The Blog and the Fragment

(This is an example of the kind of crap I leave lying around in draft form for days that I can't write anything. Simultaneously deep and pretentious. Like pretending I'm still in college)

Walter Benjamin once said that he wanted to put together a book which was nothing but quotes from other people. That was one the most of the most extreme versions of the enthusiasm for the fragment that was rampant in the eighties. Books or any intricately developed argument, it was assumed, could only distort ultimate truth and totality, insofar as the latter always resisted representation.

The blog, then, would seem like a godsend for those of the anti-representational bent. Surely as close to discursive cubism as Gertrude Stein ever got.

And yet, the blog seems so often so insubstantial, more like intellectual Captain Crunch. I remember discussing in hushed tones with Franco Moretti how important it was to one's intellectual development to flesh out a book-length argument, even if you know that the argument is scarcely water-tight, and that it becomes more attackable simply by virtue of its length. We whispered this so as not to offend another lefty luminary in the Columbia Comp Lit department, who had only collections of essays and a translation to justify her lofty perch. The point is, it's not about words adequately describing truth, it's about human brains growing.

Back as far as Heraclitus and through Socrates, the fragment has been a hip way to hide out, to adopt a defensive intellectual position. The example of the recently departed Sidney Morgenbesser, an intellectual legend who somehow never got a real book together, demonstrates this well. Lets see how the Morgenbesser Haggadah develops over time. You can't even make a biopic for this guy.