(In case you were wondering - the adjective that goes with "Foucault" is "Foucaldian". French has some really neat adjectives in that class. For example, if you are from Amsterdam, you are an Amstellodamois (or damoise, although here the root is Latin and the river the Amstel).

It appears to me that by resigning only after the Donoho story had more or less tailed off, Amanda Marcotte has placed her credibility as a blogger ahead of any advancement her involvement with the Edwards campaign might have earned her eventually. Not that she takes anything away, at this point, from her support for Edwards. Rather, she acted to preserve her credibility as a blogger in order to underline the degree to which blogging, and free and independent expression, have become synonymous.

Because there is a market, there is content. Because there is content, there is spam. Blogging in its way is the anti-spam. It offers not only content, but something like "organically thought out" content, content that refuses to co-opt the visitor to a diary or reader of a post. Content that almost religiously eschews the use of "media tricks" or rhetorical poses, often by devoting quite a bit of time to exposing and debunking or demystifying the same. Content that pushes itself to invent new rhetorical forms in order to - well, what exactly? Stay on the cutting edge? Nahhh.

This is where Bowers comes in. At this point in time there are forces that tend to expand blogging to the breaking point as a form. There are forces that will eventually change the form - but this will only happen when the form or forum has ceased to breathe the air of freedom of its birth.

Blogging began as an almost "Blindfold? Surely you jest" sort of gesture. To oppose the President after 9/11 was to court real disaster in the most unrelated jobs. In a sort of rehearsal for the Two Minutes Hate, the American people indulged in a vulgar melodrama, a real French Terror, a mass neurosis. To be a liberal blogger was like this mad mad gesture of extreme TASTE. On top of that the right wing bloggers came out of the gate first.

Even the righties were part of the Good Old Days of Blogging, since in many cases bloggers on both sides were students. The frothy, murderous edge the righties would acquire through contact with the Chimperor's movement had not appeared.

Well, since then everybody has gone through some sort of metamorphosis. The dustup about blogrolls is a nice example. It's only Kos and Atrios that do it. Atrios goes first, saying he's always meant to do this. Then Kos says he's going along with Atrios. But Kos uses blogroll reform to arrange his site even more as an election blog than it was. And oddly enough as Atrios rebuilds his blogroll it pretty much returns to its same shape.

This is a good example of the current cooperation that reigns within the left blogosphere. Election victory took people's attention away from the fact that blogging is only rarely really funny anymore. Sadly, No! and The Editors are so far ahead in this category that we at least see how dreadful most blogs and diaries really are, pasting a "snark" tag on their jokes. Could anything ever be as sad a sign of cultural rot as laugh tracks on comedy shows, you've often asked yourself? Well, this would be a junior version.

The crack denizens - Eschaton commenters - are everywhere at once. Thers and NTodd waded into the battle on Edwards' blog like mailed knights. But MOSTLY - unless you are hitting the pipe - it's witty rather than funny. Eschaton commentary is like a river of wit. Who can even read it all? I would like to know how many other comments watertiger reads. That blog is Madame de Stael's or better the Verdurins in our society. Atrios gave "overlord" to Kos after the real funniness of the "I for one..." line had died down.

Markos has imagined a ramified Interblog system for which Lindsay really has the best title: Hivemind.

The thing about it is, the Hivemind's failure to be funny - and I mean, come on, Photoshop is not inspiring, and snark is not funny - indicates problems in other realms. As in Dune, the navigators, Kossacks or what ever can literally kick around and reflect an event or idea until they have conjured up all the possible consequences, done all the Google searches, etc.

But they cannot then follow that with an accurate judgment on who came up with the best answer. And the best proof of THAT indictment is all the tribal locutions, and I could rattle of dozens like "just sayin' ", that posters and diarists of all kinds feel compelled to use. Just consider the intense Californianism of FDL, for example.

This is not a bad thing. Blogs like Think Progress have comment sections that appear to be half-troll. In fact the worse the blog the more its comments rely on tribal tags as if they were warmed over gossip -

- and suddenly blogging stands revealed, I think, as a heretofore unsuspected bridge between writing and speech. We never felt the need of such a bridge, but the analysis of one and the other in 20th century philosophy is very divergent, so we should be interested at once to describe a phenomenon that seems to be between the two.

I commented in the open thread after Edwards and Amanda and Melissa issued their responses, with the consequences that we know. I said that the situation was not stable, because Amanda had at the least had her mouth washed out with soap by Edwards. At that time I constructed the explanation. It was quite wrong to say as Edwards did that he was disgusted by something Amanda had written - something about the Holy Spirit giving some lady a creampie.

His response does not really imply that he's more of a Breck girl than we thought. He's heard dirty jokes and he's laughed at them. He has probably told them. I don't believe you could get very far in Southern politics without that ability.

Well, that's not writing. But it is exactly what Amanda did. She MADE A JOKE out of right wing PRETENSE, out of attempts by authorities to pull the wool over our eyes.

When you talk about "print" people still understand: you're a writer, already something special; what you write expresses you; and here you write about nasty things. Ew. But blogging in not like that. The very idea of archives, if you ask me, is almost anti-blogging. The idea of "the post" with its really ancient overtones directly implies a short shelf life. Amanda had to come up with the sharpest sword against THAT pretense and bullshit act that she could forge AT THAT MOMENT,

exactly as if she were in a live debate.

And we would all love nothing better than a fair debate against the right, but television, over and over, gives them the opportunity to out shout the "other guests". This is so true that Eschaton has almost become a litany of this. If Kos is subversive at the political level, Atrios is equally so with regard to network news. Simple answers to simple questions. Do they ever change their narrative? Not unless you hit them over the head with some form of 2 x 4, apparently.

It is interesting the lengths Atrios has to go to to SAY something different from what people think he's going to say. The DFH meme is anti-taste on a taste and mores blog. It is a tasteful admission that public discourse is in effect close to obscene - although Atrios is the one blogger that does not rant, and this fact is important for the understanding of his comment section - if in fact understanding is required.

Anyway - it apparently turns out - entailing great consequences for philosophy - that the difference between speech and writing is LESS a matter of medium than it is of INTENTION. That is, here we have Amanda "having written" things that would naturally appear in a book that one should not read (like some racist tract). The only thing is, her intention was to joke, and her medium was CORRESPONDINGLY IMPERMANENT. Am I wrong, or did this whole incident grow out of what was apparently a sort of "Lefty Archive Watch" put on by Malkin?

Some blogs have every post they've ever had linked out to the side. But this is precisely the picture of not much to say. If major blogs had "ancient post of the day" on the front page, maybe I would think differently. But they don't. VERY few bloggers have managed to print and sell their old posts.

The upshot of all this in terms of MOVEMENTS is that blogging has entered a new stage of its development - one in which some people try to maintain the feeling of early blogging, and others go on to adapt the medium to the opportunities politics gives it. It does not have to be a question of selling out or not. Literary history proves that satire is impossible to sustain for very long. Already we have little Rude Pundit wannabes busting everybody's eardrums because the election was won. But success always returns satire - a negative and ironic genre - to the positive tone eventually. Of course there are those that learned to speak rudely in order to free themselves of Bushism. Now they have to free themselves of rudeness.

Baby steps.

But Amanda does not fall into this category at all. It's certainly ironic that someone who had something to say, among all the million bloggers who constantly say nothing, gets crucified for it, almost as if she get a scarlet "A". If she hadn't gotten caught without a chance to acclimate to campaign blogging, she could have expressed the Edwards campaign in indelible terms. She could have characterized it. As it is, I'm afraid that the campaign has simply acquired the character of Joe Bftsplk.

Another 24 hours and they could have figured something out. The way to go was simply to say that Amanda like most of us had indeed SAID many profane things in jest, and that being in favor of free speech means not stopping it. Period.

It was time to make the rules. In effect, what this was most like was the desperate Allen maneuver in trying to pick out obscene passages in Webb's books. Donoho's intervention, laboriously set up by the right, was equally desperate, since it looked like Edwards campaign had acquired powerful weapons (which in the end they failed to respect).

Movements, I submit, have to do with moments. There was a moment when Lenin hurried to but a train ticket. There was a moment when the King could have ridden to the sea, when Valles could have led the citizens of the Commune all the way to Versailles. Very few people are presented with even one world-historical moment, let alone two. I submit that Chris has had his revolution, his whiff of grapeshot, and has in effect won, and now feels like a maturing lion who wants another battle. At least he sees that the limp corpse of Bush is hardly worth poking. (NB - this does not alter my support for all possible legislative relief and investigative power.)

Unfortunately we are entering a period history books will refer to as "The Appearance of Little America". As American influence wanes, its power will wane in a manner that will be directly felt by most Americans, such that the late 20th and early 21st centuries will be remembered as times of affluence, and people will assign blame for its loss. We will have deflation of the economy, deflation of the foreign policy, deflation of the national self-image. Other countries will exercise power over Little America, which will have to struggle mightily to retain as much influence as Great Britain did upon the ruins of her Empire. And in such a historical environment, revolution will not flourish because people do not revolt over nothing. The 19th century revolutions became possible when the population of the lower classes reached a certain point - but it became necessary when those people themselves realized what was possible for them in their lives.

A revolution must have a stake. The desire of Americans to protect what they have leads to Little America.

A desire to lead the world leads to revolution.

Didn't the Bushies just DO that one?

No. Emphatically no. They pretended to. Really, they just robbed us.

A desire to lead the world leads back to culture and morals. Our material and technological lead is gone and cannot be gotten back. On the other hand, in a low-tech enterprise like bloggin we feel the pent-up energy of American culture...the humiliated, the scandalous, the gross. All the attention the world has paid to America. All the love and fame. Is this to come down to commercial nothing? Or were we the great actors and minstrels of the world, living out its Iliad and its romantic Odyssey?

A cultural revolution. Ca te dit?