Texte zur Wirtschaft. German Business Newsletter (via Thomas **) entitled “The Archaeology of Blogs” discussing the idea that the rhizome / network view of knowledge has been around since the end of the 70’s. (I beg to differ – Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus” popularised rhizomes in 1977, but Foucault coined “The Semantic Web” back in 1966. Can’t quite work out the context of the article (my German isn’t what it should be), but it ends with a paragraph headed “But finally, Blogging”. (The newsletter includes references to Thomas Burg’s blog as well as that of the author Joerg Kantel at Der Schockwellenreiter.) Basically the line is that blogging is the culmination of the idea of networked knowledge. True because whatever the technology infrastructure of the web, blogging is by definition P2P. (See previous blog.) This is of course in practice the reason I am myself so interested in blogging – because it is the “best” model for knowledge management that I’ve yet to find, particularly once a little structure is added to the linking, via RDF / RSS say.
[** Actually found this link when I discovered that if you go to your site meter and find that someone (in this case Thomas) has followed link to your site from their site meter, what you have is a link to their site meter. Follow that link and you have links to everyone their site meter has recorded. Confusing at first, but interesting in a voyeuristic kind of way. Not deliberately snooping, sorry Thomas !]
So now, put this in a Marxist light, and look at the class struggle. D y G were interested in psychoanalys insofar as it helped better describe a Marxist critique of society. Blogging, the internet, free-media, etc…. it is a rhetorical spectrum. It just is. Just look at what is happening in the world right now, look at its rhizomatic connections….all of them… who’s doing it, who’s gaining from it and who’s losing. There is such a thing as the Military industrial complex and one of the most important things it has given us in the past decade is the internet itself. In effect they have given us a rhetorical mirror, and on the other side of it they can pursue their goals without physical interference. Sure rhizoms connect but they also form channels that descriminate.