Before I launch into this post, I want to note a couple things: First of all I'm going to be at South by Southwest all of next week for both the interactive and music portions. If you're interested in meeting up, drop me a line at swarming - at - gmail.
Secondly, an excellent new curatorial blog called New Climates has just started up. New Climates is investigating the intersection of art, climate change, and network culture and it has a seriously top-notch line-up of artists contributing. I strongly suggest that you check it out.
I'm in the middle of reading Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude - a blissfully short and refreshingly pithy text. In the very beginning pages, he makes a keen observation connecting the concept of the multitude with a sense of dislocation, a "not feeling at home":
"The people are one, because the substantial community collaborates in order to sedate the fears which spring from circumscribed dangers. The multitude, instead, is united by the risk which derives from 'not feeling at home,' from being exposed omnilaterally to the world."
To a large extent, Virno and others of Italian-operaist tendencies are pointing to flexible, mobile, and often affective labor in contrast to regionally and communally rooted modes of production, but this dislocated subjectivity can just as easily be applied to the forms of affective production that go on via the web and online social media networks. In fact Virno's observation provides a critical connection between
nostalgia and the networked, distributed, subjective production we're witnessing with the likes of MySpace and interlinking blogs.
The linkages between feelings of dislocation and web-based interaction have been documented from the internet's earliest days. This has been commonly seen as a medium which collapses distance and makes regional or national identity inconsequential (I would argue that this isn't necessarily the case and that it has just as much ability to strengthen regional networks as it does global ones, but that is for another entry). While this perceived erasure provides a certain type of freedom, it also results in explicit dislocation. This is especially true with the rise of archived social media, in which our identities are projected and retained within the network, because after we sign off, our projected identity retains its interactive ability. Simply put: when you're asleep, people can still interact with your MySpace page. This is true with blogs and any other networked medium that archives its content. As a result, our dislocation as users becomes constant - it has not been relegated to our times of active participation as it might be with a chatroom or even a telephone call. So at the same time as our labor practices have become less secure, more mobile, more modular, our very subjectivity has been imbued with a sense of "not feeling at home" as Virno puts it.
This "not feeling at home" is concurrently the driving impulse of nostalgia which has the ability to provide a brief, if false, connection to this home. Svetlana Boym makes the distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia - the former leading to nativist action and a sense of cultural superiority, the former resulting in a sense of melancholy and creative production. Within the context of web-based interaction, however, this distinction nostalgia is expressed in the formation and defense of new identity-groups and cultural practices divorced from regional identity. Blogging has become the nostalgic act of this generation, an implicit lament for times of imagined past when social life revolved around the town square/market/green, or even for the time when we all read the same papers and watched I Love Lucy.
These new forms of distributed, networked, and archived interaction have lead us to a widespread state of nostalgia. A nostalgia for the territorialized self resulting in the search for various forms of affective and subjective relocation.
