Blogging grows out of a nihilism of strength

Blogging, the nihilist impulse mutable67 Jan 10, 2007 at 5:30 PM

Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog is supposed to add to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. This process is not one of a sudden explosion. The erosion of the mass media cannot easily be traced in figures of stagnant sales and the declining readership of newspapers. In many parts of the world, television is still on the rise. What's declining is the Belief in the Message. That is the nihilist moment, and blogs facilitate this culture as no platform has ever done before. Sold by the positivists as citizen media commentary, blogs assist users in their crossing from Truth to Nothingness. The printed and broadcasted message has lost its aura. News is consumed as a commodity with entertainment value. Instead of lamenting the ideological color of the news, as previous generations have done, we blog as a sign of the regained power of the spirit. As a micro-heroic, Nietzschean act of the pajama people, blogging grows out of a nihilism of strength, not out of the weakness of pessimism. Instead of time and again presenting blog entries as self-promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the mighty and seductive power of the broadcast media.

Bloggers are nihilists because they are "good for nothing". They post into Nirvana and have turned their futility into a productive force. They are the nothingists who celebrate the death of the centralized meaning structures and ignore the accusation that they would only produce noise. They are disillusionists whose conduct and opinions are regarded worthless.[25] Justin Clemens notes that the term nihilism has been replaced by such appellations as "anti-democratic", "terrorist", and "fundamentalist". However, over the past years there has been a noticeable renaissance of the term, though usually not more than a passing remark. Significant theorization of the "condition" was done in the mid-twentieth century, which included reworking sources from the nineteenth century like Kierkegaard, Stirner, and Nietzsche. Existentialism after the two World Wars theorized Gulag, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima as manifestations of Organized Evil that resulted in an overall crisis of the existing belief systems. For those still interested in Theory, Arthur Kroker's The Will to Technology & The Culture of Nihilism (2004) is a must read as it puts Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Marx in a contemporary, techno-nihilist perspective.

We're faced with an "accomplished nihilism" (Gianni Vattimo) in that bloggers have understood that the fulfillment of nihilism is a fact.[26] Gianni Vattimo argues that nihilism is not the absence of meaning but a recognition of the plurality of meanings; it is not the end of civilization but the beginning of new social paradigms, with blogging being one of them. Commonly associated with the pessimistic belief that all of existence is meaningless, nihilism would be an ethical doctrine that there are no moral absolutes or infallible natural laws and that "truth" is inescapably subjective. In media terms, we see this attitude translated into a growing distrust of the output of large commercial news organizations and the spin that politicians and their advisers produce. Questioning the message is no longer a subversive act of engaged citizens but the a priori attitude, even before the TV or PC has been switched on.

Nihilism designates the impossibility of opposition – a state of affairs which, unsurprisingly, generates a great deal of anxiety. Nihilism is not a monolithic belief system. We no longer "believe" in Nothing as in nineteenth-century Russia or post-war Paris. Nihilism is no longer a danger or problem, but the default postmodern condition. It is an unremarkable, even banal feature of life, as Karen Carr writes is and no longer related to the Religious Question. Blogs are neither religious nor secular. They are "post-virtue". The paradoxical temporality of nihilism today is that of a not-quite-already-Now. Following Giorgio Agamben, Justin Clements writes that "nihilism is not just another epoch amongst a succession of others: it is the finally accomplished form of a disaster that occurred long ago."[27] In the media context this would be the moment in which mass media lost their claim on the Truth and could no longer operate as authority. Let us not date this event in time, as such an insightful moment can be both personal and cultural-historical. It is the move from the festive McLuhan to the nihilist Baudrillard that every media user is going through, found in the ungroundedness of networked discourse that users fool around with.

Translating Karen Carr's insight to today's condition, we could say that the blogger is an individual "who lives in self-conscious confrontation with a meaningless world, refusing either to deny or succumb to its power."[28] Yet this does not result in a heroic gesture. Blogging does not grow out of boredom, nor out of some existential void. Carr rightly remarks that "for many postmodernists, the presence of nihilism evokes not terror but a yawn".[29] Compared to previous centuries, its crisis value has diminished. If bloggers are classified nihilists, it merely means that they stopped believing in the media... Based on a lecture given at Berlin Institute of Advanced Study, the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, March 27, 2006. [1] For regular updates on this figure, go to www.blogherald.com.