of thought, whether aesthetic or political, on an intellectual plane as flat and smooth as the computer screen in front of you (us). It should not bother anybody, moreover, to short-circuit Aquinas and Marx, Christ and Kafka, even if the relation is merely scroll-vertical, between two posts made by different authors on consecutive days.

Is this not one of the most interesting things about the blog format, especially in the case of a multitude of authors conjoined at a singularity? The website (this website) ceases to be a model and becomes a system, albeit a thermodynamic one whose dysfunction remains essential for its function. The model, whether economic or legal, social or linguistic, is free of static and white noise. The system, asserting itself passionately as an instantiation of reality's flux, is overrun with parasites. Its internal logic does little to dispel the notion that its founding gesture is nonsensical (for if this wasn't the case when the ennobling began, surely it must be now!).

The Ennobler, in its return, is a monstrous paraphrase of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic mode:

• Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point on a blog can be connected to anything other, and must be
• Principle of multiplicity: only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive ("multiplicity") does it cease to have any relation to the blog
  
• Principle of asignifying rupture: a blog may be broken, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines
• Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a blog is not amenable to any structural or generative model; it is a "map and not a tracing"