Blog-Writing as Communicative Medium for Personal Ethnography of the Second Modernity

In my mind there's a video clip that's stuck about a writer who credited her experience of writing with liberating her inner areas of... She called it therapeutic and now it gives me a pause. I reflect on the word choice of what liberating action can be pointed at. Suppression, blockage, tension, unease come to mind.

However, aren't all these things making us up as we are? Aren't our limitations are just lines that our experience draws on the sand of experience? Whether or not the contemporary literature, more properly said the literature of the late modernity, is in the service of the bourgeois project of normalizing our subjectivities in the field of writing, society, and space, the successful critique of such project, or even its diagnosis, cannot but come through appropriation of its technique from the inside.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels come to mind in as much as their revolutionary writing while refounding the radical message of the French revolution, writing as it were at the heart of the British empire, which introduces its own ironies to their message, has attempted to speak to wide audience of literate readers. The question that it poses is whether these readers through the institutions of writing, literature, literacy, press, public sphere, and privacy are not inscribing so constituted subjects into the bourgeois symbolic order.

Mindful of the aporia of the avant-garde art and literature that owes its autonomy to the bourgeois society finds its own undoing in the limits of its existence, I expect the ethnographic writing that I initiate in this blog to explore the possibilities of escape from the literary condition that any self-avowedly revolutionary writing pretends to escape.

In other words, second modern ethnography - ethnography of the fully urbanized self, ethnography of the cultural cartography that any city opens innumerable spaces for practice, ethnography of the documentation of the limit areas where theorization shades off into fictionalized accounts of the spaces that in their totality can be classified as belonging to Lefebvrian heterotopia - poses the challenge to scholarly project that cannot but become personal on its way to opening towards public.

Weblogging offers itself as the medium of its time in search of its conceptualization as theoretically disruptive technology of writing. To be combined with other enmeshments with space, writing, experience, infrastructures, and culture this creative assemblage waits for its exploration.